Gotham Diary:
Promotion
April 2018
2, 4 and 6 April
Tuesday 3rd
In Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, a woman agrees to adopt the Great Dane that belonged to an old friend, a man who has committed suicide, even though the lease to her apartment expressly forbids dogs. Whether or not she will be evicted by her landlord provides dramatic excitement. The woman’s friends are excited, anyway. They “stage an intervention” at one point, insisting that she cannot risk losing her apartment because of a delusional attachment.
None of that is what The Friend is really about, though. The eviction is issue is dealt with so calmly and assuredly that it becomes something of a tease; surely the reader can’t really have worried. The woman herself never seems perturbed. Several times, she blithely says that she’s hoping for a miracle, but no miracle is required, thanks to advances, sort of, in medicine. I’ll leave it there.
We could say that the woman narrates The Friend, but it would be better to say that The Friend is a letter that she writes to her dead friend. This might sound creepy, but so strong is the second person pronoun that it brings the departed squarely into view, if not quite back to life. (Indeed, the letter’s power draws from our awareness that it will never be answered: the letter is a final judgment.) We could say that writing the letter is the woman’s way of grieving the loss of her friend, but this would be arch. In fact, the woman grieves in the ordinary ways: she weeps and she remembers. Time passes. The need for a miracle disappears at just about the same time as the grief. The Great Dane has become her new friend: in the final chapter, the second person pronoun addresses the dog, not the suicide.
Everybody mentioned in the letter, with the exception of the apartment superintendent, the Great Dane — Apollo, the only creature bearing a name — and the dead man’s third wife, is a writer. Almost everybody is not only a writer but a teacher or a student of writing. The man was once the woman’s writing teacher. Then she became, more or less, his colleague. He wrote notable books, but he continued to teach, for the money: no Philip Roth he. The woman, who lives in Manhattan, can spot other writers anywhere. She can detect the complicity with which writers support the transfiguration of actual men and women, hitherto leading their private lives, into the characters who appear in published books. She quotes a famous writer who said that, when a writer is born into a family, that family is “finished.”
In the penultimate chapter, the woman sketches an alternative ending. The pronouns here are third-person. The woman visits the man, who did not die, who was saved at the last minute. He has come out of the hospital, and she is returning his dachshund, which she cared for in his absence. The two writers talk shop. The man is distressed to hear the woman announce that she has set aside what he considered a promising piece of work, a report on women living in a Victim of Trafficking refuge. These women have had horrific experiences, often having been sold into sex slavery by family members, and, in the third chapter of the letter, we are taken to the shelter and told some of those awful stories. The woman concludes:
Here is what I learned: Simon Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.
This was the lasst thing you and I talked about while you were still alive. After, only your email with a list of books you thought might be helpful to me in my research. And, because it was the season, best wishes for the new year. (76)
Weil’s observation is expressly negated by the man in the eleventh chapter — the alternative ending in which he is allowed to live.
“I find myself inclined to agree with people like Doris Lessing, who thought imagination does the better job of getting to the truth. And I don’t by this idea that fiction is no longer up to portraying reality.”
Here he breaks off into a tirade against his “self-righteous” students, for whom it doesn’t matter
“how great a writer Nabokov was, a man like that — a snob and a pervert, as they saw him, shouldn’t be on anybody’s reading list. … It upsets me how writing has become so politicized, but my students are more than okay with this. … That’s why I’ve decided not to go back to teaching. Not to be too self-pitying, but when one is so at odds with the culture and its themes of the moment, what’s the point.”
And not to be too cruel, she doesn’t say, but you will not be missed. (194)
That last line went through me like an arrow, and in fact it made me read the book all over again. As I say, this alternative ending allows the man to live, but it also denies him the right to be relevant, to engage with the future of writing. “You will not be missed” is a way of telling us that the friend is better off dead, as indeed may explain his suicide. It also tells us, of course, that the grieving is over, at least the grieving that is inspired by the death of an artist.
Reading The Friend a second time, I not only saw how beautifully woven it is, and how effortlessly it handles — without attempting to solve — the problem of priapic writers and their adoring female students. I saw that it is a conundrum, a sort of Möbius Strip. The dust jacket announces that The Friend is a novel. But it reads like a letter — at some points like one of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, or like an entry from the displaced diary, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. The writer’s reflections on writing are never discursive or impersonal, but they are grave; intellectual positions are every bit as vital here as emotional states: not the stuff of regular literary fiction, much less fiction generally. The eleventh chapter is an argument, right out of a philosophical dialogue. The rigors of defined terms may be avoided, so that it really does read as two people talking, but you still have to know who Svetlana Alexievitch is and why she won the Nobel Prize. So, is the book a memoir? Did this really happen? Is Nunez exploiting a suicide? And yet, no one has a name, not the writer, not the dead friend, not Wife One, Wife Two, or Wife Three. Is that discretion or a process of enfabling?
I think that I had to go through The Friend a second time because, for such a serious book, it is awfully easy to read. And, thanks to Apollo, not without moments of great fun.
***
Wednesday 4th
In my enthusiasm for Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, yesterday, I elided direct reference to the rumbling argument that surfaces here and there in throughout the novel and before being taken up directly by the interlocutors in the eleventh chapter. It is not so much an old argument as the revival of one. Whether you call it a moral argument or an aesthetic argument probably indicates which side you’ve taken. It is proof, I think, that our literature culture (at least) has embarked on a confrontation with the “collapse of values” that characterized, or was said to characterize, the postwar years.
In the passage that I quoted yesterday, we see the man grasping the essence of the argument when he mentions Vladimir Nabokov, author, notoriously, of Lolita. Is Lolita a worthy novel or a dirty book?
It would be disingenuous to disclaim that Nabokov invites this question. Lolita is narrated not by a third person representing the values of the community, as shocked as anyone by the report, but by a pedophile. A European pedophile — a monstrous growth from foreign parts. Lolita luxuriates in its criminality, never more than in the narrator’s account of his aimless tour, both tortured and tedious, of America’s roadside motels. It would be one thing if Humbert Humbert carried Lolita off to a handsome chateau by a Swiss lake. Lolita is another thing altogether, altogether sordid. It is regarded as a triumph because the sordid details are expressed in such luminous prose.
Years and years ago, a friend and I were goofing around in a racy gift shop near Wall Street. She pointed to a nude male pinup calendar and asked, in a stage whisper, “But is it art?” “No,” I replied, “it’s Hank.”
The idea that art can redeem patent immorality is, like our taste for polyphony, unique to the post-medieval West. It is a notion whose prevalence in Europe and America encourages mullahs to denounce the depravity of our civilization. For quite some time, sophisticated Westerners have regarded such critics as primitive and benighted. But now, this kind of criticism is coming from Western students. They are no more impressed by the luminous language than are the mullahs. They are not saying that Lolita is not art. They don’t seem to get that far. They just don’t think, as the man in The Friend says, that Lolita belongs on a reading list.
This argument is bound up with another quarrel. Can truth be revealed by fiction? Generations of critics and literature professors have insisted that it can — that, indeed, it gets closer to the truth than any mere reportage of facts. But students — including former students, like the woman who writes the letter that is The Friend — are in open disagreement. The imagination may produce an account that is meaningful and compelling, and perhaps even morally useful. But it is not really true. It leaves things out, it alters slight details, it struggles to present a coherence that does not in fact exist.
If anything can account for this new moralism, this brisk change in the artistic climate, I think it is the failure of the sexual revolution to overpower and eliminate predatory men. Put this another way: the sexual revolution unleashed predatory men in the company of “nice” girls. Girls from good families, girls who had been to good schools, girls with professional futures. Before the sexual revolution, social norms had protected such woman from untoward advances (much less threats). It may have been conveniently forgotten by polite society, that predatory men exist. Some of these predatory men, moreover, like the suicide in The Friend, were and are nice guys. They ask politely and they don’t make gross requests. They are never coercive. But they manage to indulge their appetites. According to the man who later killed himself, “the classroom is the most erotic place in the world.” (28)
Guys who weren’t so nice (or nice-looking) took note.
***
Thursday 5th
Bob Odenkirk’s “Headlines You May Have Missed” is very amusing, but unlike most such pieces that appear in The New Yorker, I expect it to enjoy a long life in print. Its satirical view of the way we live now will be as easy to laugh at in twenty or a hundred years as it is now. Well, maybe not. But it captures our ludicrous obsession with screens, our insane conviction that the screen is the locus of reality.
It’s more than a little interesting to set Odenkirk’s mordant exaggerations next to something else that I read yesterday, this in the Times, an op-ed piece by Tim Wu arguing for the replacement, not the reform, of Facebook.
What the journalist Walter Lippmann said in 1959 of “free” TV is also true of “free” social media: It is ultimately “the creature, the servant and indeed the prostitute of merchandizing.”
Wu has written a book, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads. I haven’t read it, although I feel that I ought to, out of some sort of solidarity. It has long been obvious to me that promotion is the whole point of “free TV” and “free apps.” Promotions must necessarily get our attention, and do so in a very short stretch of time. Initially, broadcast television offered a series of “programs” — dramas, evening news, sports — with occasional promotions, or advertisements. Over time, every moment of broadcast television was surrendered to the promotion of something — the network itself, its stars, the excellence of its presentations, the careers of athletes; and then along came Fox News, with its relentless promotion of right-wing grievances. What Fox News effectually promotes is viewers’ anger and dissatisfaction. Where old-time ads urged members of the television audience to improve their appearance, Fox News marinates viewers in their own funk and applauds the stink. Fox News is really all about you, the viewer: that’s what it’s promoting. What an unbeatable product! What an orgy of egoism! No wonder the “you” whom Bob Odenkirk addresses in his funny piece has missed the birth of a grandchild and isn’t aware of any car trouble.
(That’s my favorite part of the piece: “The smell has to do with your brake pads. Doesn’t matter—just keep driving and ranting at the dashboard, and soon this problem, and all your problems, will end.” — and all your problems.)
The difference between persuasion and promotion is the disingenuousness of the latter, a deceptiveness that works only in the short term. Persuasion lines up the pros and the cons of an argument as objectively and comprehensively as possible. Promotion makes no such attempt. The pros are suited up like Marvel heroes, the cons look like the monstrosities in fun-house mirrors. Often the cons are simply left out, exploiting the genteel proposition that, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything. Promotions are rarely lengthy, even when they can afford to be, because, inevitably, infotainment begins to smell of shill, an indifference to right and wrong that is foreign to persuasion.
Has someone come up with a term that describes the behavior of people, whether at a crime scene or in the presence of a celebrity, who turn to their phones for the televised version of what’s right in front of them? The same behavior can be seen during a game at Madison Square Garden. Cameramen are the arbiters of our reality: they know what will interest us before it happens. The cession of personal judgment to professional interpreters is alarming, but I hear no alarms. More to the point, I don’t hear any discussions. No: I see couples sitting at tables for two in restaurants, each bemused by a device.
Doesn’t matter.
Bon week-end à tous!