The Christopher McCandless mystique continues

Kat Rosenfield at Unherd claims she knows why men are no longer wild: “Our sense of adventure died with Chris McCandless.”

I last wrote about the mythology around Chris McCandless and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild in 2015. Rosenfield’s article motivated me to survey the situation once more.

I won’t summarize here Krakauer’s book or Chris McCandless’ life and death. My earlier blog post (“Into the Wild and the continued fascination with Christopher McCandless’ death”) covers both. Wikipedia articles on the book and the man are good starting points too. And there’s no substitute for reading Into the Wild itself.

Why men are no longer wild

The meat of Rosenfield’s argument lies within this claim:

McCandless’s story became the object of fascination — and not long after that, backlash. His life was either an inspiring example of indomitable American spirit or a nauseating waste of privilege and opportunity; his death was either a tragic accident or an idiotic, avoidable bit of foolishness.

My motivation for this post started right there, in the above assertion. Compare it to what I wrote in 2015:

If this framing—reckless versus romantic—sounds wearily familiar, it’s because the debate over McCandless’s death has become nothing more than a flash-point in a broader argument we’ve had in America since he and I were born…

McCandless’ life has been converted into a proxy for this country’s culture wars, a string of battles where no one—no one—raises the white flag. … I’m unable to see how this situation honors or respects Christopher McCandless’ life.

Eight years later, Chris McCandless is still serving as a proxy for whatever culture war debate is on our collective brains at the moment. His life and death, cleansed and romanticized, provide a mythic framework to hang any number of ideological flags: anti-materialism, anti-woke, anti-technology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and more.

This is vital to recognize. Culture war ushers in an inevitable and putty-like transitive logic: Criticism of Krakauer is interpreted as an attack on McCandless; criticism of McCandless is read as an attack on his values; criticism of McCandless’ fans is an attack on progressivism; and so on.

So, yeah, I have and will criticize Krakauer, the actions of some of McCandless’ legions of fans, and the politicization of Into the Wild. I’ll even criticize some of McCandless’ choices. I’m trusting you to recognize that doesn’t make me a “Chris hater.”

“He’s emerged as a hero”

From there, Rosenfield takes what has become a standard approach in modern rhetoric: She claims her reasonable and clear-eyed position is the one under attack, even if she has trouble locating the hordes mounting said attack:

The lumping-together of McCandless with Thoreau was inevitable, and not just because the latter was a major inspiration for the former: here was an expression of the timeless desire to take these icons of male self-sufficiency down a peg. Today, the mention of either man tends to elicit a snarl — but the bulk of the anger is saved for McCandless, fuelled by a contemporary media ecosystem that keeps finding new ways to tell his story. [Emphasis mine.]

I cannot recall anyone “snarling” over Thoreau, who remains required reading in American high school and university curricula. He may have been dismissed in his time as a fraud or a crank, but I’m pretty sure Thoreau’s preeminence in American culture and letters is secure.

As for McCandless, Into the Wild has been translated into thirty languages and has remained in print since it was first published in 1996. It was made into a major motion picture by Sean Penn. It’s on high school and college reading lists across the nation, and was selected by Slate as one of the best nonfiction books of the past twenty-five years. A web site dedicated to Chris McCandless (christophermccandless.info) is still going strong, hosting papers written by young people affected by McCandless’ life story, a memorial foundation, a documentary, and more. The PBS special “Return to the Wild” promised to “probe the mystery that still lies at the heart of a story that has become part of the American literary canon and compels so many to this day.”

Yet Rosenfield somehow concludes McCandless and his life story are under a brutal and withering assault. If the debate could be placed on a scale like produce aisle apples, I’m certain we’d find any snarling criticism of Chris McCandless and Jon Krakauer is far outweighed by McCandless’ legions of fans and sympathetic media sources.

It doesn’t help that Rosenfield’s adoring portrayal of McCandless as the kind of masculinity we need more of in our on society is framed just as she outlined at the top of her article: “His life was either an inspiring example of indomitable American spirit or a nauseating waste of privilege and opportunity.” There are no alternatives, apparently.

“But lately,” she writes, “the controversy surrounding McCandless as a mythological figure is no longer an accompaniment to the story; it is the story.”

I don’t know that “lately” part is true. The controversy around McCandless began almost immediately after Krakauer’s story was published in Outside magazine. Its editors reported they’ve never received as much mail about a single story, before or since. The controversy became the focus of all subsequent accounts of Chris McCandless for the same reason Twitter melted down over the color of a dress: People couldn’t believe any sane person would disagree with their interpretation—and if you did, there was something wrong with you.

Here’s a good question: Why is McCandless a mythological figure? He was a human being, “full of vim and vigor, a complicated young man of effusive talents, predictable weaknesses, and eccentric foibles,” as I wrote in 2015. We can valorize a man, we can valorize his values. Why valorize his avoidable death?

Sherry Simpson of Anchorage Press put it this way in 2003:

Much of the time I agree with the “he had a death wish” camp because I don’t know how else to reconcile what we know of his ordeal. Now and then I venture into the “what a dumbshit” territory, tempered by brief alliances with the “he was just another romantic boy on an all-American quest” partisans. Mostly I’m puzzled by the way he’s emerged as a hero, a kind of privileged-yet-strangely-dissatisfied-with-his-existence hero.

I don’t agree with the “death wish” angle, nor do I think he was a “dumbshit” for entering the Alaskan interior. (I would say “grievously unprepared.”) “An all-American quest” ticks a few of my personal checkboxes, as does “I’m puzzled by the way he’s emerged as a hero.”

The diary

In an aside, Rosenfield complains that McCandless’ sister’s memoir The Wild Truth (2014) has been weaponized: “It was received less as additional context to his story than a debunking of it: McCandless wasn’t a latter-day adventurer, he was a spoiled trust-fund kid with daddy issues.” (It would have helped if Rosenfield could have linked to an actual “debunking.” The single link she provided goes to a perfunctory summary of the memoir by USA Today.)

Carine McCandless does offer eye-opening “additional context” to Chris’ story. The real issue her memoir introduces is that Krakauer agreed to withhold these key details from Into the Wild at the request of the family. By doing so, Krakauer created a hole in his narrative and in our understanding of McCandless’ motivations. The Wild Truth was not weaponized for a mass “gotcha” campaign, or if it was, the campaign made not a dent on the beatification of Chris McCandless. Rather, as with the evolution of the poisonous seeds (explained below), its details were smoothed over by sympathetic media sources as completing and supporting Krakauer’s story, and further buttressing the McCandless hagiography.

The only “debunking” of note was from McCandless’ parents:

“After a brief review of its contents and intention, we concluded that this fictionalized writing has absolutely nothing to do with our beloved son, Chris, or his character,” they wrote. “The whole unfortunate event in Chris’s life 22 years ago is about Chris and his dreams—not a spiteful, hyped up, attention-getting story about his family.”

There was another narrative hole, though, that is more substantial and of far more interest to people like me: The contents of the journal McCandless kept while in the Alaska wilderness. Initially only Krakauer had access to the diary, which he used while writing Into the Wild.

When the journal was finally released, it amounted to

approximately 430 words, 130 numbers, nine asterisks and a handful of symbols. Other than this, all Krakauer had to go on was several rolls of film found with the young man’s body and a rambling, cliche-filled, 103-word diatribe carved into plywood in which McCandless claimed to be “Alexander Supertramp” off on a “climatic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage.”

Craig Medred of Anchorage Daily News has much more to say about “the fiction that is Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. That Krakauer reconstructed McCandless’ last weeks in minute detail from such sparse documentation should be a flare in the sky to anyone who still believes the label “nonfiction” means something.

“It is as if the late writer Ernest Hemingway found a 430-word journal written by Nick Adams containing the words ‘railroad,’ ‘fish,’ ‘forest fire,’ ‘camp’ and a few others,” Medred writes, “and from that wrote ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ as the true story of Adams’ biggest fishing adventure.”

If that sounds like hyperbole, then reread the final three chapters of Into the Wild and reckon them against the source material Krakauer was drawing from. Here’s a portion of the journal, from the McCandless’ memorial site:

Day 2: Fall through the ice day. Day 4: Magic bus day. Day 9: Weakness. Day 10: Snowed in. Day 13: Porcupine day…. Day 14: Misery. Day 31: Move bus. Grey bird. Ash bird. Squirrel. Gourmet duck! Day 43: MOOSE! Day 48: Maggots already. Smoking appears ineffective. Don’t know, looks like disaster. I now wish I had never shot the moose. One of the greatest tragedies of my life. Day 68: Beaver Dam. Disaster. Day 69: Rained in, river looks impossible. Lonely, Scared. Day 74: Terminal man. Faster. Day 78: Missed wolf. Ate potato seeds and many berries coming. Day 94: Woodpecker. Fog. Extremely weak. Fault of potato seed. Much trouble just to stand up. Starving. Great jeopardy. Day 100: Death looms as serious threat, too weak to walk out, have literally become trapped in wild—no game. Day 101-103: [No written entries, just the days listed.] Day 104: Missed bear! Day 105: Five squirrel. Caribou. Day 107: Beautiful berries. Day 108-113: [Days were marked only with slashes.]

Chris McCandless’ entire diary, from day 1 to day 113.

McCandless notes on day 69, six weeks before his death: “Rained in, river looks impossible.” (I assume he means the river between him and civilization looks impossible to cross.) On day 100, he realizes “have literally become trapped in wild.” Earlier he writes, “Lonely, Scared.” Earlier still, he writes, “Weakness.”

“Male self-sufficiency”

McCandless entered the Alaskan wilderness packing ten pounds of rice, a .22-caliber rifle, ammunition, a camera, and a selection of books. Although his exact date of death is unknown, it appears he only survived for 113 days, or about sixteen weeks. All evidence is that he leaned heavily on a single food source, the seeds of a wild plant.

Rosenfield takes a crack at those who knock McCandless as unable to distinguish a moose from a caribou (“He could, actually”), although that’s beside the point. The real failure was him bagging a beast and lacking the skills to preserve it. After mere days he lost the carcass to maggots. Properly preserved, the meat and organs could have fed him for months, providing him with vital protein and fat. He wrote the waste was “one of the greatest tragedies of my life,” one of the few lucid and complete entries in his journal. Other than the wild seeds, he appears to have had no success in securing an additional food source.

The usual rejoinder to these failures is that the seeds he foraged were a good source of nutrition but, due to understandable circumstances, McCandless was poisoned by them, or some substance growing on them.

The seeds are, without a doubt, the most frustrating aspect of the entire affair. It’s oft-reported that over the years Krakauer required three tries to explain the puzzle of the poisonous seeds. As I wrote in 2015, the count was actually four, and is now closer to five:

  1. The explanation in his original Outside article;
  2. a modified explanation in Into the Wild;
  3. a third he offered in 2007 just as the movie was being released;
  4. a fourth in 2013 for New Yorker;
  5. and a modified fifth explanation in a peer-reviewed 2015 article, which he also discussed in a 2015 New Yorker article.

Diana Saverin of Outside magazine has a good summation of the history of the questions surrounding the seeds. (This article is also the first and only time I’ve seen a major media source acknowledge that the debate over McCandless’ legacy may be more than a Manichaean battle of “Chris supporters” vs. “Chris haters”: “[Some] readers don’t dismiss McCandless’ intention—spending time in the wilderness—as invalid or stupid. Rather, they reject his endeavor because of the consequence it led to: his death.” While not exactly my position, at least there’s an acknowledgment of a spectrum.)

With Krakauer’s later explanations for the seeds came sympathetic media outlets announcing he’d “solved” the mystery once and for all. NPR has declared the case closed on a couple of occasions. Salon originally titled their 2013 article “Chris McCandless’ death wasn’t his fault” before changing it to the blander “Into the Wild’s twist ending”. (The original title is still there in the page’s URL.)

The Salon switcheroo neatly encapsulates the stakes in play: By declaring McCandless was not culpable for his own death, the lessons and morality people wish to attach to McCandless’ life are preserved. Krakauer’s first explanation paints McCandless as fallible, and perhaps even liable for his own death (that Chris mistook poisonous seeds for edible ones). The later explanations (a mold or bacteria growing on edible seeds) reassures the faithful that McCandless’ death was understandable and unavoidable.

The various poisonous seed theories led to disputes between Krakauer and biologists. Even after the dust settled, the best the scientific minds could declare was “it is possible” the seeds were poisonous and “contributed” to McCandless’ death. That is not the indisputable evidence that some sources reported.

I’ll say it here, just as I said in 2015: I do not think McCandless was an idiot. I do not think he was reckless. He was far more prepared to enter the Alaska interior than a high majority of his admirers who’ve made similar attempts—but he was not prepared enough. I suspect he only realized his mistake when he could no longer trek out of the area (day 69, “river looks impossible”). Unlike living off-the-grid in places like the American Southwest, where he did well, McCandless’ resourcefulness was not enough in a truly remote and brutal location.

But even if rock-solid evidence arrived showing McCandless was poisoned by the potato seeds and nothing more, that does not prove his death was unavoidable. His survival in Alaska hinged on a single food source. He suffered from a single point of failure, and when that point failed, he was doomed. That is not “self-sufficiency.”

The cult

Rosenfield again:

On the 15th anniversary of McCandless’s death, Men’s Journal published a story titled ‘The Cult of Chris McCandless’, an examination of the young man’s legacy in and around the wilderness in which he perished. One gets the sense that there’s still little sympathy amongst Alaskans for McCandless’s death, and the quotes from locals range from pitying to contemptuous.

It’s true: A magazine wrote an article quoting some Alaskans’ contempt for Chris McCandless.

But it’s bewildering that Rosenfield could read the Men’s Journal story and come away with nothing more than the Alaskan angle. It’s titled “The Cult of Chris McCandless” for a reason. The bulk of the article regards the number of people—in particular, young men—inspired by McCandless to enter the wilderness and make a go of it themselves. They are almost always far less prepared for the ordeal than McCandless was when he entered Denali National Park.

I question the choice of the word “cult,” but confess I cannot offer a better alternative. The obsession with McCandless has made him a kind of secular saint, and the location of his death has become a pilgrimage site. TripAdvisor offers several pages on how to reach it; Google Maps still points to the site of Bus 142 before it was removed by the Alaska Army National Guard to discourage further sightseers. Authorities are routinely called in to rescue lost and stranded hikers. Deaths continue to occur. (Tellingly, Rosenfield mentions the reasons for the bus’ removal without pondering the implications of people losing their lives in the name of “authenticity.”)

If McCandless’ story truly inspires people to learn self-sufficiency—if it leads them to pause and hone the skills necessary to survive in the wilderness—I can only applaud that person for making the vision a reality. But when the inspired believe self-sufficiency is simply a matter of good intentions and a canteen of Evian, there’s a problem.

Compare the evolution of McCandless’ story—the beatification, the successive theories on the seeds, the guarded interpretation of his diary—to Charles Baxter’s observation of a proliferation of “dysfunctional narratives” in America:

Reading begins to be understood as a form of personal therapy or political action. In such an atmosphere, already moralized stories are more comforting than stories in which characters are making complex or unwitting mistakes.

That sounds an awful lot like what happened to Chris McCandless’ story over the span of thirty years.

The politics

Krakauer:

A lot of people came away from reading Into the Wild without grasping why Chris did what he did. Lacking explicit facts, they concluded that he was merely self-absorbed, unforgivably cruel to his parents, mentally ill, suicidal, and/or witless.

Rosenfield picks up where Krakauer leaves off…and makes a serious detour:

The guy who hunts his own food, chops his own wood, and builds his own home, is a suspicious character: a little too trad, a little too in-your-face masculine, probably a Trump voter. And the guy a step beyond that, the one who doesn’t just paint outside the lines but wants to buck the system entirely? There’s something really wrong with him. He’s no pioneer; he’s a misanthrope, a deadbeat, an incel. … We’re afraid of men like this, and we’re afraid of the people who admire them.

This characterization is off-the-rails.

Without exception, criticisms of McCandless as an irresponsible privileged twerp are coded right-wing. The type Rosenfield describes sounds more like a standard-issue take-down of libertarians and hard-right Republicans (“a misanthrope, a deadbeat, an incel”). Those take-downs inevitably come from sources coded as left-wing—the same sources who trumpet McCandless as a modern icon (Salon, NPR, etc.) These sources will question the myth of rugged individualism in American history—and then, with no apparent introspection, hold up high Chris McCandless’ rugged individualism as an example to follow.

If anything, the animus toward Chris McCandless is a mirror-image of the one Rosenfield describes. Critics like to portray him as a coastal elite, a hipster from a privileged enclave who foolishly launched a narcissistic quest for authenticity, and certainly not as a Trump voter. I’ve never heard anyone describe themselves as “fearful” of McCandless’ admirers. “Idiots” is the terse word one acquaintance used when I brought up the subject.

Recall Sherry Simpson: “Mostly I’m puzzled by the way he’s emerged as a hero, a kind of privileged-yet-strangely-dissatisfied-with-his-existence hero.”

“Gather, cook, and eat”

If you still think of me as a “Chris hater,” in return I ask for your opinion of other individualists who forsook modernity and escaped to the wild.

There’s Alastair Bland, the student I wrote about eight years ago. The similarities between Bland and McCandless are remarkable: Both were anthropology majors who believed hunter-gatherer societies were freer and enjoyed more leisure time than agricultural/industrial ones. Both expressed a sharp disdain for modern consumerism and materialism. Bland did not penetrate the Alaska interior, but he did live off the land in and around U.C. Santa Barbara in 2002. Bland found people around him cheering him on:

They marveled at how great [his experiment] was and exclaimed that they would some day try to do something similar. They thought it was a good thing to boycott the American market and a shame more people didn’t appreciate nature’s bounty the way I did.

Like McCandless, Bland wound up concentrating on a single food source—tree figs—which left him bleeding from the mouth and nauseous. His days were spent scrounging for his next meal. He dreamed of climbing trees and eating figs. His life became “gather, cook, and eat.”

Just as McCandless attempted to flee the Alaska interior sooner than planned, Bland too quit his experiment early:

Even now I don’t believe what I did was very constructive. It was a memorable time in my life, to be sure, and it was a good thing to have tried. But to carry on like that forever would have been, for me, social suicide.

There’s Timothy Treadwell who, like McCandless, found a spiritual refuge in the Alaska interior. He lived there for thirteen seasons among the coastal brown bears, both alone and with his girlfriend. Like McCandless, he came from a well-to-do family, and was athletic and gifted. After some failures as an aspiring actor and a bout with alcoholism, he turned his life around. He grew famous for spending time close to the bears in Alaska, daring to approach them to gain their trust. He was immortalized in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man.

In October 2003, Treadwell and his girlfriend were attacked and killed by a bear. Treadwell’s running camera captured the audio of the attack. It was the first and only incident of a bear killing a person in the history of Kitmai National Park.

John Rogers of Kitmai Coastal Bears Tour writes of “The Myth of Timothy Treadwell,” although this myth never took on the heroic proportions of McCandless’. While Rogers says, “Timothy Treadwell was not the foolhardy person the media portrays him to be,” he does not acquit him of culpability in his own death, either.

There’s Christopher Thomas Knight, the recluse who lived twenty-seven years in isolation in the north of Maine. In a bit of philosophizing that could have come from McCandless, he said by living alone “I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for … To put it romantically, I was completely free.”

But Knight survived while habitually breaking into nearby cabins. He was accused of performing over 1,000 burglaries over a quarter-century, pilfering goods and supplies for his own survival.

Note that McCandless has also been accused of breaking-and-entering by Craig Medred:

Three cabins — two privately owned and one a property of the National Park Service — were broken into while McCandless was at the bus. It had never happened before. It has not happened since.

There’s Robert Bogucki, raised in Malibu and a student at Georgetown University. As a young man, he began to question materialism and capitalism. He traveled to Australia to walk solo across its interior desert.

He entered the desert carrying a week’s worth of food and 26 liters of water. When his supplies ran out, he began digging for moisture, and cutting himself to drink his own blood. His absence sparked what was the largest and most expensive manhunt in Australia’s history. After forty-three days, he spelled out “HELP” with rocks and was rescued by a search helicopter. Bogucki “lost more than 30kg [66 pounds] from his 86kg [189 pounds] and it took him a full year to regain his previous strength and stamina.” (McCandless’ corpse weighed 66 pounds—half of Bogucki’s final weight—when he was discovered.)

Why did Bogucki do it? To see God. He desired to model Jesus’ forty days in the desert. He claimed God spoke to him and directed him to water sources. Where McCandless packed in a book on Alaskan horticulture, Bogucki carried a Bible.

Why are these “self-sufficient males” not idolized by the legions of McCandless followers? Why don’t we praise their “sense of adventure”?

Perhaps due to the faulty optics of each story: Bland’s admission of failure in a soft Southern California beach town; Bogucki’s distasteful Bible-thumping; Knight’s “self-reliance” revealed as a reliance on others; Treadwell’s violent attack recorded on tape, supplying us an unromantic record of nature’s grim realities.

Are optics really what makes McCandless different? Doesn’t such a cynical and relativist view smack face-first into McCandless’ values of authenticity—honesty with others, and honesty with one’s self?


It’s taken me nearly a year to write this post. I gave up twice. Researching and writing this has been exhausting. Why spend so much time and energy?

As I wrote in 2015:

Jon Krakauer introduced me to a vivid and lucid life, one that will stay with me for years.

That life has been flattened into an icon, propagated as a cult of personality, and used to buttress petty political divisions. In the least I must register my protest.

Charles Baxter’s dysfunctional narratives

Charles Baxter
Charles Baxter

What if I told you that there’s been a sea-change in American storytelling over the past half-century? Not merely a change in subject matter, but that the fundamental nature of American narratives radically shifted? Would you believe me?

Now, what if I told you that a writer twenty-five years ago described these “new” stories, and even predicted they would become the dominant mode in our future? Would you believe that?

In 1997, Charles Baxter published Burning Down the House, a collection of essays on the state of American literature. It opens with “Dysfunctional Narratives: or, ‘Mistakes were Made,’” a blistering piece of criticism that not only detailed the kinds of stories he was reading back then, but predicted the types of stories we read and tell each other today.

Baxter appropriated the term “dysfunctional narrative” from poet C. K. Williams, but he expounded and expanded upon it so much, it’s fair to say he’s made the term his own. He borrowed a working definition of dysfunctional narratives from poet Marilynne Robinson, who described this modern mode of writing as a “mean little myth:”

One is born and in passage through childhood suffers some grave harm. Subsequent good fortune is meaningless because of the injury, while subsequent misfortune is highly significant as the consequence of this injury. The work of one’s life is to discover and name the harm one has suffered.

Baxter adds that the source of this injury “can never be expunged.” As for the ultimate meaning of these stories: “The injury is the meaning.”

To claim this mode of writing has become the dominant one in American culture demands proof, or at least some supporting evidence. Baxter lists examples, such as Richard Nixon’s passive-voice gloss over the Watergate cover-up (“mistakes were made”), Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, and conspiracy theories, among others.

“Dysfunctional Narratives” doesn’t succeed by tallying a score, however. Rather, it describes a type of story that sounds all-too-familiar to modern ears:

Reading begins to be understood as a form of personal therapy or political action. In such an atmosphere, already moralized stories are more comforting than stories in which characters are making complex or unwitting mistakes.

Don’t merely consider Baxter’s descriptions in terms of books. News stories, the social media posts scrolling up your feed, even the way your best friend describes how their boss has slighted them—all constitute narratives, small or large. Dysfunctional narratives read as if the storyteller’s thumb is heavy on the moral scale—they feel rigged.

It does seem curious that in contemporary America—a place of considerable good fortune and privilege—one of the most favored narrative modes from high to low has to do with disavowals, passivity, and the disarmed protagonist.

(I could go one quoting Baxter’s essay—he’s a quotable essayist—but you should go out and read all of Burning Down the House instead. It’s that good.)

Dysfunctional narratives are a literature of avoidance, a strategic weaving of talking points and selective omission to harden their messaging and block counter-criticism. If that sounds like so much political maneuvering, that’s because it is.

“Mistakes were made”

Let’s start with what dysfunctional narratives are not: They’re not merely stories about dysfunction, as in dysfunctional families, or learning dysfunctions. Yes, a dysfunctional narrative may feature such topics, but that is not what makes it dysfunctional. It describes how the story is told, the strategies and choices the author had made to tell their story.

Baxter points to Richard Nixon’s “mistakes were made” as the kernel for the dysfunctional narrative in modern America. (He calls Nixon “the spiritual godfather of the contemporary disavowal movement.”). He also holds up conspiracy theories as prototypes:

No one really knows who’s responsible for [the JFK assassination]. One of the signs of a dysfunctional narrative is that we cannot leave it behind, and we cannot put it to rest, because it does not, finally, give us the explanations we need to enclose it. We don’t know who the agent of action is. We don’t even know why it was done.

Recall the tagline for The X-Files, a show about the investigation of conspiracy theories: “The truth is out there.” In other words, the show’s stories can’t provide the truth—it’s elsewhere.

More memorably—and more controversially—Baxter also turns his gaze upon Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, which features the use of recovered memories (“not so much out of Zola as Geraldo“) and veers into “an account of conspiracy and memory, sorrow and depression, in which several of the major characters are acting out rather than acting, and doing their best to find someone to blame.”

In a similar vein, a nearly-dysfunctional story would be The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. It involves a family man who, via therapy, digs through memories of a childhood trauma which has paralyzed him emotionally as an adult. He gradually heals, and goes on to repair his relationship with his family. Notably, his elderly father does not remember abusing him years earlier, leaving one wound unhealed.

Another example would be Nathanael West‘s A Cool Million, which follows a clueless naif on a cross-American journey as he’s swindled, robbed, mugged, and framed. By the end, the inventory of body parts he’s lost is like counting the change in your pocket. It might be forgiven as a satire of the American dream, but A Cool Million remains a heavy-handed tale.

This leads to another point: A dysfunctional narrative is not necessarily a poorly told one. The dysfunction is not in the quality of the telling, but something more innate.

Examples of more topical dysfunctional narratives could be the story of Aziz Ansari’s first-date accuser. The complaints of just about any politician or pundit who claims they’ve been victimized or deplatformed by their opponents is dysfunctional. In almost every case, the stories feature a faultless, passive protagonist being traumatized by the more powerful or the abstract.

There’s one more point about dysfunctional narratives worth making: The problem is not that dysfunctional narratives exist. The problem is the sheer volume of them in our culture, the sense that we’re being flooded—overwhelmed, even—by their numbers. That’s what seems to concern Baxter. It certainly concerns me.

A literature of avoidance

In his essay Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco offers this diagram:

onetwothreefour
abcbcdcdedef

Each column represents a political group or ideology, all distinct, yet possessing many common traits. (Think of different flavors of Communism, or various factions within a political party.) Groups one and two have traits b and c in common, groups two and four have trait d in common, and so on.

Eco points out that “owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one,” even though they do not share any traits. The traits form a chain—there is a common “smell” between the political groups.

Not all dysfunctional narratives are exactly alike, or have the exact traits as the rest, but they do have a common “smell.” Even if a 9/11 conspiracy theory seems utterly unlike A Cool Million, they both may be dysfunctional.

"Burning Down the House" by Charles Baxter

Likewise, in the traits that follow, just because a story doesn’t include all doesn’t mean it “avoids dysfunction.” Rather, dysfunctional narratives are built by the storyteller selecting the bricks they need to buttress their message:

  • A disarmed protagonist
  • An absent antagonist
  • Minimal secondary characters
  • An authorial thumb on the scale
  • “Pre-moralized”
  • A vaporous conclusion
  • Authorial infallibility and restricted interpretations

The most common trait of the dysfunctional narrative is a faultless, passive main character. Baxter calls this the “disarmed protagonist.” Baxter differentiates between “I” stories (“the protagonist makes certain decisions and takes some responsibility for them”) and “me” stories (“the protagonists…are central characters to whom things happen”). Dysfunctional narratives are the “me” stories.

And the errors these “me” characters make—if any—are forgivable, understanding, or forced upon them by dire circumstances. Compare this to the mistakes the people around them make—monstrous, unpardonable sins:

…characters [in stories] are not often permitted to make interesting and intelligent mistakes and then to acknowledge them. The whole idea of the “intelligent mistake,” the importance of the mistake made on impulse, has gone out the window. Or, if fictional characters do make such mistakes, they’re judged immediately and without appeal.

Power dynamics are a cornerstone of all narratives, but one “smell” of the dysfunctional variety is an extraordinary tilting of power against the main character. The system, or even the world, is allied against the protagonist. Close reads of these narratives reveals an authorial thumb on the story’s moral scale, an intuition that the situation has been soured a bit too much in the service of making a point. This scale-tipping may be achieved many ways, but often it requires a surgical omission of detail.

Hence how often in dysfunctional narratives the antagonist is absent. A crime in a dysfunctional novel doesn’t require a criminal. All it needs, in Robinson’s words, is for the main character to have endured some great wrong: “The work of one’s life is to discover and name the harm one has suffered.”

Poet Marilynne Robinson
Poet Marilynne Robinson

Name the harm, not the perpetrator. Why not the perpetrator? Because often there’s no person to name. The harm is a trauma or a memory. The perpetrator may have disappeared long ago, or died, or have utterly forgotten the wrongs they inflicted (as the father does in Prince of Tides). The malefactor may be an abstraction, like capitalism or sexism. But naming an abstraction as the villain does not name anything. It’s like naming narcissism as the cause of an airliner crash. This is by design. Abstractions and missing antagonists don’t have a voice; even Satan gets to plead his case in Paradise Lost.

No ending is reached in a dysfunctional narrative, because there’s only a trauma, or a memory, or an abstraction to work against. These injuries never heal. Memories may fade, but the past is concrete. By telling the story, the trauma is now recorded and notarized like a deed. “There’s the typical story in which no one is responsible for anything,” Baxter complained in 2012. “Shit happens, that’s all. It’s all about fate, or something. I hate stories like that.” These stories trail off at the end, employing imagery like setting suns or echoes fading off to signify a story that will never conclude.

The most surface criticism of these narratives is that we, the readers, sense we’re being talked down to by the author. “In the absence of any clear moral vision, we get moralizing instead,” Baxter writes. A dysfunctional narrative dog-whistles its morality, and those who cannot decode the whistle are faulted for it. The stories are pre-moralized: The reader is expected to understand beforehand the entirety of the story’s moral universe. For a reader to admit otherwise, or to argue an alternate interpretation, is to risk personal embarrassment or confrontation from those who will not brook dissent.

And making the reader uncomfortable is often the outright goal of the dysfunctional narrative. The writer is the presumed authority; the reader, the presumed student. It’s a retrograde posture, a nagging echo from a lesser-democratic time. (When I read A Brief History of Time, I was most certainly the student—but Hawking admirably never made me feel that way.) Dysfunctional narratives are often combative with the reader; they do not acknowledge the reader’s right to negotiate or question the message. With dysfunctional narratives, it’s difficult to discern if the writer is telling a story or digging a moat around their main character.

“What we have instead is not exactly drama and not exactly therapy,” Baxter writes. “No one is in a position to judge.” A dysfunctional narrative portrays a world with few to no alternatives. A functional narrative explores alternatives. (This is what I mean when I write of fiction as an experiment.)

This is why so many dysfunctional narratives are aligned to the writer’s biography—who can claim to be a better authority on your life, after all? But the moment a reader reads a story, its protagonist is no longer the author’s sole property. The character is now a shared construct. Their decisions may be questioned (hence the passive nature of the protagonists—inaction avoids such judgements.) If the author introduces secondary characters, they can’t claim similar authority over them—every additional character is one more attack vector of criticism, a chipping away of absolute authority over the story itself. That’s what happened to sensitivity reader Kosoko Jackson in 2019, whose debut novel was pulped due to questions over his secondary characters.

Of all the traits listed—from the disarmed protagonist to the vaporous conclusion—the trait I find the “smelliest” is authorial infallibility and restricted interpretation. That’s why I used weasel language when I called Prince of Tides “nearly-dysfunctional:” The book is most certainly open to interpretation and questioning. In contrast, questioning a conspiracy theory could get you labeled an unwitting dupe, a useful idiot, or worse.

A Cambrian explosion

What Baxter doesn’t explore fully is why we’ve had this Cambrian explosion of dysfunctional narratives. He speculates a couple of possibilities, such as them coming down to us from our political leadership (like Moses carrying down the stone tablets), or as the byproduct of consumerism. I find myself at my most skeptical when his essay stumbles down these side roads.

When Baxter claims these stories arose out of “groups in our time [feeling] confused or powerless…in such a consumerist climate, the perplexed and unhappy don’t know what their lives are telling them,” it seems Baxter is offering a dysfunctional narrative to explain the existence of dysfunctional narratives. He claims they’re produced by people of “irregular employment and mounting debts.” I strongly doubt this as well. In my experience, this type of folk are not the dominant producers of such narratives. Rather, these are the people who turn to stories for escape and uplift…the very comforts dysfunctional narratives cannot provide, and are not intended to provide.

Rather than point the finger at dead presidents or capitalism, I’m more inclined to ascribe the shift to a handful of changes in our culture.

The term “The Program Era” comes from a book by the same name detailing the postwar rise and influence of creative writing programs in the United States. This democratization of creative writing programs was not as democratic as once hoped, but it still led to a sharp increase in the numbers of people writing fiction. Most of those students were drawn from America’s upper classes. And, as part of the workshop method used in these programs, it also led to a rise in those people having to sit quietly and listen to their peers criticize their stories, sometimes demolishing them. (Charles Baxter was a creative writing professor and the head of a prominent writing program in the Midwest. Many of his examples in Burning Down the House come from manuscripts he read as an instructor.)

With the expansion of writing programs came a rise in aspiring writers scratching around for powerful subject matter. Topics like trauma and abuse are magnets when seeking supercharged dramatic stakes. Naturally, these writers also drew from personal biography for easy access to subject matter.

Another reason is staring back at you: The World Wide Web has empowered the masses to tell their stories to a global audience. This has created a dynamic where everyone can be a reader, a writer, and a critic, and all at the same time.

The natural next step in the evolution of the above is for storytellers to strategize how best to defend their work—to remove any fault in the story’s armor, to buttress it with rearguards and fortifications. And there’s been a shift in why we tell stories: Not necessarily to entertain or enrich, but as an act of therapy or grievance, or to collect “allies” in a political climate where you’re either with me or against me.

Pick up a university literary magazine and read it from cover to cover. The “smell” of dysfunctional narratives is awfully similar to the smell of social media jeremiads.

These are not the kind of stories I want to read, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distance myself from them. Writers should strive to offer more than a list grievances, or perform acts of score-settling. If it’s too much to ask stories to explain, then certainly we can expect them to connect dots. Even if the main character does not grow by the last page, we should grow by then, if only a little.

Twenty Years Later: B. R. Myers, A Reader’s Manifesto

See the “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books” home page for more information on this series.


Twenty years ago this month, The Atlantic published a critical essay on the then-current state of American prose. As dry and dusty a topic that sounds—doubly so when published by an august New England monthly—the essay improbably became a cultural sensation, triggering op-eds in international newspapers, vitriolic letters-to-the-editor, and screechy denunciations from professional reviewers. Suddenly readers everywhere were debating—of all things—the modern novel.

Writer B. R. Myers unexpectedly touched a raw nerve in an America that was better-read than the literati believed possible. “A Reader’s Manifesto” dissected without mercy the work of such literary lights as Don DeLillo, Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, and David Guterson. Myers didn’t merely criticize their prose on terms of its grammar and diction. He attacked these writers on grounds of pretentiousness, and accused the literary establishment of abetting their ascendancy.

Charged stuff, but still very inside baseball. To rouse an impassioned response from readers over books like White Noise and Snow Falling on Cedars was a remarkable moment in American culture. It’s all the more notable a moment considering some of the above authors’ books satirize the inanity of American culture.

Looking back, it seems dream-like for a critical examination of literary novels to ignite such a furor. I can’t imagine such a thing happening today. Then again, it seemed equally unimaginable twenty years ago.

History of Manifesto

Fed-up with fawning reviews of works like Timbuktu and All the Pretty Horses, Myers first wrote his manifesto in 1999. Using careful, reasoned prose punctuated with wit and scathing humor, he roasted passages from prize-winning books—passages which had been the subject of so much praise by literary reviewers as examples of masterful writing. Using tried-and-true close-reading techniques, he punctured these writers’ obtuse and repetitive language to reveal their prose to be turgid, meaningless, and pretentious.

Myers was convinced no magazine or newspaper would publish his critique. He was an unknown in the literary world; a near-anonymous monograph on the quality of modern literary prose hardly promises to fly off bookstore shelves.

So Myers did what many writers would do in later years: He self-published his manifesto on Amazon. He titled it Gorgons in the Pool: The Trouble with Contemporary “Literary” Prose after a particularly choice passage in a Cormac McCarthy novel. “Nothing happened,” he later wrote. “I went online and ordered three copies for myself; they were the only ones ever sold.”

One of the copies he mailed out wound up in the hands of an Atlantic editor, who offered to publish rather than review it. The Atlantic demanded severe cuts and revisions, and the version published in the magazine comes off nastier than he’d intended. He also had the gut-wrenching task of waving off the Times Literary Supplement from publishing a review of Gorgons, as he’d already signed a contract with The Atlantic. (“As someone said to me the other day, ‘How do you know [Times Literary Supplement] wasn’t going to tear you apart?'” he later remarked. “I suppose everything worked out for the best.”) Bad timing would develop into a cadence for Manifesto.

Gorgons in the Pool by B. R. Myers

The Atlantic article, tucked away deep inside the July/August double-issue, improbably made Myers a name-brand overnight among contemporary lit readers and writers. His outsider status only buffed his credentials as a hard-nosed reviewer. Even his use of first initials added a mysterious air to his origins. Although he received praise from many quarters, it mostly came from readers and (interestingly) journalists, a profession notorious for attracting writers shut-out of the book publishing world.

Although the literati initially ignored the essay, drumbeats of support from readers for Myers basic thesis—modern lit is pretentious—soon couldn’t be denied. Much of the early criticism directed back at Myers originated from book reviewers, book supplement editors, and literary novelists. Some of it was quite vitriolic, outraged anyone could suggest the writers he selected weren’t unassailable geniuses. Many exuded an air of befuddled annoyance: How could anyone give Myers or his thesis an ounce of credence? A few were outright smug about it, as though their refutations slammed the door on Myers and put an end to the dreary affair once and for all.

It didn’t work. The rebuttals only stoked increased support for Myers from readers around the world. The back-and-forth debate raged online and, as a mark of the times, across letters-to-the-editor pages, which printed point and counterpoint letters for weeks. This simply did not happen, even in a time when most people had their news delivered to them via bicycle.

Frustrated, the literary professional class took up what is today recognized as a surefire stratagem for shutting down an Internet debate: They doxxed him.

Not exactly—while The New York Times Book Review didn’t print Myers’ phone number and street address, they did see fit to delve into his past for anything incriminating (much like the Twitterati today will dumpster-dive people’s feeds to dig up embarrassing tweets from eight years ago). Demonstrating the ethics of a tabloid reporter, editor Judith Shulevitz dished to her readers that Myers was a foreigner (he’s not) who lived in New Mexico (i.e., not New York City) and was at that moment preparing to spend a year in Seoul “teaching North Korean literature to the South Koreans.” (Myers’ response: “I would probably have described my job in a way less calculated to evoke the phrase ‘selling ice to the eskimos.'”)

Shulevitz wrote Myers “is not just a man without a stake in the literary establishment. He is foreign to it in every way.” His manifesto could have

proved that a critic needs nothing more than taste to make a case. Does Myers’s essay do all this? It does not, because Myers doesn’t have a sure grasp of the world he’s attacking.

Most of the denunciations of Manifesto are steeped in this kind of a haughty condescension, and it served Myers well.

(I should add that I’m uncomfortable throwing around the phrase “literary establishment” as a catch-all for a wide and disjointed segment. Yet Shulevitz seemed comfortable acknowledging its existence in 2001, so I’ll assume it existed then and exists today.)

Manifesto continued to be a lodestone of bad timing. The Times‘ nativist pillorying of Myers was published on September 9, 2001. Two days later, the Times—and the rest of the world—was focused on a very different subject. The literary debate Myers had sparked that summer ground to a halt.

The history of Manifesto could easily have ended with the attacks on the World Trade Center, if not for events which nudged a little harder on the snowball Myers had started rolling in 1999.

First was Oprah selecting Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for her book club. To get an idea of how close this shaved against Myer’s Manifesto—and his continued game of footsie with bad timing—the same edition of the New York Times Book Review that exposed Myers as a Korean-teaching foreigner also included a glowing review of The Corrections laden with an irony of Oedipal proportions: The reviewer gives a winking approval that the book contains “just enough novel-of-paranoia touches so Oprah won’t assign it and ruin Franzen’s street cred.” Actually, Oprah was set to announce The Corrections as her next book club pick four days later (only to postpone it due to 9/11). When Franzen bristled that Oprah was attempting to smarten-up her book club by associating it with the “high-art literary tradition,” a new literary controversy erupted to displace Manifesto.

Although the imbroglio between Oprah and Franzen is better framed as tabloid-level tit-for-tat, Manifesto played a minor role. Online commenters made the point that Myers’ gripes about the literary establishment sneering down on the reading public were playing out before the nation’s eyes. Gone was his critics’ suggestion that, on this point, Myers was jousting with windmills.

The second event was Melville House publishing A Reader’s Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose in 2002 (one of the two first books produced by the then-fledgling publisher). This full-length treatment gave Myers the opportunity to restore much of what was lost from Gorgons in the Pool when it was adapted for The Atlantic. It’s this edition I’ve based this review on.

The backward glance

The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2001
The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2001.

I vividly recall reading “Manifesto” in the summer of 2001. I’d written my first novel and was discovering the ego-melting process called “finding a literary agent.” Over the prior years I had enrolled in evening and weekend creative writing courses around the Bay Area, where many of the books Myers lay judgment upon were held up as models exemplar. Also at the time I was a member of a weekly “writers’ reading group.” A member of the group handed me a Xerox of The Atlantic essay along with a half-joking warning not to take anything this Myers guy has to say too seriously.

I wound up taking B. R. Myers quite seriously. I had never read anything like “A Reader’s Manifesto.” Rereading Myer’s book for this post, I still marvel over his concision and convictions. It can be read in a single sitting, and unless you’re a grump, it will keep you engaged from start to finish. Myers understands well the game he’s taken up: He can’t poke a stick at others’ bad prose if his own prose is lacking. His manifesto is meticulous, refreshing, lively, and enlightening, as seen here when he trains his gimlet eye on McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses:

As a fan of movie westerns I refuse to quibble with the myth that a rugged landscape can bestow an epic significance on the lives of its inhabitants. But as Conrad understood better than Melville, the novel is a fundamentally irreverent form; it tolerates epic language only when used with a selective touch. To record with the same majesty every aspect of a cowboy’s life, from a knife-fight to his lunchtime burrito, is to create what can only be described as kitsch.

Not only is this arguable, there’s a lot packed in there to argue with: I find this to be a positive.

Or here, where he’s analyzing David Guterson’s output:

…a slow tempo is as vital to his pseudo-lyrical effects as a fast one is to Proulx’s. What would otherwise be sprightly sentences are turned into mournful shuffles through the use of tautology. “Anything I said was a blunder, a faux pas,” “a clash of sound, discordant,” “She could see that he was angry, that he was holding it in, not exposing his rage,” “Wyman was gay, a homosexual,” and so on.

This level of tight engagement with the work at hand shows this is well above the usual culture-war crap that’s saturated our nation’s dialogue for decades now.

Some of his lines of attack are novel. Performing a close and scathing read of Annie Proulx’s self-approving dedication in Close Range (“my strangled, work-driven ways”) is the kind of antic you’d expect of the University Wits or Alexander Pope. His oft-quoted rejoinder to an exchange between Oprah and Toni Morrison is his most acidic and least endearing: “Sorry, my dear Toni, but it’s actually called bad writing.” (Less oft-quoted is his explanation: “Great prose isn’t always easy but it’s always lucid; no one of Oprah’s intelligence ever had to puzzle over what Joseph Conrad was trying to say in a particular sentence.”)

Regardless of what you might have read elsewhere, the boilerplate attacks on Myers don’t stand up to scrutiny. Supposedly he values plot over form; he disdains “difficult” books; he cherry-picked bad passages from the books he attacks; he selected writers who’d gone out of fashion; or the confounding claim that he’s a humorless cur prone to sarcasm and snide shots. Having read his book at least four times now, I say none of these complaints hold water. (Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit, but it’s not humorless.) I’m not saying there’s no room for criticizing Manifesto, only that dismissing Myers without engaging his points is not fruitful.

And there’s plenty in Manifesto for writers to take away. Rather than being satisfied with throwing spitballs at modern lit, he contrasts prose he finds vapid with prose that stands up. Myers will forever get grief for quoting Louis L’Amour’s Hondo with approval, but the passage he includes is a model of clean, effective writing that succeeds in characterizing the protagonist with the deftness of a parable. Myers makes the point several times that the prose he’s complaining about could have been written with less-pompous English, and takes a few stabs at editing it as proof. He’s engaged with the texts under the gun, a marked difference from his critics who sniff down on him (and, it seems, cannot be bothered to quote and refute his specific claims).

My take-away from Manifesto for writers is, don’t produce affected writing, produce affecting writing: Language that stirs the reader and shines a light rather than obscures. Good editing requires close reads of your prose, and questioning what every word is doing in a sentence. Ditch the idea that affecting prose is “easy” and affected prose is “difficult,” an avant-garde pose. One critic complained “‘prose,’ for [Myers], equals syntax plus diction, and is expected to denote, rather than to evoke.” I think he expects it to do both.

Revolt of the reading public

The significance of Myer’s Manifesto is not a perverse thrill of taking down holy cows like McCarthy and DeLillo, but how eerily it presaged the next twenty years in American publishing. The circuitous route Myers followed from Gorgons in the Pool to The Atlantic Monthly to Melville House is a once-in-a-generation aberration, but the elements of getting said critique out of the word processor and into the hands of readers rings awfully familiar today.

When I read in 2002 of Myers self-publishing Gorgons on Amazon, I was floored: I had no idea such an opportunity was available to mere mortals. It was a bona fide light-bulb moment, the first time I pondered the possibility of making an end-run around the New York City publishers and selling my work directly to readers. Ten years later, not only was Amazon still open to self-publishing, the company was rapidly tooling up to make publishing your own e-book as easy as clicking a mouse button.

Less obvious today, but notable in 2001, was Myers praising Amazon user reviews (of the books Myers was criticizing, not his own overlooked Gorgons). Before Manifesto, any reference in the popular media to Amazon’s user reviews was bound to be dismissive or sardonic. Back then, cultural commentators saw putting opinion-making into the hands of readers as ludicrous as a truck driver penning a starred Michelin review. (Don’t forget, there were still people in 2001 arguing the Internet was a passing fad—that it was faster to drive to the bookstore and buy a book than for Amazon to deliver it, ergo Amazon’s days were numbered.) Myers didn’t merely approve of Amazon user reviews, he used them as evidence that readers can and do understand difficult literature. I believe this is the first time I saw anyone in the cultural sphere do this.

Self-publishing; “average people” versus the experts; the power of reader reviews; the pseudo-doxxing Myers was subjected to; online discussion boards keeping the debate alive; and vitriolic denunciations from on high. All that’s missing is a hash tag and some Bitcoin changing hands, and the dust-up around Manifesto would sound like any number of social media episodes we’ve seen in recent years.

Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public deserves mention here. Although I’ve not read it, I have read plenty of reviews and analyses, simply because this 2014 book is claimed to have predicted the rise of Donald Trump, Brexit, cancel culture, the Capitol Hill attacks, QAnon, #MeToo, and more. (It too was self-published on Amazon.)

Gurri’s thesis is that the Internet is destabilizing public respect for institutional authority and, in due course, undermining the authorities’ control over social and political narratives. The expert class, once considered the final word, now must defend itself from an increasingly skeptical public.

It seems to me that the narratives being disrupted by digital communications may not merely be political narratives but also traditional ones—the narratives offered by the literary novel, and the narratives sold to the public by the literary expert class. Not only are big-name authors being treated with skepticism by the general public, so are the stories they’re proffering as significant both in terms of literary heft and their cultural insights. Look no further than the controversy surrounding last year’s American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins for an example of voices from below shouting up at the ensconced above, or the backlash suffered by Sarah Dessen after shaming a critical reader.

The disruption to the literary world even extends to novelists’ fawning reviewers. There is less distinction here than would first appear: Literary novels are often reviewed by other literary novelists. This incestuousness would be a scandal in other fields. “Imagine what would happen if the Big Three were allowed to review each other’s cars in Consumer Reports,” Myers noted in an interview. “They’d save the bad reviews for outsiders like the Japanese.”

A before-and-after example of the Internet’s effect on the publishing world is Lorenzo Carcaterra’s Sleepers (1995) and James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003). Both were mega-bestsellers whose publication dates bookend the Internet’s ascension in daily life. Both were published as memoirs, and both had their factual accuracy challenged. The mass media reported the controversy around Sleepers by copy-and-pasting publisher press releases and quoting book agents. A Million Little Pieces was put under the Internet’s collective magnifying glass thanks to an investigation by the amateur web site The Smoking Gun.

This people-powered exposé became a nightmare for James Frey, and his reputation never recovered. Editions of A Million Little Pieces (another Oprah book club pick!) now include a publisher’s note warning of “certain embellishments” and “invented” details: “The reader should not consider this book anything other than a work of literature.”

Carcaterra largely escaped unscathed in 1995 thanks to the controversy being framed by the media as a publishing industry squabble. Sleepers remains sold as memoir. (Funnily enough, it’s also listed under Amazon’s “Hoaxes & Deceptions” category.) Carcaterra’s luck can be measured in years. If Sleepers had been a bestselling memoir in 2005, the Internet would have torn it to shreds.

“Leaders can’t stand at the top of pyramids anymore and talk down to people,” Martin Gurri writes. “The digital revolution flattened everything.” I say A Reader’s Manifesto was the initial deflating puncture of the literary world’s cozy status quo.

Engendered reputations

In the conclusion of Manifesto, Myers writes:

I don’t believe anything I write will have much effect on these writers’ careers. The public will give them no more thought in twenty years than it gives, say, Norman Rush today, but that will have nothing to do with me, and everything to do with what engendered their reputations in the first place.

(If you’re wondering who Norman Rush is, I confess I had to look him up myself.)

Some of the rebuttals directed at Myers in 2001 claimed a few of these authors were already “on their way out,” although each critic seemed to formulate a different list of who remained relevant and who was exiting stage left. I’m tempted to produce a list of the writers whose work Myers criticized to see where their reputations stand today. I won’t do that; any reader so inclined could make such a list on their own.

I will point out that some of Myers’ subjects have sunk into a comfortable life of teaching, penning the occasional pop culture piece, and a general resting upon of laurels. Myers makes a couple of pointed barbs about Old Man and the Sea, but at least Hemingway was still throwing left-hooks at the end of his life.

(When Myers’ critics claim that literary book awards and glowing reviews in highbrow magazines are meaningless, or that Myers ignored genre fiction’s own system of awards and reviews, they’re overlooking the enduring social capital of “literary significance.” A science-fiction writer receiving big-time accolades in 2001 is not going to be, in 2021, a tenured professor traveling the writer’s retreat circuit as a featured speaker and penning fluffy think pieces for Harper’s. The self-propelling feedback loop that is the literary world should not be discounted.)

Note that Myers leaves unsaid what exactly engendered these authors’ reputations in the first place. The optimist in me thinks he’s referring to the evanescence of their writing postures—live by the sword, die by the sword.

The pessimist in me suspects what really engendered their reputations is a resilient enabling literary class which eagerly maintains its country-club exclusivity while claiming commitments to diversity. Even in the face of a massive shift in digital publishing, and the concomitant explosion of voices now available via e-books and print-on-demand, the literary establishment remains a closed shop. Its reviewers walk hand-in-hand with big publishers, who in turn regularly ink seven-figure publishing deals and expect a return on said investment. Positive reviews in well-placed periodicals are an important component of any publishing marketing plan. (The podcast “Personal Rejection Letter” explored this question in 2017, along with a retrospective of Myer’s Manifesto.)

In other words, the authors Myers put under the microscope may or may not be relevant twenty years later, but the system that held them aloft remains alive and strong. The Internet has kneecapped it some—the literary establishment is less commanding than it once was—but it’s still humming along.

Could Myers have at least shifted the conversation? I say he did. While Jonathan Franzen’s 1996 “Perchance to Dream” (re-titled “Why Bother?”) and Tom Wolfe’s 1989 “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” are both considered modern literary manifestos of great import, it’s plain to me that Myers’ Manifesto has shown far more staying power in the public’s and writers’ consciousness. Even in a 2010 critical response to B. R. Myers review of Franzen’s Freedom, the comments section swings back and forth on the significance of Myer’s Manifesto, with the most recent comment coming in 2016. There are YouTube videos produced as late as last year going over the debate Myers ignited twenty years ago.

Meanwhile, in creative writing courses across America, mentioning Myers’ name will still earn an eye-roll and a dramatic sigh from the instructor, wordlessly asking when this guy will just go away.

Sarah Dessen & the Internet’s new literary feud

Sarah Dessen
Sarah Dessen
(Larry D. Moore, CC-BY-SA 4.0)

Last week a dust-up on Twitter grew into a Category 5 hurricane. Young Adult author Sarah Dessen learned her name was mentioned in a small-town university newspaper. The article was a feature piece on the university’s successful campus-wide reading program. One of the program’s student committee members—a junior at the time—told the newspaper

“She’s fine for teen girls,” the 2017 Northern graduate said. “But definitely not up to the level of Common Read. So I became involved simply so I could stop them from ever choosing Sarah Dessen.”

(Although I share the student’s last name and my father hails from the same state as the university, I’m not related to the student. Trust me: There are a lot of Nelsons in South Dakota.)

Miffed, Sarah Dessen took her disgruntlement to her Twitter account, where she shared with over 268,000 followers:

Authors are real people. We put our heart and soul into the stories we write often because it is literally how we survive in this world. I’m having a really hard time right now and this is just mean and cruel. I hope it made you feel good.

What ensued is a now-familiar pattern on the Internet: mob outrage followed by mob backlash followed by apologies followed by meta-analysis of what transpired (which includes this post, I suppose).

In the initial burst of Twitter outrage, the student’s remarks were construed as demeaning YA fiction, demeaning teenage girls, internalized misogyny, promoting abuse toward women, and worse. Her social media accounts were tracked down and she was hounded offline. She was even snubbed by other big-name authors she may have read and possibly admired. One of them attacked her by name in the newspaper’s comment section.

The authors’ attacks were amplified a thousand-fold by their supportive followers on Twitter, which only served to energize the authors’ continued denunciations and self-righteousness. Remember, most of the authors involved write YA, a genre whose subject matter centers around solitary young people being kicked around by those in power.

The backlash probably started on Twitter, but picked up strength when online commentary outlets voiced their incredulous disbelief at the mob mentality. The backdraft circled onto Dessen and her prominent supporters, leading them to delete their old tweets and issue apologies.

(This narrative is better covered by places like Vulture and Slate. For the gory blow-by-blow details, I suggest starting there.)

The story has more or less died down now. The media outlets have updated their reports to include these apologies. The door is closing on the story. Time to move on.

The transitive logic underpinning the entire affair is remarkable. A single college student opined that books by a certain author are not suitable for a college-level reading program. From a single paragraph in a tiny university’s newspaper (current enrollment: 3,622) sprang a hornet’s nest of vicious conclusions. The logic magnified an innocuous criticism of a single YA author to an attack on all YA fiction and its readers. Thus, the logic went, if you’re a reader of YA fiction, it’s a personal attack on you. From there the maelstrom spiraled off into more sinister territory.

It’s confirmed: One’s tastes and reading habits may now interpreted as a systematic attack on the underprivileged and powerless. Before the incident faded off, there were tweets (now deleted) declaring the college student wielded more power than Dessen—after all, the student was on a committee at a tiny Midwestern school. Imagine if she had dared to write a negative Amazon review.

The muted blandness of the authors’ apologies are no match to the heights of the original vitriol or the depths of the condescension. Some of the apologies read like the calculated boilerplate of a publicist or press agent. Some of the apologies suggest the problem is not with the authors’ own attitudes or sensitivities, but that the college student wasn’t more powerful and thereby deserving of attack. I could spend another thousand words attempting to reconstruct how the hell our culture reached this point. And yet, here we are.

Would these authors have trained the same level of indignation on a professional critic with, say, the New York Times or USA Today? I doubt it. There’s a lot at stake there. A lone reader in a flyover state? Different story. (As Roxane Gay declared, “People have strange and inflated ideas about their taste level.”)

“For the man led a mob”

What’s at play here is the rise of the superauthor: Bestselling novelists who also maintain major media platforms—interactive web sites, message boards, podcasts, and social media feeds with hundreds of thousands of followers. They’re not merely authors, they’re brands. Many of these YA authors have crafted an online persona of a confidant and sympathizing mentor. You don’t merely read their books, you hear from them everyday. You see their vacation photos and learn about their pets. You share their ups and downs in the real world.

Utilizing the tidal hydropower of a platform to take down amateur critics is a new twist. G. K. Chesterton noted Dickens could not be ignored or dismissed “for the man led a mob.” Imagine if Dickens had Twitter.

Literary feuds are the stuff of legend, but they almost always involve authors, editors, and/or professional critics. We’re now seeing a new-style of literary feud in the Internet Age: The author versus a reader. This won’t be the last time writers hit back at reader criticism with the support of the multitudes behind them.

Judy Blume
Judy Blume

(This is not so far-fetched. In private channels, I’ve witnessed writers outraged over a negative Amazon review asking other writers what they know about the reader. I’ve never seen the anger escape those private channels, though.)

Successful YA writers are often adored by their fans for bringing magic and solace to a gray, heartless world. Classic YA writers like Judy Blume have shined a much-needed beacon for generations of struggling and desperate young people. Of course she’s adored. (I read Judy Blume when I was young. I thought she was wonderful too.)

But I simply cannot imagine Judy Blume engaging with the behavior on display last week. She’s a human being, a real person with quirks and faults, but she puts readers first—not only her readers, but readers of all stripes. Would Judy Blume have responded “I love you” to someone who posted worldwide “Fuck that fucking bitch” about a college-aged reader? I don’t see it.

Readers of any taste are comrades-in-arms with authors. This is doubly true in an age of Netflix, video games, and big-budget film. Fiction is increasingly perceived as losing relevance, if not irrelevant entirely. Of course negative reviews sting (I’ve suffered them too) but I hope I’ll never take for granted the grace of a reader devoting their time and energy to read my work. The college student’s remarks demonstrate she’s a passionate reader. It’s too bad none of the authors involved noticed that before launching their crusade.

That’s why I can’t let go of this line from Dessen’s original message:

Authors are real people.

As are readers.

Twenty Writers: Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

See the “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books” home page for more information on this series as well as a list of other reviews and essays


So far in this series, about half of the books I’ve discussed have been nonfiction and the other half fiction. This is the first time I’ve written about a text on critical theory—and it may be the best lit crit book I’ve ever encountered.

The text I’m speaking of is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Published in 1993, the book remains the definitive work on comics theory a quarter century later. Others have attacked the subject, but none come close to McCloud’s exhaustive treatment.

McCloud is an unlikely “Aristotle of comics.” Prior to Understanding Comics he was best-known for Zot!, a lighthearted superhero comic book series which introduced many American readers to the tropes and style of Japanese manga. While Zot! was a success in the 1980s, its reputation has not swollen over time, as evidenced by McCloud’s sheepish preface to a 2008 reprint.

There’s nothing sheepish to be found in Understanding Comics—McCloud is not merely comic’s Aristotle, he’s one of its best ambassadors. His belief in comics’ power and universality is unshakeable. Page after page he convincingly argues comics belong in the same inner circle as other high art forms, including art considered vulgar upon its first appearance, such as film and jazz. Comics may even be more inclusive than other forms, as the language of comics is the language of the modern world. Advertising, software, religion, news, and entertainment all employ comics’ visual cues for their own purposes. This isn’t so much a book on comics as a book on perception and semiotics.

When I first picked up Understanding Comics in the mid-1990s, I enjoyed reading comics occasionally, but only as a guilty pleasure. I’d read superhero comics as a teen but set them aside as childish even before I left high school. (And this was during the 1980s rise of so-called “adult” comics like The Dark Knight Returns and the all-but-forgotten Camelot 3000.)

McCloud’s treatise left me with a renewed pleasure for reading comics. He disassembled and reassembled what I “knew” about comics before my eyes, all the while with concision, humor, and infectious zeal. His unraveling of the “invisible art” also left me with a fresh re-looking of the world at large. I can’t think of higher praise for McCloud’s magnum opus.

The sequential art

Understanding Comics is not the first work on the principles of comics. That honor goes to Will Eisner’s Comics & Sequential Art.

Before Eisner, books on comics focused on technical production: inks, scripting, musculature, shading, etc. (The most prominent example I know of is How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, the standard go-to guide for aspiring fourteen year-olds back in the day.) Comics & Sequential Art focused on the language of comics, much as a book on film theory would discuss camera angles and shot selection as the “language” of movies.

Prior to Eisner and McCloud, books on writing comics skewed toward technique and process.

Sequential Art‘s biggest contribution is right there in its title—Eisner put forward a general definition for comics. He held up comics as a special style of communication with unique properties and advantages. Eisner saw the field still struggling to break free of cultural restrictions (“comic books are for kids”) and waiting to be applied to broader purposes. For example, Eisner advocated using comics for technical manuals and in education.

Reading comic books in grade school may be more acceptable today than when I was young, but I suspect the suggestion still earns chuckles among certain educators. That’s too bad; Eisner remains ahead of his time. After all, while IKEA’s assembly guides and their Ziggyesque “IKEA Man” character have elicited much lampooning, their ability to transcend written language stems from the fact that they are comics. And when Google wanted to introduce the world to its new Chrome browser in 2008, it hired none other than Scott McCloud to present the software’s design and features via a digital comic book.

Understanding Comics takes many cues from Eisner’s work, and McCloud is eager to tip his hat to the master as well as introduce readers to a plethora of other comic artists you may or may not have heard of. But where Eisner’s book is head’s-down on the drawing easel, McCloud’s eyes are fervently skyward. Eisner’s intended audience is other comic artists; McCloud’s audience is everyone. To McCloud’s thinking, the language of comics permeates the modern world. He’s not merely comics’ Aristotle and ambassador, he’s its evangelist. Understanding Comics may be the first foundational lit crit text written by a fan boy.

The invisible art

The care and thought put into Understanding Comics is evident from the front matter onward. Consider that a book subtitled “The Invisible Art” opens with an enlarged image of an eye staring back at the reader—an iris, eyelashes, and eyebrow framed by a comic panel. Seeing is everything for McCloud, which is why Understanding Comics earns a space on the shelf beside Berger’s Ways of Seeing.

One bit of lingo in the software business is “dogfooding,” that is, the idea software developers should use their own software to better understand the problems and bugs their users are experiencing. (Imagine if every Apple employee used Microsoft PCs and Android phones, or if the entire workforce of The Gap wore Armani suits.)

McCloud dogfooded comics. His entire thesis, from first page to last, is told in comic form. He demonstrates the ubiquitousness and power of comics by drawing comics. The only places McCloud “reverts” to pure text are the Acknowledgments and Bibliography pages (where he can be forgiven, since I doubt anyone wants to read a Bibliography set to comic form).

Cleverly, McCloud inserts a cartoon representative of himself into the book to gently guide the reader along (and even analyzes the strategy itself as a graphic device). He deploys every trick in the comic biz to illustrate his points: alternate panel layouts, strange word balloon shapes, odd and abstract art styles, and so on. Every page offers a surprise for the reader. I can’t imagine the quarts of blood McCloud must have sweat to craft this masterpiece. Whatever criticism you may lob at McCloud, you can’t call his book dry.

After an ambitious and vivid history of comics going back to prehistory (no, really), McCloud appropriates Eisner’s term for comics—”sequential art”—and develops his own rigorous definition. From this foundation he launches into the depth and breadth of the language of comics: panels, gutters, lines, word balloons, transitions, and the utility of color (as opposed to the job of coloring, a la How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way).

McCloud’s ambitious “picture plane,” from photo-realism (left) to iconography (right) with the degree of abstraction rising up the pyramid. The eye on the left is the realm of visual and the mind on the right is the realm of ideas. Notice on the far right how McCloud considers written language a kind of “pure” iconography.

But McCloud isn’t satisfied to stay grounded on matters pertaining to comics itself. He reaches further with chapters on iconography, the nature of vision, and perception versus self-perception. He muses on the unique language of comics, where pictographs plus written word combine, and how space on the page can represent shifts in location and time, and sometimes shifting both simultaneously. He concludes with a surprisingly moving chapter on the relationship between artist and art that should be required reading for students of all creative disciplines.

Whether you agree or disagree with his conclusions, McCloud’s faculties for persuasion are appealing and impressive. The power of Understanding Comics is in taking McCloud’s tour through language and imagery, even if you don’t always agree with his destinations.

Recommendations

If you enjoy Understanding Comics, I recommend exploring the terrain McCloud mapped out. What follows is a list of graphic novels reflecting McCloud’s vision. They’re also rewarding in their own right:

  • City of Glass, Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli: Engrossing graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s novel. City of Glass reads like a pure application of Understanding Comics.
  • Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, Shigeru Mizuki: Mizuki’s semi-autobiographical World War II manga features a “cartoony” military against a backdrop of stark photo-realistic Pacific island landscapes, a visual strategy McCloud fleshes out in his book.
  • Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, Guy Delisle: A story of palpable solitude, Shenzhen spends much page real estate showing off modern China via “aspect-to-aspect” transitions discussed by McCloud.
  • Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli: Like Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Polyp is a personal tale about a man hitting the road intertwined with philosophical musings on nature and existence. As with City of Glass, Polyp is obsessed with structure, symbols, and synthesis. Mazzucchelli’s detailed visuals slyly make the abstractions concrete.

For an entertaining stroll through the lingo and icons of the funny pages, I also recommend “Quimps, Plewds, And Grawlixes: The Secret Language Of Comic Strips.”

Twenty Writers: David Kidd, Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China

See the “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books” home page for more information on the series as well as a list of other reviews and essays.


Peking Story by David Kidd

David Kidd’s Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China has settled into a somewhat unnoticed shelf of American literature: the literary eulogy.

Serialized by The New Yorker in 1955, collected in book form in 1961 as All the Emperor’s Horses, and republished in 1988 under the title it holds today, David Kidd’s book is an underappreciated classic in American nonfiction. Memoir, travelogue, New Journalism, creative nonfiction—none of these terms are a snug categorization of Peking Story. The book is wistful, mournful, and laced with dry humor—a eulogy.

As the book opens, Kidd is an American college student on a foreign exchange trip to Beijing in 1946. There he meets Aimee Yu, one daughter among many in a prominent Beijing family. In the span of a few pages, the couple are married. Courting Aimee is more glossed over than spun out, treated as a perfunctory narrative requirement. Peking Story is not a romantic book in the sense of love and matrimony. It’s a romantic book in the sense of Eastern exoticism and lost traditions. It’s right there in the subtitle: The Last Days of Old China.

As the book progresses, David Kidd the narrator develops as a kind of mystery himself. He doesn’t come off as one would imagine most Americans would talk or act in the mid-1940s, especially a college student from the Midwest. There are moments that read like a Graham Greene novel, the world-weary Britisher turning up his nose at the dreary reactionaries and their anti-imperialist manifestos—only Kidd studied at a state school, not Oxford, and his father was an automobile executive rather than a member of Parliament. That’s one of the many mysteries of Peking Story, this American narrator who sounds distinctly un-American, seemingly more comfortable in Chinese silks and soft slippers than sneakers and blue jeans.

The Last Days of Old China

Like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, Kidd goes to some lengths to remain outside the book’s lens, preferring to focus on the events and people around him. Peking Story is a public story told by a very private man, and that shapes the narration and contributes to its unique form.

Kidd alludes to his private nature (and the burden of telling his story) in his preface:

Only a few Westerners who once lived [in pre-Communist Beijing] are still alive today—no more than ten or twenty of us at most, scattered throughout the world. I used to hope that some bright young scholar on a research grant would write about us and our Chinese friends before it was too late and were all dead and gone, folding back into darkness the wonder that had been our lives.

To this day, no such scholar has appeared, leaving me, as far as I know, the lone, first-hand chronicler of those extraordinary years that saw the end of old China, and the beginning of the new.

Author David Kidd
Author David Kidd

With the courtship and marriage out of the way, David Kidd eagerly moves into the opulent Yu family estate just outside of Beijing. (“Beijing” and “Peking” are Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations, respectively, for the current capital of China. As Mandarin is now the official language of the People’s Republic of China, I use it here and reserve “Peking” for the book’s title.)

Once situated within the family compound, Kidd slides his marriage away from the reader’s field of vision. In its place he slides in the colorful Yu family and their grand estate, garden, and art collection. Beyond the compound’s walls the Communist revolution begins to encroach on their daily lives. These elements are Kidd’s true focus, with his marriage merely the frame to explain his presence on the estate grounds and in the Yu family’s lives.

The Yu’s are rich beyond the everyday meaning of the word. The family’s history and prominence extends hundreds of years into China’s past. The grandfather was at one time the Chief Justice of the Republic of China’s Supreme Court. The family estate is known for having one the best gardens in Beijing, and perhaps all of China. The Yu’s once held mansions and houses all over northern China, but declining fortunes and currency devaluation have chipped away at their holdings. By the time Kidd arrives, the Yu’s can lay claim to the family mansion, a burial shrine outside the city, and a stunning collection of historical Chinese art they cannot bear to part with.

Arriving in Beijing two years before the Communist Revolution and leaving two years after it, Kidd witnessed China’s transition from a strict traditional society with deep class striations into a political culture intent on leveling the field and erasing its past. Rather than write this story with a breathless, you-are-there urgency, Kidd describes the changes from the comfort and safety of the Yu estate. Kidd’s encounters with the new Communist regime comes fleetingly, such as when they must register with the local police that the Yu’s intend to hold a costume party. Kidd portrays the revolutionaries as dreary, inconvenient, and déclassé.

I normally hold little interest in British entertainment of the upper-class variety, with the rich lolling about on their divans and club chairs, plotting intrigue against each other, while servants rush up and down stairs attending to their every whim. Peking Story is not this type of entertainment, but it certainly skirts its edges. For all of Kidd’s blind spots, Peking Story works because Kidd’s focus is to document the Yu’s way of life crumbling beneath their feet. Rather than pick up guns and defend their estate—what an American story that would be—the Yu’s shrug, brew another pot of tea, and reflect upon their garden before it’s wrested from them. The tension between dynamism and stasis is the backbone of Peking Story.

The bronze braziers

As a fiction writer, what I draw from Peking Story is Kidd’s skillfulness at sketching out characters and painting colorful scenes with graceful economy. Although Kidd comes across as waspy throughout the book (and a bit blithe to the poverty about him), his education and breeding gifted him with a clean writing style that flows effortlessly. It’s harder than it looks.

Kidd’s narrative construction is as classical as his prose. The chapters are arranged almost perfectly. Early scenes that read as little more than humorous anecdotes are later revealed as precursors of devastating consequences for the Yu family. Kidd neatly sews disparate events together to craft chapters that compare and contrast China’s culture and the steamrolling revolution. Although “compare & contrast” rings like a English teacher’s tired essay topic, these pairings illuminate the reader’s way through Peking Story like a trail of paper lanterns.

The most memorable episode in Peking Story relates to a collection of bronze braziers the Yu’s display throughout their mansion. As Kidd tells it, the luster of these incense burners is indescribable. They must be continually heated in order to keep their sheen, and so the Yu’s charge their servants to maintain a small charcoal fire burning beneath each at all hours. Kidd writes that the Yu family has kept the fires lit and the braziers hot for hundreds of years.

Encouraged by the Communists beyond the estate walls, the servants begin to question the nature of their employment. One morning, the Yu’s discover the charcoal fires have been extinguished. The once-indescribable bronze braziers are now irreparably dull and gray.

The tale of the bronze braziers is the perfect metaphor for the aristocratic Yu family straining to bolster China’s ancient culture against the Communist revolution threatening to overthrow it all.

However, the story may be too perfect:

I hope that specialists in Chinese bronzes, and technical experts, will back me up in saying that the story is completely phony—as is, I felt on reading it, much of the rest of the book. That Kidd had married Aimee Yu was plausible, although when I knew him he was plainly gay—he might have changed, or could—entirely laudably—have married her to get her out of China. But the obviously deceptive picture that the book painted was upsetting; this is one of the few books I’ve read that made me angry.

James Cahill’s rebuttal to Peking Story is well worth the read. He voices here a suspicion I too had in the back of my mind the first time I read the story of the bronze braziers. Their sublime beauty destroyed by ideological malice seems a writerly addition by Kidd who (possibly) felt the need to put an authorial thumb on the novel’s moral scale.

I’m torn on this subject. Cahill’s objections are worth any reader’s consideration, but I still find myself drawn to the elegance and power of Kidd’s prose. I don’t particularly care about his sexual orientation, although it certainly explains why his marriage takes a back seat in the book.

In Kidd’s defense, unlike fabricators such as James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) and JT Leroy, Kidd’s falsehoods—if they are false—don’t create an undeserved authority or prop up an exaggerated persona. His presence in China is documented, as is his marriage to Aimee Yu. The parable of the bronze braziers sweetens the book, the kind of misstep even a seasoned novelist might make to seal a point with the reader.

Tiananmen Square & Forbidden city entrance, Beijing, China. Joe Hunt. (CC BY 2.0)

It’s not the first time a well-respected work of nonfiction was revealed to contain fabrications and get a pass. Questions about the veracity of Steinbeck’s Traveling with Charley have been received with a shrug by Steinbeck fans and academics. If Cahill is “angry” at the “deceptive” Peking Story, he must be outraged at Steinbeck. If not, why? Because Steinbeck’s sympathies are on the right side of history and Kidd’s are not?

(If Kidd stretched the truth, it’s conceivable a kernel of truth inspired the story. Even if the braziers were not required to remain heated to sustain their beauty, it’s possible the Yu’s kept incense burning day and night throughout the household, and that one night the servants rebelled, damaging them somehow. The metaphor of an Old China lost is not so strong, but its thrust remains. Where Cahill sees deception, I see craft.)

The reader’s reaction to the story of the bronze braziers is a leading indicator of the way they’ll receive the entire book. Some will toss the book aside, disgusted with Kidd’s approval of Chinese high society and disdain of the servants. Others will sympathize with the Yu’s, for no reason other than their desire to preserve a four thousand year-old culture and its rich traditions. In either case, Kidd’s parable frames the entire book and the reader’s reception of it. It’s that kind of skill that encourages me to write a 2,200 word essay on Peking Story.

However, I’m less sure Kidd’s sympathies lie with the Chinese aristocracy per se. Kidd does not present the Yu’s as bold keepers of the flame, but rather as eccentrics of the Miss Havisham variety. Without exception, Kidd’s tragedies are the loss and destruction of Chinese art, culture, and tradition. Kidd mourns for the dispersal of the Yu collection and estate more than any death in the book. He also mourns the death of common sense. In Kidd’s hands, registering a costume party with the Beijing police is as absurd as proving to the American consulate his wife is Christian to guarantee her visa out of the country.

Then there’s the matter of Cahill accusing Kidd of kowtowing to “anti-Communist sentiment in the U.S.,” guessing Kidd was “encouraged somehow by the powerful and rich China lobby.”

Kidd may be accused of all manner of motivation, I suppose, but Occam’s Razor strikes me as appropriate here. I see Kidd as genuinely upset at the rearrangement of Chinese culture and its priorities. He seems deeply shocked to witness a four thousand year-old cultural legacy deleted in a fit of moral outrage. The suggestion of shadowy, powerful forces funding a book that, frankly, did little to shape American attitudes toward Communist China is unnecessary to explain the existence of Peking Story. I also don’t view The New Yorker—even The New Yorker of the 1950s—as a publication to kowtow to right-wing nationalists.

Fabricator or not, Kidd is forthright with his opinions and biases. When it comes to motivation, it’s simplest to take Kidd at his word. Cahill, on the other hand, appears more motivated by a sense of social justice than he’s letting on in his essay.

What’s more, for Cahill to argue Kidd misrepresented the Chinese Communists as a “mean-spirited movement” is to ignore the crop yielded by Maoism: The Cultural Revolution, an artificial civil war unleashed by Mao to silence his critics and tighten his grip on the levers of power; its annihilating purges, denunciations, self-criticisms, and “struggle sessions”; the anti-intellectualism behind the forced relocation and labor of students, leading to China’s own “Lost Generation”; and the party’s historical rewriting and reeducation tactics. Kidd’s stories, first published eleven years before the Cultural Revolution’s earliest stirrings, practically predicts the furies to unfold. It’s a literary feat almost as impressive as Graham Greene warning the United States out of Vietnam in 1955’s The Quiet American.

The 21st century may be China’s century, but Peking Story eulogizes the price China paid to make its great lurch forward.

David Kidd died in in 1996 leaving behind a life as far-removed from his Midwestern origins as possible. After fleeing Beijing, he settled in Kyoto and founded a school of traditional Japanese arts:

As a tourist attraction, Mr. Kidd did not disappoint. To sit on a cushion before his throne, listening to his erudite patter, and seeing him sitting cross-legged on his kang, a divided Chinese sofa, rustling his silken gown as he gestured extravagantly with his inevitable cigarette, was to be in the presence of a presence.

With China’s role ascending in the 21st century, I would recommend Peking Story to anyone curious to learn about China’s future from its past. For those who want to go deeper, I would pair Peking Story with the superb Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang and Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan.

On Don Herron’s Fritz Leiber Tour

Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz LeiberSaturday I had the pleasure to take Don Herron’s Fritz Leiber Tour. Like his more famous Dashiell Hammett Tour, Herron recreates through personal research, recollection, and local points-of-interest Leiber’s life story and the circumstances that led him to spending his last years in San Francisco.

My attendance in the tour was accidental. In October, while talking with Nicole Gluckstern after the conclusion of the Bikes to Books Tour, I mentioned what can only be called a minor parallel in my life with Fritz Leiber’s, and how I’d been meaning for years now to learn more about this prolific author. Nicole told me she was in talks with Don Herron to have him lead a one-off, by-invite-only Fritz Leiber Tour. I eagerly jumped when she asked if I wanted to attend.

Leiber’s life defies a summary in brief. The child of actor parents (his father appeared in a number of early Hollywood productions), Leiber developed an avid readership over a career of decades with his wide-ranging work—science fiction, fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, horror & the occult, and more. In addition to experience in theater and acting, Leiber was an amateur astronomer and one-time editor of Science Digest, making him the rare science fiction writer with an actual background in science.

Fritz Leiber as Dr. Arthur Waterman in Equinox: Journey into the Supernatural (1965 or 1966). Will Hart, (CC BY 2.0)

Fritz Leiber as Dr. Arthur Waterman in Equinox: Journey into the Supernatural (1965 or 1966). Still by Will Hart (CC BY 2.0)

As a child and young man, I was familiar with Leiber through his science-fiction short stories (although I don’t recall reading any of his novels). His stories were featured in “best of” collections and back issues of science fiction magazines I dug out of dusty cartons in Livermore’s public library.

Then, via Dungeons & Dragons, I learned of a swords-and-sorcery series featuring Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, a duo comprised of an oversized swordsman and a diminutive thief. When I saw this series was penned by someone named Fritz Leiber, I distinctly recall thinking, “What a coincidence—there’s a science-fiction writer with the same name.” No coincidence, it turns out. (According to Herron, Leiber coined the phrase “sword-and-sorcery.”)

A personal friend of Leiber and his second wife, Herron is a fount of history and insight into this prolific author. Much like his Hammett tour, Herron led us down and around Geary Street and the Tenderloin (names which might ring familiar to readers of Bridge Daughter). Then we boarded MUNI and trekked up to Corona Heights (and its stunning views of the city) in the Castro District. All locations have some connection to Leiber and his semi-autobiographical Our Lady of Darkness. It’s a Lovecraftian novel that takes place in 1970s San Francisco whose main character endures a battle with the bottle and grief over the death of his wife, just as Leiber was undergoing at the time.

I hope Herron considers permanently reviving the Fritz Leiber tour—but I suspect the only way that would happen is if there was a strong revival of interest in Leiber himself. Personally, I’ve already added Our Lady of Darkness to my reading list, and I plan on searching out more of his work.

About that parallel

When I earlier claimed a parallel with Leiber’s life, I should explain. I don’t mean some personal connection with the author or his work, only that Leiber wrote about an event in his life that rang similar to one of my own.

Eight years ago, after going through what can only be called a divorce immediately followed by a second relationship gone sour, my trials culminated with me busting up my shoulder in a bad accident. I severed all the tendons there, leaving me with a separated shoulder. (To this day it looks like I have “two” shoulder bones.)

I found myself bedridden for six weeks and unable to move my right arm. Day and night I consumed painkillers, delivery Chinese food, and—unwisely—whiskey. (I wrote about this episode for We Still Like‘s “Gravity” issue, a piece titled “Taylor & Redding”.) I spent my time in my apartment, alone, absorbed with Miles Davis and Cal Tjader. I spent my less stuporous hours reading whatever I could get my hands on. In particular, I located at the library a thick collection of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories, which I consumed cover-to-cover.

To keep from going stir-crazy, I took long walks up and down Nob Hill and through the Tenderloin, often at odd hours of night. Due to the painkillers, sleep was varied and sporadic. Some of these walks were as late as three in the morning, when the insomnia was too much to bear.

On these walks I discovered locations and buildings named in Hammett’s work, all mere blocks from my Geary Street apartment. The old part of San Francisco is rife with short streets and dead-end alleys, too insignificant to be incidentally included in a story for local flavor, yet Hammett would feature them prominently in his work. These names did not come off a map or phone directory, these were streets intimate to Hammett, a writer obsessed with specifics and verisimilitude. Some of the Continental Op’s stories are set in Chinatown. It got so I went out of my way to seek them out.

Humphrey Bogart and "the dingus." (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Humphrey Bogart and “the dingus.” (CC BY-SA 2.0)

This led me to reread Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (which I’ve written about not just once but twice). There, in this single detective novel, I re-experienced in concentrate everything I’d experienced the prior weeks poring over the Continental Op stories. In The Maltese Falcon Sam Spade walks streets I walked every night, attends theaters down the block from my apartment, eats at restaurants still in operation. Sam Spade, living and breathing in San Francisco circa 2008. My front stoop was backdrop and stage for this classic of American literature.

It’s not merely the rush of casual literary association—similar to the rush of meeting a celebrity—that overwhelmed me. Details of the novel easily overlooked snapped into clear focus. That gunman Thursby is shacked up at Geary & Leavenworth suggests he’s residing on the hairy edge of the Tenderloin, an area rife with flophouses, while the supposedly-delicate Brigid O’Shaughnessy rooms on posh California Street. Sam Spade rides streetcars up and down Geary Street, a notion that defies imagination, as Geary in downtown San Francisco is narrower than the suburban lane I grew up riding my bike on. (The Geary streetcars were known as “Iron Monsters” and phased out in 1956 to make way for America’s love affair with automobiles.)

I’d been forced to move to Geary Street a few years earlier due to a bad break-up and the meager income I drew, living paycheck-to-paycheck tending bar. I wasn’t happy to reside a stone’s throw from the Tenderloin, infamous as San Francisco’s seediest neighborhood. It’s not—there’s a dignity in the TL easily overlooked—and Hammett’s work gave me a second sight, another way of reading my surroundings, and with it came another way to see my own circumstances. I say without qualification, Dashiell Hammett’s writings carried me through one of my lowest periods of my life.

Some time after my recovery—personal and monetary fortunes on the rise—I sat at the bar of John’s Grill in Union Square nursing a drink and waiting for my dinner to arrive. (“Jack LaLanne’s Favorite Salad”—a cold seafood salad with avocado slices, pure protein and fat.) On the back of the menu I found a newspaper article the restaurant had reprinted, “Stalking Sam Spade” written by one Fritz Leiber.

And I distinctly recall thinking, “That’s funny…there was a science fiction writer with that name.”

Stalking Sam Spade

Light reading while waiting for your steak medium-rare at John’s Grill.

After Leiber snapped out of the grief over his wife’s death and started drying up, he too rediscovered the city he lived in by reading it through Hammett’s lens. Geary Street, he wrote, is the “spine” of The Maltese Falcon, and he set out to locate its landmarks much as I’d attempted myself. Leiber was more organized about the project than I ever was, and “Stalking Sam Spade” does a much better job detailing his discoveries. Learning about San Francisco’s past through a detective novel led him to search for the history of the apartment house he lived in, culminating in his building becoming the nexus of Our Lady of Darkness.

Perhaps the allure of “rediscovering” a city through literature is not unique to San Francisco, but it’s certainly an active and avid pastime here. While some people move to San Francisco solely concerned about which address is currently beau chic or which nightspots are ripe for seeing-and-being-seen, I’ve encountered just as many who’ve found themselves ensnared in this game, the game I played those sleepless nights. It’s much as the Baker Street Irregulars “play the game” retracing Sherlock Holmes’ footprints as though he’d lived and breathed. With each step of the game comes the chill of revelation, the buzzing realization you’re walking the streets Hammett, Kerouac, Frank Norris, and others once trod daily. Each San Francisco writer is inspired in very different ways by the same city—a city that reinvents itself every generation, granting each artist who lands here a bed of fresh soil to sow and till. Some waste it, some fail to tend their seedlings. Others grow oak trees still standing today.

As Herron pointed out on our tour, Leiber got one fact wrong in “Stalking Sam Spade”: Spade’s apartment was most likely at Post & Hyde (not Geary & Hyde), the same location as Hammett’s apartment when he lived in San Francisco. A landmark plaque is on that building today, just as there is one at Burritt Alley—the location of the first murder in The Maltese Falcon—a plaque that did not exist when Leiber wrote his article.

Photo by Parker Higgins

Photo by Parker Higgins (CC0)

Another plaque that did not exist at that time is today placed on the Hotel Union at 811 Geary Street. It’s dedicated to Fritz Leiber and the book he wrote while drying up there, Our Lady of Darkness, a book inspired by his quest to re-walk the chapters of Hammett’s San Francisco and see the world anew.

Learn more about Don Herron’s tours and books at donherron.com