Weekly Readings #173 (05/26/25-06/01/25)

maximalist self-enchantment

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

“The first cult hit of the 21st century”—so says the most recent newsletter of Leviathan Bookstore in St. Louis of my new novel, Major Arcana, which you can order in all formats (print, Kindle, and audio) here and in print wherever books are sold online.

In The Metropolitan Review, Vincenzo Barney also reviewed Major Arcana this week, matching its maximalist style with his own. I’ve been moved to watch the novel pass from reader to reader, each one rotating the crystal to let different facets catch the light. Many reviews have focused on the novel’s possibly epochal publishing history; many have focused on its controversial themes. Barney, however, while making acute thematic observations (“It is in love with the human”), also gratifyingly dwells on its language, and on the paucity of such language in recent fiction:

[I]ts ethos is: yes, this is how good writing can be. Or, remember what good new novels were like?

One can feel this ethos in almost every sentence. Campus colonnades in spring are overhung with “branches burst into autumnal flame or wetly budded pale green.” Wetly budded! This is the type of supposedly obsolete poesy that constitutes Pistelli’s tenor and mode. But Major Arcana is what they used to call a complete work, meaning two things in this case. The first is that the world and its colors and its weather and its times of day are described. This, after all, is what writers with metaphorical intelligence do, and what tenured mediocrities and high-ranking style monopolists inanely decree is against the “rules” of writing, for, incapable of mixing melody with translucid association themselves, it is emotionally and professionally important that their flaws be unattemptable and that another writer’s misguided undertakings of the same are rewarded with the bleating dismissals of a trained supermajority of bland conformists.

Let us catch our breath. This metaphorical intelligence means that some days are “storm-darkened.” (Yes, with a modernist hyphen.) Some characters “stare out across the grass, the hollows in the green bright with wet snow.” Heat is “liquescent.” Enwombed and overdue infants are “trapped sideways in the amnion.” Mirrors “desilver,” and lacy garters press “inflamed spirals and arabesques into the pale flesh of thighs.” Simon Magnus’s first adolescent love, whom he meets “in that very forest into which Simon Magnus had always looked up from Crime and Punishment or Vigilante Comics to await some dark revelation’s emergence,” leads Magnus up to her bedroom that very night where she “dropped herself to the carpet in a blossom of pink tulle.” Proustian paragraphs swelling between parentheses engorge themselves with the maximalist self-enchantment of such language and such artistic languor. This is a novel which isn’t concerned with the metrics of speeding a reluctant reader through it as fast as possible like an advertisement, but with the unique spacetimes of its own prism. It is concerned about creating a world with its own cosmology and allowing the reader, a guest in this world, the courtesy of relaxing within it. It is a total artwork one can rest their legs in.

One more time: isn’t concerned with the metrics of speeding a reluctant reader through it as fast as possible. Because this doesn’t work. We could blame capitalism (or, God help us, “late-stage capitalism”) for agents’ and editors’ and publishers’ demand that authors obey these metrics: that we omit all needless words, excise each digression, CTRL-F and delete any word ending in -ly, murder every last darling as if metaphors and similes were the Romanov girls in a dank cellar. But it’s not even good capitalism. We shouldn’t compete with rival media by making ourselves smaller than they are, still less by implicitly apologizing for ourselves. Audiences don’t want a mutilated and self-embarrassed récit; they want a whole world they can wander in and explore at will. Barney’s style has been execrated as purple and pretentious, my own sentences have been diagrammed with a high hand, and none of us, surely, is perfect.¹ Better, however, the grand and memorable catastrophe than the modest, forgettable success.² I also like the part where our scandalous Cormackian describes Simon Magnus as “a crossdressing Judge Holden.”

This week I also posted “The Text Is Immutable” to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. It’s the penultimate episode in the sequence on modern western world literature in translation and offers an original interpretation of Kafka’s The Trial, a novel too often misread as a political dystopia, a weirder Nineteen Eighty-Four anticipating Hitler and Stalin, when in fact it is more likely— Well, you’ll have to subscribe and listen to the episode to find out what it more likely is.³ Next week: Borges’s labyrinths, mirrors, encyclopedias, libraries, and knife-fights. After that, we decamp for a summer of Shakespeare and Milton. In the fall, we will explore great American novels from James and Twain to DeLillo and Morrison. A paid subscription grants you access to an archive of over 60 episodes on modern British and American literature from Blake to Beckett and from Emerson to Faulkner; the works of James Joyce (especially Ulysses); George Eliot’s Middlemarch; ancient Greek literature (from Homer through the Athenian dramatists to Plato and Aristotle); and modern western literature beginning with Goethe. Thanks to all my paid subscribers!

For today, a little listicle of dialogic novels inspired by a question submitted to my super-secret Tumblr. Please enjoy!

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Iconic Dialogues: A List of Dialogic Novels

Henri Matisse, The Conversation (1908-12)

An anonymous reader inquires:

What are some good examples, aside from Dostoevsky, of heavily dialogic novels?

(For context, this is responding to when you roughly summarised the strands of the European novel as lurid⁴ Catholic aestheticism, inward-looking Protestant individualism, dialectical Jewish dialogic, scientistic Enlightenment social anatomy, and faux-Eastern cosmic consciousness. And don’t just say ‘they’re always intertwined’, even if it’s true)⁵

They are always intertwined! But the supreme example, surpassing even Dostoevsky, is The Magic Mountain. Preceding Dostoevsky, the 18th century, Siècle des Lumières, was a good era for this type of novel, or novels encompassing this type. There’s Tom Jones with its essays on the theory of fiction, dueling ideologue schoolmasters, politically quarreling gentry, and hero demonstrating but not arguing for a new ethic; Candide and Gulliver’s Travels with their fantastical embodiments of the era’s fashionable theories; La Nouvelle Héloïse with its epistolary soap opera giving way to further discourses on virtue from the era’s premier philosopher; Rameau’s Nephew with its latter-day Platonic dialogue on genius and cynicism; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship with its many reflections on the meaning of the artistic life; and Sense and Sensibility with its heroines emblematizing the eponymous values that divide Enlightenment from Romanticism. In the dead middle of the less intellectual and more sensationalist 19th century—there is everything in Dickens, for example, except ideas, give or take Hard Times—is Moby-Dick, a polyphony on nature, evil, and the meaning of the cosmos, itself influenced by Carlyle’s metatextually dialogic primer on German Idealism of Sartor Resartus. A little later comes George Eliot, and what is Middlemarch but a long conversation where every intelligent character gets in a good line about marriage, reform, and the meaning of progress? Mann notwithstanding, modernism was sensationalist in its own way—ideas dissolve into sensations in Pater, Wilde, Conrad, James, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, though let me put in a word for Marius the Epicurean and its meditation on the origins of Christianity—but there are exceptions: Howards End, the great liberal vs. conservative novel, and Women in Love, the great novel of marriage and its discontents. In the ultra-ideological midcentury we find the religious Iris Murdoch of The Bell, the social Ralph Ellison of Invisible Man, the philosophical Saul Bellow of Herzog, the political Graham Greene of The Quiet American, the scientific Stanislaw Lem of Solaris. In more recent fiction—I will take us no farther than the end of the 20th century—there is the anthropological science fiction of Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, the embodied literary theory of A. S. Byatt’s Possession, the slave narrative as conte philosophique of Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, the novel as historical fantasia over the end of Enlightenment of Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover, the novel as academic lecture and animal liberation pamphlet of J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, the antimatter epic on the meaning of literature and evil of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. That should be a long enough list for now—honestly, even I still need to finish reading Wilhelm Meister!

1. For the human biodiversity crowd, I note that Hegel, in calmly Teutonic lines from the Aesthetics I’ve quoted before, blames such a style on our southerly extraction, Vincenzo’s and mine. We are the Europeans most proximate to the torrid zone, practically African, a fate the Greeks somehow escaped, perhaps because those we call “the Greeks” were Northern invaders, Hegel’s own cold-blooded kin:

And, as a general rule, Southern nations, such as the Spaniards and the Italians, and previously to them the Mohammedan Arabs and Persians, are conspicuous for a wealth and tedious prolixity of image and simile. With the ancients, more especially in the case of Homer, the flow of expression is characterized by smoothness and tranquillity. With the nations above mentioned, on the contrary, we have a vision of life gushing forth in a flood which, even where the emotions are in other respects at rest, is ever intent upon expatiation, and owing to this expressly volitional effort of the will is dominated by an intelligence which at one time is visible in abrupt parentheses, at another in subtle generalization, at another in the playful conjunction of its sallies of wit and humour.

To put this another way: if you object to my or Vincenzo’s style, you are, in a word, racist.

2. Across the landscape we see evidence of this worldview’s re-emergence, of the need for literary vision. See, for instance, Celine Nguyen’s essay on Proust, especially this quotation from Ottessa Moshfegh: “A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness.” (Also a reminder that we’re probably going to have to get the thought-terminating cliché “pretentious” out of our critical vocabulary for a little while, until we need it again to puncture the swelling afflatus. But as it currently stands—or sinks—the balloon is out of air.) Under the nom de guerre of Pound’s iconic failed poet, one Hugh Selwyn Mauberley critically assails the underground reactionary equivalent of the aboveground progressive minimalist anhedonic autofiction (and note that the problem is not autobiography itself, as Proust proves, but blank mimesis):

Why do we need more insipid diarists and autofictional documentarians in an age as solemn and impoverished as our own? Does anyone need literature that reminds them that the world is dull and sterile and mundane and tedious?

[…]

The prose is readable and conversational, but often stale, uninventive, shop-worn, and banal. It reads essentially like the transcript of a bad Twitter space. Part of the problem is that Mr. Boyfriend has only a single register. He cannot move from recitative to aria. He cannot summon any kind of grand style or lyrical power. Every line is the same, and thus the whole novel just becomes this flat, toneless desert. At the sentence level, the problem is that Mr. Boyfriend cannot escape a vocabulary of stock phrases and dead metaphors— “lazy piece of shit,” “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere,” “break the rules,” “I guess it’s good to know,” “Maybe next time,” “she loves me a lot,” “reality set in,” etc. There are almost no novel descriptors in this book—breasts are “big;” girls are “decent;” hookers are “fuck-able.” Mr. Boyfriend cannot seem to detach common nouns from common modifiers. His brain just extrudes worthless American idioms. If there is a purse, it is being “rumaged through;” if there is a bill, it is being “run up;” if there is a silence, it will soon be “broken.” Of course, the problem with such phrases is that they have no evocative power. They don’t mean anything—they’re just the recycled packing material that takes up empty space in conversation.

Coming from another ideological quarter entirely, Robert Rubsam enjoins American publishing to abandon a too-timid idea of the bottom line and raise its standards lest it be permanently outcompeted by translations from less obsessively anti-intellectual literary cultures:

The result is a crisis of lowered expectations. Contemporary fiction must obey the rhythms, the logic, and the attention spans of people drowning in endless distraction. They must have simple premises and clear stakes, and they can’t be too long, too complex, too ironic or ambivalent or ambiguous, for fear of confusing or distressing a half-attentive reader or vindictive Goodreads reviewer. Deluged by denuded culture like prestige television and IP cinema, authors increasingly write their books to read like film scripts, all dialogue and basic exposition, easing their adaptation into more seamlessly consumed media. Whatever formal possibilities have been opened up by online life, their expression among the recent generation of ‘internet novels’ has largely been confined to forcing very loud, ‘very online’ prose into easily-consumable text blocks, disconnected from any larger narrative or formal project, and ready-made for sharing on social media—essentially, as memes. In effect, this is a literature of planned obsolescence…

For this reason, though I love Alex Perez, I would hesitate at resurrecting Ray Carver or at nominating him the bard of men or of the working classes, as if men and the working classes could not enjoy magnificence. Then again, we’re discussing all aspects of Ray except what is perhaps the most pertinent one: the time he spent on Lish’s short leash, subject to a minimalism so severe it transformed into its opposite, right back into the baroque. I wrote about that here. Minimalism, sure, but only if it’s maximal.

3. Kafka’s polysemy raises questions about “literature in translation.” Often what needs to be translated is less the author’s native language than the author’s alienating use of that language in relation to a context going well beyond language, encompassing all of culture and everyday life. Sometimes translation plugs that language into a different context entirely: thus the midcentury Kafka imagined to be commenting on a Hitler and Stalin in recognition of whom his antennae were supposed to have twitched anxiously some two decades before their rise. I am not superior to this speculation about literary sortilege, especially not in the hands of an exponent as articulate as George Steiner. But, for better and for worse, in ways that promise both to save some lives (by removing the liberal international order’s permanent casus belli) and to end some others (by inspiring the terrorist-totalitairan assassin), we are losing the pathos of the midcentury, masked by our nostalgia for it, and are perhaps regressing to older forms of life. And so, symptomatic of this regression, I posit a Kafka less mesmerized by the advent of Hitler than a Kafka transfixed by the recess of Flaubert—not a proto-victim of the camps but a present victim of his own tormented post-aestheticism.

Speaking of literature in translation, the great German translator Michael Hofmann—discussed both in my essay on Berlin Alexanderplatz and my episode on Michael Kohlhaas—gives us in the NYRB a hilarious phenomenology of how incomprehensible literature-in-translation can be if you don’t force yourself to understand it prematurely, an essay more effective in its way than the one on brodernism:

There probably is a way to read the Soviet novelist Andrey Platonov and come away from the experience with something, but I didn’t find it. I read four of his bright dark works in English (it took me ten months), and I have next to nothing to say about them. They might as well have been written in some other alphabet for all the good I got out of them. (They were.—Ed.) My progress was painfully slow; two pages a day was about my limit. Even that was enough to exhaust me, and to color the days. There went 2024. Platonov wrote his books faster than I could read them.

I read and reviewed one of those Platonov novels Hofmann couldn’t get through 12 years ago. I no longer remember the experience, but, from the evidence of my text, I found its surface incomprehensibility intelligible enough against the background of the theological debates within Marxism I was just then escaping in my last year of graduate school. (How many revolutionary subjects can dance on the head of a pin?) Again, language per se was not the question. As Virginia Woolf said, writing novels has nothing to do with words—not that this absolves us of style.

4. I was going to say something about the Substack Notes controversy over sex scenes in literary fiction incited by this puritanical polemic, but I’ve decided just to quote an old essay I wrote on John Updike. To put it in historical context, the essay is almost exactly 10 years old—a response, therefore, to the first stirrings of “wokeness.”

The novel is of course punctuated by sex scenes; they are, so to speak, climactic, and why not? They are what the realist novel has in place of gunfights, alien invasions, or fantastical metamorphoses—and they serve the purpose in their genre that those do in theirs. And this is a novel of the midcentury, disporting itself in the new post-Chatterley freedoms. Pornography in mid-20th-century novels is like sentimentality in mid-19th-century novels: a literary requirement imposed by period ideology that you just have to endure to enjoy the other pleasures afforded by the fiction. Even at that, as Nabokov defended Dickens’s sentimentality as an advance on Homeric brutalism, Updike’s pornography, too, is defensible: with his modernist precursors and his 1960s peers, he made sex intelligent, an aspect of characterization and drama, so that personal sexual habits become signs of individuality, and changes in those habits register personal transformations. Updike was fearless, to appropriate William Deresiewicz’s adjective for him, giving his hero honest thoughts that might give anyone pause, as in this passage wherein Rabbit’s sister, Mim, shows him her California tan:

She pulls up her pinstripe blouse and her belly is brown. He tries to picture the rest and wonders if her pussy is tinted honey-blonde to match the hair on her head.

Updike’s seemingly dated approach to sex may even become relevant again, as this seems to be, at least as far as literary culture goes, a new age of prudery, heralded by Wallace’s wounded Gen-X dismissal of the sexual revolution, and signaled by feminism’s increasing advocacy of Victorian norms and gay liberation’s climax in the annexation of queer desire by the Hegelian-progressive state. We may yet find something to learn, or at least to wonder at, in those 20th-century writers who exposed how complicated and intricate and dangerous sex could be. I am certainly not always impressed with the heights of Lawrentian vagueness (“His fair silver girl with flesh-colored hair and cloudy innards floats upon him, stings him, sucks him up like a cloud, falls, forgives him”) and sub-Joycean tastelessness (“she is gumdrops everywhere”) scaled by Updike’s sex scenes, but as Deresiewicz writes, “Updike stood between the old and new Victorianisms”—between, that is, the hegemony of Christian sexual morality and the hegemony of progressive sexual morality, when sex was briefly available for amoral examination. (As for the feminist critique of Updike, I have observed elsewhere that I think it is at least partially made in bad faith.)

And for gender parity in pornography, I wrote a small sequel to my Updike post two years ago in a capsule review of Delta of Venus:

In these crisply and beautifully narrated stories, written as pornography-for-hire by a literary collector, Nin writes in the same moment and gives voice, moreover, to female desire, whereas John Updike, as befits his somehow tumescent name, gave voice to male (though both authors write from male and female perspectives). But she fulfills this supposedly progressive mandate before progressive hegemony, even as she writes after Christian hegemony. This means that we find in these stories wholly unembarrassed portraits, in Nin’s precise and evocative prose, not only of female sexual satisfaction and homosexuality male and female and even intersex erotica, but also of pedophilia, bestiality, racial fetishism, and rape fantasies, reminding us that desire, like literature, makes no moral or political guarantees.

5. I don’t remember writing a schematic as intriguing or offensive as that, but, assuming I did, I would have meant by “dialogic” not literally dialogue-heavy but rather as focusing on worldviews or forms of life in conflict, usually embodied by different characters, sometimes embodied by the inner quarrel of a single character. (I am inspired here by Bakhtin.) Dostoevsky happens to be dialogue-heavy and dialogic, but a novel can be one without the other. Hemingway’s fiction, for example, is dialogue-heavy without dialogism in this sense.