Smiley’s People

Jane Smiley, that is. And the appellation is really unfair (although pretty cute) given what I’m about to post, because when she’s good, as in The Age of Grief, she’s among the very best representatives of a school of writing and thinking about writing that I’m going to disparage. And the truth is, I don’t actually object to this school of writing, or any school of writing. Whichever school gets your story written, well, that’s the fight song you should sing.

What I object to, always, in all creative arts, is hegemony.

And this particular hegemony has much to do, I think, with why The Book of Bunk is having a hard time finding a home during its first pass through New York.

I’m going to have to type that again, because I’m having trouble believing it. Accepting it. Because while I know that I am the last person on earth qualified to judge, I’m also right, in this case. And they’re wrong. People can argue– and I fully expect that they will, before too long– about whether I can get away with combining the elements that I combine in this novel. About whether it’s overambitious (though I think too many critics and editors have forgotten what ambitious fiction looks like). About whether all its interwoven stories finally form a cohesive tapestry. But to argue that it doesn’t deserve to be out in the world and part of the argument…I’m sorry, but it’s absurd. It will not stand. So I’ll try typing it once more:

The Book of Bunk is having a hard time finding a home in New York.

Nope. Didn’t help. Blogging about this process helps. I’ll do that.

In some later post, I may put up some of the responses I’ve gotten from editors. Not with attributions. Not to strike back. But because some of you preparing yourselves for your next submission probably need to prepare yourselves harder. Not today, though.

One of the only objections at least a couple of editors have raised– amongst many glowing, loving expressions of admiration for this book they don’t want or don’t think will sell enough– involves three short scenes in Bunk that take place during a U.S. Senate hearing. The objections run one of two ways: either the Senate scenes “aren’t realistic” or “strictly believable,” or else the fact that those scenes play out with overtly mythic overtones is problematic because Senate hearings on these subjects really did happen. Put more simply, the perceived problem is that the Senators involved seem outsized. Archetypal, even.

A few days ago, I realized I could conceivably cut those scenes. They constitute less than a 10th of the novel, and I could make the book work without them.

And then I thought about Smiley’s People.

American literary fiction, at the moment, is dominated by characters who are not only not larger-than-life, but smaller (it’s also dominated by a brand of magical realism so cold, joyless, self-consciously allegorical and/or wink-wink cute that it’s functionally neither, but that’s for another day).  Striving for the ruthless realism so successfully embodied in John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, writers are redacting not just all trace of myth or uniqueness from their characters’ personalities, but also all hint of action that isn’t driven by self-interest. The thinking here goes that self-interest is the root of even the most altruistic human actions, that honesty and cynicism are the same thing, that fiction’s best goal is to confront us with characters who perfectly resemble the would-be adulterer (or child abuser, or bigot, or embezzler, or bored spouse, or exhausted parent, or entitled xenophobe, or jealous sibling, or hit-and-run driver) inside all of us.

Sometimes– in The Age of Grief, in good Carver– that so-called realism can ring with an authenticity and preciseness of insight that renders it mythic in spite of itself. And that’s when it’s great.

But I humbly submit that we don’t remember Ahab, or Bill Sykes, or Daisy Buchanan, or Bigger Thomas, or Huckleberry Finn, or Hester Prynne, or Philip Marlowe, or Aunt Sylvie in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (who is often mistaken for a Smiley’s Person), or the Misfit, or Stephen Dedalus, or Stephen King’s Carrie, or Elizabeth Bennet, or Cormac McCarthy’s towering, ruthless, sketchbook-weilding, hairless judge, or even Rabbit, because they’re so realistic, or because they remind us exactly of ourselves and neighbors. We remember them because they are us plus wonder. Us writ large. Us making sense. Us outside of our own skins, but still us. Us in the way we most dream and fear ourselves. Us collectively, as a community, a nation, a species.

I say that’s what fictional characters are all about. What they need to be about.

And damn it, my Senators are staying put.

So Just What Sort of Bunk is This?

More details about the business of The Book of Bunk next post. I’d rather get to talking about the book itself.

About a month ago, just before we sent off the novel to the handful of major-press fiction editors in New York still claiming to be seeking new acquisitions, my agent and I had a spasm of panic. (In retrospect, it might have been better just to have the grand mal panic seizure and get it over with, but the jury’s still out, so we’ll pass that.) The concern was this:

For fourteen years, I’ve believed that if I ever got this novel done, it would be the very first thing I’d written that would be easy to categorize. No more nostalgic, wistful literary novels about serial killers who never appear. No more ghost stories about miscarriage’s effects on marriage. If this one got to the bookstores, people would know where to put it.

Somehow, my agent bought into that delusion, too. At least until I’d actually finished, and stepped back, and both of us realized what I’d done.

Turns out it’s another Glen Hirshberg book, alright. For better or worse. Another story rooted hip-deep in history that isn’t really a historical novel. An old-school adventure tale– complete with multiple romances, three separate fires, F. Scott Fitzgerald, railroad tramps, orphans, a haunted forest, Communists, a (possibly) imaginary country of shadows, and at least one murder– told by a narrator who thinks he’s an impostor (but isn’t) to the brother he believes is also an impostor (and might or might not be). A fairy tale with no magic (the book is in fact subtitled A Fairy Tale of the Federal Writers’ Project); a page-turning thriller about sitting around telling stories. A book our narrator doesn’t want to write about the creation of a series of books no one wanted to write that just may have created the myth of America.

“Good God,” my agent said. “Write an introduction.”

I wrote two. The first was an attempt to situate the book in history, to explain what the Federal Writers’ Project was and why it’s almost scarily relevant to talk about right now. The second, a misfire that practically typed itself in italics, aims to establish the book’s strangely fable-like quality.

Neither one is going in the manuscript. The novel doesn’t need them. Or, put another way, the intros aren’t going to help. Whatever the hell The Book of Bunk is, it’s itself.

But that’s no reason not to post both introductions here. And if you actually read them, you’ll get the historical backdrop, alright. Plus an (over)dose of the fairy-tale flavor that is much more faint and elusive in the actual manuscript. And somewhere in the gigantic, unmapped country between them lies the imaginary North Carolina mountain town, and the haunted woods, and the great mythologized catastrophe of American history where The Book of Bunk lives.

How appropriate– you’ll see how appropriate soon, I hope and pray– that the first posted or published pieces of this novel aren’t actually in it…

Not-Intro #1

Even at the time, no one could agree on what it was meant to be or whom it was meant to serve. All of the Arts Projects established by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration in the midst of the Great Depression and overseen by an umbrella agency bearing the oddly militaristic name of Federal One proved enormously controversial amongst politicians, employees, and ordinary citizens alike. But at least the Federal Art, Music, and Theater Projects produced creative art, music, and theater.

The Federal Writers’ Project, on the other hand, seemed designed from the very beginning to block the generation of any creative writing under its auspices. When Harry Hopkins, the director of and primary visionary behind the entire WPA, commissioned the Arts Projects, he hewed close to the whole program’s original principles: that work is fundamentally ennobling and essential for the human spirit, and that any work paid for by the federal government should have tangible and lasting economic, social, and cultural value.

The problem with hiring artists, of course, proved to be an ages-old one: how does one determine art’s economic, social, and cultural value, and who gets to say? At a time when a third or more of the nation’s population faced devastating impoverishment and unemployment, did anyone have the right to claim themselves an artist? Did the government owe those who did so an opportunity to make a living through their chosen professions? Could it make use of them?

In the case of the Federal Writers’ Project, the solution was a hedged bet, doomed from the outset to please no one. First, only ten percent or so of the people hired by the Project were writers. Researchers, teachers, academics, and numerous others who worked with the written word in one way or another also qualified, particularly if they were on the relief roles, as Project guidelines stipulated that 90% of the work-force had to come from those roles.

Secondly, and even more tellingly, the founders of the Writers’ Project conceived of a series of tasks– from interviewing the last surviving slaves to collecting regional folklore and data about immigrant communities rarely discussed, to that point, in mainstream American culture–designed to keep employees busy without being seen as frittering away precious public money on frivolous pursuits such as fiction or poetry. The heart of the Project became the American Guide Series, a massively ambitious and unwieldy effort aimed at compiling the first exhaustively detailed, informative, and useful travel books for motor tourists to every region in the nation.

The irony of sending out relief workers, many of whom could barely afford shoes, let alone cars or gas to run them, to compile and pen vacation guides was lost on no one. Many Project employees, already embarrassed to be forced onto relief, found themselves humiliated and frustrated by the demands placed on them and also overwhelmed by the enormity of the task.

By 1937, meanwhile, members of Congress, deeply divided from the beginning of the WPA, found themselves reeling from intransigent recession and a brutal legislative fight over President Roosevelt’s plan to alter the conservative balance of the Supreme Court by adding a new Justice for each sitting Justice over the age of 70. They had also become increasingly alarmed by the activities of American Nazi and radical left groups, and saw in the Guides, and the Writers’ Project as a whole, opportunities for unconscionable waste at best and dangerous, even treasonous subversion at worst.

Predictably, given such origins and circumstances, the Federal Writers’ Project lasted as a fully functioning entity for only four years, from 1935-1939, though work continued on the Guides into the early 1940s.

The miracle, then, is not just that the FWP existed at all, but what it produced. The 48 books of the American Guide Series– slapdash, under-funded, politically slanted one way or another depending upon a region’s editors or writers, selective in their details and sometimes appalling in their prejudices and omissions– remain, even now, perhaps the most complete and illuminating portrait ever attempted of the United States as it existed at a single moment in time.

Of course, even before the WPA dissolved in 1943, the nation documented by the Guides had become a very different place. Most of the bureaucrats, politicians, and bureau chiefs who oversaw the Federal Writers’ Project, as well as the great majority of writers, folklorists, and teachers who staffed it, hoped it would be quickly forgotten.

But its rich, troubled, complicated legacy is one well worth remembering. The arguments it engendered or revealed are still with us, and its greatest achievement– the reluctant, impossible, very nearly successful mapping of the entire American landscape by its own people– is one we have never honestly attempted since. The Federal Writers’ Project in The Book of Bunk is not the actual Project but a dreaming echo, and it exists in an America that probably never was, and still might be.

Which brings us to:

Not-Intro #2

Then the dust came. It swept off the earth in great, teeming clouds and descended on the cities and towns and farms and plains. It choked machines and buried buildings. It drowned animals, and burrowed into the lungs of the people and sickened them. Even before the dust, there were few jobs, and little money. The people starved, and they struggled to save their homes. And when their homes were gone, and even the land on which they stood slipped from beneath them, the people gathered what remained of their possessions, and they took to the roads and railways.

And in the capital city, under the Great Dome, the beleaguered leaders of this once-proud land huddled, and in their desperation, they devised an impossible solution few of them liked: they themselves would put the people to work. They would build roads and bridges, parks and schools. They would plant trees and cultivate the earth, to keep the ground from rising. The coffers of the nation would empty. But the nation itself would survive.

And so it came to be. The farmers farmed. The laborers labored. And the call went out from the Great Dome to its artists that they should create music and murals and theatrical productions that would lift up and embolden the workers in their struggles.

But for its writers, the leaders had a different task. Go amonst the people, they said. And say what you see there…

The Book of the Book of Bunk–Intro and Welcome

What is this blog this time around, anyway?

A soap opera, maybe. “Hoosiers II,” except in North Carolina and with no basketball? A release of tension?  A whoop of joy (or is that terror)? A stream of babble? The Alamo?

For now, this is a chronicle about a book I spent fourteen years trying to get right. It’s called The Book of Bunk, and it’s done, now. Whether another fourteen years pass before any of you get to see it remains an open question.

Or not, actually. Because I’ve decided not to let that happen. The question is what I’m going to do about it. This blog is the first step. It will chart the history of this novel from this moment forward. I’ll be posting all sorts of tidbits about this book’s journey to wherever it’s finally going. Plus excerpts, maybe. Teasers. Contests. Sing-alongs (not a joke, that last. You’ll see).

Who would care?

Well, me, obviously. But of all the bad moments there’ve ever been to be a novelist–and really, they’ve almost all been bad–this may be the worst: the end of publishing as we know it; the end of bookstores; the end of print book reviews; very possibly the end of books, whether any of the people who read or write them want that or not. The end of novels, because who wants to read a novel or even a blog post this long on a Kindle unless one has to?

The worst of times, then.

Unless it’s the best. The moment there was finally so little chance of actually making the money that may or may not still exist in this field, so little hope of attaining the fame and respect that were always ephemeral, always at best half-earned anyway, that the remaining writers–and they are legion–just up and filled the air with stories. Like kites over India. Balloons over Del Mar. Airships over the North Pole.

What is this, then? An act of defiance? A raspberry? A prayer?

Six years ago, at the Bob’s Big Boy in Burbank where we had all the meetings that led to the creation of the Rolling Darkness Revue, Pete Atkins and Dennis Etchison and I were in the midst of another intensive planning session (or else Pete and I were trying to distract Dennis from talking about wrestling, I can’t remember which) when Dennis put down his burger, stroked his beard in a remarkably Parisian Left Bank sort of way, grinned, and said, “You know it’s all folly.”

Maybe that’s what this is. A folly, in every sense of that word:

An extravagant fake, built to commemorate a real book about a fake book that no one can even get their hands on yet.

A mistake.

A parade.

A celebration.

Welcome to Bunk County.  I hope you’ll like it here.