Don Delillo: Bore or Genius?

I mentioned reading Don Delillo's one paragraph in my last post and how I couldn't go on, and then wondered: why is that?

So I cracked open Underworld and gave it a try. I read the entire prelude -- the famous pennant game between the Dodgers (when they were still based in Brooklyn) against the Giants on October 3, 1951. I read it very slowly.

I'm in two minds -- ok, rightaway within half a page, I realise the man is a different league altogether. The prose is beautiful, many gemological sentences tucked away everywhere to steal your breath away. BUT -- every play of the game was so laden with portent, moments were frozen for so long and then repeated, the prose overblown at times, the pace so plodding, the significance farcical -- I find myself wondering, is this to be the standard-bearer of 'high literature', literature that broadens and uplifts? It felt like Delillo trying to pour his whole understanding of the world into a ball game. Isn't it just a ball game? Gertrude Stein would say, a ballgame is a ballgame is a ballgame...

There's no central character. There are a number of fictional and real characters. Russ Hodgson the radio announcer whose job it is to report the game (we hear snatches of his report throughout interspersed with straightforward narrating of what's actually happening on the field). We have four famous personages in the celebrity box -- Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor (never heard of him) and J. Edgar Hoover who receives news that the Soviet Union is detonating atomic bombs in the desert in trials. It's the dawning of the Cold War. We also have an intimate conversational exchange between two fictional characters -- Cotter from Harlem and Bill Waterson, your average suited guy from an insurance office out to catch this all-important game. They both fight over the baseball from the inline drive that dropped into the lower deck of the stadium that was a homer that ended in the Giants winning the pennant.

Delillo does not adopt a straightforward narrative. Ostensibly, the central play is the actual shot by shot of the game from the seventh to the ninth inning. But he comes back and cuts away, comes back and cuts away, like a zigzag camera, and in the cutaways, Hoover receives the news of the Russians, we get glimpses of the antics of the baseball crowd raining paper, Gleason goes through his comedic stand-up routines and then proceeds to barf all over Sinatra's shoes, Russ Hodgson nurses a fever, the players flex and posture and go through a sequence of actions that has happened in every ball game I've ever been to (I'm not much of a fan but reading a description of these actions stirred such a jolt of memory that I suddenly desperately wanted to go to one!). Most importantly, as Bobby Thomson scores his homer in the last inning, and propels the Giants to victory, the crowd is in uproar, and paper comes raining from the upper deck, one page of which is a full scale reproduction of Pieter Bruegel's painting The Triumph of Death. Which Hoover captures. The metaphor comes full circle. Even as we celebrate life in the best and sweetest way possible -- the victory of a beloved home team in a game that defines the quintessence of what it means to be American -- somewhere out there, the threat of death is nowhere more ominous and looming than now.

Punch him for his verbosity by all means, but he delivers. Delillo landed me somewhere else in this prelude. Somewhere I could have no ability to be on my own. That someplace is a mix of history and nationalism and sports and art and moment -- it is what damn good literature should do. Delillo sees something extraordinary in everything ordinary -- he looks behind every gesture and deed and word and thought -- this is the secret place where he lives his life. Of course everything should be invested with portent, because in 1951, the menace lurked unseen and unfelt and yet, everything was a kind of hovering of death.

Not all of us could be pseudo-philosophers with such pizzazz and not every book by such pseudo-philosopher is handled with pizzazz, but so far, the ride is pretty amazing.

When is the MOVIE better than the BOOK?

Here I've made a partial list of all the books or short stories turned movies I've watched and read, and where I come out on this question.



Pride and Prejudice (BBC version) -- a most excellent version, but book still better.
Pride and Prejudice (Keira Knightley version) -- atrocious movie. Book way ahead.
Sense and Sensibility (Ang Lee version) -- a good movie, but book still better.
Mansfield Park (with Hannah Taylor Gordon -- 1999) -- book still better. But was a good movie.
Mansfield Park (with Julia Joyce -- 2007) -- the changes from the book were very interesting -- I learned the value of making the Crawfords more evil but the book still better.
Emma (Gwynneth Paltrow) -- book much better
Brokeback Mountain -- short story better
Lust and Caution -- movie better (I found the translation hard to access -- from the movie nuances were dramatised and when I reread the short story, I had a glimpse into Ang Lee's head and what he saw to dramatise and that was very eye-opening).
American Psycho -- book much bettter
Twilight -- book (although atrociously written was still better than the movie for me).
Bridget Jones -- book was better.
Remains of the Day -- book was amazing! Movie less so.
English Patient -- movie was spectacular, as good as the book maybe?
Jane Austen Book Club -- ok, it's rare, but I actually think the movie is better than the book
Message in a Bottle -- the book was so bad the movie easily trumps it.
The entire Harry Potter series -- ok, I'm indifferent. Perhaps because I enjoyed both, but didn't care much in the end.
Cry, My Beloved Country -- book definitely better
Lord of the Rings (entire) -- book far and away better.

Ok, that's my partial list. For readers of my blog, will you share your list?


I've seen loads of other adapted movies but may not have read the book, so can't compare, eg. the Virgin Suicides, and the Devil Wears Prada (which was very good). This is so often said that it becomes hackneyed -- that the book always tends to trump the movie. Why is that? For me, the reason is because I believe our imagination really is far richer than we give ourselves credit for. When we read a novel, what's happening in our head feels like what's happening before our eyes, and a movie steals away that visual imagination -- it tells us what to see and how to see it. And yet, sometimes, even though a book is well-written, the movie wins out. That's an outlier because I can count on one hand the times when that happens. Can we learn something about writing fiction from analysing why the movie does better?


A case in point for me here is The Jane Austen Book Club. I really enjoyed the suppleness of Fowler's writing (you cannot read this book and think you're reading a novice writer -- this is good good writing), and some of her insightful details were breathtaking -- I will never forget the way she pointed out how Grigg's bookcase was stacked vertically and crossways and horizontally -- the sign of a genuine reader (she claims). Or the way she noticed the eye-bagged look of short-sighted people without their glasses. These details can be filmed but lose their impact on the watcher -- it has its proper place in a book where it brings that rush of visceral pleasure when a mental image jumps into one's mind complete in all its details. I saw Grigg's bookshelves in all its dustiness, its books with curled and dog-eared covers, its range and color and woodsy-ness. The same visual picture given to me in a movie will fail to move. It's something to do with brain and visual imagination, something that means I'm intricately involved.


With all this, why did I like the movie more? For all that the writing moves me, the novel as an entirety did not. There simply aren't many in this category. In the past, I preferred to overlook the failure of the novel in exchange for the beauty of the prose. But now that I'm studying all the different aspects of novels I've loved, this no longer satisfies.

Let's talk a bit about this movie. The director and scriptwriter changed not a few things. Sequences of events were moved backward and foreward. The romance between Grigg and Jocelyn were played up. While the book engaged in a sort of backward-looking memory flashes, the movie moved it all into present-time. Prudie and Dean's marriage tensions were played up greatly. In a telling scene in the movie, Daniel crashes Sylvia's book club meeting and because he's trying to get back together with his ex-wife, Bernadette, a bookclub member advised him thus, "Never underestimate the value of a good letter." This was not in the book. I thought it should have been. It was a very poignant point. It's very Austen, in any case


In a different novel-adapted-to-screen movie, Twilight, I thought the writing was so bad that at times I grimaced myself through it. While Meyers showed her writing naivete in her first book, yet it remains the best in the series, in my humble opinion. She captured a raw emotion on the part of Bella Cullen and transposed and played it out in an intoxicating conversational sequence in the book. Later, I learned from her blog that this entire sequence came to her in a dream. I take from this that Meyers was true to her original inspirational muse. But despite being a novice writer, or perhaps because she's a novice writer, she brings to the book what she's learned from movies and television and how and what to dramatise.

B.R. Myers, in his article "A Reader's Manifesto", decries in vehement language the 'affected prose' of most literary fiction today. He takes Annie Proulx as an example and tears into her 'lyrical, evocative' prose the way a rabid dog does with a juicy leg. He says, "

today, any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be 'genre fiction' -- at beast an excellent 'read' or a 'page-turner', but never literature with a capital L. An author with a track record of blockbusters may find the publication of a new work treated like a pop-culture event [e.g. Twilight], but most 'genre novels are lucky to get an inch in the back pages of the New York Times Book Review (ok, he wrote this article in 2001, today he might find that this claim is not quite as true as before).

If, as he claims, throwing around big words like 'ontological' and 'nominalism' (surely a dig at writers like Eco, DeLillo and Pynchon) is what passes for profundity these days, novels that move with 'plot' and suspense and pace are considered 'genre'ish.

David Guterson is thus granted Serious Writer status for having buried a murder mystery under sonorous tautologies (Snow Falling on Cedars, 1994) while Stephen King, whose Bag of Bones (1998) is a more intellectual but less pretentious novel, is still considered to be just a very talented genre storyteller.

He goes on to skewer, in good order, Charles Frazier, Frederick Busch, Cormac McCarthy, DeLillo, Auster, and by the time he's done, you almost feel like he's just another curmudgeonly critic saying No One Can Write Nowadays which is just another way of saying If I could have written my book, it would have been the Grand American Masterpiece. Well! May we breathe a sigh that we are thus spared.

But I find I cannot ignore Myer's more salient points, once I overlook the invective. I admire McCarthy and DeLillo greatly. I read one paragraph in DeLillo's Underworld recently. On page 3 of Underworld, DeLilllo describes going to a ball-game.

Cotter sees the first jumpers go over the bars. Two of them jostle in the air and come down twisted and asprawl. A ticket taker puts a headlock on one of them and his cap comes loose and skims down his back and he reaches for it with a blind swipe and at the same time-- everything's at the same time -- he eyes the other hurdlers to keep from getting stepped on. They are running and hurdling. It's a witless form of flight withe bodies packed in close and the gate-crashing becoming real. They are jumping too soon or too late and hitting the posts and radial bars, doing cartoon climbs up each other's back, and what kind of stupes must they look like to people at the hot-dog stand on the other side of the turnstiles, what kind of awful screw-ups - a line of mostly men beginning to glance this way, jaws working at the sweaty meat and grease bubbles flurrying on their tongues, th gent at the far end going dead-still except for a hand that produces automatic movement, swabbing on mustard with a brush.

I closed the book with a snap. I never read beyond this paragraph. I saw stars, and then stars. I felt surfeited. I felt a rush of admiration so great I didn't want to read anymore. I knew a master when I saw one. Not only did he use mainly 'verbs' in this one long paragraph -- but the paragraph itself was a kind of art-in-motion -- a picture of continuous motion with the ability to freeze in a stroboscopic movement, and don't you just love the word 'stupe' and 'radial bars' in the same paragraph?

This is an example of Myer's 'edgy prose' which is so lauded in contemporary writing. He goes so far as to call this a sleight of hand -- the trick of a 'novelist with limited gifts'. He calls it 'spurious profundity'. Look, I haven't read 'White Noise' -- I don't know if it is spuriously profound. But I do wonder if readers don't saddle writers with a hog-load of unachievable expectations. We expect writers who dare ask philosophical questions to be philosophers; we ask that if they raise existential concerns in their characters that they illuminate as well; I want to say we almost expect them to be god(as in god can provide answers)-cum-magicians in the same breath they use to create 'art in motion' -- sort of a kapow-and-voila in the same gesture. Who can meet this challenge?

Let's go back to Austen. She wrote six great books -- revered and read today with great avidity and critical analysis and I for one love her. I've read Pride and Prejudice like six times. Is she profound like DeLillo? No. I've read the French greats -- Zola, Stendhal, Balzac -- and how about Dreiser's Sister Carrie or Dickens or Thackeray's Vanity Fair -- in those novels they wrote, don't you agree that there was a great amount of sordidness, of made-for-television lowbrow drama, people stampeding on each other to get ahead? And Jane Austen, if I can be crass, if you were going to skin off all the social commentary, couldn't you argue she was the 'queen of chicklit'?

Great thinkers don't necessarily make great novelists. Those who can illuminate the human condition in these philosophical ways should stay with philosophy -- a novel with imaginary characters and imaginary desires and imaginary happenings just clouds the point. I agree with a lot of Myer's points about contemporary writing, but in a writer's defense, perhaps a writer should be judged on how great he or she is not just on the writing (fair enough), but also on how good the story is. Not whether he can tell me something about how to live my life or think about the world I live in that hasn't occurred to me before. So again, first and foremost, the story. And tell it from the heart, please. Give me all the bells and whistles. Give me some bad people, some saurian exemplars of the human heart in all its sleaziness. Dramatize, dramatize, dramatize. All these other intellectual things that happen are wonderful byproducts -- and when they happen, I only love the story more.

So, maybe we can learn something about writing fiction from watching the movies after all. I don't mean the cliches or stereotypes (I just saw Catherine Zeta Jones in No Reservations -terrible movie -- abound with cliches and standard-issue emotion-wringers that fail to wring emotions). I mean knowing when not to let a moment get away from you. That moment when things happen, sparks fly, characters begin to really get to each other. That moment when conflict happens. When art takes on life.

Real Life or Cliche?

Earlier this year, as it became clear that we would be moving to Hong Kong, a friend of mine wrote in an email : 'Ironic, here you've written a story about a Filipino amah and cruel taitais and in moving to Hong Kong, you'd be a tai tai yourself'. I remember thinking, I may be a taitai (I'm one regardless of wealth, so long as I'm sitting pretty at home without quote-a-regular-job-unquote) but I hope I won't be cruel.

A couple of weeks after arriving in Hong Kong, during a meeting to open a bank account, our friendly banker (by the name of Collen, but is not a man, her name is just missing an 'e') warned me in all dead seriousness. "There are two things you really need to watch out for. One, your husband will find another woman. Two, your helper will steal from you." Ok, I laughed. I laughed because I appreciated her doomsday black-humor, which suited me so perfectly in those early days of trying not to suffocate under severe heat with two fractious ankle-biters who refused to eat any food for days. Collen however didn't appreciate my laugh -- she thought I wasn't taking her seriously, so she proceeded to tell me a couple of true stories around Fear No. 2. By the time she was finished, she had managed to scare the paranoid in me into overdrive.

We moved into our regular place in the Midlevels at the end of August, and found a nice, gentle, youngish helper who was also religious. She would start in a couple of weeks once she was approved by immigration. Within a week, I realized that she was inordinately bright. She watched and learned, needing very little instruction. She knew exactly what to do with the kids. While it takes time for kids (mine especially) to warm to anybody, my daughter got on with her quite quickly.

All was well, and within three weeks of moving in, I felt that the house was in order, and while there were still many things left to do (like finding curtains to screen out the bright-as-god daylight at six a.m. every morning screaming through the length of windows), still I felt as if I could now turn back to the most important project of all -- my novel.

Still paranoid, with Collen's words never deep in the subconscious, I decided to buy a safe for the house. Over the weekend, I transferred my jewelry there. And noticed that four pieces were missing. None of the four were expensive things -- two were these cheap gold necklaces from my hometown, but they were graduation gifts from my mother. The sentimental value had increased since my mother's death last year. I can't look at them without remembering the scene of her handing the necklaces to me. That pained feeling that she had squandered her hard-earned savings to buy me something for my graduation that deep down, I knew I didn't really need.

When I discovered they were missing, I had an immediate sinking feeling. These were not things I wore at all. They hadn't been touched for a while. They should be here.

I also immediately pushed another thought out of my head.

I searched and searched. I ransacked my house for three days. I did everything I could to convince myself I was so paranoid I'd managed to hide my belongings from myself. I'd somehow managed to erase all traces of memory of the location from my brain. I was willing to believe I'd misplaced my brain along with those necklaces.

I told myself this nice gentle lady I hired wouldn't do this so early in the job in a two-year contract. In my Filipino story, I had written about the 'conoondrum' of being fired. A Filipino amah only has two weeks to find another job when discharged and she needs a discharge letter from her old employer. If she leaves on bad terms, the chances of finding another job quickly aren't good. The labor laws protecting helpers are also ostensibly slim.

I told myself the theft did not make sense, and therefore it did not happen. Why not take the more expensive things? Why, like a crow, take the cheap glitter?

My helper sensed that things were not right. She began to hover. She became more diligent than ever. Her eyes were watching. I sensed all this. I began to go quietly out of my mind with paranoia and suspicion. I felt terrible suspecting her. I felt guilty and crazy.

I called my friends to ask for advice. Theft is so rampant in households here that sympathy is pointless -- all they can rustle up is a shrug at your bad luck and the fact that our Hong Kong experience thus far hasn't strayed from the cliches. I'm told the first things to always disappear are the cheap gold and money. Small household items hard to pin down, list or remember.

I was advised to secure proof. Without proof, I can't dismiss the helper. I was advised to engage in cloak and dagger maneuvers that frankly smelled of entrapment (e.g. leaving money underneath the bed, as if it has accidentally fallen there). Or to try subterfuge (getting another helper to gain her confidence and get her to confess). I was advised that direct confrontation is useless. She would never admit to anything because the consequences are dire. All these things are true. I could not in all honesty write a discharge letter recommending her when I know she has stolen. And if I were to write one that told the truth and shamed the devil, well, I was literally ensuring her journey back to the Philippines.

The first instinct towards theft of one's own belongings is a feeling of violation. Someone has been carefully and meticulously going through your things and selecting the things they think worth having. The second is an immediate wanting to be rid of this element. Wanting nothing whatsoever to do with suspicion and blame.

Here's where you can shake me out of being a lawyer, but perhaps never shake the legal training out of me. I began to construct a case of circumstantial evidence. I questioned my other temporary helper who comes in a couple of extra hours to help with the cleaning and ironing. I've noticed they tended to converse in Tagalog, and I queried about the nature of their conversations. As I suspected, it turns out that my gentle, nice helper has been having desperate money problems, involving an absconding husband and the needs of her children. And debts. If I succumbed to thinking like a hardboiled detective, I've just found my motive.

I thought carefully. Opportunity. She's had ample opportunity during all the times I wasn't in the house. She lives with us, but also keeps a boarding room in the New Territories. When she told me this several weeks ago, I had thought it very odd. There seemed a nefarious reason to pay a quarter of her salary to keep a boarding room when she had a room in our house. I had wondered then if she had a man on the side.

I don't suppose I will really secure entirely satisfactory proof. I also believe the warnings my friends give me -- if I choose to overlook this, it will happen again. When you have children, you can't continue living with a helper whom you can't trust. To be honest, it's easy enough to dismiss her by finding another reason, if I'm watchful enough. But it seems just what a cruel taitai would do.

I confess to serious misgivings and a conflicted conscience. I confess to the namby-pambiness of my leftist leanings and moral quivers. My initial instinct was to react harshly to theft. To punish. But I also thought this would be secular and superficial -- too inconsiderate of the entire social structure of which this thieving behavior is a symptom. I find myself thinking about the desperation of their circumstances, the low wage standards and the lack of protection. Even if she wasn't entirely honest about her financial situation, I found I could not shake off my understanding of that more subterranean desperation of wanting more but not having the means to secure it because of circumstances and the random tragedy of birth.

Out of that initial instinct came another one -- instead of wanting to punish her, I wanted to pay her more. To lessen her desperation. It may not cure her instinct to steal, but perhaps it will at least engender loyalty in response to kindness instead of cruelty. I confess to being very tempted to overlook this incident. To give a severe warning -- there will not be a second amnesty, so to speak -- and be done with it. Concomitantly, there's my horror that instead of punishing wrong behavior, I'm actually rewarding it. But is stealing always wrong? I'm thinking Robin Hood here. I'm thinking a number of romantic legends of brigands and pirates. Of course, this is anything but romantic, no matter how much one wishes to follow victorian notions of romantic virtue. Even in Jane Austen's time, people pursued money in ambitious and sordid ways.

This is sordid. Cliched. But still, it's only property. If the facts were even slightly changed -- i.e. she had asked me for money and detailed her circumstances, I would have given her money freely. I could not have denied her help if the help went towards the well-being of children, whether truth or lie.

Once upon a time, I was as poor as she was. Had as little, dreamt as little, was as desperate. I have now migrated to a position where I have something others wanted to steal. It may be stupid, and against human instinct, but I cannot think that it is weak to let yourself be taken advantage of from time to time.

This is a society whose laws actively support the exploitation of domestic helpers. How does one square away one's understanding and narration of this in fiction, but live under this society's rules, and benefit outrageously from it, without betraying one's sense of justice and fairness? What is the compassionate but fair way of dealing with my helper?

Browsing bookstores in Hong Kong

A booklover like me can't go for long without a nice leisurely browse through a bookstore and picking up a basket full of books to take home -- the equivalent of apple-picking for others less sedentarily-inclined.

One of the first things I did when I moved to Hong Kong was to explore the number of bookstores and what's on offer. I had heard that the offerings of mainstream literature fiction are dismal beyond the bestseller lists or those on the popular circuit. Mysteries and crime are preferred, and chicklit. There isn't an equivalent to the Waterstones in Picadilly (how I could lose myself in those comfortable stacks!) or Hatchards or Daunt in Marylebone. I was pointed towards Dymocks and from my past encounters whilst working here, I remember cookbooks galore, your Jeffrey Archers and Val McDermids and Ian Rankins, and a large number of how-to books. On initial survey, not much has changed.

But the bookstore scene has diversified slightly. One does not need to resort only to Dymocks. It was imperative for me to attend the Hong Kong bookfair, which I did, despite fighting jetlag and abandoning my two children to whimsical help. This is what I noticed -- the English-language bookscene might not be as rich as perhaps one might like, but the Chinese-language literature scene dwarfs comparison. Stalls upon stalls of Chinese language books filling three massive halls, none of which I could hope to read with any degree of fluency. Here's a world of infinite literary pretensions, if only I could access it.

Still, I found a supplier of books from the academic presses e.g. Harvard University Press, Princeton University Press through the bookfair, and they're located in the New Territories. To be sure, one is likely paying a premium of 33% above the prices one would pay in the U.S. or the U.K., but it would be the same through Amazon. This was how I found Ha Jin's The Writer as Migrant (but at £20, when I would have paid half that in the States, I simply couldn't justify the cost against the probable knowledge).

Swindon and Kelly & Walsh were passable for its classics collection and certain less commercially-plied novels (found David Benioff's City of Thieves and Aleksandar Hemon's Love and Obstacles). Pollux has a good selection of children's books. And one can actually purchase The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's off the magazine racks at GREAT, the foodstore in Pacific Place.

Still, the following small forays I've made have met with doom:
-- In the Kitchen, Monica Ali
-- Penmarric, Susan Howatch (this is actually her more famous book)
-- The Jane Austen Book Club, by Karen Joy Fowler
-- a decent inexpensive copy of Wuthering Heights
-- Dai Sijie's Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch

Forget even trying to get Simon Van Booy's Love Begins in Winter, which won the Frank O'Connor prize this year and was just announced.

But....But....these are early days. While I may have swiftly tried to acquaint my way around all of Hong Kong Island's bookstores from Stanley to Central, I have yet to explore the New Territories. I have yet to discover libraries and English collections that are part of organizations and clubs. I have yet to discover the exorbitant shipping charges on the import of books through Amazon. All of that and more to come, huzzah!

Moving to Hong Kong

We are moving to Hong Kong July 16th -- I won't be blogging for awhile! Not until I find us a new home and internet connection. :-( Wish us luck.

Can writing be taught?

I'm not alone in the emerging writer's dilemma of whether or not to get a Masters in Fine Arts. This was a question I considered off and on for the better part of four years, but the thought of juggling motherhood and forcing myself through the strictures and finance of a creative writing program made me keep putting it off, but ultimately, if I were to be honest, I'm not sure it's the idea of the slog that deterred me or rather, my continued doubts as to its touted benefits.

When I first started writing, I took some courses. Like everyone else, I observed my own curve of diminishing returns. I credit my beginner creative writing courses for opening up the 'short story' to me. Even though for years prior, I'd always guzzled down the Best American Short Stories, it wasn't until I took a course on how to write a short story that I began to understand the cog and wheel of it, and my appreciation of the form today -- its utter brilliance and illumination of the human condition, its ethereal prose (when it's done well, of course) -- is far finer than before I started writing. At some point however, I began to realize that these courses strive to produce a certain kind of writing -- the kind that Salman Rushdie deplored in his foreword to the latest Best American Short Stories collection -- stories filled with a bloodless, technical competence.

You can spot this kind of writing in a lot of the short stories published in the academic journals like Tinhouse or Ploughshares or Glimmer Train. Stories sprinkled liberally with words like "striate", "strafe", "rime", "rinse"; stories with labored prose, instead of simply saying, "I remembered", it's "My brain rolled up into a tube and my childhood rushed through it...". I'm not trying to knock the good work produced by these hardworking folks, and certainly, you're free to argue 'sour grapes' since I've never published in any of them. Aside from a couple of attempts though, I've not really pursued them too vigorously. One quick survey of the credentials of the writers they publish will reveal a majority (if not total dominance) of those with MFAs. Why waste my time to get a piece of paper that kindly thanks me for my worthless story? Or sometimes, not even that.

Articles challenging the benefits of a creative writing program are surfacing. As a topic, whether writing can be taught is certainly no stranger to any discussions in writers' groups or circles. I do read these academic journals -- the prose is often good, and I do get something out of them, but the stories seem to lack heart or life. Very seldom do they inspire me. Too many 'single middle-aged white woman' feeling lonely and disparaging romance (Lorrie Moore does it best, and everybody else who comes along later just seems like a copycat), too many 'divorce', 'adultery', 'disease' stories, many of these written by big-names with MFAs and appearing in the New Yorker.

In some ways, this topic is so old-hat, rehashed so often and argued cross-ways, left and right that I feel I can really add nothing to this space. Then comes an article by Louis Menand, called "Show and Tell" in the New Yorker, essentially taking up the arguments of Mack McGurl in his recent book "The Program Era" (Harvard; $35) examining the rise and prevalence of creative writing programs in the States. Here's an astounding statistic: in 1982, there were 79 creative writing programs in the United States; today there are 822, 150 of them are MFA programs!

There are some interesting claims in here, some new things to think about.

McGurl places the rise of creative writing programs in the context of the educational history of post-war America. The surge of creative writing programs happened post World War Two, and the changes in funding were responsible.

Title II of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944—the G.I. Bill—provided forty-eight months of tuition for veterans who enrolled in colleges and universities. More than two million veterans, a much bigger number than anticipated, took up the offer, and by 1950 the government had spent more money on tuition and other college costs than on the Marshall Plan. The key requirement of Title II was that the tuition assistance be used only for study in degree or certificate programs, which is why creative-writing courses grew into degree-granting creative-writing programs.

He goes on to argue that the rise of the creative writing workshop is the "most important event in postwar American literary history"(emphasis mine). On its surface, it seems hard to argue with this, given the lack of epistemiological alternatives. His list of writers identified with university creative writing programs is long and notable, filled with eminent names, and his list of those who were students of programs is even more revealing: many (basically unknown to the rest of the reading world) are sellers of the short story and have made, at one point or another, the Best American Short Story or other derivations thereof :John Casey, Gail Godwin, Andre Dubus, John Irving, Ken Kesey, Robert Stone, Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Ernest Gaines,Tillie Olsen, Michael Chabon, Alice Sebold, Richard Ford, Susan Minot, Rick Moody, Tama Janowitz, and Mona Simpson.

Menand paraphrases McGurl's argument about the impact of creative writing programs:

Still, the creative-writing program, unsystematic or even anti-system as it might believe itself to be, is a system. People go in at one end and they come out the other, bearing (like the Scarecrow) a piece of paper with a Latin inscription, but also bearing (unlike the Scarecrow) the impress of an institutional experience. The nature of that experience mutates as the folk wisdom of the workshop mutates—from “Show, don’t tell,” which was the mantra in the nineteen-forties and fifties, to the effectively opposite mantra “Find your voice,” which took over in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. McGurl suggests that these mantras encode shifting patterns of cultural assumptions—about identity, about work, about gender and class, and, of course, about what counts as good writing—and that they have had a big effect on the stories and novels that American writers have produced.

Menand agrees with this. His point his simple: we ought to pay attention to the way the system is affecting the outcome of postmodern American literature. Well, duh. Nowhere in Menand's article does he even talk about the rise of internet fiction, the proliferation of 'flash fiction', or fiction that makes it into print despite the lack of educational credentials of those writers (back to this in a moment). Nor does he address the deleterious effects of 'cookie-cutter' writing. Surely the answer to Salman Rushdie's 'bloodless technical competence' isn't to dump all creative writing programs (a case of 'throwing out the baby with the bath water') but perhaps a closer look at how we teach them. Menand simply doesn't play out or extrapolate this argument of systemic effect at all. What effect? How effect? To this point, all Louis Menand would say is something along the lines of how a teacher's impact is a direct correlation of his personality. Some fun anecdotes here.

• Once, on the first day of class, Angela Carter, who taught at Brown, was asked by a student what her own writing was like. She carefully answered as follows: “My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man’s penis.” The course turned out not to be oversubscribed.
  
• One of Rick Moody’s teachers at Columbia asked the class to indicate, by a show of hands, how many found Moody’s work boring.
  
• Donald Barthelme, at Houston, assigned students to buy a bottle of wine and stay up all night drinking it while producing an imitation of John Ashbery’s “Three Poems.”
  
• Lish taught private writing classes that lasted from six to ten hours, a little like est training. He had students read their stories aloud to the group, and would order them to stop as soon as he disliked what he was hearing. Many students never got past the first sentence.

Let's not ignore the fact that the system of the creative writing program is self-perpetuating, with its own raison d'etre and set of incentives. Many of the products of this system return to teach and publish under its academic aegis. Many more products are then manufactured, aspiring to the same thing. Sure, there's a bit of disgruntlement surrounding the extremely-reductionist truism -- those who can't write, teach -- but self-protection or not, the students of MFA programs who return to teach writing have their own brand of effect to impart. If you were not given the impetus or ideas or channels to which you can escape writing 'rather soulless' stories, why should you be expected to teach anything other than what you've been taught?

So we return to the same question: can writing be taught? The most prestigious writing program in the U.S. -- the Iowa Writers' Workshop -- apparently has this to say on its website: “We continue to look for the most promising talent in the country,” the school says, “in our conviction that writing cannot be taught but that writers can be encouraged.” Ok. You either have it or you don't. If you do, we can help you sharpen your talent. If you don't, come back and teach. Another way of saying: Can you teach writing? Yes, certainly. Can that someone taught then write? Who knows. Can they fudge it? Maybe.

The rub is: Usually, the people who do well in creative writing programs have probably a glimmer of talent, which helped the selection process, but do the programs help them to unearth more? Why is it that 'craft' is emphasized to the exclusion of art? Perhaps you can't teach 'art' but can you teach the process by which you access art, open up the channels to which you can explore 'art'?

The format of the workshop is an interesting one. Aspiring writers learn from other aspiring writers, with the teacher's critique given most weight. Scanning back over all the critique forums I've ever been in, workshop or private circles, how much did I learn? A lot, and it's not just how to make my fiction better, oftentimes the learning is inadvertent, unrelated, tangential. In retrospect, I probably learned more about the subjectivity and diversity of individual readers' preference, and I drew generalizations from that, more than I learned about how to write better.

Where do I do the bulk of my learning then? From reading. And not just MFA writing. I read classics. I read plays. I read short stories written by foreigners who have never been through the American mill of creative-writing-mass-process. I can't even say the authors of these books taught me; their prose taught me. I'm still thinking through this, but I would wager : take a look at the literature you ask students of workshops to read. How much time is spent just reading and analysing? What are they reading? Who are they reading? How do they talk about what they're reading? How do you encourage them to 'think' about the stuff they read? These discussions shouldn't be just in the domain of bookclubs and reading groups. In all the academic workshops I've been in -- including the ones here in Britain, there's so much emphasis on writing and looking at each other's writing, there's very little time devoted to examining and thinking about 'great writing'. Is it possible that we might learn more about 'great writing' by examining how great writers do it so well? Why not devote more time to reading good writing, not just critiquing each other's bad writing?

Innovate your artistic explorations. It's such a hogtied belief that you can't make an artist. Talent exists in the raw. Yes, surely there are people squarely within this realm -- your Michelangelos and Picassos and Mozarts, who danced to an inner private tune. Look, I've not read the biographies of these great talents with an eye towards dissecting their genius, but could it be possible that they had an innate ability to extract vision and emotional/artistic process and inspiration from what's around them? If you buy this argument, is it possible to extrapolate further to say that you can actively and progressively assist and guide students towards the same goal? I'm not talking about those fiascos who can't produce things with any form of syntactical structure (they weren't being experimental, and really it would be kind to tell them to stop writing). I'm talking about the majority of 'cookie-cutter' writers coming out of MFA workshops achieving even a measure of prolific success in semi-elite journals everywhere in the United States.

Many, many people write well. (Might be why so many lawyers turn writers). They may not produce those gem-like sentences that turn your world like E.M. Forster or Jonathan Franzen did to me, but they can certainly produce cogent, persuasive, prose supporting cogent persuasive and even inspiring ideas. And they have good stories to tell.

What is the penumbra of literature outside the canon that they're introduced? How do creative writing programs propel or urge them to harvest these inner reservoirs? What cross-pollination of artistic venues are they challenged to seek? How many have been forced to enumerate or essay systematically on how they shape or stock their artistic vision?

Why do you like the 'literary styles' you like? What does your fictional prose say about you? I'll bet you a creative writing class taught in the manner of being on a psychotherapist's couch might yield more introspective (as opposed to navelgazing) fiction about the human experience. Or take your class to an art exhibit and have them talk about the interaction of their emotional responses to the visual art they see, and then write about it. See what comes out. It may not always be fiction. Yes, why don't people write more fiction-that-is-not-fiction in fiction writing classes? Would literature fall over dead if they did?

Flash fiction. Ought to be its own topic. I genuinely believe I'm a more daring, adventurous writer because of flash fiction. Most of which I read on the internet, not in print. Just imagine! People like Joe Young, Kuzhali Manickavel, Jimmy Chen, no MFA, no hype, just producing steady mind-boggling stuff. At heart, I'm a conventionalist, I like my plot and my structure, but if I hadn't read these new frontiers, I wouldn't have seen how limiting and soulless some of the contemporary short story world is. I too might turn my eyes only on self-perpetuating the system.

The Ethnic Writer: To Be Or Not To Be?

I.

I started out my writing endeavor fighting being pigeonholed as an ethnic writer with all my might -- so my very first stories took flights of fancy. I wrote as far as my imagination could carry me -- Spanish Points of View, although I speak beginner's Spanish only. I wrote about Dominican Republican immigrants living in New York, old World War Two veterans living in London, English public teachers with a criminal bent in London, two Americans gaming Andalucia for free meals, etc. etc. Perhaps I was trying to prove something to myself. That I could write beyond what I know. That my imaginative muscle would show that I had some talent. But rereading those stories today, I see a lot of dramatic saber-rattling. I'm not saying they're bad, or inauthentic (well, some of them seemed a bit cliched!), and I might even fool a lot of people some of the time. I wonder --- I wonder, though -- if they weren't a reflection of my wish at the time that I wanted my life to be bigger. I wanted it to contain more than it did. By life, I was a London housewife with two small kids. By imagination, I could live outrageous fantasies that scale the vasty deep.

II.

Then comes the ethnic writer dilemma. With publications, the pressure to pigeonhole mounts. Academic teachers highlight my "Asian" stories. The "Asian" stories win prizes, get anthologized, receive more publicity. The agent calls (if an agent calls) -- I wonder if they will ask : do you have an ethnic story? The dilemma is: of course I do. I have thousands. My novel ideas are also filled with Asian characters. But that's not the only stories I have. I also have the Londoner story. The immigrant-went-to-America story. The big New York power-career story. These were all facets of my life. The life I've been accorded (although at one point, I considered it puny).

I don't want to be pigeonholed as the 'ethnic' writer, but as soon as you debut with an "asian" novel, how do you then resist walking that treadmill? Think Min Jin Lee. Korean-American experience. Wins the Narrative Prize with a Korean American story. Debuts with a novel about the Korean American experience. I fear she would not be taken as seriously if she comes out next with a book from an Italian Mafia perspective. Think Ha Jin. Think Yi Yun Li. Think Jhumpa Lahiri.

Well, one could simply retort: so what? What's the fucking big deal? Look at how successful they've become -- Yi Yun, and Jhumpa, and Chimamanda, et. al. How is this different from Colm Toibin or William Trevor or Claire Keegan being pigeonholed as Irish writers? Not different, you're right. Not different at all.

Except that perhaps it's particularly the ethnic writer -- or shall I say 'ethnic' like it is a slightly dirty word -- it's that 'ethnic' writer who wants to escape the puny-ness of her immigrant experience. That ethnic writer who fears that the pigeonholing will reduce her experience to its skimpy minority nature -- oh, those problems are those of Cambodians, or Zimbabweans, or Nigerians, not really anything to do with us. That ethnic writer who fears that gradually, this reduction or deminimisation will hamper his/her growth or disable his/her import or the significance of the stories he/she tells. Of course, Political Correctness is all the rage now -- it's trendy to write ethnic lit at the moment -- but not so very long ago, it really wasn't.

III.

Which brings me to Nam Le. I want to write about Nam Le's The Boat, a review of this hopefully coming out soon in The Short Review. I think Nam Le embodies this ethnic lit dilemma perfectly. The accolades have been astounding -- doubtless, the collection is truly ambitious, venturing far beyond known waters -- writing about Colombian teenage hired killers, old male artists in New York, etc. etc.

Here's the rub for the ethnic writer:

(1) if you're from a small village, say, in Cambodia, and you have chosen to write short stories in English, and you even write them damn well, the sad truth is : there is no one else who can speak to the experience of growing up or living in a small village in Cambodia like you can. That does overflow into pigeonholing, on the minus side. I agree with a writer friend of mine, Sequoia Nagamatsu, that just because you're an Asian American, that does not mean that all you can do is write stories from an Asian American POV. At the moment, the publishing industry seems to see this as a sliding slope, a penumbra, when perhaps these two kinds of 'ethnic writers' ought to be as distinct from each other as a peacock is from a hippo.

(2) Ethnic immigrants who have a diaspora background, i.e Nam Le (growing up in Australia, but of Vietnamese origin, and now living in the United States) -- which part is more true of him? Publishers want to pigeonhole him, but it's not that simple -- the whole diaspora is mixed within him -- you can't say that the Vietnamese influence is the smallest factor just because he spent the least time there. One just doesn't know.

The mantra that a lot of writers, including myself, believe in wholeheartedly is : it shouldn't matter what you write about so long as the story is good. It doesn't matter what POV you choose, how far-flung your imagination flies, so long -- yes, that's it -- so long as the STORY IS GOOD.

The problem is when ethnic writers with a diaspora try to surpass themselves -- when the fear of containment spills over into ambitious armchair travelling -- in Nam Le's book, what's really surprising was that the three stories that stood out head and shoulders above all the rest, turned out to be the ones where he wrote

• from a Vietnamese immigrant POV -- Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice (that this titular quote is actually from Faulkner might hint at the 'bigness' or commonality of human experiences, regardless of locale
• about an Australian boy in Halflead Bay and
• a refugee boat on the South China Seas (The Boat).

This doesn't mean that none of the other stories in the collection was any good. They were readable, they were enjoyable, they were skilfully written and carefully thought out, and yet, something seems to be missing from them. What's that secret quotient? Is it because Nam Le knew these three stories best? Well, not really. The last story -- The Boat -- is no less a feat of imagination than the Colombian teenage drug killer. And yet, why did it shine and glimmer and haunt so?

I suspect that the routes to which you lay your creative soul down must transact with your memories and experiences, those memories and experiences which only you have, and the authenticity of those feelings and memories are the tracks a reader sees. So, it isn't that Nam Le should only write about Australians and Vietnamese and Iowans or Harvard lit, but that to write Colombian drug killer stories and have them ring with the awful truth of life, such that no one else could have written that story, he must find a way to transcribe his Vietnamese-Australian-etc. experiences to being a Colombian drug killer.

That requires him to be an actor. It requires him not only to be convincing, but to light up the screen with the visuality of his feelings the way Sean Penn might have to -- and that's just damn difficult. First, because writers have no training to be actors. And second, do you really need to expend this much creative energy to be who you're not in order to be as good as great?

Murakami only writes about Japan. Marquez only writes about Latin America. Joyce didn't try to go beyond the world he knew. Dickens is distinctly, definitively English. Calvino's work is imbued with his Italian outlook, upbringing, surroundings.

One way to showcase prodigious talent is of course to show the many faces you can inhabit, like a great, great actor. Another way is to dare to mine the treacherous psyche of the ethnic diaspora within you -- the first casts the imaginative net wider, the second trawls far deeper. 'Ethnicity' itself has changed, the Asian American, or the British Indian experience may indeed have much more in common with the Caucasian American or the British white experience, than it may have with the Cambodian villager or the Pakistani local (ala Daniyal Mueenuddin) experience. And I would argue there's yet another distinctly 'ethnic' writer yet to emerge -- the one who has moved and lived globally and yet finds himself not able to shirk the breeding ground, the heritage, in which he swam.

The fiction an ethnic writer writes has got to be that which he's proud of. No one can impose an obligation to do more. And yet, to touch a reader, to really touch a reader, though everything flowing from your pen is made up, there's got to be something of you that you're willing to bare. I'd argue that "wider" allows you to hide behind your fiction, "deeper" exposes you.

Does this impose an obligation on ethnic writers to write 'ethnic'? To touch on those difficult issues of race and culture, of politics and shades of cultural difference that have become increasingly difficult to nuance and dissect? Does it come down perhaps to how much you care about the distinctiveness of your "voice"?

There's a lot of talk and hashing among beginning and emerging writers about finding your own voice. In fact, beginner writing classes will probably devote a class solely to 'Voice'. A friend of mine once told me that perhaps I'm thinking about it all wrong -- perhaps I just happen to have many voices -- no one true voice that's mine. I really liked this, so I bought it. But recently, I am beginning to wonder --am I really looking deep enough? Can you really escape who you are? As an evolutionary biologist aquaintance of mine might say, a brushworm is a brushworm though he be in a beautiful whelk. Why not trust that your small, inconsequential, minority-life might have something to tell, to have stories that can touch? How you tell it -- perhaps that's more a showcase of your 'talent' than how far your imagination can take you or how many voices you can inhabit.