Both Flesh and Not: Essays Read online

  It wasn’t that Ivan Lendl was an immortally great tennis player. He was simply the first top pro to demonstrate what heavy topspin and raw power could achieve from the baseline. And, most important, the achievement was replicable, just like the composite racket. Past a certain threshold of physical talent and training, the main requirements were athleticism, aggression, and superior strength and conditioning. The result (omitting various complications and subspecialties15) has been men’s pro tennis for the last twenty years: ever bigger, stronger, fitter players generating unprecedented pace and topspin off the ground, trying to force the short or weak ball that they can put away.

  Illustrative stat: When Lleyton Hewitt defeated David Nalbandian in the 2002 Wimbledon men’s final, there was not one single serve-and-volley point.16

  The generic power-baseline game is not boring—certainly not compared with the two-second points of old-time serve-and-volley or the moon-ball tedium of classic baseline attrition. But it is somewhat static and limited; it is not, as pundits have publicly feared for years, the evolutionary endpoint of tennis. The player who’s shown this to be true is Roger Federer. And he’s shown it from within the modern game.

  This within is what’s important here; this is what a purely neural account leaves out. And it is why sexy attributions like touch and subtlety must not be misunderstood. With Federer, it’s not either/or. The Swiss has every bit of Lendl’s and Agassi’s pace on his groundstrokes, and leaves the ground when he swings, and can out-hit even Nadal from the backcourt.17 What’s strange and wrong about Wimbledon’s sign, really, is its overall dolorous tone. Subtlety, touch, and finesse are not dead in the power-baseline era. For it is, still, in 2006, very much the power-baseline era: Roger Federer is a first-rate, kick-ass power-baseliner. It’s just that that’s not all he is. There’s also his intelligence, his occult anticipation, his court sense, his ability to read and manipulate opponents, to mix spins and speeds, to misdirect and disguise, to use tactical foresight and peripheral vision and kinesthetic range instead of just rote pace—all this has exposed the limits, and possibilities, of men’s tennis as it’s now played.

  … Which sounds very high-flown and nice, of course, but please understand that with this guy it’s not high-flown or abstract. Or nice. In the same emphatic, empirical, dominating way that Lendl drove home his own lesson, Roger Federer is showing that the speed and strength of today’s pro game are merely its skeleton, not its flesh. He has, figuratively and literally, re-embodied men’s tennis, and for the first time in years the game’s future is unpredictable. You should have seen, on the grounds’ outside courts, the variegated ballet that was this year’s Junior Wimbledon. Drop volleys and mixed spins, off-speed serves, gambits planned three shots ahead—all as well as the standard-issue grunts and booming balls. Whether anything like a nascent Federer was here among these juniors can’t be known, of course. Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform—and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.

  —2006

  appoggiatura—embellishment note that’s one note up or down from precedent note appressed—lying flat or pressed closely against something; “his hair appressed from hours in a cap” aquarelle—drawing in transparent watercolor argillaceous—containing or resembling clay arrant (adj.)—completely such, thoroughgoing: “an arrant idiot” art nouveau—decorative style of early 20th c. using leaves and flowers in flowing sinuous lines, like on vases, columns, etc. ashcake—Southern/rural for johnnycake ashlar—a square block of building stone Asmodeus—demon in Tobit book of Bible; “Asmodeus flight” in Lesage’s Le Diable boiteux, Asmodeus takes Don Cléo fas to steeple of church, highest point in city, and all the roofs of all the houses open and they can see private stuff going on in everyone’s house. A kind of voyeurism-of-the-gods. From Brewer, p. 55 aspergillum—Catholic perforated container for sprinkling holy water athanasian—defender of Christianity ; see Athanasius, Greek patriarch of Alexandria atomy—a very skinny person; (adj.) atomical atony—lack of normal muscle tone atopic—relating to inherited oversensitivity like allergies, hay fever autoclave—strong pressurized steam-heater for sterilizing surgical instruments, some kinds of cooking autophagy—self-digestion (of a cell via cell’s own enzymes) avulsion (medical n.)—the forcible tearing away of a body part by trauma or surgery; (v.) avulse awl—pointed tool for making holes axilla—armpit or similar hollow in a body part, like the hollow under a bird’s wing axiology—philosophy: the study of values and value judgments Baals—fertility gods of ancient Semitics bacchante—female reveler/orgier (priestess at Baccanal) baculiform—rod shaped baize—green felty stuff used for pool tables bandeau—narrow band for the hair bandoleer—chest-crossing belt w/pockets for cartridges or bullets banquette—platform lining trench where soldiers can fire from; sidewalk in east Texas and southern LA; long upholstered bench against or built into wall barbette—raised mound inside fort from which guns are fired over the parapet barbican—tower or other fortification on the approach to a castle or town beadle—usher at church service bedight—to dress or array belvedere—open, roofed structure built to command a view, like a press box bema—platform from which services are conducted in synagogue benefice—sinecure, church post w/secure income benignity—niceness, gentleness berm—narrow ledge or shelf on cliff or slope beurre blanc—butter & scallion sauce served w/seafood bezel—a slanting surface or bevel on a cutting tool like a chisel bier—stand for a coffin bifacial—having two faces or (of a bldg.) facades bifid—forked or split into two parts; botany bight—loop in a rope; middle or slack part of an extended rope or cable (phone lines have bights in the middle, etc.) birl—cause to spin rapidly with feet (as with logrolling)

  FICTIONAL FUTURES AND THE CONSPICUOUSLY YOUNG

  THE METRONOME OF LITERARY fashion looks to be set on presto. Beginning with the high-profile appearances of David Leavitt’s Family Dancing, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, and Bret Ellis’s Less Than Zero, the last three-odd years saw a veritable explosion of good-willed critical and commercial interest in literary fiction by Conspicuously Young1 writers. During this interval, certain honored traditions of starvation and apprenticeship were inverted: writers’ proximity to their own puberties seemed now an asset; rumors had agents haunting prestigious writing workshops like pro scouts at Bowl games; publishers and critics jockeyed for position to proclaim their own beardless favorite “the first voice of a new generation.” Too, the upscale urban young quickly established themselves as a bona fide audience (and market) for C.Y. fiction: Ellis and McInerney, Janowitz and Leavitt, Simpson and Minot enjoy a popularity with their peers unknown since the relative popular disappearance of the sixties’ hip black humor squad.

  As of this writing, late 1987, the backlash has been swift and severe, if not wholly unjustified. Many of the same trendy reviewers who in the mid-eighties were hailing the precocity of a New Generation now bemoan the proliferation of a literary Brat Pack. The Village Voice, which in 1985 formalized the apotheosis of McInerney in a gushy cover story, this autumn uses a scathing review of some McInerney disciples as occasion to headline the news that THE BRAT PACK SPITS UP, with crudely cut-out faces of Janowitz, McInerney, Ellis, et al. pasted on photos of diaper models. Nineteen eighty-seven saw the staff and guests of the New York Times Book Review suddenly complaining of a trend toward “world-weary creative writing projects,” a spate of “Y.A.W.N.S. (Young Anomic White Novelists),” an endless succession of flash-in-the-pan “short-story starlets.” In its October 11 issue, no less an éminence grise than William Gass administers “A Failing Grade for the Present Tense”:

  You may have noticed the plague of school-styled [writers] with which our pages have been afflicted, and taken some account of the no-account magazines that exist in order to publish them. Thousands of short-story readers and writers have been released like fingerlings into the thin mainstream of serious pros
e…. Well, young people are young people, aren’t they…. Adolescents consume more of their psyches than soda, and more local feelings than junk food. Is no indulgence denied them?… I read [a recent Leavitt-edited anthology of C.Y. fiction] as a part of my researches. It is like walking through a cemetery before they’ve put in any graves.

  What’s caused this quick reversal in mood? Is it capricious and unfair, or overdue? Most interesting: what does it imply?

  In my own opinion, the honeymoon’s end between the literary Establishment and the C.Y. writer was an inevitable and foreseeable consequence of the same shameless hype that led to many journeyman writers’ premature elevation in the first place: condescending critical indulgence and condescending critical dismissal inhabit the same coin. It’s true that some cringingly bad fiction gets written by C.Y.s. But this is hardly an explanation for anything, since the same is true of lots of older artists, many of whom have clearly shot their bolts and now hang by name and fashion alone.

  More germane is the frequent charge of a certain numbing sameness about much contemporary young writing. To a certain? ITo a ce extent anyone who reads widely must agree with it. The vast bulk of the vast amount of recently published C.Y. fiction reinforces the stereotype that has all young literary enterprises falling into one or more of the following three dreary camps:

  (1) Neiman-Marcus Nihilism, declaimed via six-figure Uppies and their salon-tanned, morally vacant offspring, none of whom seem to be able to make it from limo door to analyst’s couch without several grams of chemical encouragement;

  (2) Catatonic Realism, a.k.a. Ultraminimalism, a.k.a. Bad Carver, in which suburbs are wastelands, adults automata, and narrators blank perceptual engines, intoning in run-on monosyllables the artificial ingredients of breakfast cereal and the new human non-soul;

  (3) Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words “competent,” “finished,” “problem-free,” fiction over which Writing-Program pre-and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to “show” what’s “told”; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by any Freitag on any Macintosh.

  Mean, but unfortunately fair—except for the fact that, like most generalizations, these apply validly only to the inferior examples of the work at hand. Ironically for the critic who wants both to bemoan invasions and pigeonhole the invaders, the very proliferation of C.Y. fiction, with its attendant variety, raises the generation’s cream above stereotype. The preternatural smarts with which a Simpson or Leavitt can render complex parental machinations through the eyes of thoroughly believable children; the gritty white-trash lyricism of Pinckney Benedict’s Town Smokes; the wry, bitchy humor of a good Lorrie Moore or Amy Hempel or Debra Spark story; the political vision of William Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels; the conscientious exploration of motive behind Yuppie dissolution in McInerney’s Bright Lights—these transcend Camp-following and, more important, merit neither head-patting nor sneers. See for yourself. Among the C.Y. writers who do, yes, seem to crowd the last half of this decade, there are some unique and worthy talents. Yes, all are raw, some more or less mature, some more or less apt at transcending the hype the hype-mills crank out daily. But more than a couple are originals.

  But it’s weird: all we C.Y. writers get consistently lumped together. Both lauds and pans invariably invoke a Generation that is both New and, in some odd way, One. Unfamiliar with the critical fashions of past decades, I don’t know whether this perception has precedent, but I do think in certain ways it’s not inappropriate. As of now, C.Y. writers, the good and the lousy, are in my opinion A Generation, conjoined less by chronology (Benedict is twenty-three, Janowitz over thirty) than by the new and singular environment in and about which we try to write fiction. This, that we are agnate, also goes a long way toward explaining the violent and conflicting critical reactions New Voices are provoking.

  The argument, then, is that certain key things having to do with literary production are radically different for young American writers now; and that, fashion-flux aside, the fact that these key things affect our aesthetic values and literary choices serves at once to bind us together and to distance us from much of an Establishment—literary, intellectual, political—that reads and judges our stuff from their side of a… well, generation gap. There are, of course, uncountable differences between the formative experiences ofoinperienc consecutive generations, and to exhaust and explain all the ones relevant here would require both objective distance and a battalion of social historians. Having neither at hand, I propose to invite consideration of just three specific contemporary American phenomena, viz. the impacts of television, of academic Creative Writing Programs, and of a revolution in the way educated people understand the function and possibility of literary narrative. These three because they seem at once powerfully affective and normatively complex. Great and grim, tonic and insidious, they are (I claim) undeniable and cohesive influences on this country’s “New Voices.”

  Stats on the percentage of the average American day spent before small screens are well known. But the American generation born after, say, 1955 is the first for whom television is something to be lived with, not just looked at. Our parents regard the set rather as the Flapper did the automobile: a curiosity turned treat turned seduction. For us, their children, TV’s as much a part of reality as Toyotas and gridlock. We quite literally cannot “imagine” life without it. As it does for so much of today’s developed world, it presents and so defines our common experience; but we, unlike any elders, have no memory of a world without such electronic definition. It’s built in. In my own childhood, late sixties, rural downstate Illinois, miles and megahertz from any center of entertainment production, familiarity with the latest developments on Batman or The Wild Wild West was the medium of social exchange. Much of our original play was a simple reenactment of what we’d witnessed the night before, and verisimilitude was taken very seriously. The ability to do a passable Howard Cosell, Barney Rubble, Cocoa Puffs bird, or Gomer Pyle was a measure of status, a determination of stature.

  Surely television-as-lifestyle influences the modes by which C.Y. writers understand and represent lived life. A recent issue of Arrival saw critic Bruce Bawer lampoon many Brat-Packers’ habit of delineating characters according to the commercial slogans that appear on their T-shirts. He had a scary number of examples. It’s true that there’s something sad in the fact that Leavitt’s sole description of some characters in, say, “Danny in Transit” consists of the fact that their shirts say “Coca-Cola” in a foreign language—yet maybe more sad is that, for most of his reading contemporaries, this description does the job. Bawer’s distaste seems to me misplaced: it’s more properly directed at a young culture so willingly bombarded with messages equating what one consumes with who one is that brand loyalty is now an acceptable synecdoche of identity, of character.

  This schism between young writers and their older critics probably extends to the whole issue of strategic reference to “popular culture” in literary fiction. The artistic deployment of pop icons—brand names, television programs, celebrities, commercial film and music—strikes those intellectuals whose consciousness was formed before the genuine Television Age as at best frivolous tics and at worst dangerous vapidities that compromise fiction’s “seriousness” by dating it out of the Platonic Always where it properly resides. A fine and conscientious writing professor once proclaimed to our class that a serious story or novel always eschews “any feature that serves to date it,” to fix it in history, because “literary fiction is always timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about in electrically lit rooms, propelled themselves in autos, spoke not Anglo-Saxon but post-WWII English, inhabited a North America already separated from Africa by continent
al drift, he amended his ruling’s application to those explicit references that would date a story in the transient Now. Pressed by further quibbling into real precision, his interdiction turned out really to be against what he called the “mass-commercial-media” reference. At this point, I think, trans-generational discourse breaks down. For this gentleman’s automobiled Timeless and our F.C.C.’d own were different. Time had changed Always.

  Nor, please, is this stuff a matter of mere taste or idiosyncrasy. Most good fiction writers, even young ones, are intellectuals. So are most critics and teachers (and a surprising number of editors). And television, its advertising, and the popular culture they both reflect and define have fundamentally altered what intellectuals get to regard as the proper objects of their attention. Those cognoscenti whose values were formed before TV and advertising became psychologically pandemic are still anxious to draw a sharp distinction, à la Barbara Tuchman, between those sorts of things that have genuine “quality” and are produced and demanded by people with refined tastes, on one hand, and those sorts of things that have only “popularity” or “mass appeal” and are demanded by the Great Unwashed and cheerfully supplied by those whom egalitarian capitalism has whored to the lowest of denominators, the democratic market, on the other. The enlightened older aesthete, erudite and liberal, weaned let’s say between 1940 and 1960, is able to operate from a center of contradiction between genuine refinement and genuine liberalism that advertising scholars like Martin Mayer had already begun to deride by the fifties’ end: