fiction – Recall This Book

165* Helen Garner Hacking Away at the Adverbs: a Novel Dialogue crossover conversation

In this RTB and Novel Dialogue episode from 2021, Helen Garner sits down with John and Elizabeth McMahon, a distinguished scholar of Australian literature. Helen’s novels range from the anti-patriarchy exuberance of Monkey Grip (1977) to the heartbreaking mortality at the heart of The Spare Room (2008). She has also authored a slew of nonfiction, plus screenplays for Jane Campion’s Two Friends and Gillian Armstrong’s wonderfully Garneresque The Last Days of Chez Nous. After a reading from John’s favorite, The Children’s Bach, the trio discusses Garner’s capacity for cutting and cutting, creating resonant, thought-inducing gaps. Garner connects that taste for excision, perhaps paradoxically, to her tendency to accumulate scraps, bits and pieces of life. She relates her father’s restlessness to her own life-total of houses inhabited (27). “Why wouldn’t I write about households?” asks Helen, “They’re just so endlessly interesting.”

Who shaped her writing? Raymond Carver: packed with power, but the pages white with omissions and excisions. Helen offers an anecdote about her own pruning that ends with her “ankle-deep in adverbs.” That’s how to escape the “fat writing” that stems for distrust of the reader. She thoughtfully compares the practical virtues of keeping notebooks for the “music” of everyday life to the nightly process of diary-writing (more analytical). John raises the question of pervasive musical metaphors in Helen’s writing, and she reports her passion for “boring pieces” and the “formal” side of Bach, which makes a listener feel that there is such a thing as meaning. “There’s something about shaping a sentence, too, which can be musical.”

Mentioned in the Episode

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (the fixed people and the wandering people), Gilead, Home,
The West Wing (yes, the TV show! Helen watched it during lockdown when she couldn’t bear fiction…)
Raymond Carver‘s minimalist fiction (his first collection)
Tess Gallagher (as writer and as Carver’s editor)
Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé” (1922; on how to un-furnish fiction, leaving it an empty room)
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Sigmund Freud on “the day’s residue” (e.g. in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900)
George Eliot, Quarry for Middlemarch

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159 Glenn Patterson: You Can Choose Who You Are (JP, DC)

In Belfast, good fences can make for bad neighbors. David Cunningham (Wash U. sociologist, author of There’s Something Happening Here and Klansville, U.S.A) joins John to speak about the Troubles and their aftermath with the brilliant Northern Irish novelist/essayist/memoirist Glenn Patterson. His fiction includes The International (1999) and Where Are We Now? but the conversation’s main focus is his two collections of short non-fiction, Lapsed Protestant (2006) and Here’s Me Here (2016).

Glenn has lifetime of insights about the boundary markers and easy to miss shibboleths that define life in divided places–and in divided times. In Belfast, everyone learns to use words without being marked out: how do you avoid uttering “the one word that gets you killed”?

158* Ben Fountain in Dark Times (JP)

Ben Fountain is far more than just the author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which won RTB hearts and minds (and the National Book Award) long before it became a weird Ang Lee movie.

157 Mangrum’s Comical Computation (JP)

When does comedy become more than a laugh? Ben Mangrum of MIT joins RtB to discuss The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence, which in some ways is organized around “the intriguing idea that human knowledge work is our definitive feature and yet the machines we are ourselves made are going to replace us at it.” Comedyhas provided a toolbox (Charles Tilly calls them “collective repertoires”) for responding to the looming obsolescence of knowledge workers.

156* Recall This B-Side: Merve Emre on Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”

RtB loves the present-day shadows cast by neglected books, which can suddenly loom up out of the backlit past. So, you won’t be shocked to know that John has also been editing a Public Books column called B-Side Books. In it, around 50 writers (Ursula Le Guin was one) have made the case for un-forgetting a beloved book. Now, there is a book that collects 40 of these columns. Find it as your local bookstore, or Columbia University Press, or Bookshop, (or even Amazon).

Like our podcast, B-Side Books focuses on those moments when books topple off their shelves, open up, and start bellowing at you. The one that enthralled Merve Emre (Wesleyan professor and author ofsuch terrific works as The Personality Brokers) was a novella by the luminous midcentury Italian pessimist, Natalia Ginzburg. And if you think you know precisely why a mid-century Italian writer would have a dark and bitter view of the world (already thinking of the Nazi shadows in work by Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani) Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart will have you thinking again.

154* Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson (Elizabeth Miller, JP)

With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, Kim Stanley Robinson has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California.

All of that, though, only prepared the ground for The Ministry for the Future, his 2020 vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. Flanked by JP, KSR’s friend and ally Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (celebrated eco-critic and UC Davis professor) asked him to reflect on the book’s impact in this conversation with our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue.

139 Recall This Story: Ivan Kreilkamp on Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “Foxcastle” (JP)

Ivan Kreilkamp, Indiana University English professor and no stranger to Recall This Book, is the author of two books on Victorian literature and one about Jennifer Egan. For this episode of Recall This Story, Ivan reads Sylvia Townsend Warner‘s “Foxcastle. It was first published in The New Yorker in 1975 and became the final story in her final book, Kingdoms of Elfin.

135.2 Recall This Story: Part 2 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana” (JP)

{You will want to start with Part 1 of episode 135; it can be found right here]

Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, “Miles City, Montana” in our new series, Recall This Story.

135.1 Recall This Story: Part 1 of Linda Schlossberg reading and discussing Alice Munro’s “Miles City, Montana” (JP)

[this is the first half of the story; the second half can be found here]