It follows on the publication of another story, ‘Late Quartet’, in Issue no. 89 of The Greensboro Review, back in March.

It is often the case with major writers that their major works tell only half, or less than half, the story. It is their minor, even incidental works – their draftsman’s labors – which serve as the final proof of genius: Sontag’s or Camus’s youthful journals; Beckett’s correspondence; Kafka’s diaries; Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne. Consider a story of Wallace’s, ‘All That,’ printed recently in The New Yorker. It isn’t even 4,000 words in length – the equal of a few pages in the most recent edition of Infinite Jest – and what exists of its narrative is elliptical, suppressed, barely there at all. Its title, perched delicately on a double entendre (the phrase ‘all that’ could mean either all the little things not worth mentioning – in the sense of ‘et cetera’ – or all that exists in the world), is profoundly apt: it is truly a story about all that it means to be a human being, told in the style of a tangent or an afterthought to another, more complete story. I can’t think of a better piece of fiction published in The New Yorker in 2009, and I can think of few I read anywhere that moved me as much.

The story’s major revelations come as elliptical remarks. Its first paragraphs describe a present the unnamed narrator’s parents gave him when he was still a small child: a rope-pulled toy cement mixer. They convince him that the truck’s drum, which is wooden and fixed in place, actually rotates when he pulls it – but does so only when he’s not looking. He tries to ‘trick’ the mixer, devising elaborate methods of testing his parents’ claim; none works. On the first approach it doesn’t dawn on the reader that the story is a meditation on faith and the credibility of authority until a third of the way through, with the first sentence of the sixth paragraph: ‘The toy cement mixer is the origin of the religious feeling that has informed most of my adult life.’

This claim comes abruptly, with pleasurable startling effect – it shows the preceding paragraphs in an entirely different light – and just as suddenly it recedes, as the narrator returns to an analysis of his parents and their somewhat cruel fiction about the cement mixer’s ‘magic.’ The narrator, it becomes clear, was a boy of unusual sensitivity, of tremendous, undirected feeling: he experiences the pleasures of a summer afternoon as unbearable ‘fits of ecstasy’; in the eyes of his parents he was an ‘eccentric and mysterious’ child because of his nascent religious sensibility; the episodes of trying to ‘trick’ the cement mixer cause in him ‘a mix of crushing disappointment and ecstatic reverence.’

But just as the story gives us the narrator’s own analysis of his condition and his relationship to his parents while revealing only by implication a truer and more complex state of affairs which remains, by him, unanalyzed, it is a story about religion and faith only inasmuch as it is a story about identity – more particularly, about the ways in which we fashion our own identities, about how we invent ourselves.

The person you see in the mirror is not the person others see: the sight is accompanied by the soundtrack of your own self-consciousness, almost never comprised of just one voice, but almost always comprised of many. At times it is possible to feel crowded inside your own head: a small room hosting a too-large gathering. Wallace’s story is about that crowd in your head: it is about the decisions you make, both consciously and unconsciously, to become who you are, to sort through the voices. ‘There are little boys who like trains and little boys who like vehicles – I liked the latter,’ the narrator tells us. You make any such decision – I am the kind of little boy who likes vehicles; I am the kind of person who marries later in life rather than earlier; I am the kind of person who has read Infinite Jest – and it allows you to take the first step toward actually becoming that kind of person. You begin to sort yourself into categories before the world does. It is a matter of instinct, surely, of something innate, but it is also a matter of conscious choice.

But anxiety lingers. You take a few steps toward the version of yourself you imagine and then, a little like Orpheus or Lot’s wife, those of the famous backward glances, you might turn around to make sure you’re traveling in the right direction, to make sure what you have left behind is something you wanted to leave behind. You see other possible selves, discarded selves, and perhaps you feel a cold spasm of doubt – is this really the person I’m supposed to be or do I only want to think of myself as this person?

It is a question of autonomy, of personal solvency: of control. You belong to yourself, or you ought to, and if there’s one thing you should be able to control it is your identity. There is a word for the feeling of not being who you want to be: agony. Agony is, in a strict sense, a struggle with yourself. It was Jesus’s struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane, when, faced with the spectre of his coming crucifixion, he confessed to Peter: ‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ But the spirit and the flesh are inextricable: each has a veto over the other, and to say that one is weak is to admit that both are. Jesus wrestled with his vocation as a martyr – really, with his vocation as the Son of God. But agony is also the experience of a teenager with acne whose face won’t cooperate with his own strong idea of who he is, the experience of a stutterer whose voice won’t obey; it is the frustration of knowing that the most essential manifestations of your outward self don’t belong to you even as they do – they aren’t under your control, but you must own them nevertheless. It is the same for more abstract qualities of self: I am a giving person, I am a listener, I am brave, I am spiritual, I am self-reliant, I am adventuresome, I am unconventional. These and the countless other self-conceptions people hold add up to the one we all share: I want to believe I am the best of all my possible selves. We continue to think such things about ourselves even as our actions, choices, and levels of happiness tell us differently. We want to think that, if over nothing else, we have control over our own essences.

These are the concerns animating much of Wallace’s writing. (Including, from what I am told, Infinite Jest.) Writing itself is, of course, another arena of control, and there is a ferocious level of control on display in ‘All That.’ Every sentence is rich with meaning and maintains subtle, surprising correspondence with other sentences elsewhere in the story; I found an even greater pleasure in the story on my third reading than I did on my first. Part of the attraction of writing, for a writer, is this aspect of control: if you are willing to expend the mental calories it takes, to sacrifice the time and to suffer the doubts, writing is a place to enjoy a level of control you cannot elsewhere in life. If a sentence isn’t what you want it to be, you revise it. Unlike your own self, with its unwanted inheritances, its frequent uncooperativeness, the words you put on the page are entirely yours to choose and to shape. (That you still get so many things wrong is the colossal frustration of writing.)

The terrain of self can be tricky, even slippery, and the questions of identity – not in the political, ethnic sense, but in the most basic private sense – often go unresolved. Or they can fall suddenly from what seems like resolution into confused disarray, dismantled as easily as an IKEA bed. Wallace, in both his fiction and his life, is one example of the consequences of such confusion: suicide, among other things, is the most radical possible act of control over the self you don’t want.

This page was originally conceived as a piece of advertising: as a means to build an infrastructure of interest around my debut novel, CITY OF STRANGERS, published last summer. Now that the book’s publication cycle has come and gone, that reason for this page’s existence has become obsolete; there is nothing new to sell. (Which doesn’t mean you cannot still buy CITY OF STRANGERS from your local bookseller, or from Amazon.)

But. Revisions was never meant to be an author blog; it was never meant to catalog the ins and outs of readings, of meeting other authors, of the coincidences and odd ephemera one discovers upon Googling one’s own name; it wasn’t meant to record those moments, like the undiminishing thrill of seeing one’s name on a spine in a bookshop, which attend the publication of a first novel. None of that is particularly interesting; no more interesting than a stranger’s diary. From its beginning, Revisions was intended to house longer, more serious writing, and I find myself wanting to preserve it as a home for the publication of occasional essays on literature and writing. And so it remains. The schedule of publication cannot return to a pace of once or twice a week, but I hope to muster once or twice a month, with a new piece soon to come.

As part of the reboot I have changed the image at the top of the page. Where a detail from Anselm Kiefer’s The Renowned Orders of the Night once was, now hangs a detail from Robert Motherwell’s Reconciliation Elegy. The painting itself – massive, looming, spectacular – lives in the East Building of the National Gallery, in Washington, DC. It is one of the best things I have encountered in this, a city which, however temporarily, I am forced to imagine as home.

In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be’s and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering. Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.

Fair enough. But he also once said this:

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

And you know what? He was right.

Au revoir, New York.

For some, a blog is indistinguishable from life. Not for me. Life intrudes; the blog suffers. In a week’s time, some fairly meaty life changes will take place, and, while I will continue to post new columns about once or twice a month (I hope), I am no longer able to maintain a once-a-week pace. I will also continue to use REVISIONS to post updates about readings, events, and reviews of CITY OF STRANGERS, and news of any other publications.

Which is to say: Please do check back, from time to time.

In that spirit, then, Walbert’s novel is about the history that isn’t written. Cleverly, it takes as its structure a series of short episodes, shuttling across decades, in the lives of five generations of women from the same family; the newest members of that family, whom we meet as late as 2007, frequently have only a partial or confused understanding of the legacy of their forebears. That legacy includes the woman at the top of the family tree: Dorothy Trevor Townsend, an Englishwoman who, in 1914, starved herself to death for the cause of suffrage. Her great-great-granddaughter, a freshman at Yale, appears only as her Facebook page – a device that could easily have felt needless and cheap, had it not so ruthlessly condensed easy comedy into a core of fierce sadness, as we watch the ambiguity and terror of the great-great-grandmother’s sacrifice squandered with a privileged teenager’s casual pith: ‘Color me revolutionary.’

Any novel called A Short History of Women implies a parallel history of men, if only by exclusion. Hemingway called one of his story collections Men Without Women in part because there is no such thing; the irony is built-in. The men in Walbert’s novel are, indeed, pushed to the periphery, even if its central female characters are highly and painfully conscious that their stories – complete, poignant, complicated – are occurring at the periphery of what’s usually called history. With the exception of one chapter, men flit into view and then flit out again. They only partially shade the novel’s action, which charts English and American life from the end of the nineteenth century to the opening years of the twenty-first; yet the novel shapes itself around the major human event from which women have traditionally been excluded: war.

Male life in the book is nearly synonymous with military activity. Men, and even many women, asperse Dorothy Townsend’s effort to starve herself in the name of women’s suffrage, because that effort happens to coincide with World War I. The men dying in French fields know a far greater sacrifice, say her critics; their suffering makes a cartoon of hers. Later, we see Dorothy’s daughter, Elizabeth, now an adult, on V-J Day, moving in a kind of dream through a wildly celebrating Manhattan. Elizabeth is at one point with her friend Helen, and, when a man appears suddenly and kisses Helen, it leaves her in a daze.

Somewhere in the Forties, Helen is wrenched into a kiss and afterward takes my hand and holds it tightly, her glasses lost, one lens crunched by a heel before they’re retrieved. It’s an interesting perspective, she’s shouting. ‘I’m left-sighted,’ she’s shouting. ‘My father’s going to kill me.’

The moment, into which Helen is ‘wrenched’ – nothing romantic about that – casts a new light on the famous Life Magazine photograph of a white-hatted (and, one is meant to assume, heroic) sailor dipping a woman in Times Square at war’s end. It is not even specified whether the man who kisses Helen is a soldier himself or simply someone benefiting from what soldiers have done; in fact, Walbert’s subtle use of the passive voice means that the agent of the kiss – the man – goes unmentioned. It is as if Zeus, the original avatar of men’s rough claims on women, had descended invisibly to do the kissing.

V-J Day marked the victory of men over men, in a contest invented by men. Later episodes entrench this theme. A kaffeeklatsch of country club wives whose opposition to the Vietnam War blends with a discussion of the hegemony of male culture generally. An aging woman with three adult children and a failing marriage engaged in a protest of uncertain merit against the Iraq War, photographing soldiers at a military base in Delaware. Walbert applies her themes deliberately, like coats of paint.

In François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, Jules, who like his friend Jim has just returned from the trenches of World War I, says the tragedy of war is that it deprives a man of his own ‘personal battle.’ It does nothing to diminish the strengths of A Short History of Women to point out that this is, at least partly, true; war is a contest invented by men, but there are limits to its use as a proxy for male life generally. Men in war would prefer, in most cases, to be anywhere else. It is interesting to read A Short History of Women alongside The Suicide Run, a forthcoming posthumous collection by William Styron, whose stories comprise an examination of war through the eyes of young men – many of whom are substitutes for Styron himself, an active-duty Marine at the end of World War II and later during the Korean War – who have not yet experienced it, and who, if they are honest with themselves, would really rather not.

Styron’s characters, in their callow youth, are anything but pacifists. They feel a fierce, deep lack as men, simply because they have not yet seen battle. Since Homer, since the Vikings, men have proved themselves as men in mortal struggle; not even the full library of war’s horror has totally erased the belief that honor is bound up in lethal adventure.

The men in Walbert’s novel indeed exist as an almost unvaried atmosphere of violence, of unseen battle on foreign shores. Which is why Styron serves as a useful counterpoint. ‘My Father’s House,’ which was to be part of a novel but in The Suicide Run appears as a long story, is told by Paul Whitehurst, who awaits orders for his company to engage the Japanese in the waning days of World War II. His comrades itch for battle: ‘Jesus, I hope this is it’; ‘I hope the fuck it’s soon.’

Whitehurst, inwardly ashamed, feels none of the same bravado:

Oh, Jesus, I thought. I hope the fuck it’s never. I couldn’t even work up a falsely brave remark, and I felt twisted with envy at their breezy offhandedness.

Homer and Tolstoy wrote of war with great complexity, but with an air of reverent inevitability; war had a necessary part to play in the course of human events, and was consequently a necessary part of masculine life. In Tolstoy’s ferocious late novel Hadji Murád, the eponymous hero, a Chechen rebel leader turned to the Russian side, is depicted as almost unvaryingly noble; and war is portrayed not without a degree of sentimentality. His wife and family, whom he loses his life trying to save, are ciphers: they could be any wife and family. Martial literature has never stinted on the tragedy at the heart of war – the deaths of good men – but only a later addition to this literary tradition, emerging from writers like Styron, Mailer, James Salter, Tobias Wolff, and Tim O’Brien, who have themselves served in the military, employs a different set of scales to measure the worth of the men who fight. (One might think also of a recent film, The Hurt Locker, which offers an ambiguous portrayal of the relationship between men and war, and which was directed, not incidentally, by a woman.)

What makes Walbert’s book effective literary counternarrative is its tangible awareness of the narrative it seeks to counter. In other words, it keeps men in the picture, even as it lodges them at the edge of the frame. Another nice touch is the presence of Florence Nightingale, who acts as a presiding spirit in A Short History of Women: she was a woman who individually made enormous strides for all womankind while serving as a nurse to men wounded in battle; who suffused traditionally feminine work with nominally unfeminine toughness, and who did so deep within the masculine arena of warfare.

But I don’t want to overstate the politics of A Short History of Women; that would give too thin an impression of it. What makes it a good novel, what makes any novel good, is that under its skin of ideas is a body of living muscle, working organs, a beating heart. People converse, yearn, suffer, take joy. Walbert knows what Tolstoy knew: men with women – or women with men – is, for all the trouble it has caused us, our basic universal experience.

[Note: I will be reading with Kate Walbert this Sunday, October 4th, at KGB Bar, in the East Village.]

Earnestness, like all such terms, contains shades of meaning. Hamlet’s earnestness is not the same thing as, say, Green Day’s earnestness during their recent anti-jingoistic phase. The latter does, as Baldwin suggests, clang a bit. It’s not especially good or memorable music – certainly it does not have very good or memorable lyrics – but it does seem to be, well, sincere. Like Coldplay, it at least wears a sincere face. (Or does it? It’s also very lucrative.) Whereas the songs of LCD Soundsystem, to use an example of particular contrast, are bathed in irony, and arrive steeped in knowing allusion to other bands, genres, periods of style; yet those songs are extraordinarily good, and the lyrics are not only good and memorable, but sharp and often quite funny. (One of LCD Soundsystem’s best songs is called ‘Daft Punk is Playing at My House.’) Nobody who’s listening goes rushing off to the thesaurus to find synonyms for ‘earnest.’

It is irony, but irony sincerely done. That the incoherent sincerity of Coldplay produces laughably bad lyrics while the world-weary irony of LCD Soundsystem produces terrific lyrics probably seems self-evident to many: the link between excessive sincerity and bad art is well-documented. There’s the schoolboy in all of us; schoolboys prize irony and aloofness, and the music world (at least the world of people hip about music) preserves those distinctions. We expect the worst as soon as we see someone wearing his heart on his sleeve. (No wonder: the phrase is Iago’s.)

What about the corollary? If bad art often has sincerity as its chief ingredient, can good art come from insincerity? A recent and quite funny novel, How I Became a Famous Novelist, takes as its premise that question (sort of). Its hero, Pete Tarslaw, seeking to impress the guests at his ex-girlfriend’s upcoming wedding and in turn shame that ex-girlfriend for ever having left him, decides that the surest path to doing so is to write a best-selling novel. He models his effort on the books of (the fictional) Preston Brooks, whose writing appears to be a sort of admixed caricature of David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain, and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons, as well as books by Mitch Albom, Nicholas Sparks, Wally Lamb, Winston Groom, and (at his most risible) Cormac McCarthy. (One of Brooks’s novels is called Kindness of Birds.) Hely gives a precise anatomy of the finely-honed rustic outsider image Brooks has cultivated for himself: a man at home with nature and tools, with the roughness of life. (In all writer-image cultivation, and especially in parodies of such, Hemingway looms large.) These signifiers of manliness allow the luxury of fluffier descriptions of his artistic process. ‘I call this the dance hall. Because characters will appear, and introduce themselves and ask me to dance. The character always leads. I bow, accept, dance for a while,’ Brooks says in an interview.

Hely’s novel is airily and pleasurably comic, and at times awfully slapstick, but it also wades into serious questions about what we call art and how we assign value to it. His target here isn’t really bad writing per se, or even the enduring and (to many of us) vexing popularity of so much bad writing. The real target is a culture that values the apparatus of a product over the actual quality of that product: a culture that likes stickers on the fronts of its books, that has lost track of what might constitute worth in a piece of art.* Tarslaw, in crafting his Preston Brooks pastiche, relies on Wikipedia to add authentic-seeming detail to his far-flung locales, one of which is World War II-era Tunisia; later, in Hely’s bang-on version of an Entertainment Weekly review (a ‘B’), Tarslaw’s novel, although it ‘can get cloying at times,’ is praised specifically for those details: ‘want to know what Tunisian fisherman eat? pages 213-217.’

‘The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector,’ Hemingway said. But that much ought to be true of everyone, not just writers. Preston Brooks, whether he knows it or not, is full of shit, and no one seems to realize it. He belongs to a growing plenitude of false sincerity, most of which goes unpunished, in a society that seems increasingly unwilling or unable to detect bullshit. It lives in our politics and in our discourse, and it’s no wonder that it trickles into our art. In a culture where so many buy into the supposed wisdom of a Preston Brooks (or the many writers for whom he is a proxy), it isn’t surprising that millions of people actually believe Glenn Beck means it when he issues his daily tears on television.

Pete Tarslaw, in his insincere attempt to write a best-seller, is the obverse of Richard Tull, from Martin Amis’s The Information, a serious-minded but unregarded novelist with the misfortune to have as his rival a friend from university, Gwyn Barry, who is the author of preposterous, faux-profound best-sellers, such as a utopian novel called Amelior. (In interviews Barry talks about his passion for carpentry, tools, and manual labor.) Both Tarslaw and Tull see through the lie; they just enact different solutions. Tarslaw tries to replicate the feats of the bullshitters. Tull goes nearly insane trying to tear down his apparently less-talented friend, an effort that mirrors Tarslaw’s crucifixion, near the end of How I Became a Famous Novelist, at the hands of a crowd of staunch Preston Brooks admirers. They buy what Brooks is selling, and they like it.

Much of the brilliance and amusement value in Amis’s novel comes from the ambiguity surrounding Tull’s actual talent. Barry is a hack, but Tull might not be that much of a writer either; his real talent, aside from crossword puzzles, seems to be his ability to recognize Barry’s unworth. Hely, too, wisely preserves the ambiguity at the core of his satire: the reader never knows whether Brooks believes in the quality of his own writing – that is, whether it is sincerely done or is a craven pandering to commercial taste. Certainly, Brooks – like the writers he evokes – gives every outward indication of total sincerity, even as his comments about his own writing grow increasingly, glaringly ridiculous, a kind of nightmare version of the Art of Fiction interviews in The Paris Review. Tarslaw, however, knows what he thinks: ‘Preston Brooks is a genius. He’s the greatest con artist in the world.’

There’s nothing wrong with being entertained. But Hely’s novel isn’t going after the books – or the movies, or the music – that strictly entertain; after all, both Preston Brooks’s fiction and Pete Tarslaw’s novel sound like utter chores to read. Rather, Hely holds up to ridicule the belief, increasingly prevalent, that the worth of a novel is bound up in its ability to supply extraliterary value: the dietary habits of Tunisian fisherman, for instance, or perhaps something less tangible, like nuggets of self-help wisdom; and that a novel ought, above all, to make the reader feel good about himself. In other words, a book Oprah might choose for her book club.

How I Became a Famous Novelist serves as an indictment of a passive culture: we pay to see the most heavily advertised movies; we read the books everyone else is reading. That’s one of the reasons, I think, that Oprah’s Book Club is so popular: it’s popular because of its popularity. If you read the book currently on offer, you’re doing something hundreds of thousands of other people are doing. You belong. I haven’t got the figures, but I can’t imagine that her most recent pick, Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of Them, sold more than a few thousand copies before Oprah anointed it, despite strong reviews and two stories originally published in The New Yorker. (The New Yorker, of course, is another kind of anointment.) That she has is terrific for Akpan and good for an industry which, frankly, needs all the bestsellers it can get. What rankles is the arbitrary nature of the whole thing – arbitrariness masquerading as taste, commercial triangulation dressed up as a kind of natural selection. I haven’t read Akpan’s book and have no opinion about it one way or the other, but I am sure there are a dozen books which are just as good and which might have met similar categorical desires. (People seem to be impressed that the book is by an African writer and that it is comprised of short stories, two boxes that Oprah’s previous selections have not, apparently, checked.) Perhaps Oprah really did read a dozen books, and was struck, particularly and personally, by Akpan’s; it is impossible to know. But the fact that hundreds of thousands of people who previously held no interest in Akpan’s book – let alone possessed the sort of literary curiosity that would have led them to seek out such a book on their own – are now going to buy that book simply because of a sticker seems more than a little like madness.

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*Samantha Peale, like Hely, is a writer whose recent first novel, The American Painter Emma Dial, explores the sometimes illegible border between art and bullshit. In her book, an artist’s assistant suggests to his boss running off a series of twenty prints, simply for the income they will generate; capping the series at twenty, he points out, will sustain the ideal price. Think of Damien Hirst’s dot paintings, which have almost no aesthetic virtue and would indeed be worthless were it not for Hirst’s imprimatur, but which, for Hirst, are the equivalent of legal tender; producing them, or rather signing those that his assistants have produced, is for him literally printing money, and the only reason he has authorized only 300, as opposed to 3,000, is the same reason the treasury doesn’t print bills indiscriminately: inflation.

REVISIONS will return on September 22nd, with a new column. In the meantime, Susan Chi, another New York-based writer, very kindly did an interview with me about CITY OF STRANGERS for the blog at BOMB Magazine’s website. You can read the interview here.

In the meantime, I will mention that, for those in New York, I will be doing a reading at KGB Bar, in the East Village, on October 4th. More information on the Events page to your right. Kate Walbert (the author, most recently, of A Short History of Women) will also be reading.

Finally, CITY OF STRANGERS received some kind words a couple of weeks ago in The Star-Ledger, from Betsy Willeford: ‘Paul [Metzger] trudges through the wintry gray New York City days like one of those Graham Greene innocent Americans who get themselves destroyed for inchoate causes. . . . Ian MacKenzie’s novel is simultaneously lyric and chilling.’

CITY OF STRANGERS also got a nice write-up in The Barnes & Noble Review, where David Abrams called it a ‘bleak, beautiful novel,’ comprised of ‘one part Albert Camus, one part Philip Roth, and one part Martin Scorsese.’