Does it amplify what we already dread or anticipate? It is all exceptions and no rules, wobbly explanations and multiple vaguenesses which are seldom called upon when we usually subject artistic creation and its makers to scrutiny. A work can be described as, say, neo-realist, plangent, pastoral, melancholy, mauve, belligerent, mocking, cuddly, gormless, cyclopean, sickening, Biedermeyer… All these mean something more or less. They are devices for seeing, pigeon-holing, anatomizing screeches, distinguishing a willow’s bark from a Labrador’s.

These are veneers, a colorist’s province, chromatic patterns for the coming season, “styles” in the debased sense of an add-on, a surface superficiality, applied post hoc. And Late Style should on the face of it belong among them. But it doesn’t. This epithet belongs to a different gamut, determined by the calendar and the infirm body’s deliquescence — which are in tune. Beethoven’s late quartets were welcomed by his friends and admirers with “We knew he’d gone deaf… now he’s gone mad.” And when Op 131 turns into a jug band’s singalong of a century later we can see their point. So this is what he’s been hiding all these years.

Does “late” have any place in a variegated inventory of, inter alia, moods and passions, tempers and humors? Is it merely tagging along, clutching at an elbow as a reminder of its presence in a world sated with competing qualifiers? And can it be allied to such qualifiers? Is, for instance, “late pastoral” anything more than portmanteau clumsiness possibly representing mutton with scrapie, and a shepherd’s despair? The old have a lot to be frightened of — just look at them — just look at the face I see in the mirror.

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It is surely Late Style which Buffon had in mind when he wrote “the Style is the very man / the man himself”. It is the quintessence of the artist arriving at the threshold of decrepitude, disintegrating. The earlier tendencies of the career are abandoned. They are not in terminal earnest. They derive from the Pantone guide to life or, for those that don’t drop their aitches, the Farrow and Ball Formula For Fulfillment. The Late Comer is different. Late Style works derive from its maker’s core. It is sooner identified by instances than by a generalized program. We can follow a maker’s creations over a career of many decades but never understand it till the four last things menace and it all becomes clear. Or not.

I can still summon the puzzlement of half a century ago. It was with delight that I realized I had been had. The sensation was electric. I had been Cruyffed by a double-take after a few sentences of Transparent Things. The septuagenarian author was heading apace into his Late Space, which had remained fallow since childhood and was now ready to be cultivated. This marvelous novella, a proxy amulet of a mere 100 pages, was the work of an old man impersonating the young man he once had been, a young man looking forward to being an old writer yet bereft of the old man’s achronic knack of whizzing forward and back though Time. Yet page after page proclaimed a lack of bereavement. And with it a mastery of legerdemain. Although he shared the name of the writer of the greatest novels of the century, this was a previously mute Vladimir Nabokov whose choice of Late Style was unfamiliar, may not even have been a choice… This was Late Style not just as reheated leitmotifs but as entire divergence from the great accumulated oeuvre which was now shed. The burdens of genius and high expectation could be abandoned without reference to them. In his and the century’s late Seventies it appeared that he was reinventing himself, almost provenantlessly, taking as his model without prior example the contemporary French writer he most admired, a generation his junior. He was all of a sudden dressed as Alain Robbe-Grillet. This was evidently a popular choice: Muriel Spark was kindredly togged at the same moment for The Driver’s Seat. Had they listened too attentively to their critics: Émigré purple… Lush and arid…

Transparent Things is a puzzle set, one guesses, by a teasing trickster who has already forgotten both the clues and the solution. It is dense with precise detail. Things happen: and then more things. It is quite unlike the bland featurelessnesses of the current fiction in which dull creative writing students chat to dull creative writing students (there is today a generalized fear of imaginative invention and giving offense). Transparent Things is a treasury of hotel fires, murders, mangled colloquial English, a heart attack caused by a struggle (probably unmatched in all literature) with trousers in a fitting booth, bogus allusions, the shadow of God, infidelities, unremembered strangulation, arch narration by a voice or voices whose owners are never fully disclosed — are they even human? The worst thing a great work can be accused of is that it has taught us something, like a self-help booklet. Don’t believe them, whoever they are — cassock, beard, hijab, forecourt suit etc. The more instructive and pedagogic art intends to be, the lesser its worth, for it is a sort of mental trap which gives the reader or spectator no option but to follow the writer. Transparent Things only rarely makes “sense”, only rarely vouchsafes any explanation of its protagonists’ behavior.

When it broaches the most profound of all matters it is skittish, evasive and improbably avuncular — as though this were not the most profound of all matters.

“….the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.”

“Easy, you know, does it. Son.”

The book suggests to me, upon my 15th or 20th reading, that it is a chalice void to the brim: the valley of the shadow of death where we laugh and dance in amity, not fearing the chummy hand that will, inevitably, grip our shoulder.

I rather fear that the hand is closing in.

Since its publication in 1962, people who admire Pale Fire — fawn upon it, adore it — like to speak of it as a feat of baroque intellectual magic, which it is. In her New Republic review, Mary McCarthy described it as “Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, and do-it-yourself novel”, among other things. Brian Boyd, in his book Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, writes densely and ecstatically about the novel as a near-endless array of ever-deepening “problems and possibilities”, an intellectual delight to explore; Ron Rosenbaum (in The Observer, circa 1999) declared the book “The Novel of the Century” based on the idea that it is a “theology of Shakespeare”, haunted by Shakespeare, housing Shakespeare, that it is, basically, a Shakespeare phantasmagoria. (Rosenbaum also acknowledges that the book is “an almost obscenely sensual pleasure”, but that is an aside.)

The book has also been criticised for this very virtuosity, even dismissed by those who interpret the book’s brilliance as cold, wilfully weird or even hostile towards the reader. These opposing critical opinions are sincerely echoed by readers of all kinds, sometimes simultaneously. A friend of mine described his amazed delight in the book as something he might feel “if a winged griffin had landed on [his] lawn”, awed, but not moved emotionally — and secretly suspecting that the author might consider him a sucker if he were moved. An academic acquaintance who generally loves Nabokov considers it his least wonderful book, flawed by excessive cleverness, compulsive literary cross-referencing and the homophobic portrayal of its ridiculous and bitchy queer narrator, Charles Kinbote.

It is true that Kinbote’s queerness is unflattering. (It is also not quite convincing; there is more narrative energy lavished on his dramatic woman-spurning than on his conquests of — or rejection by — men and boys.) Indeed, the generic condemnation “problematic” more than applies to the character Kinbote, a comically unpleasant personality who has been morally condemned or pitied by readers since his creation.

He appears on page one of the novel to explain that he is the editor of a poem titled Pale Fire, authored by his neighbour, friend and academic colleague, Professor John Shade, who has been recently murdered in error by an incompetent foreign agent dispatched to kill Kinbote. Kinbote, you see, is not your average college professor; that role is a disguise to hide his true identity as the fugitive King of Zembla, where he reigned as Charles the Beloved until an annoying crew of Soviet-style revolutionaries turned his beautiful world upside-down. Thus forced to take a drab teaching position at Wordsmith College in Wye, Appalachia, subletting the furnished home of a local judge (full of family pictures so distasteful to His Majesty that they are quickly consigned to the closet), Kinbote’s only consolation is his proximity to Shade who he truly admires — so much that he stalks Shade’s house to spy on him.

Whether or not Kinbote is completely crazy is a question throughout the book — indeed his very identity is a question. From my point of view, he is just somewhat crazy and a lot desperate and has certainly taken advantage of Shade’s distraught widow in order to seize control of the poem so that he may explain to the world that it really is or at least ought to have been about him and his camouflaged royalty. After his fevered introduction, written from a cheap and desolate mountain hideaway, he presents the poem, 36 pages of wry, elegiac perhaps rather staid beauty. This is followed by 228 pages of Kinbote’s wildly self-centred commentary — even the suicide of John Shade’s daughter, poor homely Hazel, with whom Kinbote feels more empathic identification than anyone else, is seen through the fanatically minute lens of His Majesty’s Zemblan concerns. And then there is the almost mystically Kinbotian index, in which detailed notes are supplied for characters barely mentioned and it is revealed that the Zemblan assassin’s name spelled backwards is the name of a “mirror-maker of genius”.

For all his fantastic humour, Kinbote seems the unintentional butt of his own jokes, the ultimate “unreliable narrator”, meant to be pitied or contrasted unfavourably with the imminently normal Shade. And yet… he reminds me of a line from Nabokov’s short story Spring In Fialta in which the narrator describes a circus poster “which depicted a red hussar and an orange tiger of sorts; curious — in his effort to make the beast as ferocious as possible, the artist had gone so far that he had come back from the other side, for the tiger’s face looked positively human”. If you replace the word “ferocious” with “grotesque” the tiger could be Kinbote.

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Almost on introducing himself to us, at the beginning of his forward to Shade’s poem, Kinbote interrupts his faux scholarly description of the work with the non-sequitur, “There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings”, before picking up right where he left off. It is one of a few small but telling oddities that made Brian Boyd, rhetorically remark: “What sort of person is this commentator?” I might answer, using a word that Nabokov would’ve hated and which I sort of hate too: a very relatable one. Someone who possesses a contemporary sensibility that feels free mixing a subjectively personal aside into what is supposed to be a scrupulous public presentation; someone who hates being pestered by loud noise when he is trying to think; someone so given to incongruous blurtings that he can be trusted to tell you the truth about himself even when he is lying.

It sounds complicated because it is. And I haven’t even mentioned the book’s most complicated aspect: the layers of patterns, linkages and intricate structure that give Pale Fire a kind of supernatural depth. The supernatural is literally a theme in the book, in the form of attempted communication between the living and the dead in weird partial words tapped out by a maybe spirit and flickering lights that show up in an Appalachian barn and are then incongruously refrained in the Zemblan tunnel King Charles traverses with one of his young loves. The colours red and green act in opposition/connection with characters and doors that link disparate times and places and the number eight; minor characters are doubled with Zemblan and Appalachian incarnations through similar names and attributes; the hiding place of the Crown Jewels is doubled as are the actual jewels; butterfly imagery links Hazel Shade, her mother Sybil and King Charles’s unwanted queen Disa — who is also linked with Hazel in a triple iteration of rejected girls.

Dates and letters also join the fun! Kinbote, John Shade and Shade’s killer all have the same birthday; Shade is killed on the day that Nabokov’s father was born and Nabokov’s father was killed by a gunman aiming to kill someone else. The family pictures that Kinbote furiously stuffs into the closet of his sublet home are all of girls named in alphabetical order — an order reversed in the names of King Charles’s possibly invented royal family. And throughout, poets and poetry star the skies of Zembla and Appalachia alike: direct and subtle references to Browning, Shakespeare, Eliot and Goethe shine piercingly or dimly in the most quotidian and/or dramatic scenes, sometimes ostentatiously quoted, sometimes so simply and quietly there that only a scholar would notice.

Only a scholar would notice most of these (and I haven’t even noted all of it), at least on the first reading; while I was aware of some of this layered patterning (the repetitive tropes of butterflies, dancing lights, opposing colours and rejected girls for example are hard to miss), I discovered most of what I’ve summarised above through critics, particularly Brian Boyd who’s book I love and recommend. Indeed the novel’s complexity has ironically unleashed armies of Kinbotes, devoting themselves to decades-long online arguments about whether or not the character John Shade invented Kinbote and faked his own death or if the reverse is true, that Kinbote actually invented Shade and wrote the poem attributed to him or — but wait! — that actually the deceased Hazel Shade spiritually transmitted the delusion of Zembla into Kinbote’s tortured mind so that he could tell her father about it and also to comfort Kinbote himself and further to create a more beautiful version of her own lonely life in his fantasy.

To refrain McCarthy: “a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers…” Except that in the context of this fantastic novel, the critic’s theories are not as crazy as they appear on paper. I don’t find McCarthy’s words entirely right; the book is more like its own living universe than anything mechanical, and in such a world (as in ours) many strange things can happen. It is designed yes, but not to trap. It matters because I think this chess game emphasis has contributed to the popular perception of the book as steroidally brainy but emotionally cold. Critics haven’t exactly ignored the book’s touching aspects: the death of Hazel Shade and her parent’s grief are given their due as is the theme of mortality and the moving beauty of the natural world. (Though I agree with Michael Wood, in his essay The Demons of Our Pity, that there is something oddly shallow about the emotion towards Hazel in Shade’s poem, not to mention an unpleasant fixation on her homeliness.) But those emotional elements tend to get lost in the critical excitement about traps and problems and creates the impression that in order to enjoy Pale Fire you need not merely an intelligent mind but a very particular type of intelligent mind, preferably one outfitted with a first-class education.

But. When I first read the book I was an ignorant 24-year-old with a barely adequate undergraduate education. Because I had not majored in English (I was concerned about what kind of job I might get after graduating and an English degree did not look promising), I had not taken many literature courses. I had read very little poetry and almost no Shakespeare. I recognised the names of the poets mentioned in Pale Fire but I could not possibly register the more subtle meanings evoked by the adjacent language because I didn’t know their work in any depth or really at all. That didn’t matter. I loved Pale Fire. I could feel its intellectual power in the intense perceptual contrasts of its characters, in the descriptions of faces and objects and, for example, the swift evocation of an alternate world in John Shade’s image of himself reflected in the window glass, “above the grass” with his furniture and an apple on a plate. I could feel it in the patterning I saw and sensed, viscerally, as if I was not only seeing a griffin landing before me but feeling the vibration of its wings come up through the ground into the soles of my feet.

But it wasn’t primarily the intellectual power that drew me in. I experienced Pale Fire far more emotionally than intellectually. I felt the emotion of longing saturating the story, the depth of Kinbote’s loneliness, the cruelty visited on Hazel and the bewilderment of her father at having lost her; I felt Kinbote’s anguish in his affected, light and giddy voice, and in the way those naturally polarised tones were electrically joined in the fast-moving comedy. (If you have read Lolita, it is a voice reminiscent of Humbert sans Dolores on a drunken drive with drunken Rita on the perpetual road to Grainball: the voice of someone broken and desperate yet mentally agile enough to bob and weave under a rain of blows, real and imagined; someone too broken and desperate to fully dissemble). The actual prose was, as Ron Rosenbaum noted, a great sensual pleasure. Then, about 200 pages in, the experience intensified when I came to this description of a secondary character, Queen Disa, the woman Kinbote/Charles indifferently marries because marry he must:

‘What had the sentiments he entertained in regard to Disa ever amounted to? Friendly indifference and bleak respect. Not even in the first bloom of their marriage had he felt any tenderness or any excitement. Of pity, of heartache, there could be no question. He was, had always been, casual and heartless. But the heart of his dreaming self, both before and after the rupture, made extraordinary amends.”

This is a narrative depth change, with no lightness or giddiness or humour. I sometimes read this section to students as an example of how a narrative can be indirectly and deeply illuminated through minor characters or descriptive asides, and no matter who they are, grad students or sophomores taking the class to fulfil a Lit major, I can feel their attention come into focus from the first two lines. Even with minimal information about who the speaker or the woman he is speaking of might be, almost any nominal adult, no matter how inexperienced, can recognise the emotional reality of those sentences that open the soliloquy.

“He dreamed of her more often, and with incomparably more poignancy, than his surface-life feelings for her warranted; these dreams occurred when he least thought of her, and worries in no way connected with her assumed her image in the subliminal world as a battle or a reform becomes a bird of wonder in a tale for children. These heart-rending dreams transformed the drab prose of his feelings for her into strong and strange poetry, subsiding undulations of which would flash and disturb him throughout the day, bringing back the pang and the richness — and then only the pang, and then only its glancing reflection — but not at all affecting his attitude towards the real Disa.”

Here, words create images to describe something that happens wordlessly, physically but subtly, in the inchoate realm of feeling. The words “subsiding undulations” which “flash” and then gradually fade (as a wave returns and fades) describe the movement of intimate emotion, the way people repeatedly draw near one another and then move away, sometimes simultaneously, in different aspects. The words also describe the bodily experience of strong feeling in a single person, rising up and then subsiding, either becoming greater or — as it is here — fading completely but for a troubling echo that lingers so faintly you can’t tell where it’s coming from. It is something almost impossible to talk about let alone write about but which almost everyone experiences. Using words to describe what is experienced wordlessly is art on a high level, at least as impressive and more affecting than even the most intricate structuring.

“Her image, as she entered and re-entered his sleep rising apprehensively from a distant sofa or going in search of the messenger who, they said, had just passed through the draperies, took into account changes of fashion; but the Disa wearing the dress he had seen on her the summer of the Glass Works explosion, or last Sunday, or in any other antechamber of time, forever remained exactly as she looked on the day he had first told her he did not love her. That happened during a hopeless trip to Italy, in a lakeside hotel garden — roses, black araucarias, rusty, greenish hydrangeas — one cloudless evening with the mountains of the far shore swimming in a sunset haze and the lake all peach syrup regularly rippled with pale blue, and the captions of a newspaper spread flat on the foul bottom near the stone bank perfectly readable through the shallow diaphanous filth, and because, upon hearing him out, she sank down on the lawn in an impossible posture, examining a grass culm and frowning, he had taken his words back at once; but the shock had fatally starred the mirror, and thenceforth in his dreams her image was infected with the memory of that confession as with some disease or the secret aftereffects of a surgical operation too intimate to be mentioned.”

The pain of unrequited love, both for the lover and the loved one who cannot return the feeling, is an obvious subject of the book as is the longing for an ideal which bleeds up through mundane reality, “the shallow diaphanous filth” vs. the fantastic colours, the dream which might be delusional or might actually be more real than acted-out life; the imagery is in effect a crumbling bridge between the two. It is in this passage that I see what I called the understated “essential something” about the book: how this elemental and raw experience is evoked as closely as possible to how it is felt, through the textures of the natural world that exist as the body exists, humbly and unknowably: plants, mountains, water, sky, light, the amazement of colours.

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“The gist, rather than the actual plot of the dream, was a constant refutation of his not loving her. His dream-love for her exceeded in emotional tone, in spiritual passion and depth, anything he had experienced in his surface existence. This love was like an endless wringing of hands, like a blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness and remorse. They were, in a sense, amorous dreams, for they were permeated with tenderness, with a longing to sink his head onto her lap and sob away the monstrous past. They brimmed with the awful awareness of her being so young and so helpless. They were purer than his life. What carnal aura there was in them came not from her but from those with whom he betrayed her… and even so the sexual scum remained somewhere far above the sunken treasure and was quite unimportant.”

A blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness and remorse. This secondary character may be, as some critics say, a figment of Kinbote’s narcissistic imagination; she may be an alt-world creation of the deceased Hazel Shade. But whatever she is, the complex of emotions embodied in and provoked by her are real in any existing human world, as deep and for me more riveting than any problem posed anywhere else in the book. It is the mystery of human feeling/lack of feeling, the need for love and the fear of it, part of what Kinbote calls “the prison of personality” and it is not going to be solved. But here at least it is seen profoundly, with the compassionate wisdom that is the real “Crown Jewels” of Pale Fire, hidden in a description of an incidental relationship.

Of course, there are other jewels hidden elsewhere in the book, more than might be addressed within the scope of this essay. Brian Boyd quotes Nabokov remarking in relation to Pale Fire that: “You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you can never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms and hence unquenchable, unattainable.” The novel is a joyful and reverent mimic of such reality — and yet it invites readers and critics to come close, to find the unattainable, and so, with great gusto, they try. And I am glad that they do, even if it sometimes looks a bit like blundering through an infinite maze of some sort. I am especially glad for Brian Boyd and Michael Wood; over time, reading and learning from their intrepid analyses has deepened my understanding and respect for the book. But I still remember, as something rare and unrepeatable, the power of my first reading when I had so little knowledge and yet felt the brilliance and depth of Pale Fire almost as if through my skin. If reading this is your first experience of the book, that is what I hope for you: that you acquire a copy and see the griffin come in for a landing. If you worry that it is looking down on you, don’t. Because all you have to do is look up. Its heart is strange but it is huge; let yours beat in response.

***

Pale Fire, with an introduction by Mary Gaitskill, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

There are a number of reasons I feel this, most of which have to do with how we take in knowledge and information and how that has changed the nature of perception. I’m not saying anything new here: think iPhones and the constant staring there at, a skull-fracturing change which plainly has consequences beyond how people understand the reading and writing of fiction.

Which by itself — the reading and writing of fiction — is a very hard thing to talk about without falling all over yourself. First because opinions about it are highly subjective; one person will think a book is great, another person finds it boring, another will find it meaningless — these “findings” are socio-political to some extent, but they are also so personal they are almost impossible to parse. On top of that, good writing is contextual; a phrase or even an entire paragraph that is actually awful in one context may be fantastic in another. When you read a book review on Goodreads or the New York Times, what you’re usually reading is a description of the plot, what the characters are like, and what the (sometimes highly imaginative) reviewer thinks the writer is saying. This is because those elements are important, plus they are easy and fun to talk about.

But there is something even more important that almost never gets talked about, because it’s almost impossible to talk about, and that is what I think of as the inner weave, the subtle life inside the apparent story. Here, the plot or the theme functions almost like a conduit; an ineffable content which can be compared to a person’s unconscious or the guts of the body; you don’t see the unconscious but you feel it, you may misunderstand it but you feel it. We all have had the experience of speaking with someone who seems friendly, who is smiling at you and yet who is making you very uncomfortable — or the reverse: we’ve all known people who act like aggressive jerks, yet for some reason we feel warmly towards them; we are responding sympathetically to something that is happening under the social signalling and is even at odds with that signalling.

Unless you are a surgeon or are the witness to a horrible accident, you aren’t going to see the guts of the body, but if you touch the person you will feel them beating under your hand — on a hot day you might even smell them. But smell them and feel them or not, they are what is holding the body up. The unconscious and the viscera; each is a fundamental force behind the person you look at. Something comparable to that fundamental inner quality or qualities are what make a piece of writing alive or not. These inner qualities determine what the work is about as much as the plot or the theme or even the characters. Strangely, writers themselves sometimes don’t know what this inner force is in their own work because it is so entwined with our own way of seeing, we barely notice it, any more than we notice our own breath.

The paradox of this mystic inner quality is that its depth gets expressed by what we think of as a superficial quality: style. The best definition of style I know of was given to me by an eccentric older man who ran a second-handbook store where I went to school in Michigan. When I say “older” I mean that I was 22 and he was in his 40s but was so strange-looking he appeared older or really ageless; he had a shapeless body and he wore heavy coke-bottle glasses literally strapped to his bald egg-shaped head. He shared store space with a guy who sold plants and could be seen everyday perched on a stool amid a forest of fronds, reading intently.

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I found him fascinating and took more from his store of knowledge — I believe he had read everything — than any of my professors. He considered style to be the “inevitable by-product” of the writer feeling their way through the shape of their creation, through word choices and small decisions as well as big ones. I didn’t like the term “by-product” because it didn’t sound central enough — style mattered to me even then — and he said that he meant it in the way the appearance of a plant or flower is the by-product of its most essential inner workings, that there is simply no other way for the flower or plant to look according to its genetic structure.

It is a definition I have never forgotten. It is a very exacting metaphor, and perhaps overly fanciful; I don’t know how often style and substance can be that closely connected. But it’s an inspiring way to look at how style, when arrived at through rigorous, sincere work, emerges from the inmost workings of a person; an extremely intimate consciousness.

An element of style that I especially care about is description of the world that the writer creates on the page. This currently undervalued technique can perform practical and useful functions, such as indirectly conveying a character’s emotions and locating the reader in a character’s world — where are they from, how much money do they have, what is their neighbourhood like? However, it can do more: it can give words to what is wordless and form to what is formless through creating pictures and images that irrationally make a connection to the deeper body of the story — the viscera or unconscious.

What do I mean by that? Fiction, even when it’s fantasy or sci-fi, is about life and life is not mostly about words. Consider how many things you’ve thought or seen that are impossible for you to say in words, even something simple, like someone’s facial expression. Life, even on a quiet day, happens so densely and quickly around us and most of it is about seeing, feeling and thinking in a not-strictly verbal way. Writing translates all of this into words but paradoxically the most powerful writing uses words in a way that transcends language to become more true to life; it mimics how we live in a world that is constantly changing and moving before our eyes.

Writing is a rational process of connected thoughts and ideas, but great writing comes from a stranger place; an interface between the intensely intimate perception of an individual and the social and natural worlds. It is related to the rational mind but in a way that dreams are related to thought —poetically and irrationally. It is through poetic and irrational means that the unseen world of your story gets radically illuminated, like a burst of music can illuminate a scene in a movie or TV show.

To give you an example of what I mean, I’m going to read an excerpt from a novel by Vladimir Nabokov called Pale Fire which, while not as widely loved as Lolita, is as beautiful in its own demented way. It is narrated by someone who may be actually demented, a queer literature professor at a college in New England and who, according to him, is a king in exile. His name is Charles Kinbote and a lot of his narration concerns his unrequited feelings for his neighbour, the poet John Shade; that story is intercut with memories of his kingdom in fabulous Zembla where he can have any man or boy he wants. But even in Zembla, convention dictated that he had to be married so marry he did, choosing a very beautiful young wife. Because she’s so young she doesn’t understand why he won’t have sex with her and she’s miserable. She’s not in any way a major character; she gets only a handful of the book’s 315 pages. I’m going to read two of those.

First notice the tone of the sentences, almost apart from their meaning: they are subsiding, soft, undulant, attenuated in shape, and that tone is amplified by the meaning of the words: “the listless grace of ineffable grief”. “a blundering of the soul”, the rippling water, the subsiding feeling that gets less and less, then returns in a great rush. The language is infused with longing for an ungraspable ideal which bleeds up through mundane reality: “the shallow diaphanous filth” versus the fantastic colours, the blurring and blending of the real and the unreal, the dream which might be delusional or might actually be more real than the character’s acted-out life, the “sunken treasure” solidly sitting under the scummy surface.

This imagery (which is emotionally deeper than perhaps anything else in the novel) is in effect a bridge between an imaginary world and the world that exists and the tension between the two; what’s hidden is most real and we may never truly see it. This is to me the emotional core of the book, hidden like the treasure, in an intense description about a secondary character, a description which is completely unnecessary to “move the plot forward”.

The next example is very different; it’s the first paragraph of a story by Flannery O’Connor titled Good Country People. It also spends a lot of words, proportionally, on a secondary character.

This is a great example of the utilitarian function of description: we meet a local personality, we hear how people speak to each other and get a glimpse of how they live and what they eat. We are also introduced to a theme of great stubbornness, a state of being in which only two directions are possible, where questioning is met with blankness. The voice is arch and a little comical but what it describes is heavy, corporeal, a limited world of grain sacks and heavy trucks, a place of no nuance or subtlety — a miserable place for a complex mind. And, at the end of the story a stubborn person with a complex mind is going to find herself literally in such a place, trapped by her own limited corporeality, in an extreme version of the state foreshadowed by the first paragraph. Which you don’t remember by the end of the story and don’t need to. Because you’ve felt it and will subliminally recognise the refrain at the end, particularly when Mrs Freeman appears to underscore it simply by being there.

It’s true that very few people can write this way; very few people even try, in part because this caring attention to such detailed descriptions of the physical world or imagery based on that world has for a long time been undervalued or not valued at all. Back in 2000 I did a college talk with George Saunders, who I consider a collegial friend. We were “in conversation” and I was saying something like what I just said, but with more focus on the practical uses of the technique, for example: to locate yourself in a character’s body, have the character look out the window. The entire world is out the window, what does it look like to the character, the sky, the trees, the buildings — and George passionately burst out “Like anybody does that? Who looks out the window and thinks about trees?  Only people in books do that.” Or something, I’m paraphrasing.

It made me realise I might sound either absurdly arty or just really old-school but — I think people still do look out the window. They might not think about trees, or beat-up buildings or cars or people or whatever else is out there — but they experience them. Or at least they used to. The year 2000 was before everybody had a phone and earbuds. That’s changed things. We are now much less likely to experience trees because… we may not see them even if we do look out the window.

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The books that made me

By Michel Houellebecq

More recently, in 2019, Joyce Carol Oates came to Claremont McKenna where I was teaching and did an intimate Q&A. I brought up the writer John Updike; I was teaching a novel by him which was hard for students to read partly because he was sexist and backward in his racial attitudes, but even more because he described his worlds very, very densely. He would spend pages describing what a character sees driving down a country road at night. Students had a hard time even tracking it — they could, but they had to try. (Note: at least one of them, once he got the hang of it, loved it, which was great.)

I wanted to hear what Oates had to say about it because she’s of an older generation; she and Updike were peers. What she said was (paraphrasing again): yes, John could describe anything and everything but no one wants to read that any more, because (directly quoting) “people have moved on”/  I was really surprised by this. “Moved on”? We’ve moved on from the world we live in? How is that possible?

I want to make clear that I absolutely don’t mean any disrespect to Saunders or Oates, both of whom I admire. They were, after all, just talking off the top of their heads in a moment. (It’s possible that George in particular thought I sounded pretentious — and, actually, I can see how my words could sound that way. But these things are very real to me and deserve big earnest words, monster, gesticulating words.) In any case, their comments really stayed in my mind. Both writers are serious and brilliant people with sensibilities very different from mine and… they may be right. Perhaps — let’s face it, probably — literature has moved on. We don’t look at the physical world as we once did, and so we don’t write about it as we once did. And that is just one way it is being taken for granted and abused to the point of destruction.

That may sound rhetorical, but it isn’t. It is remarkable to me, based on the sample of humans that I’ve had in writing classes, both “kids” and adults, how many people: 1) express great concern about climate change and its effects on the planet, 2) are completely uninterested in other humans’ visions of what the planet they want to save looks, feels and sounds like, and 3) are even less interested in writing or just noticing what it looks like to them. Even as a writing exercise it’s hard for them to say, for example, what someone’s face looks like in a fundamental way. Which is not to say that they can’t do it. Some of them do it very well once they try. But it doesn’t occur to them in the way I think it naturally occurred to people of my generation.

Fascinatingly, one student told me that he didn’t like to describe what people look like because he thought it was like staring at someone which was rude. Another remarked in a similar spirit that in describing people you have to assign value to their appearance in terms of conventional beauty standards. This second statement is completely untrue; conventional beauty standards can be made irrelevant when describing a face if you want to focus on how the person’s nature animates that face.

The first concern, about rudeness, makes more sense to me. But it confuses social looking with artistic looking. Artistic looking is about care and respect. It is like saying: I see this human in my mind’s eye and this particular human is worth the most precise attention I can give them. Because they won’t be here forever and they are as amazing as any animal you might see in a documentary devoted to the heart-breaking beauty of endangered animals. That is not just respect, that is reverence. It is a more intense, focused version of reverence that normal, non-writers can experience or at least used to potentially experience all the time.

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Mary Gaitskill teaches us to embrace complexity

By Ann Manov

I am thinking of something I saw on the subway in the early Eighties, perhaps 1982. I was sitting at the end of the last car on an express train and saw three or four boys — in my memory they are 11-13 years old, maybe younger — grouped around the back window, staring out of it with pure absorption. Curious, I stood to look over their shoulders and saw what they were so raptly taking in: the piercing combination of speed and density as the train gathered momentum and hammered through the massive concrete and metal tunnels, our view herking and jerking with the cars, snatching bits of burning light in metal casement, underground signage, the track flashing and going dark as we clangored through stations, past dozens of waiting humans, personalities firing off bodily messages that our eyes saw before our minds could read them. It was beautiful and the boys were radiant with it, this wordless amazement of things.

I think I remember this so vividly so many years later because even though it wasn’t “nature” the boys were looking at, the way they were looking showed natural reverence, something no one had to instruct them about. (Probably I also remember because I was young too, in my 20s, and was unconsciously forming what mattered to me, in life and in the art I was working on.) I’m sure they were not even aware of me but still, witnessing their shared seeing was like a spiritual recognition similar to what I might experience alone in my room, reading the world through the eyes of a great writer.

That may seem an odd comparison, but it makes sense to me because it is a real-life example of what I was talking about at the start of this piece, how the deep nature of stories can be revealed through descriptive imagery of small things irrelevant to the obvious narrative — unexpectedly poignant things we notice intensely or just out the corner of our eye, glimpsed patterns outside the spectrum of our daily lives.

It makes me sad to think that those same boys, if they existed today, wouldn’t be looking out the subway window because they would be staring at a phone. But even so, they would still have that ability to see in them, waiting to come alive.

***

A version of this essay first appeared on Mary’s Substack, Out Of It.

Before our call, she’d emailed me explaining that she wanted to talk about incels, and I thought that Whatever was the best book about them ever written: the world is divided into ugly and hot people who compete in ruthless combat, with no relief in marriage and no reward but rot. It’s obviously depressing — when I first read it, I immediately made my first (and for many years, last) therapist appointment. I was a 21-year-old living with my brother on Gainesville, Florida’s Sorority Row. I had no romantic prospects.

A few years later, I was in graduate school further north, in a contrived relationship with a cheerful Connecticut lawyer. In a cold and sunny condo, on the smooth wooden flooring, I read Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior: it was one of the only books about ugly women I’d ever read. There it was, again, but Midwestern and dumpy, not French and brainy: the sick sad world, where you might get laid but you’ll never get better.

Reading Gaitskill’s fantastic latest book, the essay collection Oppositions, I began to see why she’d reacted so badly to Houellebecq: he sounded simple, scientific, and therefore stupid. And Gaitskill doesn’t brook stupidity. Her terror and her grace — alongside her disorientingly good looks — is her intelligence; an elegant and icy one that, in the end, is also merciful. Throughout these astonishing essays about literature, music and more, she seems to be circling the notion that curiosity—embracing the muddle —is the path to empathy for sick, sad creatures like us.

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The Velvet Underground had to die

By Ann Manov

Most of the essays in Oppositions are reprised from her 2017 collection Somebody With a Little Hammer. That title comes from her essay — included in both volumes — about teaching Anton Chekhov’s Gooseberries, with its famous speech: “At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall — illness, poverty, loss — and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now.”

Gaitskill serves as the person with the little hammer, but she doesn’t just remind us of unhappiness: beyond that, her job is to remind us how complicated living is, how little we know, how much we have left to do. Her job is to make us be adults.

That maturity — sometimes painful, often bleak — can prove unpopular, especially when it comes to sex. But here, Gaitskill is in a class of her own: braver, ballsier—just smarter. Twelve pages into an essay defending Lolita as a book about love, about how lovers strive for heaven and dwell in hell, she starts talking about how she was molested at five — and says she felt empathy for the man; that she was even aroused. Wow!

Anyone rushing to dismiss Gaitskill as unempathetic or cold would be hard-pressed: she inserts herself into these questions with unflinching bravery, and she knows suffering herself. But her “story”, like everyone else’s, is up for debate, and she doesn’t make herself a martyr or a hero. And her goal isn’t to condemn — not to condemn Mailer or Nabokov or her assaulters or the pretentious boyfriend obsessed with The Talking Heads: her goal is to complicate. Her goal is to change her mind.

She brings the same remarkable mixture of clear thought and startling vulnerability to questions of sexual consent: her essay “The Trouble With Following the Rules” is, for me, just about the best analysis of date rape ever written. It begins with Gaitskill’s description of her date rape as a sixteen-year-old girl dropping acid with strangers in Detroit, before questioning whether it was really rape. In a stunning turn, she says that when she was “raped for real” by an attacker who threatened to kill her, she got over it pretty quickly. Then, she writes about when a casual friend and her get drunk and he became aggressive and seemed almost to force her into sex.

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The sexual revolution killed feminism

By Mary Harrington

In a move reminiscent of Amy Hempel’s The Harvest, Gaitskill writes: “In the original version of this essay I didn’t mention that when I woke up the next day I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and that when he called me I invited him over for dinner again. I didn’t mention that we became lovers for the next two years.” That first draft made the story simpler, but the messy version is braver and more true.

In Gaitskill’s vision, sexual partners have awkward, often painful, negotiations to make, often in the dark, often in a rush, often in confusion. And any decent, kind sex won’t come from rigid rules; it will come from, as she writes, “the kind of fluid emotional negotiation that I see as necessary for personal responsibility”. That negotiation may take years. By the end of the essay, she takes responsibility for pretending to consent, tripping in that apartment decades earlier, with that man who was poor and black and “high on acid and misunderstanding, just as I was”.

Gaitskill isn’t telling women to have lower standards for sex; in a sense, she’s telling them to have higher standards. In a remarkable piece on reading the Bible (“A Lot of Exploding Heads: On Reading the Book of Revelation”), she defines fornication not simply as sex outside of marriage, but as “sex done in a state of psychic disintegration, with no awareness of one’s self or one’s partner, let alone any sense of real playfulness”. It is a “primitive attempt” to “give ballast to the most desperate human confusion”.

Lately, outlets including the New York Times have been chattering about the idiotically termed “sex negativity”, supposedly in vogue among young women. However, after reading Gaitskill’s essays, it seems they’re not opposed to sex, but rather to what Gaitskill calls fornication.

“The Trouble With Following the Rules” is probably the best articulation of what, I think, women my age are so unhappy about: in the old sexual regime, the rule was for women to have as little sex as possible, and now the rule is to have as much sex as possible. But neither world really cares what women actually want or need, and in the new, supposedly liberated world, even if you aren’t date raped, as she says: “sometimes I did find myself having sex with people I barely knew when I didn’t really want to all that much.” Sex can be unpleasant or regrettable or confusing without being assault; with women under so much pressure and in so much pain, it’s hard to imagine otherwise.

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The sexual revolution killed feminism

By Mary Harrington

As she writes, all people have a mixture of strong and delicate parts; part of them wants strange sex, while part of them flinches from it. Often, we want many things we can’t articulate at all: that’s what being human is. We all know that, and we all deny that as we tell students to fill out “consent forms” on their phones before sex.

Gaitskill is trying — alongside other books of this year, such as Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again and The Right to Sex — to make sex complicated again. Often, it’s neither pure, joyous, free-willed pleasure, nor felony rape. As Gaitskill writes in her sympathetic but clear-eyed essay on Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat who later became an anti-porn activist, “I imagined that Lovelace simply lacked the confidence to describe what she did and felt in a nuanced way, and that the thing was very, very nuanced and contradictory. So she went with either ‘I liked it’ or ‘I was raped.’”

So many experiences are in between; in another anecdote, a woman in her fifties described how she was furious when she thought about how in her twenties, a man in the East Village would grab her breasts. But back then, she was giggly and flirted and loved attention. “So which is true, the giggly girl who just laughed when the guy grabbed her, or the angry woman in her fifties?”

Then she amps it up: apparently, some women orgasm when they are raped. What are we to do with this information? We live in a world of pain and compromise, and we need new language for “the sometimes excruciating contradictions that many women experience in relation to sex”. Without it, to quote her essay on the adaptation of Secretary (“Victims and Losers”), “every American has been “telling his her ‘story’ and trying to get redress for the last 20 years. Whatever the suffering is, it’s not to be endured, for God’s sake, not felt and never, ever accepted.”

Gaitskill accepts suffering. Perhaps that’s why girls my age love her so much. Gaitskill can see that even when we behave badly, we’re not just bad people making bad choices; we often don’t have good choices. We’re not sluts or evil or victims. We’re lost and lied to by everyone that was supposed to give us answers.

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How feminism ate itself

By Kat Rosenfield

Too many of us, like the protagonist of Secretary, “yearn for contact in an autistic and ridiculous universe, and… wind up getting [our] butt spanked instead.” We know that sex won’t save us, that work won’t save us, we know that feminism won’t save us, and we don’t think the old rules will either. There’s a sense of doom.

The last thing Gaitskill said to me, as I was leaving her home last week, was that she thought she’d have been a very different person if she hadn’t been raised in Michigan. Perhaps that’s the Midwesterner in her — a sense that the world where safety and comfort were a promise, where if you made the right choices the right things happened, has already ended. We showed up late.

But there, too, she’s different from Houellebecq. She might be dark, but she isn’t mean. She sees that everybody is suffering, men and women, beautiful and ugly. We are all both villains and victims. Across these essays, she’s attuned to the way art and experiences people dismiss as upsetting or triggering are simply attuned to the complexity of life — to the way that love is a living nightmare.

Tippi Hedren had never acted before. But on the basis of that advert alone Hitchcock offered her a five-year contract on $500 a week. He first cast her in The Birds, his dreamscape horror film set in northern California. The fact she wasn’t a star meant Hitchcock had greater leeway to exercise his Pygmalion instincts: he instructed her on what to wear, what to eat, what friends to see, and he isolated her from the other actors. Hedren later accused Hitchcock of sexually harassing her in Marnie, their final film together.

How did a greengrocer’s son from the East End of London, end up, by the time Marnie was being shot, the most powerful film director in the world? Edward White’s enjoyable jaunt through the different aspects of Alfred Hitchcock is not a straightforward biography; we don’t go from baby Hitch at the twilight of Victorian England to a portly octogenarian in sunlit California. The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock examines Hitchcock thematically. Through these themes an answer to that question emerges.

Hitchcock grew up in Edwardian London. As a boy, he read Edgar Allen Poe, John Buchan, and G.K Chesterton — works of fiction that combined cheap thrills with weightier metaphysical themes of dread and alienation. He loved the West End, and grew up in the culture of music halls and pubs. Both parents had Irish backgrounds, but his father was raised in the Church of England. When his father married his mother, he converted to Roman Catholicism.

He retained in later life all the fears and anxieties of his childhood. He was scared of policemen, strangers, driving, solitude, crowds, heights, water, and conflict of any sort. Like a child playing with his favourite toys, he preferred to work on sets rather than locations. And it is childishness, this desire for control, that, paradoxically, fuelled his status as an auteur.

Hitchcock was christened as such by La Nouvelle Vague, that avant-garde movement from the country that invented the cinema. But he was never the sole “author” of his films. Unlike Woody Allen or Quentin Tarantino, “when it came to screenwriting, Hitchcock relied on the talents of others”. Nevertheless, all his scripts had to have a “Hitchcock touch”: “The biggest trouble”, he once said, “is to educate writers to work along my lines”. He also had to educate actors to work along his lines, and this dictatorial approach to female actors, especially, is the most troubling aspect of his career.

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White describes Hitchock’s relationship to women as “complex” and “contradictory”. On the one hand, “he surrounded himself with women, sought out their friendship, gave them responsibilities and opportunities that few men of his station did, and proudly championed their work”. But on the other hand, it was through women that “he revealed the darkest, most discomfiting parts of himself”. White wonderfully describes him as a “curious brew of J. Alfred Prufrock and Benny Hill: English repression meeting English bawdiness, which may be two sides of the same coin”.

Hitchcock claimed his life with his wife Alma was celibate, and joked that when they conceived their only child he used a fountain-pen. When directing his first film at 25, The Pleasure Garden, he was baffled when one of the actresses refused to go inside water for a drowning scene. A cameraman had to explain to him what menstruation was: “I’ve never heard of it in my life!”. Yet a few years later, during a screen test with the Czech actress Anny Ondra for his first talkie film Blackmail, he questioned her on her sex life.

He also maintained throughout his career that he made films “to please women rather than men” because the majority of cinema-goers were supposedly women. White points out that the producer of his TV show was a woman, as were many of the screenwriters he worked with. Still, the most famous scene he ever shot features a woman, who the audience had up until then thought was the protagonist of the story, being stabbed to death less than halfway through the film.

Psycho cost $800,000 to make, and it made 15 million dollars. Hitchcock self-financed the film, and its success made him the richest director in America. After the high-budget Technicolor suspense thrillers of the 1950s with Grace Kelly, James Stewart, and Cary Grant, Psycho was a different affair. It was a black-and-white horror. The famous shower scene, lasting 50 seconds, took seven days to shoot. Chocolate syrup was used for the blood, and Janet Leigh’s body double for the scene was the Playboy model Marli Renfro.

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Who whacked Jensen Huang?

By Sarah Ditum

The most remarkable thing about the film was not the content, though, but the publicity. Hitchcock made cinema managers sign contracts which forbade audience members from entering the film after it started. He also ordered that, after the final haunting shot of the film was shown, cinema lights be kept low for a further thirty seconds. The effect was electric. Audience members apparently ran out of their seats; many soiled themselves. Promotional posters for the film featured Hitchcock pointing to his wristwatch next to the words: “No one … BUT NO ONE … will be admitted to the theatre after the start of each performance of ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S PYSCHO”. He was a consummate showman.

This concern for appearance was also evident in his attire. White dedicates one chapter in his book to exploring Hitchcock as a dandy. “Despite looking like a staid British bank manager”, White writes, “Hitchcock apportioned great depth to the surface of things. He wasn’t showy”, but “he was committed to the perfection of appearance as a way of exerting control over himself and the world around him”.

After he became rich in the mid-twenties, Hitchcock made a pilgrimage to Savile Row to establish his look: “dark business suit with white shirt, dark tie, and highly polished black shoes”. This trademark look was more than a disguise: it was, as White quotes Philip Mann on dandies, “a uniform for living”. The clothes expressed his soul. And that an outward appearance can express a soul illustrates an equally important element of Hitchcock’s aesthetic vision: Catholicism.

“One should add”, White writes, “that English cultural life in the years of Hitchcock’s childhood and young adulthood was more informed by Catholicism than at any moment since the early seventeenth century”. The two most prominent dandies in the decade Hitchcock was born, Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, were converts to Catholicism. Two novelists born less than a decade after Hitchcock, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, would convert later. Chesterton was a favourite of Hitchcock’s childhood. According to White, “the identifiably Catholic idea that can be found in Hitchcock’s aesthetic sensibility” is that “surface beauty is transcendental, a gateway to another dimension of experience”. He adds that “some of the most famous shots in Hitchcock’s films display objects that seem to be imbued with forces, good and evil, beyond the physical realm”.

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Black radicals don't need white saviours

By Tomiwa Owolade

There’s a tension, according to White, between Hitchcock’s Catholicism and his experimental techniques: “the magical elements of Catholic teaching to which Hitchcock was drawn were defended fiercely by the Vatican in the years of Hitchcock’s creative life as a bulwark against modernity — a condition that Hitchcock not only grasped but embodied”. Nevertheless, White contends Hitchcock found a way to fuse the “magical” and the “modern”: “he had a fixation with technique and precision planning, but this was used to create a filmic world that slipped the grasp of science, technology, and rational thought”. He used modernist techniques, then, but resisted the overarching beliefs that explained them. And the Catholicism that suffused his films was the vague and cryptic kind, not clearly articulated doctrine.

This is why, perhaps, when people asked Hitchcock what his films were about, he shrugged: “I don’t give a damn what the film is about”. He disdained attempts to find larger meanings in his work; he wanted them to be appreciated for their form and visual excellence. In this sense, he resembled the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who claimed of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Any ass can assimilate the main points of Tolstoy’s attitude toward adultery but in order to enjoy Tolstoy’s art the good reader must wish to visualize, for instance, the arrangement of a railway carriage on the Moscow-Petersburg night train as it was a hundred years ago”.

Both rejected ideological or moralistic readings of their work; both were characterised by their stylistic virtuosity; both were fascinated by obsessional love and delusion; and both exercised omnipotent control over their art. Hitchcock’s control over his actresses recalls Nabokov’s description of his characters as “galley slaves”. Hitchcock and Nabokov were both born in 1899 and took America as their home at around the same time: they were two expats from the Old World who gave sunny post-war America a sinister edge.

In November 1964, Hitchcock had even written a letter to Nabokov asking him to write a script for two films. The first was a spy film, which Nabokov declined. The second was about “a teenage girl who realises that the hotel run by her family is a front for an organised-crime operation”. Nabokov was intrigued by this, but it never came to fruition: “Demands on both men’s time meant the collaboration never happened”. Our loss.

Nevertheless, even if his films were not about large overarching themes, White’s book shows they were nevertheless a crucible through which many of the currents of the twentieth-century clashed. Hitchcock wanted us to watch his films for entertainment; but we know they are more than that. He was a modernist and a Catholic. Elegance and charm mixed in his films with sex and violence. As White notes near the end of this stimulating book, Hitchcock’s “variegated legacies, buttressed by his phenomenal talent and unconventional personality, make him a codex of his times, usually complex, often troubling, but always vital”.