Grant Faulkner

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The Ides of March: The Most Dangerous Time for New Year’s Resolutions

March 12, 2018 by Grant Faulkner 1 Comment

The dangers of the ides of March

March has carried a dramatic aura since a seer warned Caesar in 44 B.C. to “beware the Ides of March,” and sure enough, Caesar was assassinated.

It’s a time on the Roman Calendar notable for the settling of debts, on the eve of the end of winter and the beginning of spring. On my calendar, it’s a time to reckon with the goals I’ve set for myself for the year, and as with most people, it’s unfortunately a time when I begin to smell the stench of my New Year’s resolutions rotting.

In fact, most people’s resolutions die by February 4. There’s data to back that up. Foursquare and Swarm, two location-based apps, analyzed check-ins at fast food restaurants and gyms over an entire year. They found a 36 percent increase in gym visits during the weeks following New Year’s Day, along with a 13 percent decline in visits to fast food restaurants. But by February 4, the trends had reversed. Gym visits declined, while fast food check-ins started to rise.

when resolutions lapse

I’m assuming this applies to all types of resolutions, whether they concern fitness, creativity, or spirituality. The Ides of March are even more dangerous than the early days of February because I think most people continue to think about their resolutions in February and have at least a faint notion that they’ll re-engage and bring them to life. But by March most have sunk into their recliners and essentially decided that a handful of potato chips or a few hours of social media is more important than their dreams and desires.

We begin to relinquish the notion that we can shape ourselves into the people we want to be. We wait for another time to make changes—such as next year, when our “future self” will surely have the discipline and resolve to change things around (not!).

I made very do-able resolutions this year. I wanted to simply read one mediation a day from my book 365 Tao: Daily Meditations—a book I have owned for 20 years but failed to read on anything close to a daily basis—and then meditate for five minutes each day with my new Headspace app. This requires all of 10 or so minutes a day, and there’s no sweating, no showering, no expenditures—and I can eat whatever I want—yet I’ve only read 38 meditations (I should be at 70) and used Headspace 8 times.

Patterns of behavior are difficult to change. Since I live in a world of time scarcity, since my to-do list expands with alarming promiscuousness, I often rationalize that I need to do “more important things” to accomplish all of the shoulds in this crazy business of life instead of tending to the nourishment of my soul.

Here’s the thing, though: The days I spend 10 minutes reading a meditation and using Headspace are infinitely better than when I don’t. Here’s one more thing: I like to believe that I’m a creature who can shape myself into a better self. I don’t want to wallow in past behavior. I want to be an actor in life, a creator. I want to change.

So … instead of letting March’s maggots feast on the rot of my neglected resolutions, this is the time to actually double down and commit. The most dangerous moment is always pregnant with opportunity. In fact, there’s research that shows that starting—or re-starting—a goal is most effective when you do it on a “milestone day”—the first day of a new year, a new month, a new week. So this Monday, I’m going to start again. And I’ll start again next Monday if my efforts flag. And I’ll start on the Monday after that and after that, etc., if need be. The main thing is to keep starting, keep going.

I discussed overcoming lapses in Pep Talks for Writers:

After a lapse, it’s important to forgive yourself, readjust your goals, and give yourself a fresh start so that a bad week of writing doesn’t lead to a bad month of writing, which then turns into a bad year. It’s all about designing your life around the things you rationally want to achieve instead of sinking into the powerful claws of more impulsive needs.

Life goes by too quickly to wait for next year. We must claim our dreams and create a system to realize them. I don’t want to die with a list of all of the things I wish I would have accomplished. I don’t want to be a person unable to change, unable to improve myself.

Filed Under: Blog, goals, The Writing Life, Uncategorized

On Revision

December 13, 2013 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

I wrote this post a year ago, when I was embarking on what I thought was a final grand revision of a novel I’ve been working on (or poking my way through) for an interminably long time. I made progress, good progress, but I’m afraid I’m just now putting the finishing touches on this whale. My commitment to it is deepening fortunately, even as my anticipation of my next project grows.Here are my thoughts on revision…

I’m going on the record with a controversial statement: Your inner editor, despite his or her persnickety reputation, can be fun.

Now I know that we in NaNoLand advise writers to banish their inner editors during NaNoWriMo. No one wants to hear some crank screaming “No!” in the background or get dressed down for a plot hole during the rush of writing a first draft. But with a first draft in hand, you’ve now built a playground for your inner editor to frolic in. Yes, frolic.

I recently opened the door to the dark mental dungeon where my inner editor has been locked up, and it turns out he’s got a nice smile (despite being a little pale). Examining the arc of my novel is like going down a twisting, double-dipper slide for him, and he loves brainstorming stirring details to add to my story’s cauldron. He also possesses a rather refined eye for sentences written in the passive voice, and he likes prodding me to write with “vivid verbs” and to “show don’t tell.”

So I’m primed to rewrite my swirling, chaotic mess of a NaNo novel and see if I can shape it into something readable, if not outright good. “Writing is rewriting,” as the old adage goes, and although revision has a reputation for being daunting and full of drudgery, it also holds the deep satisfaction of shaping the textures and contours of one’s ideas. It’s just a different kind of play than writing a first draft.

Revising with a Plan
That said, I’ve suffered through flawed approaches to past novel revisions. I tend to just start rewriting from the beginning: reading and reworking the first chapters ad nauseum, so much so that I end up essentially neglecting the final two-thirds of the novel. Because I haven’t devised a true game plan, I don’t make the daring and often necessary moves of restructuring the plot or “killing my darlings,” as William Faulkner advised (one of the best revision tips out there).

I end up with essentially the same novel, only with a new coat of paint on the front porch, continuing to fail to see that there’s a huge hole in the roof.

To escape my revision rut this time around, I’m taking some tips from The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself, by Susan Bell. Bell, a former Random House fiction editor, believes that writers can overcome the “panicky flailing” that revision can induce by learning “to calibrate editing’s singular blend of mechanics and magic.” She weaves in self-editing advice from the likes of Michael Ondaatje, Tracy Kidder, and Anne Patchett, and provides a wonderful running case study of the editorial collaboration between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his editor Max Perkins.

The book opens with a quote by Walter Murch that sums up her approach: “We’re grafting these branches onto a tree that already had an organic, balanced structure. Knowing that we’re changing the organism, we’re trying not to do anything toxic to it, and to keep everything in some kind of balance. At this point, I don’t know what the result will be. I have some intuitions, but my mind is completely open.”

While keeping my mind open—perhaps the key way to make revision fun and creative—here’s an outline of my approach:

Set a deadline: Revision can be another word for procrastination. I have a novel I wrote 9 years ago that I’ve puttered through several times, and it still lacks a decent ending. Just as a deadline is important in churning out a first draft, it’s crucial for the second draft. I’m giving myself 6 months to revise this year’s NaNo-novel. Check in with me on July 1, 2013 and hold me to my words.

Gain distance: “The greater the distance,” writes W.G. Sebald in The Rings of Saturn, “the clearer the view: one sees the tiniest details with the utmost clarity.” Time is the best way to distance yourself from your novel and read it as another might. The key is to take enough time away from your first draft so that you can read it with fresh eyes, but not to take too much time so that you lose your momentum. Everyone is different, but December distanced me plenty from my novel.

Beyond the distance of time, I’ve printed out my novel in a different font so that it won’t look like the novel on my computer screen when I read it. I also plan to read it somewhere else than at home because reading in a café or library will provide an extra layer of remove.

Read first with a macro edit: Bell discusses two types of editing: 1) the macro view, editing with a larger view toward the rhythms and connections of structures and themes; and 2) the micro view, editing with attention to such things as images, word choice, and sentence structure.

In my first pass, I’m not going to noodle with sentences. I want to focus on the big picture and evaluate the patterns of my novel, its leitmotifs and plot points. Then I’ll read the novel again—much more slowly—and hone in on the specifics.

Change my writing mode: Since I banged out my NaNo novel on a keyboard with such desperate speed, I want to slow down for the second draft and ruminate on my story, so I plan to write new sections longhand. Writing with a pen and paper changes writing in mysterious ways because it brings on more pauses and leads to fewer of the Facebook distractions that plague me on my computer.

Revise non-chronologically: Who says you have to revise from beginning to end? I specialize in novels with strong beginnings, weak middles, and weaker endings. Maybe I’ll start with the ending this time around and hop around to sections that need the most strengthening.

Find beta readers: I don’t want anyone to read my first draft; it’s just too messy for another to critique. But after a solid second draft, I’ll crave feedback. Finding readers is tough, though. I’ve made a list of friends who read in the genre I’m writing in, and they know how to deliver feedback without raining on my parade (I hope). My wife is a great reader, but I find that novel critiques and a happy household don’t usually go hand-in-hand.

Fortify myself with resilience magic: Revision can be a battlefield of self-doubt and torture, where writing turns into a swamp of masochism rather than a font of creativity. I’ve done enough revision to know that I’ll have a day or a week or a month when I lose faith in my work, if not my entire worth as a human being.

I’m steeling myself for such moments. As much as I believe in the urgent necessity of letting loose the pure flow of creativity, I also believe in the powers of resilience, the necessity to just keep plodding. Most things are accomplished not in grand gushing sweeps, but through daily incremental resolve.

It’s that resolve that matters most in revision, and I don’t think any “how to” book can give you that. But if you participated in NaNo, you have it. You had the fortitude to accomplish the audacious task of writing a novel in just a month. Revision might even be easier because you already have a story to work with, and hopefully a constructive inner editor to play with.

If you’re ready to revise one of your NaNo novels, please tell me your next steps. I’m constantly refining my approach, so I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Revision, Writing Tips

Francesca Woodman: Model Upside Down on the Stairs

October 4, 2012 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

I’d never written a story to a photo before a friend and I swapped photos for a 100-word story exercise a couple years ago. She gave me a photo by Francesca Woodman. I didn’t know who Francesca Woodman was. The photo was about as arresting and disturbing as a photo can be: a beautiful nude woman, blurry and abandoned, sprawled upside down on a stairway that has a cracked mirror at the bottom.

My story was very literally titled “Model Upside Down on the Stairs.” The photo overwhelmed the story, of course, although I managed to recently publish it in PANK, which just published an interview with me about the story as well.

The model in the photo is elegant and poised, yet doomed and falling, and contorted in a way that begs the question of what has happened to her, how has she lost herself. It’s a photo that demanded a story, simply because of its irreconcilable contradictions, which was why I was surprised when I went to the Francesca Woodman exhibit at SF MOMA last December and read on a placard that Woodman wasn’t a narrative photographer.

I jotted down my rebuttal to that notion as I studied her haunting excavations of self. She took most of her photos in a rundown apartment house while at the Rhode Island School of Design, posing nude with broken mirrors and crumbling walls in a style reminiscent of 19th century spirit photography, her photos playful but taunting, erotic but not quite erotic, a self blurred but wanting to be seen. Unfortunately, I lost that notebook, but my conclusion was that her photos told a quite courageous and troubling narrative. She’s the type of artist brave enough to empty her innards yet remain inscrutable at the same time.

She killed herself at the age of 22 in 1981. A friend of mine posited that she was sexually abused. Many photos certainly hint at that, perhaps especially the one of the black, muddy handprints on her breasts and her crotch. And then there is a series called “Charlie the Model,” one of few that includes a man. In one picture he kneels naked next to a mirror while Woodman stands, also nude, behind him. She is blurred, as if she’s violently recoiling from him, affronted and afraid of his sexuality.

Some photos appear innocent by contrast, however. She revels in the play of self, embracing the angelic and the demonic, the naïf and the seductress. I’ve read critics who disparage her work as sentimental and melodramatic, but that’s part of the reason I like it; her photos possess the daring verve of youth, the ability to scream while not wanting anyone to respond. In fact, her family and professors didn’t know about the wide body of her work until after she’d died.

The question with photographers like Woodman is how much they truly want to be known, how much they even want to know themselves. In so many photos her body blurs into a wall. She wants to appear even as she disappears. Dematerialization is one of her themes. It seems as if she’s exploring the poses one has to travel through to discover or create the final pose of self, as if there is a final pose, but she’s dodging herself all the time, even in her states of nakedness, making sure no one can truly know her.

Thank God for the Francesca Woodmans of the world, although I wish she would have lived longer, discovered the restful state that sometimes can only come with age, and come out from her wispy smudges of self to be seen. Her fervency would have surely faded, but perhaps she would have slowed down, finally told her story. Inscrutability comes with a price, and screams usually want to be heard.

Filed Under: Blog, The Writing Life, Uncategorized Tagged With: Creative Process, Photography

Finding Oneself in Flight. Or Not.

May 20, 2011 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

I like searches that lead to other searches. Existence that lacks resolution. A drift of self that becomes a strange sort of home after a while.

These are the themes I’ve been writing about for the past eight years in a novel titled Elsewhere. I’m fascinated by a placelessness of identity that can overtake, if not guide one, especially in travel. A diaspora of self that afflicts and enlivens at the same time.

It’s difficult to capture such a state in words without becoming too indulgent and losing the narrative thread of the novel, which was why I really enjoyed the coincidence of coming into contact with a film, Volo, that my old friend Jerome Carolfi has been working on. He calls the film “a meditation that blends travel and dreams, confronting travel as an escape from reality and dreams as signposts which reveal our deeper psyche.”

Those words don’t do the film justice, though. What I admire about the film is the way he’s captured the textures of such moments of estrangement and quest, a disjointedness of self in flight, through the layers of his collage of images. He’s truly created an arresting dreamscape.

It’s a reminder for me of the power of experimental film, which is more akin to poetry. As a viewer, you follow the mood rather than the action of a main character. The plot points become internal. The experience becomes the narrative. You drift, in short.

The only weakness of this film is my amateurish voiceover, but I was honored to be invited to contribute. Please watch.

 

Filed Under: Blog, Uncategorized

Script Frenzy and Me

May 14, 2011 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

What’s a blog for if not self-promotion? Or self sabotage.

The latter is more likely the case here, but since this is one of my few onscreen forays, I figured what the hell, I might as well share the video. And I loved participating in Script Frenzy–an event put on by the local Office of Letters and Light, which also puts on the famous National Novel Writing Month–so I’m willing to be embarrassed to support the event. The basics are that you write a 100-page script in a month.

I wrote (or rewrote) a script about the ever dramatic, damnable, alcoholic, love-starved, and sex-starved Hart Crane. Who also wrote quite magical poetry.

The thing I learned in shooting this video (especially at a cafe after lunch) was how difficult it is to talk cogently to a camera. It requires practice. I have much more admiration now for every puffed-up, fluffed-up newscaster (yes, even you, Katie Couric).

Okay, let the rotten tomatoes be thrown…

Filed Under: Blog, Uncategorized

2011 Reading Resolutions: I Aspire

December 28, 2010 by Grant Faulkner 2 Comments

Like most hopeful and ambitious readers, I always have a teetering stack of books that I’m either reading or planning to read. The stack operates as an ongoing reading resolution throughout the year—and a reminder that life is exciting with infinite possibilities that are damnably constricted by too little time.

That said, to echo the motto Truman Capote jotted in his boyhood journal, “I aspire,” here’s a brief rundown of my reading aspirations for 2011. Just because it’s that time of year.

1) Desert, by J.M.G. LeClezio (because after reading two novels of his I’m doggedly trying to figure out why he won the Nobel)

2) Barthes by Barthes (and other Barthes because I like to revisit one thinker who’s influenced me each year)

3) Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch (because it’s on my list every year and I know I’ll never read it, so I want to be buried with the book in my hand)

4) Dusk by James Salter (Salter is one of those masters who is like a friend, so I have to get together with him regularly and relish his way of seeing the world)

5) Break It Down by Lydia Davis (as with Salter, I could read Lydia Davis for a lifetime just trying to figure out how to write the perfect short short story)

6) The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (I loved the Poetry Foundation’s podcast on Koch featuring the brilliant, lively, spirted Dean Young)

7) Fear of Dreaming by Jim Carroll (because I have a strange affection for junkie literature)

8) 2666 by Roberto Bolano (Bolano, bien sur)

9) Just Kids by Patti Smith (two artists in NYC in the early ’70s is irresistable)

10) Logicomix (a graphic novel with some serious thoughts at its core—I need cartoons to guide any intellectual endeavors)

11) Everyday Drinking by Kingsley Amis (essays about drinking meant to be read while drinking, which should be easy to accomodate)

12) The Curtain by Milan Kundera (just because I’ve read everything else by Kundera)

13) Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes (death must be recognized, always)

I’ll stop at 13–because of its fate as a number, and I’ll be lucky to read even a book a month this year. Ah for the days of yore when I literally structured my daily life so that the best hours could be spent reading and writing. Then I turned 30.

One resolution that’s not on my list is to explore a different literary magazine each week or so. I’ve discovered so many good new ones this year—all of them online mags, which seem more lively and interesting than the old standby print journals. Smokelong, Pank, Word Riot, Frigg, Used Furniture Review….

Let me know a few of your reading resolutions in the comments below.

Filed Under: Blog, Uncategorized

C.P. Cavafy and His Histories of Desire

October 10, 2010 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

His mind has grown sick from lust.
The kisses have stayed on his mouth.
All his flesh suffers from the persistent desire.
The touch of that body is over him.
He longs for union with him again.

Naturally he tries not to betray himself.
But sometimes he is almost indifferent.
Besides, he knows to what he is exposing himself,
he has made up his mind. It is not unlikely that this life
of his may bring him to a disastrous scandal.

The overwhelming thing that you take away from the poetry of Constatine Cavafy, a part-time clerk and Greek poet of the early 20th century, is desire. It’s his sustenance, nurturing him in the dark alleyways of Alexandria, where he lived for most of his life.

The impulse of his needs, skin on skin, human connection, is greater than all of the expected punishments of inevitable scandals. Dishwashers, tailor’s assistants, grocery boys briefly and passionately interrupt the loneliness of Cavafy’s nocturnal landscape. They’re the air he breathes.

But in the mix of these drives of desire are historical poems that trace through the old histories of the Hellenic period. Cavafy viewed himself as a poet-historian, which meant that he viewed all human conduct, his own included, through the lens of recorded time.

The juxtaposition of such intense personal narratives alongside the probings of Greek history create a unique commentary on life, brief sexual trysts in the shadows mixing with the grand, tragic sweeps of Greek history.

Cavafy was a man who lived in the background—even preferred obscurity as a simple clerk—so it’s no surprise that he’s drawn to the stories of the insignificant and uses “insignificance” as a backdrop and counterpoint to “significance,” altering the traditional notion of history.

When reading a collection of Ptolemaic inscriptions he discovers “a tiny,/insignificant reference to King Caesarion”:

Ah, see, you came with your vague
fascination. In history only a few
lines are found about you,
and so I molded you more freely in my mind.
I molded you handsome and full of sentiment.
My art gives your features
a dreamy compassionate beauty.

It’s art, the ability to mold his desires, to transform life into something dreamy and compassionate, that saves Cavafy, even though its salvation is a lonely affair. Later in “Caesarion,” he imagines that Caesarion enters his room:

You seemed to stand before me as you must have been
In vanquished Alexandria,
Wan and weary, idealistic in your sorrow,
Still hoping that they would pity you,
The wicked—who murmured “Too many Caesars.”

As his desires wend through battles and conquests and downfalls, Cavafy almost celebrates human foibles in his recognition and identification of them. His poems force questions about the very record of history and how it so frequently leaves out the nuances of human imperfections and desires as a way to understand life.

Cavafy wrote unwaveringly about his homosexuality and embraced the possibility of scandal. It’s interesting how gay literature often puts our prim moral code in question these days—begging the question of why straight literature seems unable to do the same (there are no more Henry Millers, Charles Bukowskis, only middle-class domestic dramas).

Straight people, white straight people in particular, have to live vicariously through others’ decadence—truly “othering” such impulses—pretending, it seems so often, to possess no decadence of their own.

Shame on you Bill Clinton, shame on you Eliot Spitzer. It’s easy to bash our scandalous public figures, and although Clinton and Spitzer might not deserve any accolades for their transgressions, after reading Cavafy, I can imagine our contemporary history being written by a poet-historian in the far future, and perhaps the narrative will be of simple lost souls seeking a moment of tenderness, a connection between heart and life that’s forbidden—the part of the story left out of CNN’s coverage.

Cavafy’s poetry has this effect of providing the subtext of history, of life, that all too often we don’t want to acknowledge or explore because it’s easier to damn (at least as a good American).

In his poem, “In a Famous Greek Colony, 200 B.C.,” Cavafy writes,

To be sure, and unfortunately, the Colony has many shortcomings.
However, is there anything human without imperfection?
And, after all, look, we are going forward.

In a culture that so often strives for perfection and chastises others for their “blemishes,” I wonder if we are going forward. Cavafy shows that a life lived within one’s imperfections instead of one’s perfections (if that’s the right way to put it) might be the more meaningful one.

Perfections tend to have a sharp, bright glare after all. There’s a peace to find with a life in the shadows. Nuances. A realization that we’re unable to see everything clearly. Humility. Even progress perhaps.

For in the end, our imperfections create a life of surprises, explorations, a life that is worth examining. In “Their Beginning,” Cavafy writes of two lovers rising from the mattress, walking furtively and uneasily on the street afterward, knowing that their “deviate, sensual delight/is done.”

But how the life of the artist has gained.
Tomorrow, the next day, years later, the vigorous verses
Will be composed that had their beginning here.

For more, check out Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation, C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems.

Filed Under: Blog, Uncategorized Tagged With: Poetry

The Naked and the Conflicted by Katie Roiphe

January 15, 2010 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment


Roiphe’s Sexual Continuum: A Phallic Narrative

The great thing about Katie Roiphe’s recent essay in the Times, The Naked and the Conflicted, a historical analysis of male authors’ approach to sex scenes (or lack thereof in the case of contemporary authors) is that it got everyone talking. No matter what your take might be, Roiphe hit upon a cultural nerve, something that any lit reader must reckon with.

It’s the kind of essay that people will refer to years from now. In fact, it’s the kind of essay written to be the kind of essay that people will refer to years from now.

And it all began with a friend of Roiphe’s throwing away a Philip Roth novel (The Humbling of all books) in a New York subway because she was revolted by his sex scenes—the “disgusting, dated, redundant” nature of them.

“But why, I kept wondering, did she have to throw it out?” Roiphe asks. “Did it perhaps retain a little of the provocative fire its author might have hoped for?”

Roiphe eloquently provides a literary history of male authors’ (all white and straight) embrace and indulgence in provocative sex scenes as a way to explore life and assert an existential stance of dare and virile conquest—at least those authors who came of age in the ‘50s.

In short, she’s validating the efforts of writers who have been maligned for their sexism, giving a long overdue shout-out for the nuances of their carnal endeavors. After all these years, she sees that their writing is about sexual connection and what that means to human connection. (To think that anyone could have maligned them as immature sex pots, traffickers in lit porn, specialists in the male gaze!?!—which they’re guilty of, of course.)

“After the sweep of the last half-century, our bookshelves look different than they did to the young Kate Millett, drinking her nightly martini in her downtown apartment, shoring up her courage to take great writers to task in Sexual Politics for the ways in which their sex scenes demeaned, insulted or oppressed women,” Roiphe writes.

But Roiphe’s challenge isn’t so much in taking on Millett’s narrow view. It’s questioning the “heirs” of Roth, Updike, and Mailer—those emasculated, sensitive souls such as David Eggers, Michael Chabon, and Jonathon Franzen (who all probably read Millett in college, talked with their female friends about feminist theory, and did their damndest to be upstanding gentlemen of this new world in their behavior and their writing—only to end up being chastised for not slinging their dicks more in their prose—ouch!).

She describes today’s straight male authors as “cautious, entangled, ambivalent, endlessly ironic,” while the old guard is “almost romantic”: “it has a mystery and a power, at least. It makes things happen.”

“Our new batch of young or youngish male novelists are not dreaming up Portnoys or Rabbits. The current sexual style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than virility, the cuddle preferable to sex,” writes Roiphe.

Roiphe recounts a scene in Egger’s road trip novel, “You Shall Know Our Velocity,” where the hero leaves a disco with a woman and she undresses and climbs on top of him, and they just lie there: “Her weight was the ideal weight and I was warm and wanted her to be warm.”

Contrast that with a passage from Mailer’s “controversial obsession” of the “violence in sex, the urge toward domination in its extreme.” A sampling: “I wounded her, I knew it, she thrashed beneath me like a trapped little animal, making not a sound.” “He must subdue her, absorb her, rip her apart and consume her.”

While Roiphe’s points are compelling and worth a great deal of pondering—and Eggers’ scene of warmth might be a tad laughable—she misses something. Perhaps it’s in her insistence that Eggers, Chabon, and Franzen are Mailer, Updike, and Roth’s heirs. They’re not.

Even as Roiphe’s post-feminist feminism is reclaiming the male maestros of the sex scene, men have moved on. The above passages from Mailer sound utterly ridiculous now to a man exploring sexual attraction—or even conquest. If you’re a straight white man writing today (and for the first time in literary history, this is actually a fairly problematic endeavor, as Roiphe’s essay certainly demonstrates), a sex scene like Mailer’s has not only been ridiculously overdone, it’s become absurd in the past thirty or so years (let’s call it game over with Bukowski).

Such writing is often only a few lyrical phrases above a Penthouse Forum column, and the contemporary male writers that Roiphe chastises for being, um, not man enough to write a sex scene, are man enough to plumb other nuances of male/female relationships that Mailer, Updike, and Roth are only scarcely aware of at best.

And who is to say that Eggers’ “cuddling” isn’t a different sort of commentary on the human connection that Roiphe claims to value?

In other words, the sex scene doesn’t make the man. And it’s a bit insulting to value an author’s work in such a scanty, narrow way. These contemporary authors haven’t posited sex as their subject like Mailer, Updike, and Roth did, so Roiphe’s comparisons aren’t truly relevant (i.e., she calls them “heirs” relentlessly, just because they are white, male, straight, and critically celebrated, not because they’ve patterned themselves after this old guard—in fact, they’ve disregarded the old guard).

One has to feel sorry for poor David Eggers and Benjamin Kunkel on Roiphe’s chart, doomed to reside on the “snuggling” end of the sexual continuum while Roth and Updike are celebrated with a long (gosh, even penile!) bar on the other end for their “outrageous behavior.” It’s as if Eggers and Kunkel are the nerdy, bookish boys in high school being teased for not having muscles.

Isn’t Roiphe’s graphic strangely phallic, but without irony? Suddenly the old, leering, lascivious professor seems to be back in vogue.

Still, Roiphe says that the “crusading feminist critics” who objected to the likes of Mailer “might be tempted to take this new sensitivity or softness or indifference to sexual adventuring as a sign of progress.”

But, no, this isn’t progress, Roiphe says. “The sexism in the work of the heirs apparent is simply wilier and shrewder and harder to smoke out. What comes to mind is Franzen’s description of one of his female characters in The Corrections: “Denise at 32 was still beautiful.”

Is that all of the sexism she can come up with. Is that wilier and shrewder and harder to smoke out?

Gosh, a guy can’t win for losing. A youngish male author has to feel somewhat doomed. Most of one’s young adult years spent hearing about how that “outrageous behavior” was, well, outrageous. Now it’s as if Katie Roiphe is hanging around Jack Nicholson, chuckling and winking with him, calling him “Uncle Jack.”

She seems to think that sexism is inherent in men, so they might as well embrace it in a Maileresque way, to spear rather than cuddle? In this sense, she posits such a ridiculous either/or of masculinity that her arguments become adolescent despite their erudite veneer. She reduces straight men to a single, highly limited sexuality. It’s a view that’s as reductive as, well, pornography.

I applaud Roiphe for revisiting these authors’ “outrageous behavior” and saving them from the politically incorrect graveyard. But I think she needs to rethink her position on the likes of Eggers and Chabon and grant them their own existential pursuits, their conquests—not as heirs, but as independent creators.

Journeys and battles and conquests don’t all have to happen in the bedroom, after all. Isn’t this one of the great benefits of feminism? Feminism didn’t only unshackle women; it set some men free as well.

Filed Under: Blog, Uncategorized Tagged With: Literary Critique

Reading Resolutions

January 13, 2010 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment

This is about the time of the month where New Year’s resolutions start to tail off, right?

After struggling through the first 10 pages, or perhaps the first 10 sentences, of Finnegan’s Wake, you decide to read the cloaks and daggers and symbology of the latest Dan Brown novel instead. Your salad first turns into a chicken salad, and then into a cheeseburger.

So, here’s a fresh look at resolutions, at least reading resolutions–and perhaps a more inspiring guide than my last post on reading resolutions. This one comes from the Times, and recounts notable 2009 best seller’s take on the subject of reading goals, flagellations, and joys.

One of my favorites is Alexander McCall Smith (“The Lost Art of Gratitude”), who has carried Vikram Seth’s 1,400-page novel A Suitable Boy with him through airports for years. It’s like that resolution to lose five pounds each year. You might as well just enjoy your cupcakes. But I love his intention (my equivalent is Hermann Broch’s Sleepwalkers–it will be such a shame if I die before completing the heavy slab).

On the opposite end of wrangling with the tomes of our times is a resolution much more do-able, and perhaps more meaningful. Doug Stanton, the author of Horse Soldiers, aims to “reread side by side the last lines of Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and the last lines of the first paragraph in Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses. They both end by repeating a last line, and it’s in the white space, or pause, between these lines that art is made. They are like an eerily silent magic trick.”

What a beautiful resolution. To return to white space where art is made. If I can achieve that, then who cares about the five pounds–or Hermann Broch’s Sleepwalkers.

But I’ll keep trudging around with Sleepwalkers. For what would the joy of reading be without lugging around such strivings. To think that my last words might be, “I wish I would have read Sleepwalkers.”

Filed Under: Blog, Uncategorized

Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates

February 20, 2009 by Grant Faulkner Leave a Comment


There have been so many novels and movies about the vacuous nature of suburban life, the biting angst that dooms just about anyone who wears Dockers and lives in a subdivision or at the end of a cul-de-sac and, gosh, God forbid, works hard to earn a living for the family, that it’s perhaps the most tired and clichéd storyline of our times.

At the same time, this pernicious confrontation between the urgent need for individual expression in the vicious swarms of conventionality is a peculiarly gripping storyline that’s uniquely American.

Revolutionary Road might be the grandfather of this genre, despite the fact that Rabbit Run was published one year earlier, in 1960; it’s influenced everything from The Ice Storm to American Beauty and the television series Weeds.

But Revolutionary Road doesn’t have any freaky moms selling dope in order to keep up appearances as Weeds does. In fact, while reading it, I wondered how a novelist could pitch such a story today. Everything about it drips with the sort of ordinariness that agents and publishers shy away from. There’s not a gimmick to be had in this novel—no alchemists, time travelers, or circus freaks. Its hook is existential angst, straight up, no chaser. Who wants to read such stuff?

And yet the novel is refreshing—still, nearly 50 years later—in unexpected and stunning ways. I don’t think I’ve read any domestic drama that is quite so disturbing—not because of any extreme actions or events that take place, but simply because of many small yet tragic pivots that life and love turn on.

It’s the mundane that is the most disturbing thing of all in this life.

Yes, there’s a big whopping tragedy at the end that’s plenty disturbing, but it’s the quotidian arguments, the daily tussles with the self that truly haunt me. These people try, no matter how ineptly or awkwardly, to make it all work—and that’s the key to the tragedy, they do try—but they fail in a way that probably isn’t too far from the way most of us fail or nearly fail or could fail. Life is a horrid summation of all of their small missteps and downfalls, the small traps that they fall into—traps they unfortunately often set for themselves.

The novel begins fittingly with a wide-angle group shot, as if Yates is on a hillside describing a herd of sheep, except he’s describing the dress rehearsal of the Laurel Players, a theatre group that some of the more imaginative and perhaps more daring members of the community put together. No one is singled out for description; the director addresses “them” as if they are a team, all wearing the same jerseys and masks.

Yates gives this herd of sheep, these gutsy artists, the same hopes and fears—both of which sabotage their happiness and success. “The trouble was that from the very beginning they had been afraid they would end by making fools of themselves, and they had compounded that fear by being afraid to admit it.”

Fear debilitates the best of efforts of the characters in this story. Their fear causes them to mangle their lines, and the performance turns embarrassing, perhaps most noticeably for April Wheeler, who plays the lead role and pins the most hopes on the theatre group.

Afterward, Frank Wheeler goes backstage to console his wife. “It simply wasn’t worth feeling bad about,” Frank thinks. “Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstance might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.”

Remembering who you are turns out to be a difficult and ghastly thing.

Frank and April are smart, perceptive people—and therein lies the tragedy: Their sensibilities don’t guide them out the traps they find themselves in, yet they’re smart enough to realize that life should hold more. How…how…how?

When April and Frank first met, the unencumbered possibilities of youthful dreams made them look and feel brave and smart. Frank could spout his caustic, spirited, grand theories of life like a college undergraduate, and April admired his wit and intelligence because there was no reason to think that they wouldn’t lead exotic, heroic lives, that they would become bohemians, artists, even if they didn’t have an art to practice. They didn’t know that living such a life goes far beyond words and theories and requires a genuine and undeniable passion—the recklessness of fervid pursuit.

April becomes pregnant before their fanciful conceptions are put to the test, and their life quickly shifts into the deep furrows of conventionality, even though they don’t desire such a life. Frank takes a job with Knox Business Machines and becomes a “man in a grey suit,” even if he conceives of himself above it all.

Frank later thinks: “Wasn’t it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn’t really wanted to do? Taking a hopelessly dull job to prove he could be as responsible as any other family man, moving to an overpriced, genteel apartment to prove his mature belief in the fundamentals of orderliness and good health, having another child to prove that the first one hadn’t been a mistake, buying a house in the country because that was the next logical step and he had to prove himself capable of taking it.”

Still, Frank hides from the reality of his life by propping up what turns out to be a chimera: that he is saving himself for an invisible “creative” life. What will make it creative, no one, especially Frank, knows.

Frank is anything but frank, after all. He moves through life trying to pull its strings like a novelist, in the hope that nothing will get ruffled, least of all his self-conception.

Frank and April’s marriage follows a pattern of connection and disconnection, as most relationships do, but the whipsaws of their arguments become increasingly familiar territory. They’re adversaries who need each other. Adversaries, who can, but seldom, comfort each other. Adversaries who love each other, except they don’t know what love is, and they wonder if they ever did. Everything, it seems, is a fateful, disturbing contradiction.

Frank’s lost and found manhood and his misplaced attempts to stave off the emasculating forces of the world—and in himself—form a dangerous undercurrent to their lives. Life in the suburbs, it seems, inherently strips a man of some fundamental and necessary aspect of manhood.

He returns to his truer nature only when swilling martinis and having an affair, or in the glimmers of moments while doing something mundane and unheroic like yard work.

“Even so, once the first puffing and dizziness was over, he began to like the muscular pull and the sea of it, and the smell of the earth. At least it was a man’s work. At least, squatting to rest on the wooded slope, he could look down and see his house the way a house ought to look on a fine spring day, safe of its carpet of green, the frail white sanctuary of a man’s love, a man’s wife and children.”

The repetition of “at least” is like a drum beat in the novel. Life is a series of rationalizations that begin with “at least.”

But then a moment emerges to break free from the “at leasts” of their lives. April proposes that they move to Paris–the last moment of springtime renewal she offers in a life devoid of more Aprils. “You’ll be doing what you should’ve been allowed to do seven years ago. You’ll be finding yourself. You’ll be reading and studying and taking long walks and thinking. You’ll have time.”

Nothing terrifies Frank more; he senses that there’s no self to find, no creativity to express. And he’d have to accept April as a breadwinner to his lethargic, empty self.

“Alas! When passion is both meek and wild!” Yates quotes John Keats to begin the novel. Such a battle ensues in the passions of Revolutionary Road, but Frank and April fail to pick up the figurative musket of their revolution to take a single shot at the enemy.

What a definition of the tragic—Keats’s meek and wild passions dueling. Does the person who complains about not having enough time for his or her true self have the courage to seize the time when it becomes available? It’s easier to complain—and therefore imagine that that better self, that better life exists—than put it all to the test.

Ah, what I could be if I only lived in Paris…

Frank can’t express his fear, for that would make him a failure, in April’s eyes and his. He goes along with things, tries to learn French, tells his co-workers and his friends that they’re leaving, and is even energized by the timidity of their reactions—finally, he can live in contrast. But when April accidently becomes pregnant, he’s saved. He doesn’t want the baby, but at least it shields him from any attempt to find—and confront—himself.

“The pressure was off; life had come mercifully back to normal,” Yates writes.

A life of fear—and security—is preferable to a life of bravery—and insecurity. What a nettlesome and devastating existential situation.

James Wood accurately described Yates’s prose as “richly restrained” and “luxuriously lined but plain to the touch” in his essay in the New Yorker. Yates’s talent was such that he easily could have succeeded in the over-the-top lyricism that commands such attention these days, but he chooses to restrain himself for mimetic reasons, it seems—to convey the simple, devastating truth that runs through his story. He’s the definition of an honest writer.

He’s so honest that he can appear cruel at times, especially because he doesn’t shy away from piercing displays of life’s cruelties. Take the scene when Frank breaks up with Norma, the secretary he’s been having an affair with, just when she surprises him with a nude dance, the wafts of a carefully cooked dinner coming from the kitchen, her naïve love about to be shattered forever. But her love wasn’t a part of his “level” breakup plans.

And nothing ends up being “level” in this novel. The suburbs, it turns out, are again full of singeing drama. Why would we ever think such a place was safe?

For more, Emily Gumport wrote a thought provoking essay on Richard Yates in Bookslut.

Read more reviews at Lit Matters.

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Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month, co-founder of 100 Word Story, writer, tap dancer, alchemist, contortionist, numbskull, preacher. Read More…

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