Norman Mailer died six years ago, and, already, five biographies have been written about him. The most recent is J. Michael Lennon’s “Norman Mailer: A Double Life,” which is a springboard for an essay on Mailer by Louis Menand in this week’s issue. Here, Menand and the film critic Richard Brody talk about Mailer’s life and legacy with the literary editor of the New Yorker’s Web site, Sasha Weiss.
Also on the podcast, Deborah Treisman explains why Alice Munro’s first story in the magazine in 1977 caused an in-house ruckus.
“I’m really frustrated with the inability of Congress to do its job,” says Mark Ulriksen, the artist behind this week’s cover, “Haunted House.” “Boehner and Cruz—these politicians are only after the perpetuation of their own power. There are spider webs growing in the Capitol, bats haunting it, and all this legislation that’s just dying because these guys can’t do anything. The main sign of life is that black cat. If it wasn’t so tragic, it would be worth laughing at.”
I have nothing at all to say this week. But that’s pretty much the case every week, and, since it hasn’t stopped me in the past, it’s not going to now. I mean. I could do a simple “Week in Review” feature:
The authors Junot Díaz and Karen Russell shared a stage on October 5th at the New Yorker Festival, where they told Willing Davidson, an editor at the magazine, about children’s appeal as literary characters, and about the advantages of fantasy as a genre. Both Russell, who wrote “Swamplandia!,” and Díaz, whose 2007 novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” won the Pulitzer Prize, are recipients of MacArthur “genius” grants, and both are contributors to The New Yorker.
In 2008, the New Yorker’s Fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, interviewed Alice Munro at the New Yorker Festival. In their hour-long conversation, Munro—who this week won the Nobel Prize in Literature—spoke about growing up in rural Ontario, writing her early short stories as a young mother, and the ways in which her writing process and attitudes toward her work had changed over the years.
Munro said that in her home town of Wingham, “one of the worst things you could do” was draw attention to yourself, and that hardly any women there went to college. Munro was an outsider. She began inventing stories at an early age, after making up a happier ending to Hans Christian Andersen’s tragic version of “The Little Mermaid,” which she couldn’t bear. “From then on, I just told myself stories all the time,” she said. “I had a long walk to school.”
After hearing the wonderful news this week that Alice Munro was named the thirteenth female Nobel laureate in literature, my thoughts turned toward another Canadian writer and master of the short story, Mavis Gallant. Gallant, who was born in Montreal in 1922 and now lives in Paris, published her first story, “Madeline’s Birthday,” in The New Yorker, in 1951. Over the next forty years, she contributed a hundred and fourteen short stories to the magazine, nearly as many as John Cheever.
A superb stylist, Gallant imbues her stories with images that, as Jhumpa Lahiri wrote in an introduction to “The Cost of Living” (2009), have “the intimate resonance of still-life painting.” In the 1976 story “Voices Lost in Snow,” Gallant uses the metaphor of snow to marvellous effect while describing a daughter’s strained relationship with her detached father. The daughter accompanies her father to lunch and then to visit a mistress, who had previously been on good terms with the girl’s mother. Gallant exquisitely captures the young girl’s feeling of being an observer rather than a participant—of brushing up against life. The story’s winter imagery reflects the narrator’s feelings of confusion as she gazes up at unfamiliar adult scenarios and emotions. Comparing the interactions between adult and child to a snowfall, Gallant highlights the precarious nature of childhood, when parents “seem to speak out of the lights, the stones, the snow; out of the crucial second when inner and outer forces join, and the environment becomes part of the enemy too.”
One summer, when I was nine or ten, I inherited a few thousand science-fiction and horror paperbacks from a friend of my mother’s. Over the next few months, in our damp and cobwebby basement, I raced through this library of slim, yellowing paperbacks from the fifties, sixties, and seventies, half of them with sexy space girls on their covers. There were mentalist sci-fi novels like “Dune” and “The Stars My Destination”; horror books with titles like “Night Thirst” and “The Howling”; genre-mixing novels about robot detectives, space cowboys, and galactic emperors. Some of these novels were bad, and others were great, but it didn’t matter—the main thing was that they were all defiantly and originally weird. It was the most mind-bending summer ever.
Congratulations again to Alice Munro on her Nobel Prize! To celebrate Munro’s win, Page-Turner is running a series of reflections on her work; read posts by James Wood, Deborah Treisman, Sasha Weiss, and other writers.
At the New Republic, Laura Bennett interviewed Andrew Wylie, the literary agent who is known for disdaining commercial fiction, and for his “aggressive poaching of other people’s clients.” Wylie, who has counted writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth among his clients, spoke with Bennett about the future of the publishing industry and his short-lived partnership with Amazon, and delivered delicious one-liners on a range of other literary topics. On meeting young writers: “When they see me, it’s like meeting Ronald Reagan.” On the London Book Fair: “Like being in a primary school in Lagos.” On the e-reader sections of bookstores: “It’s like driving through a bad neighborhood. I just keep focused on the road and hope to arrive in the country.” On alternate career paths he might have taken: “I don’t have any other skills. If the industry dies, I die with it.”
