"A Sign of Some Deeper Malady"
Also: David Foster Wallace’s letters, Scottish tea, ghazals in English, Cormac McCarthy’s anti-Catholicism, and more.
Another negative review of Ocean Vuong’s new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, has been published. Last week, I linked to Tom Crewe’s barnburner in the London Review of Books. This week, the Literarian Gazette runs one. The review was written before Crewe’s, commissioned by “a fairly big magazine, which mysteriously and rather unprofessionally ghosted me without explanation.” Here’s a snippet:
The book world has been all too kind to Ocean Vuong. In the 2010s, he received breathless plaudits for his unremarkable early poetry and first novel before raking in a Whiting Award, Eliot Prize and a MacArthur “genius” Grant. His new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, about a young Dilaudid addict and restaurant worker named Hai and his various dreary adventures around the invented town of East Gladness, Connecticut, received the kind of gargantuan mainstream book coverage of which most writers may only dream. Yet after reading this and his other work, I have a question: What happened to our literature? How did American letters emerge from the riches of the Bible and Shakespeare, with Hawthorne and Melville in tow, then produce a 20th century of Faulkner, Bellow, Pynchon, Ozick, Kincaid and McCarthy, only to land us in an illiterate swamp of endless purple description and laughable metaphor? Bad popular writing happens. But literary writing this bad, this praised? This is a sign of some deeper malady.
Not just a sign. Proof?
In other news, Christian Lorentzen writes about a couple of David Foster Wallace letters: “Last week a friend DM’d me to say that some letters that David Foster Wallace wrote in the 1990s to the editor and critic Sven Birkerts were up for auction on eBay. ‘Some good stuff,’ Steve wrote. Indeed, the two letters I’ve seen will be fascinating to anybody interested in contemporary U.S. literature.”
In praise of John Piper’s stained glass: “In 1963 Stephen Spender characterised John Piper’s already eclectic and unusual career, as ‘a fusion of a lifelong search for a contemporary idiom with a passion for tradition’. Stained glass – medieval, sacred and austere – presented the perfect challenge for the artist’s temperament.”
Alistair MacDonald writes about Scottish tea fraud in The Wall Street Journal:
When Ron McNaughton was asked to investigate an entrepreneur claiming to sell Scottish tea, he had one thought. ‘You can’t grow tea in Scotland,’ the former police detective remembers thinking of a plant normally grown in notably hotter and sunnier climes of China and India.
Thomas Robinson’s The Wee Tea Plantation business was feted for cultivating novel homegrown brews sold in some of Britain’s most exclusive hotels and stores. The self-styled “Mr. Tea” even claimed the late Queen Elizabeth II as a fan.
But his story sparked questions about the provenance of his product, setting off a seven-year probe that took investigators from Scottish fields to a Parisian cafe and a Mississippi tea farm. Along the way, McNaughton found out he was wrong about one thing: There are legitimate tea farmers in Scotland, a country famed for its cold and cloud. Robinson just wasn’t one of them.
Ralph C. Wood writes about Cormac McCarthy’s anti-Catholicism in Suttree. The novel’s many Catholic allusions, Wood writes, “have led numerous critics to read Suttree as philo-Catholic and even confessionally Catholic . . . I will seek to show—as to my knowledge no one else has done—the ways wherein the novel is relentlessly anti-Catholic. Cornelius Suttree makes, in fact, a sustained attack on Roman Catholicism as the chief miscreant in denying that the world is the realm of Demiurgic death rather than Christic life.”
Anthony Madrid writes about what goes wrong when we write ghazals in English: “The rule says: Couplet after couplet should end with the same word or phrase and with a rhyme sound right before the repeated bit. Can this be done in English? Yes. But has no one noticed that it’s an awkward mess when you do it in English? Could it be that the grammar of English differs from the grammar of Urdu and Farsi and Arabic in important ways, making it a bad idea to imitate the formal specifications at the expense of the principle that animates them?”
Annie Zaleski reviews Alan Niven’s rock and roll memoir. “On the way into the house” for his very first Guns N’ Roses meeting, “he passed by a broken toilet and ‘one of the better-known strippers from [the] Sunset Strip.’ Stradlin and Slash were the only ones who’d shown up. Once the meeting started, Stradlin nodded out at the table and Slash fed “a little white bunny rabbit” to a massive pet python. ‘And I’m sitting there going, “Keep your cool. This may be a test. Just go with it and get through it.”’ . . . kinds of stranger-than-fiction anecdotes dominate Niven’s wildly entertaining (and occasionally jaw-dropping) new book, Sound N’ Fury: Rock N’ Roll Stories. With brutal honesty and vivid imagery, he describes the challenges of wrangling Guns N’ Roses before and after the band’s 1987 debut, ‘Appetite for Destruction.’ These include mundane business matters (like shooting music videos on a budget) and more stressful moments, such as navigating Rose’s mercurial moods and ensuring that band members didn’t take drugs on international flights.”
The saints return to Notre Dame: “Sixteen giant statues are to be hoisted back on to the spire of Notre Dame in the latest step of the cathedral’s €700m (£600m) reconstruction after the devastating fire of 2019. The copper-coated figures, each weighing almost 150kg, escaped the blaze because they were removed from the Parisian landmark for renovation just four days before flames consumed the roof and destroyed the spire.”
Patrick Galbraith writes about the surprising response to his new book on rural Britain:
At about four o’clock on a Friday evening — five days before my new book, Uncommon Ground, was due to be published — an email landed from my editor. It had been forwarded to me, and I could see that the original had been sent to various people, including the managing director of William Collins and their top man over in Legal.
I had never expected my ranging and fairly raking exploration of the land access debate in Britain to be a hit with everybody. The case for foxhunting is complex, and the rural illegal rave scene — with its taste for criminal damage and hard drugs — isn’t going to be for everybody; but the fury of this particular email was a little surprising.
The complainant, one of the top brass over at the Right to Roam campaign, felt aggrieved on almost every level. I had, he raged, included far too much of some of their supporters’ views and not enough of others.
Tibor Fischer reviews Francis Young’s new book on European paganism: “I have to be honest: I’ve never been much concerned with what happened in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1387. I suspect that may even be true for many Lithuanians. In Silence of the Gods, Francis Young pinpoints this year – of the conversion of the duchy to Christianity – as the official triumph of Christianity in Europe over paganism and idolatry. But he then goes on to examine the debris – and the survivors of paganism and their traditions in the northern regions of Europe.”
