What Happened to Sophie Wilder
I’m excited to announce that Tin House Books will be publishing my first novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, in 2012. Tin House’s announcement of the deal is here.
In praise of bestiality (or something like that…)
I’ve been looking for a good excuse to post a few things on this long-dormant site, so I’m glad to have found myself embroiled in a bit of a literary dust-up. Yesterday, the Times ran my review of Benjamin Hale’s The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore. Hale’s novel is a first-person confessional in the mode of Nabokov—and more recent practitioners like Banville, Amis, and Peter Carey—with a significant innovation: the first-person confessor is a chimpanzee. In praising the book I noted that there were scenes of human-chimp sex that would likely turn some readers off, though I didn’t give all that much space to the matter, since it is far from the most interesting thing about the book.
Little did I know that I had become an apologist for “bestiality/literary porn.” So at least says Wesley J. Smith on Secondhand Smoke, his bioethics blog at First Things. Since I didn’t find anything in Hale’s book especially titillating, I was interested by Smith’s choice of the word “porn,” but it turns out to be entirely empty rhetoric. That is, Smith may very well have a carefully considered framework for drawing that difficult line between the obscene and the aesthetically valuable, but he can’t have applied it here, since he doesn’t pretend to have opened Hale’s book.
He hasn’t even read my short review of the book with any notable care, which makes responding to his post not as much fun as it ought to be. What he did instead was note certain contextual markers—I work at Harper’s Magazine! I write for the New York Times!—and conclude that I’m a liberal relativist. He then briefly skimmed my review through the lens of this conclusion. The result is to be expected. Questions raised are read as conclusions drawn: if I write that “the point of these scenes is not to shock us but to ask what fundamentally makes us human,” that actually means that I “applaud destroying the principle that being human is something unique, important, and special.” Descriptions made are read as judgments rendered: if I make the neutral observation that certain readers will find the bestiality an “insurmountable barrier,” this must mean not only that I “find the bestiality perfectly fine,” but that I look “down [my] intellectual elite nose at those who wouldn’t agree.”
None of this bothers me, especially. Reviews are now written to be read lazily by agenda-driven bloggers. Benjamin Hale spends a few years writing a book so that I can spend a few weeks writing a summary of it so that Smith can spend a few hours writing a blog post condemning both the book and my summary so that I can spend a few minutes updating this tumblr. The only part that chafes is that last bit, about my “intellectual elite nose.” It bothers me not because I couldn’t take my nose off even if I wanted to, but because I happen to wear it proudly. I come from a family steeped in the traditions of Catholic intellectualism, where the drawing of moral distinction is more important than the picking of a cultural-political team or the straw-manning of “the liberal intellegentsia.” (Smith actually uses this term.) This tradition insists that there is no tension between being a religious believer and being an intellectual. So it bothers me, not on my own behalf but on behalf of this tradition, when a writer for the late Father Neuhaus’s First Things, a writer who doesn’t know how to spell “intelligentsia,” uses the language of anti-intellectualism to attack a book he hasn’t read.
In my review, I draw the obvious comparison between Hale’s book and Lolita. As it happens, Lolita’s initial success, its engagement as a serious literary work rather than a piece of kiddie porn, was greatly helped by the praise of Graham Greene, who called it the best book of the year at the time when it could not be published in England or the United States. He would not have thought to frame the book as an intellectually elitist subversion of populist values, because he didn’t think of Catholic values as populist and because he didn’t have a mindless fear of being thought of as a “rube.” Wesley Smith is quite right to worry about cultural “degradation.” One mark of that degradation is the difference between Graham Greene’s response to Lolita and Wesley Smith’s response to Bruno Littlemore.
I can be heard (briefly) on the latest episode of Dinner Party Download, a public radio program I highly recommend.
Paperback Row
The Whole Five Feet, now in paperback, was featured last week in the New York Times Book Review’s “Paperback Row.”
Now in Paperback
The Whole Five Feet is available in paperback on May 11. Order it on Amazon or elsewhere » (www.thewholefivefeet.com/buy-the-book.html)
Addendum
My latest piece in The Believer, “Every Reader Finds Himself: Notes on the Book I Didn’t Write About Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf.”
New Believer
“A Partisan of Eternity,” my reconsideration of Thornton Wilder, in The Believer.
