And Charles and I first started talking because he asked me about the tattoo — what it meant. So now it holds the memory of our first meeting, too, and everything that came after.
So I feel like so much of what we read on the Internet is about immediate gratification. Writers post a short blog post to get their thoughts out into the world. Facebook status updates stand in as mini-essays. But we’ve also seen some commitment to long-form works this year, like Jill Abramson announcing her new venture to pay writers and websites like The Atavist that published your essay. What’s the biggest challenge for writers in this state of information overload?
I do think that writers face certain perils in the Internet era that have to do with the ease of publishing and the possibility of publishing things without working on them for a long time. And so much great writing happens because it marinates for a long time. Emily Cook has this great essay in The New Inquiry about how first reactions or early reactions aren’t necessarily more authentic. Sometimes we have a tendency to associate immediacy with authenticity, but often the most authentic thought or narrative is one that’s been considered and reconsidered and worked over. That practice of working on pieces for a long time — holding on to them for a long time and revising them over a long period of time and coming back to them over and over again — I don’t think we should let go of that. And I don’t think that digital culture means we have to let go of that, but I think it can function as a Siren. I feel it too. We have to plug our eyes and tie ourselves to the mast. It’s a perilous kind of affirmation: the possibility of immediate publication and the gratification of immediate readership.
Jason Diamond and Tobias Carroll wrote great think pieces about this being the year of the essay. Do you agree? I know we spoke about this at length in a previous interview for Salon, but what changes have you seen in the way that essays are read and discussed? Jeffery Renard Allen, author of “Song of the Shank” (Graywolf Press)I’m a big fan of Amis, especially such masterpieces as “Time’s Arrow” and “The Information,” and I found this one jaw-droppingly good — even by the very high bar I set for Amis. His return to Auschwitz is wrenching, a portrayal of hell that is haunting and human and, yes, absurd. It’s a devastating glimpse into vapidity and evil – and one very randy Nazi’s attempts to seduce the commandant’s wife.Jessie Burton, author of “The Miniaturist” (Ecco)
“Life Drawing,” by Robin Black (Random House)
One of my favorite novels of this year was “Life Drawing” by Robin Black. Using scalpel precision to pare back the painful beauty of a long marriage, Black’s prose is frequently breathtaking. What comes next after infidelity? Youth and aging, responsibility and betrayal, tenderness, creativity and the unavoidable fact that we never stop changing, make this a compulsive, revelatory read. Black has a skill few possess, and I look forward to what she writes next.
“Mount Terminus,” by David Grand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
I am all the better for having read David Grand’s masterful novel “Mount Terminus,” which is a reimagining of the origins of Hollywood. The novel is the literary equivalent of “Citizen Kane” in the way that it evokes a time and place that is both real and imagined, familiar and strange, every day yet magical. And the book manages to achieve all that it does by putting the hardcore issues of felt life at its narrative center—namely, the universal longing for love, our desire to be, our need to belong.Geoff Dyer, author of “Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush” (Pantheon)Jeff Hobbs, author of “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League” (Scribner)
“All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid,” by Matt Bai (Knopf)
Not only does Matt Bai look at both sides of the central issue — which in and of itself is rare enough in political journalism — but he looks at every space in between. In doing so, he gives us a political drama that is both taut and empathetic. Gary Hart is a name that most Americans born after 1980 can’t remember, and one that, had a few particular decisions been made differently, all of us might have known as our 41st president. Whether or not you agree with (or even care about) the overarching thesis, you can’t help but come away with an uncomfortable understanding of just how precarious, and even randomized, the future of our nation is — as precarious and randomized as a guy meeting a girl on a boat.
“Redeployment,” by Phil Klay (Penguin Press)
I am sorry to report that a little thesis of mine has been shot down, is missing presumed injured. Back in 2010 I proved beyond reasonable doubt that since so much great reportage (David Finkel, Dexter Filkins et al.) had come out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan there was no need to wait for fictional accounts. Ben Fountain’s great novel “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” dodged that bullet by being set almost entirely in the U.S. but Phil Klay’s collection of stories “Redeployment” turns out to be exactly the book I (didn’t know I) was waiting for.Jac Jemc, author of “A Different Bed Every Time” (Dzanc Books)
“The Empathy Exams,” by Leslie Jamison (Graywolf Press)
A book willing to ask more questions than provide answers goes straight to the top of my list, and “The Empathy Exams” did just that. Jamison manages to grip the reader through a digressive exploration of the previously shoulder-shrug-worthy topic of empathy, poking and prodding at each of her biases and assumptions, and urging readers to do the same. That a book as contemplative as “The Empathy Exams” has made such a splash this year proves that the bestseller lists can surprise us yet.
I’m glad that this is being touted as “the year of the essay” — and certainly glad to see work by writers I admire (Charles D’Ambrosio, Meghan Daum, Roxane Gay) getting wonderful attention and circulation — but it also strikes me as somewhat humorous. The essay has a long history and it’s such a basic form — not “basic” in the sense of easy, but “basic” in the sense of primal: a transcription of a mind reckoning with some subject — what could possibly be more compelling or intuitive? Why hasn’t every year been the year of the essay? I do think that the capaciousness of the essay — in particular, its ability to simultaneously hold personal material and outward inquiries (critical or journalistic) — is part of its appeal right now; it can offer the intimacy of access alongside the wider horizon of exploration beyond the self.
Who are some of the great thinkers (writers, painters, architects, etc.) that influenced or inspired you this year?
I can tell you about a few of the artists who have really gotten deep under my skin this year, although there are too many to list. I read Chris Kraus’s “I Love Dick” for the first time and it floored me: the way it negotiates the dynamics of exposure, plays with obsession as an empowering rather than degrading force, talks openly about how female desire is perceived and received… it felt like running into the snow from a hot tub, that crazy tingling of my own nerve endings activated. I’ve been a Maggie Nelson fan for a while, but I got to revisit both “The Art of Cruelty” and “Bluets” for a criticism seminar I was teaching at the NYU Journalism School — a bunch of deeply thoughtful, truly talented aspiring critics whose bylines I’ll be watching out for in the years to come — and I was so moved, once more, by how Nelson treats her own interior life with rigor, and treats the rigors of criticism with a sensitivity forged deep in her interior life.
Two art exhibitions really electrified me this year: Wangechi Mutu at the Brooklyn Museum — especially her work with the female body and consumption: a video of herself squatting in front of a chocolate cake, stuffing fistfuls in her mouth, is one of the most powerful transcriptions of the fraught female relationship to consumption I’ve ever seen. I watched it multiple times; just stood there transfixed. I also loved a Lucio Fontana exhibit I saw at the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris over the summer. He’s known for making holes in his work — neat slits, sweeping gashes and ragged mouths — and I was captivated by the effect: this idea of puncturing the stillness of a single color, or a single material — some finite canvas in the foreground — to suggest the infinite beyond. “Who knows how God is?” he said. “So I made holes.” That says something about my process of writing essays, as well.