The Week in Pieces

George Steiner’s Dog

George Steiner’s Old English sheepdog, Ben, monopolizes the first half of Christopher Tayler’s Guardian profile of Steiner. Ben is described kindly, as is Steiner, who receives the admired-yet-eccentric-elderly-intellectual treatment. Steiner, an important early contributor to Granta, is ‘quadrilingual, which means I love this language freely, not by imperative imposition’. Steiner doesn’t say how many languages Ben can speak, or whether quadrilinguality is a desirable quality in a dog. One presumes not – it’s bad enough being woken on Sunday morning by the dog next door, but can you imagine if that dog could also express itself in German, French, English and Italian?

Steiner’s wit is well-worn but not worn-out and his observations are acute. Britain’s cynicism, he says, is also its salvation. The country owes its ‘tolerance’ to ‘its ironies… It is my conviction that had the infinite rhetorical genius of Adolf Hitler been tested at Hyde Park Corner, people would have said, “Ah, come off it”, and walked away’. This is a sentiment with which Ben might agree – he is an English sheepdog after all.

Who Did You Say You’re Pretending to Be?

The novelist Marie Myung Ok-Lee has a sharply written essay in Bookslut on the peculiar desire of white memoirists to pass themselves off as Native Americans.

Lee writes that the ‘literary fascination with Native Americans goes back to the seventeenth century with the popularity of so-called captivity narratives, titillating, sometimes embellished autobiographical accounts of being kidnapped by Indians. These accounts were runaway bestsellers of their day; in colonial New England houses had two books: the Bible and The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Mary Rowlandson’s account of her time among the Wampanoag Indians’. Lee, who is Asian American, argues that ‘too much Asian exotica would brand me a literary sell-out. Yet, these white writers are selling out a culture that isn’t even theirs, and the so-called best minds in the publishing and book review worlds seem unable to sniff out these impostors, or even, really spend a lot of effort doing so’. This last charge is most damning of all.

Road to Nowhere

Michael Hogan, Vanity Fair’s ‘executive online editor’ (we don’t know what that job entails either), blogs about Facebook’s Visual Bookshelf application, a program that ‘lets you snoop around and find out what “your friends” are reading, which is a convenient way to feel intellectually superior or inferior, depending’. Hogan has spent the better part of a year reading Kerouac’s On the Road: The Original Scroll – but we’d advise him to skip the book and read Louis Menand’s superb New Yorker essay on the Beat movement instead. Menand rightly calls On the Road ‘more of a literary phenomenon than a work of literature’.

The Irish Writing Olympics

In the Atlantic, Joseph O’Neill pays tribute to Flann O’Brien, ‘the shadowy and indeed overshadowed hero of modern Irish fiction’. In a metaphor at once sharp and sad, O’Neill considers O’Brien ‘the bronze medalist on a podium otherwise occupied by Joyce (gold) and Beckett (silver)’. There are solid-gold anecdotes in this essay – for example, O’Brien (whose real name was Brian O’Nolan) may never have published his first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, if Graham Greene hadn’t been an early and enthusiastic reader for Longmans. O’Neill goes for the gold himself, describing At Swim-Two-Birds as ‘annihilat[ing] axiomatic notions of what it means to read and write’. (John Updike approached O’Brien’s fiction from a different angle in a New Yorker essay earlier this year.)

Can a Feminist Classic be an American Classic?

Elaine Showalter reports from a conference celebrating thirty-five years since the first publication of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. The title of the conference – ‘Can a Feminist Classic Be an American Classic?’ – is either radical or risible, depending upon your view of Jong’s novel. Isn’t the definition of a classic a book that holds up over time? Fear of Flying is, among other things, dreadfully dated. Showalter goes easy on Jong, who never fulfilled her potential as a writer, perhaps because she was spoiled by the success of Fear of Flying, her first book. Ultimately, it isn’t flying you ought to worry about – it’s landing that’s cause for concern.

Worth Noting

Edward Champion conducts an interview with the American novelist Tobias Wolff, a ‘dirty realist’ and early contributor to Granta. Wolff has recently published Our Story Begins, a collection of short fiction.

The Nation has an impressive overview of the short fiction of Donald Barthelme, the American absurdist, postmodernist and Granta contributor. Although Barthelme died in 1989, Flying to America, a collection of unpublished stories, appeared late last year. Joanna Scott, herself a talented short-story writer, investigates ‘Barthelmismo’, which is Thomas Pynchon’s phrase for the ‘transcendent weirdness’ of Barthelme’s fiction. Thomas Pynchon describing another writer’s work as ‘weird’ – that’s high praise.

Email comments and tips to rrobins@granta.com. Special thanks to Alice Haworth-Booth for her assistance.