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Just posted the full version of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s amazing review of Through the Pale Door online. Now let’s get right down to business. The Wall Street Journal yesterday published an even more amazing article on books. I’d never read anything like it before. In it, Lev Grossman hits the nail on the head.

This article makes all kinds of insightful assumptions. Boldly speaking for “the novel,” but focusing mainly on Americans, Grossman says the trick to fiction in the new century lies in tight, quick-paced literary stories. Forget Rushdie and Marquez. What about House of Leaves or The Corrections or Beloved? Screw ‘em. What about the Harry Potter books? No comment.

Wait. Here we go: “The revolution is under way. The novel is getting entertaining again. Writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Richard Price, Kate Atkinson, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke, to name just a few, are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction…” This is news to me. Who are these people? I’ve never heard of Neil Gaiman before. Is he that folk singer? No, no, hold on. That’s Neil Diamond. Neil Diamond. Or Neil Young. Now what about this Jonathan Lethem, was he the guy on “Third Rock from the Sun” and The World According to Garp? Come to think of it, what was The World According to Garp? There’s some guy out there I heard who’s also part of the revolution. Name’s John Irving. Another one, Tom Wolf or Wolfe or something.

I’m getting distracted. Back to the main point. Grossman goes on to make a lot of fine pronouncements. Previously literary authors are turning their eye to this thing called popular genre fiction, whatever that is. Ha! I guess I just can’t keep up with the ever-changing world of literature. (Good thing we got Grossman!) So here’s what he says: “Look at Thomas Pynchon—in ‘Inherent Vice’ he has swapped his usual cumbersome verbal calisthenics for the more maneuverable chassis of a hard-boiled detective novel.” This is absolutely right on the money, Liv. I heard that Pynchon also has plans to write this short, plot-driven mystery novel called The Crying of Lot 49. Can’t wait to read that one. Oh, wait, it’s already out? Even better!

Here’s another great comment: “The Modernists introduced us to the idea that reading could be work, and not common labor but the work of an intellectual elite, a highly trained coterie of professional aesthetic interpreters.”

You better believe it, brothers and sisters. Those traditionalists were way too easy. Henry James, get out of here with your simplistic three-page sentences. Same with you, Thomas de Quincey and Tristram Shandy. Your stuff belongs in the elementary school.

And take that, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein: “To the Modernists, stories were a distortion of real life. In real life stories don’t tie up neatly. Events don’t line up in a tidy sequence and mean the same things to everybody they happen to.” I always thought Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo and Balzac were way, way to kind to their characters. And Flaubert. His novel Madame Bovary wraps up a little too neatly for my taste, as well. So does The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Scarlet Letter. Those Gothics and Romantics. You can have them. I want tough, sad, drama.

“There was a time when difficult literature was exciting. T.S. Eliot once famously read to a whole football stadium full of fans.” Well, hmm. By football, do you mean soccer? And what do we mean by fans? I also wonder if this was the football team at Yale or Harvard. Makes a difference, you know.

Grossman also says that The Modernists thought pleasure wasn’t the point of their writing. I couldn’t agree more. I really hated reading all that stuff and the only reason I stuck to it was the lessons it taught me. In the 1920 we was just learning good compared to the now-times. But the answer is plotting. Plotting, let it ring from the stove tops and bell towers. Let plotting ring from the shores of Allegheny to the mountains of California. Let plotting ring. We should dispense with commentary on life and leap full on into the headlights of pure entertainment – the new, uncharted waters in writing. It’s murky, foggy territory out there. Who knows what we’ll find. Certainly none of the familiar insights afforded by Tolkien or Kurt Vonnegut. Plot-driven fiction. Woo. Boy. Pack your bags. Make sure you’ve got plenty of beef jerky in there. Gonna be a long trip.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I leave you to go enjoy (sigh) some mindless Pynchon novel.

A week of trying to squash the spoiled-kid-on-Christmas Eve feeling, and finally: the book review appears. The Sunday edition of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the inside of which I saw way back in second or third grade. Who knows? Maybe even first-grade. Back then, they still laid out the newspaper partially by hand, if I remember. No Quark or Indesign. Boy, there’s a way to feel old.

Now that autumn lurks around the corner with its switch blade drawn, ready to mug us all, I reflect on my summer of happiness. One of my biggest regrets was missing out on all of the MJ memorabilia. I bought none of it. The pang of remorse didn’t hit me until I passed a rack of crap left over from the big commotion. Let’s hope that book stores and other retailers can move the rest of this stuff before shelves and tables begin filling with issues and histories and memoirs dedicated to Ted Kennedy. A story from PW says book sales have already jumped way up thanks to the senator’s passing. There’s only one other business I know of that benefits more from death, and it ain’t the fast food industry.

Kennedy’s death doesn’t seem to have caused quite the uproar that Jackson’s did. Nobody in my neck of the woods is pondering suicide, and although he was a helluva speaker his voice doesn’t fill the air waves. Too bad. But I’ll say this. The magazine stands are going to look like one gigantic American flag in about a week. Mark my word.

Enough about important deaths. Let’s talk about trite ones. I lost $1 in the laundry machine downstairs. It’s kaputz.

Now that we’ve discussed trite deaths, let’s move on to mid-range deaths. Summer is gone. Where did the bad boy go? I find myself looking back with fond memories already. What all happened this summer? We lost some celebs. We almost lost track of a governor, but thank the lord he turned up (in Argentina). Iran had some trouble with an election or something, I hear. (Joke.) I zoomed around the Southeast reading from my book. Graded 700 or so AP Lit exams. Spent a little time in Charleston. Spent a little time in Atlanta. Spent some time in the Rockies. Wrote most of another novel. Read some good books. Avoided the beach. Not bad.

My biggest triumph, however, was avoiding the Transformers II movie. I’m so glad I resisted and gave my slow summer afternoons to something else.

So now we move on into fall. This coming weekend I head to Atlanta for the Decatur Book Festival to meet fancy authors and read from my book. Looking forward to it. Must remember to get oil changed tomorrow.

Saturday morning. The sky opens and leaves streets in NC gushing with water. I head onto the highway for McIntyre Books for an 11 am reading. When I reach my exit, Google Maps says “Take a left at 64-West.” I look at my directions. I look at the road. Going left at I-64 means I would drive onto I-64 East. Why doesn’t Google just tell me to go I-64 East. Oh, why do they always do this?

So I do what any natural person would do. I assume that my gut is right and go the wrong way, driving for about 20 minutes. This means I lose 40 minutes at least in the end.

I arrive at the book store in the midst of a flood. They say, “It’s okay, Brian.” For the first time in my life I want them to say, “Nobody came to your reading anyway, so you didn’t let anyone down.” But I did.

Good news is we’re rescheduled for 0ct 9. Now, a few days later I give a reading in Greenvillle full of dinner tables. It’s great. I read with Joni Tenvis, who read a little bit about everything – including a job at a cemetery. Definitely grimmer than working at a steel mill. Among some familiar faces in the audience and surprises were John Jeter and George Singleton.

Now I’m wrapping up my first day of the fall semester. Almost. Still have a three-hour seminar to sit through. At least I get Mon, Wed, Fri off so to speak. It will help now that the book tour is kicking into high gear. I’ve got something every weekend from now through mid October. If anyone’s interested in buying a book so that I’ll be sure to afford the oil changes and tune-ups ahead, you’re welcome to do so. Otherwise, I’m fully prepared to walk up to strangers on the street with my novel and say, “Hey there, sir. How are you? Good, good. Can I ask you a question?” Or, no. Perhaps I should sit on the curb and shout, “Good afternoon, how are ya’ll? Do you have a couple of minutes? You see, I’m an emerging author whose aunt is in the hospital with amnesia…”

All this said in jest. Like all panhandlers, I have 50k in the bank. Seriously, dude.

Finally, the new Pynchon novel is either in my gym bag or my apartment. I’m so thrilled. The last Pynchon book I read the whole way through was Mason & Dixon. I’ve made it about 1/2 through GR. I think Pynchon might be the only author whom you can claim as an influence while having read less than .5 of his works. Anyway, this one’s only about 300 pages! This is a great new direction for him. I was expecting Inherent Vice would fall around, oh, say, a gagillion billion pages.

Other updates: Hub City has secured funds for the second first novel prize. Now this promises to be confusing. “Hub City is pleased to announce the second first novel prize.” Wait. The first second novel prize? I like the sound of that much better, must say.

Wrapping up another major revision of my new top secret novel. Book touring. Watching weird movies (Eraserhead, anyone?) What a summer. The latest cult film, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, has got me thinking a lot about constraints, audience expectations, and creativity. No easy answers here, but I was stunned to find out how badly that film flopped in the US despite considerable success abroad. And, about fifteen years later, not even JK Rowling could convince Warner Bros to give the cult auteur a chance at the Harry Potter franchise. Of course, having swum the depths of Tim Burton’s career, the fact that big movie companies give creative directors a hard time doesn’t come as a surprise.

I’m of the mind Brazil’s US flop had nothing to do with Gilliam and everything to do with terrible decisions aimed at mainstreaming the film. They cut out the best parts, glued on a cheesy happy ending, trashed the original symphonic score, and then to top things off they tossed in a bunch or “rock music” to “attract teenagers.” It so happens that Warner Bros. tried to do the same thing with Burton’s Batman back in ‘89, foisting the hipster god Prince onto Burton who miraculously managed to ditch most of the corny 80s music for Elfman’s now-unforgettable motion picture score. (Ever wonder why there were two soundtracks to that film? Now you know.) Really, people. Imagine watching this film with “Purple Rain” playing in the back ground. It’s like eating a peanut butter and shrimp sandwich. Both good but the idea of them combined triggers your gag reflex.

What’s this got to do with writing? Way ahead of you. I’ve given a lot of thought to the love-hate relationship between creativity and marketability. When and where they meet, how they fall in love, and what do their kids look like? On one side of the spectrum we have terrible works like LA Candy. On the other we have DeLillo’s The Names (my favorite novel but not a big seller). And then we have miracle writers like Pynchon, Marquez, Rowling, Gaiman, and others who do more than straddle two worlds. Writers like these folks take the biggest risks. They break the most rules, in some ways. And they wind up legends in their own time. And now for me to reference my own novel and compare myself to the pantheon. (What’s that, you say? Stick my foot in my mouth? No problem.) My own first novel, Through the Pale Door, takes significant risks that seem to be paying off when it comes to sales.

What has this got to do with Southern Lit and reality? Way ahead of you. Over the past few months I’ve heard many writers, editors, readers, and agents say the word “reality,” speaking to me or about me or about Southern Lit. I’ve heard the old adage that asserts the “it really happened that way” argument holds no water for creative writers. I beg to disagree. Yes. Credulity can be strained. Stories need a degree of verisimilitude. But the “it really happened that way” case means, to me, that writers, et al need to open their minds to what constitutes reality. For example: a friend recently told me the story of how a distant relative was obliged to attend a friend’s funeral with a knife in his back pocket and a bodyguard in tow because he feared some attendees would try to settle an old score. I recently heard a somewhat famous (and true) story of a town in Tennessee that spent an entire day trying to inflict capital punishment on an elephant for killing its owner – they finally had to hang the thing with a construction crane. Many writers, et al would tell me that none of these events could make a decent story. But they certainly could. If you can tell it over a table, you can write it down. It’s a matter of how confident your voice is. (Marquez has said the same thing, but I guess nobody remembers.)

All right. Taste is subjective, but mine’s less so. I promise. The End. Been writing for 12 hours a day the past two or three days. Now it’s time to rejoin the world.

No royalty checks yet on the book. But my tuition refund came in today and now I’ll finally give up the foam pad I’ve slept on the past three weeks and buy a real bed (almost). Having learned that air mattresses are a bad investment, I’m looking at portable mattresses. Buying a full-fledged bed has struck me as a bad idea for a long time. I like the freedom of being able to move if I come to hate the apartment I live in, and grad students (as well as young “artsy” people in general) need to be mobile.

The reading in Spartanburg went well. I haven’t talked that much about Southern Literature (yes it does deserve to be capitalized) or steel mills in a while. Hub City is almost out of copies of Through the Pale Door, although their distributor still has a couple hundred copies. No doubt a hundred or more have spread across stores in the Southeast.

Don’t make fun of me, but I’d like to recommend a book called Secondhand Spirits. Maybe the best case of not judging a book by its cover to date. Not chick lit, though it pushes the envelope in places. And yet, sufficiently dark to keep me interested. I saw on it on the bottom shelf of B&N. Part of my campaign the last year’s involved reading more deeply into pop fiction – branching out from the likes of DeLillo, Nabokov, Faulkner, Atwood, Robinson, and company. And I gots to say, if the heroine from this novel showed up at my door to warn me of mortal danger, I’d let her in and then some. But I’m having to skim through a lot of the sections that talk about dresses. For anyone out there snickering, my second and third favorite books are Blood Meridian and Blood Meridian. Here’s you an idea:

The man in the brown stetson walked up to the four chuckling men. On the way he passed the undertaker and said unto him to prepare three coffins. Then he addressed the men and he said, “I don’t think it’s funny, you laughing. Me and my mule’s liable to get the wrong idea and think you’re laughing at us.” And the wind swept and it carried the scent of the men’s sweat as they fingered their guns and then they all drew on each other and a roar of gunfire filled the dusty street. The four men were fast. But the man in the stetson was faster and it was clear now why he’d asked for coffins – but not three, no, four would be needed now. The man in the stetson had miscounted but not misfired. As he left, the Sheriff showed the man in the stetson his badge and explained the laws of man here, to which the man in the stetson replied, “Well, if you’re the law, you’d better get these dirt bags under ground, before they start stinking.” The world wasn’t a cruel place. It just wasn’t over-kind. A man could get kilt for laughing at another man’s mule. The four men were now dead men not laughing; had been living fools, but now dead fools.