Weekly Readings #124 (06/17/24-06/23/24)

this city through which I pass

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

First, a tale of two reviews. This week I posted a review of poet Emmalea Russo’s forthcoming debut novel, Vivienne, which I summed up thusly and alliteratively:

Vivienne is a novel of rare vivacity and invention in a literary period not noted for visionary fictions: a vital recreation of the sheer scandal of our surreally real lives, a poet’s novel in the sense in which all novels worth the name should be poets’ novels: a work of poiesis, the inspired formation or manifestation of a new reality.¹

Also, the writer Scott Spires has contributed a detailed, perceptive, and generous review of Major Arcana, my new but also forthcoming novel:

The best thing Pistelli has done here is create fascinating characters. A long novel can survive a clumsy style if it has great characters, but even a great style can’t save a novel that has boring characters. A while back I tried to read a couple of Jonathan Franzen novels. Both of them failed my personal 50-page test, and for the same reason: the characters were too boring and insubstantial to sustain a big book. Pistelli has a style that’s a pleasure to read – detailed, elegant, and slightly old-fashioned, with numerous literary and artistic references – a story that tackles the concerns of the present day with the seriousness they deserve, and most importantly, great characters.

[…]

[T]his is one hell of a reading experience. By the time you reach the end, you may find yourself wishing you could throw a dinner party and invite Simon Magnus, Marco Cohen, Ellen Chandler, and the two del Grecos (Ash and Diane). Sparks are guaranteed to fly, and you might want to bring some mace for your own protection; but the conversation would be unforgettable. If you’ve been shunning the unimaginative non-genre genre that literary fiction nowadays too often is, with its dull characters and timid storytelling, Dr. Pistelli has provided you with an antidote: buy yourself a copy of Major Arcana.

Seven days, as Samara says in The Ring: that’s how long you have to buy the soon-to-be-collectors’ item first self-published edition of Major Arcana at Amazon before I pull it from the market on July 1. Then you will have to wait until the Belt Publishing edition comes to a bookstore near you in April 2025: I can tell you that it promises to be a very beautiful object. I also note with gratitude Samuél Lopez-Barrantes’s reading-in-progress as recounted on Substack Notes:

🙏🏼

This week I also released “Who’s He When He’s at Home,” the second episode of The Invisible College’s six-week summer sequence on Joyce’s Ulysses. (My first episode, I remind you, is free to all; the rest will be paywalled.) In this one, we met that exemplary modernist hero, Leopold Bloom, and considered his kindness and curiosity, his sexualization of the domestic sphere as well as the city streets, his skeptical thoughts about Zionism and Catholicism, and his epochal trauma plot. Next week, a clash of titans: Joyce vs. Shakespeare.

In today’s post, I have finally done it: gone full Pale Fire. The “post” consists almost entirely of a brief list in response to a question a reader sent in; the actual essayistic content is found entirely in the footnotes. I thought it was worth doing once, but don’t worry, I won’t do it next week. Please enjoy!

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Unreal City: The Urban Novel and Literary Modernity

What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
     —T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?
     —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Tullio Crali, Nose Dive on the City (1939)

Someone wrote in to ask me what the best city novels were. I made a quick list, roughly chronological—not an exhaustive list, just one of personal favorites. I’ve cut it off at the end of the 20th century to avoid listing what might prove to be ephemera. I did want to annotate it a bit, especially where my selections are not typical or self-evident, and to “theorize” about the whole idea of the city in literature and related matters, so please see the footnotes for some explanations.

1. Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders²

2. Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions

3. Charles Dickens, Bleak House

4. Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education

5. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

6. Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde³

7. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie⁴

8. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

9. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice⁵

10. James Joyce, Ulysses

11. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

12. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Naomi⁶

13. Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz

14. Nella Larsen, Quicksand

15. Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust

16. Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin⁷

17. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

18. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

19. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

20. Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet

21. Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

22. Cormac McCarthy, Suttree⁸

23. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children⁹

24. William Gibson, Neuromancer

25. Don DeLillo, Underworld¹⁰

1. I didn’t put this in the review, because I didn’t want to make it all about meeeeee, but I couldn’t help but note some strange correspondences between Vivienne and Major Arcana despite their obvious and overt differences. Especially, if I can put this in a non-spoiler way, the unexpected pull toward the desert in both novels’ concluding pages. What’s that about? And this “pull toward the desert” is happening at every level of our culture now, from popular blockbuster films like Oppenheimer and Dune to weird vanguardist performances like this. I don’t know what it means, but I take note of it here in case it’s important.

2. The high-modernist reverence for the superficially simple-minded realist Defoe—a reverence shared by Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, as I detailed here—is a curiosity of literary history. There are as many definitions of “modern” as there are definers, so many that I am sometimes tempted to label Homer the first modern, as well as the first city novelist for his depiction of the doomed Troy, except that I believe he was pre-empted by the singer of Gilgamesh. In more conventional terms, however, Defoe has some claim on being the first modern novelist: the one whose tie to the novel’s enchanted precursor and anti-type of “romance” is most sublimated in mimesis of the writer’s own everyday and often urban reality. Don Quixote accomplishes the same task, but it is also and rather strenuously about this task, whereas to Defoe the project seems to come naturally.

3. I follow Nabokov in potentially overvaluing this perfect prose-poem of a neo-Gothic novella, with its labyrinthine nightmare of a bachelor London that is probably Edinburgh in disguise. Its inclusion here raises two issues: one of length and one of genre.

Since Stevenson’s tale is little longer than a long short story, I am reminded that the short story as a form also seems important re: fictional portrayals of the city. I’ve mentioned elsewhere the status Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” enjoys in modernism for its inspiration on Baudelaire and Benjamin’s flânerie. Dostoevsky’s “White Nights” also deserves mention, as does Melville’s “Bartleby.” Plus the visions of London and Buenos Aires that arise collectively from the fictions of Conan Doyle and Borges (not a strange pairing: Borges’s first publication in English was in a mystery pulp). And of course there’s Dubliners.

(Footnote-within-a-footnote re: Baudelaire. City poetry is a whole other topic, but poetry isn’t all pastoral, so, before you ask, I’ll tell you to start with Les Fleurs du mal, Leaves of Grass, The City of Dreadful Night, The Waste Land, The Bridge, The Weary Blues, Howl, and Lunch Poems. Hell is among other things a city: the tradition of modern city poetry and city fiction probably begins with Dante’s Inferno. I also exclude drama—one probably has to begin with Renaissance city comedy; I’m a bit ignorant there, alas—but I note how many of the most canonical American plays starting with O’Neill’s early drama are city plays: Death of a Salesman, A Raisin in the Sun, A Streetcar Named Desire, Fences, Angels in America.)

Stevenson and Conan Doyle also remind us that the city—with its teeming and freshly literate masses in need of new entertainments—has a privileged relation not only to high literature but to low literature (even when done with high art, as by RLS) and its exploding new popular genres. This fact is reflected on my list by the presences of Chandler and Gibson, whose noir and cyberpunk versions of the city (respectively) are indelible from Los Angeles to Tokyo. I excluded comics, but their ur-urban Art Deco u- and dystopias—Metropolis and Gotham—also still haunt the urban imagination, as Alan Moore, self-consciously writing the Quixote of the comics, has a character reflect in Watchmen:

When the gap between the world of the city and the world my grandfather had presented to me as right and good became too wide and depressing to tolerate, I’d turn to my other great love, which was pulp adventure fiction.

But are novels, short stories, poems, plays, or comics best at portraying the modern city? As friend-of-the-blog Paul Franz would advise, we need to be putting these forms into pitiless combat—we need to be paragone-maxxing.

4. The American Moll Flanders, similarly revered by people you’d expect to place a higher premium on style. I personally found it utterly mesmerizing, despite Dreiser’s well-known aesthetic deficiencies. I’ve quoted this before, but here’s Bellow on his Chicagoan precursor, from his Paris Review interview:

Dreiser, a realist of course, had elements of genius. He was clumsy, cumbersome, and in some respects a poor thinker. But he was rich in a kind of feeling which has been ruled off the grounds by many contemporary writers—the kind of feeling that every human being intuitively recognizes as primary. Dreiser has more open access to primary feelings than any American writer of the twentieth century. It makes a good many people uncomfortable that his emotion has not found a more developed literary form. It’s true his art may be too “natural.” He sometimes conveys his understanding by masses of words, verbal approximations. He blunders, but generally in the direction of truth. The result is that we are moved in an unmediated way by his characters, as by life, and then we say that his novels are simply torn from the side of life, and therefore not novels. But we can’t escape reading them. He somehow conveys, without much refinement, depths of feeling that we usually associate with Balzac or Shakespeare.  

Despite his greater fame as a laureate of Sandburg’s “city of broad shoulders,” Bellow himself is represented on this list by his New York neocon novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, because in that book I think the city passes from setting to theme.

5. There are all sorts of cities, not just the teeming metropolises evoked by the idea of the modern city novel of Balzac’s Paris or Dickens’s London. Venice is a city, too, even though it’s small and a tourist trap and has canals for streets and is sinking and miasmic and pedophile-haunted, at least in Mann’s unforgettable telling. (I spent a day in Venice once, but I think Mann has overwritten my actual memory. Such is the power of art.) Joyce’s Dublin, for that matter, had a population around 350,000 circa 1900, as compared to London’s over 6,000,0000. Some say Los Angeles isn’t really a city, and one knows what they mean, but I have three L.A. novels on my list. Don’t we all—what with that Didion and Babitz book bearing down on the literati—live intermittently in an L.A. of the mind?

(Somebody should send me that book to review, please. I’ll even make a more serious effort to read Babitz. I didn’t think she was bad when I tried Slow Days, Fast Company; I just thought she was a witty, lively alt-weekly columnist compared to the somber, mordant Didion, who was and is a Major Writer, capital M, capital W. I gather that Lili Anolik—whose criminally addictive Once Upon a Time at Bennington College podcast was my summer 2022 guilty listen—wishes to contest this division, however, and I’m ready to hear the case.)

6. Tanizaki’s disturbingly proto-Lolita sex comedy isn’t the first novel or the first great novel to portray the city as a whole way of life that replaces the you you were in the provinces—Lost Illusions has that covered, not to mention Sentimental Education, Great Expectations—but it might be the first to collate this experience with a nexus of other crucial themes, such as modern sexuality, the cult of youth and advertising, and the whole question of urbanization as imperialism: urbanization as universal westernization or Americanization of the sort that would so irritate a whole congeries of modern reactionaries from Martin Heidegger to Osama bin Laden. Then again, maybe this is all covered somewhere in Zola. I know he’s trending now, but I admit that, like Bellow’s racistly fancied Zulus vis-à-vis Tolstoy, I’m deficient in Zola, having limited myself so far to the not-wholly-un-Naomi-like Thérèse Raquin, which I read for my grad-school orals only because it conveniently had his Naturalist manifesto in the front.

7. As a literary topos, the doomed city goes back to the Bible with its Sodoms and Gomorrahs and Ninevehs and to Homer with his aforementioned Troy. Weimar Berlin is modernity’s exemplary doomed city, hence its appearance twice on my list, in the highbrow-insane and middlebrow-sane (respectively) versions of Döblin and Isherwood. See also Isherwood’s A Single Man for another great L.A. novel, an anti-Chandler or anti-Didion novel for which the City of Angels is renowned less for noirish glamour than for postmodern tawdriness and vulgarity redeemed only by the setting’s natural beauty.

(Re: the fourth word of this footnote, “topos” is surely the term people want when they say “trope” today. A topos is a common or traditional literary theme, such as “enemies to lovers” or “the doomed city.” A trope is a figuration, a transformative use of language, a metaphor or metonymy. To trope on a topos is to transcend the commonplace, to avoid the cliché, unavoidable as topoi may be, by transfiguring the traditional topic into an original experience and significance: making the commonplace into your very own figuration. Turning topos into trope just is the literary process. The topos by itself—what people are calling “trope” today—is inadequate, is not literature. This aside is inspired by Mitch Therieau’s recent essay on “what the trope reveals about the means of literary production.”)

8. Joyce’s Dublin and McCarthy’s Knoxville, which Joyce’s Dublin inspired, are the two closest literary cities in “feel” or “vibe” to my own hometown of Pittsburgh. (Knoxville and Pittsburgh arguably occupy the same region, given that, as I explained in a lecture on Fences, Pittsburgh occupies about three distinct regions, is three distinct types of city: Northeastern, Appalachian, and Rust Belt.) I really like The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I believe I recounted the story on here already, as an illustration of how far back our gender-trouble goes, about how my then-lesbian/proto-enby high-school girlfriend read me the gay-male sex scene over the phone as an act of quasi-seduction circa 1997. We contain multitudes! But I’m not entirely sure it can sustain the company of Joyce and Woolf. The Great Pittsburgh Novel may remain to be written.

9. Glory awaits the first novelist to put a city on the literary map, either because the novelist is the first to write about it at all or is the first to write something great about it, as with Rushdie’s Bombay (in English anyway), but also with Defoe’s London, Dreiser’s Chicago, Joyce’s Dublin, Chandler’s L.A.

10. DeLillo’s Underworld—one of my all-time favorite novels, as I explain here—has many virtues and many settings, from the suburbs to the mountains to (yes!) the desert. What I love most about its portrayal of the city, though, chimes with Alex Perez’s essay from this week about “Cultural Adjacency.” A lot of city novels—Lost Illusions, etc.—are explicitly about cultural adjacency: about going from the country to the city, or from the poor part of the city to the rich part of the city, and the costs and benefits involved. The benefits, as Sister Carrie like Lucien de Rubempré learned, are usually money, sex, and an artistic career, while the cost is usually your soul. Something of this happens in Underworld, too, as it happened in DeLillo’s own life, minus, I think, the soul part. (In DeLillo, you lose your soul not in the city but in the suburbs.) But the novel’s temporally reversed structure embodies a poignant aesthetic traversal of the journey back from the haute-bohemian demimonde to the close tenement quarters of the immigrant working-class, a journey as much for the reader as for author or characters. DeLillo’s rapturous, rhapsodic description of the avant-garde artist Klara Sax’s “rooftop summer” in Part Four—

It was the rooftop summer, drinks or dinner, a wedged garden with a wrought iron table that’s spored along its curved legs with oxide blight, and maybe those are old French roses climbing the chimney pot, a color called maiden’s blush, or a long terrace with a slate surface and birch trees in copper tubs and the laughter of a dozen people sounding small and precious in the night, floating over the cold soup toward skylights and domes and water tanks, or a hurry-up lunch, an old friend, beach chairs and takeout Chinese and how the snapdragons smell buttery in the sun.

—gave me the city of my dreams when I read the novel in suburbia at age 17. But the recreation of Nick Shay’s tenement boyhood in Part Six told me something about the generations behind me, about the city my grandparents lived in before my parents made it out to those very suburbs where their children learned to dream of rooftops again.