So it's a book about writing by a guy who doesn't even claim to be a writer: he was a long-tenured fiction editor at Esquire. So that means there are no writing exercises, and there are no lofty flights about the magic and power of the written word. It's basically just one long essay explaining what exactly differentiates great literature and moving works of art from, say, "Cat Person" by Kristen Roupenian. A discussion I’ve, stunningly, rarely run into throughout my 20+ years of studying writing—perhaps because Hills isn't really a writer he feels less protective of allowing people to plainly see how literature does what it does (I mean, if I fully understood how to create literature the last thing I'd ever do is blab about it all to you.) Does he do it though? Does he explain what literature is? I think so. And it was way simpler than what I was attempting to do. Four stars.
"The Craft of Fiction" by Percy Lubbock (1921)
I'm not sure if this is considered "New Criticism"; if anything, it feels like a precursor to that movement, which apparently took off in the 1940s. Both this book and that movement import to the ordinary reader that in order to fully appreciate literature a reader needs to go beyond the pleasures of story and implant within themselves some understanding of the workings of craft. I buy that in the sense that ... well, remember how in the 90s people thought Harry Potter would usher in this renaissance of reading? And all that ended up happening is now there are a whole bunch of grown adults pushing 40 reading books that were explicitly intended to be comprehended by children? Well, so, to backtrack, I buy that in the sense that understanding the mechanism of story might help people expand beyond the things they already like, in the same way that someone who understands the game of baseball can watch and appreciate games played by teams other than their favorite. So should this book, which is focused entirely on the role point of view plays in accomplished novels, be read by the casual reader? Well, no. But if you aspired to be a writer, there's great stuff in here! What's interesting is, as writing instruction became more formalized in the 20th century, it seems like the "rules" actually grew more and more rigid, even as the field became more and more democratized. I think that's what happens if you want to open up the field to more people: it's hard to organize (hard to sell) a big tent if you tell everybody: Hey, fundamentally, there are actually no rules whatsoever! The New Criticism crowd seemed to understand that, even while pointing out exactly how the gears turned. It's interesting to read thoughts about writing from this era, to me, because I keep running into fundamentally sound arguments that seem to have been entirely forgotten/ignored/rejected, for whatever reasons, none of which seem good. Four stars.
"Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" by Fredric Jameson (1991)
In a word, it's exhausting. Which isn't to say it's unpleasant—there's actually a nice little (albeit peculiar) flow to this Marxist literary critic's entangled and far-ranging writing style. I'll start with this though: you get a clearer idea of whether his ideas on the tenor of our current culture hold any water now that we're 33 years out and the "postmodern" trends he identifies and argues for only seem to have exponentially exploded. Whether you're patient enough or primed enough to explore them is a whole other issue (I don't think I would have understood practically anything here if I hadn't taken myself through a university survey of literary theory a couple years ago, and that still didn't prevent a great deal of re-reading.) So why do I feel it's worth talking about if the book is so clearly difficult and esoteric? Well, attempting to take an all-encompassing, birds-eye view of the cultural era we currently live in—characterized mainly by gargantuan pluralization, fragmentation, and commodification—is frankly insane.* That Jameson does a pretty good job of it in a little over 400 pages is impressive, at least considering how many times he got me to pause and consider my own era (Have you ever spent an idle weekend considering your own era? Especially one as fucked up as this one?) There aren't many books out there that attempt to sum up THE ENTIRE STORY. And if that wets your whistle I'd say this is a pretty good one. I would think speeding through it on your one off-day away from the kids is out of the question though: you'd give yourself a stroke. Four stars.
*Here is the book's closing paragraph: "The rhetorical strategy of the preceding pages has involved an experiment, namely, the attempt to see whether by systematizing something that is resolutely unsystematic, and historicizing something that is resolutely ahistorical, one couldn’t outflank it and force a historical way at least of thinking about that. 'We have to name the system': this high point of the sixties finds an unexpected revival in the postmodernism debate."
"Our Aesthetic Categories - Zany, Cute, Interesting" by Sianne Ngai (2012)
A dense academic book (accordingly, a fairly slow read) nonetheless it might be interesting for the casual reader as it focuses on three things we're culturally, irresistibly drawn to: things that are cute, things that are interesting, and things that are zany. Why these three and not, say, the most familiar aesthetic category: beauty? Because Ngai believes a focus on these three will help us understand much more generally "what hits" in our current era, the postmodern era*—cute is a "claymation"/dollhouse Airbnb commercial, interesting is an ongoing Wendy's "staffers" campaign, and zany is Flo's ever-shifting role in Progressive ads—you see these three "hooks" pop up again and again and again, and in combination, in any commercial break or, for that matter, in any social media post (YouTube video essays commonly, strenuously aim for all three at once.) Now, I'm not going to claim I've read enough books on philosophical aesthetics to confidently say exactly where Ngai is or isn't off-base with her arguments (cuteness=commodity, interestingness=information, zaniness=performance), or whether her focus on these three aesthetic categories is even justified, though I certainly have some thoughts (tying zaniness to the ever-consuming demands of capitalism on femininity kind of makes sense, but still feels somewhat shoehorned in—I don't think that explains why I enjoy watching "I Think You Should Leave.") I sure don't want to drag this out too long, so what I'll say is: there must be a reason why people in, say, advertising or social media reliably turn to these three things in order to nab our attention/affection in a crazily overstuffed field, and there must be a reason why these three things are often relied upon by ourselves to procure our own likes. And in a very extensively, very diversely sourced book that gets you to pause on and consider these seemingly disposable aesthetics—things we encounter every day that actively and powerfully and somewhat silently influence our behavior, things we barely give a second thought to—any serious examination is welcome, even if inevitably at times it feels "off," even if it's naggingly dominated by Marxist ideas. There's more than enough "on" there to encourage eyeing the world through an askance view: Ever notice that tech companies overwhelmingly embrace a cute visual style? Ever notice that whenever you're drawn to something cute, they're usually "little" and "submissive" and "weaker," which implies a power differential between you and the cute object? Ever notice that that power differential, much like with a newborn baby, inspires a kind of protectiveness, which means that the cute object is now making demands off of you? So who exactly is the powerful one here?—Ngai makes you think about stuff like that. Four stars.
*"The zany, the cute, and the interesting are not really 'minor' in the sense of being unimportant or marginal. The specific social transformations and/or aesthetic problems to which they intimately speak—the convergence of art and information; the loss of tension between art and the commodity form; the rise of an increasingly intimate public sphere and of an increasingly exchange-based private one; the proliferation and intensification of activity in both public/private domains that cannot easily be dichotomized into play or work—are ones that significantly affect the making, dissemination, and reception of all culture. These three particular categories thus help us totalize the contemporary repertoire of 'aesthetic categories'; indeed, they help us understand the meaningfulness of this very concept for doing aesthetic theory in general."
"On Writing" by Eudora Welty (2002)
I feel like we all forgot about her—sure, Flannery O'Connor wrote better short stories, and sure, Flannery O'Connor was so enticingly mean, and sure, it's a little odd that a fellow Southern writer wouldn't mention Flannery O'Connor once in her book about writing (Faulkner gets gushed upon), but Eudora Welty was still good. At the very least, Eudora Welty was more generous in her thoughts about it, even in this short, 100-page book (Flannery O'Connor's mysteries and manners kind of feels like a scolding.) What's different about this one? First, it starts from a base of: Not everybody can write. So it immediately dispenses with "Writing 101" issues. Hence, it also dispenses with the Writing 101 idea that writing should be a mirror reflection of life, and insists that good writing is really more an imitation of life, similar to how Van Gogh's sunflowers don't quite look like real sunflowers, and that's what makes it beautiful. The rest of her thoughts lie on this elevated level: how does the writer work with the reader to, together, create something beautiful? The effect is to expand your understanding of how beauty is achieved beyond, say, describing landscapes using exquisite words. And you could see her focus on beauty across each page: this is probably the best written treatise on writing I've ever read, wordsmith-wise. As I went through this I couldn't help but think that the prevailing writing advice I've received: "Just keep reading and writing," is flat-out horrible advice—yes, I've learned how to pack an enormous amount of big thoughts into one small paragraph and still make it digestible, but is what you just read beautiful? I would say no. Four stars.
"Nonconformity - Writing on Writing" by Nelson Algren (1996)
A humanist railing against how "being American" is a dehumanizing force, a treatise teetering on the edge of unhinged rage. Good thing I didn't really get into Algren when I was younger. Because if I did I would probably now be dead—I didn't really need an avowed nonconformist to fan my flames; if so, I would have exploded. Three stars.
"Letters on the Short Story, the Drama, and Other Literary Topics" by Anton Chekhov, Selected and Edited by Louis S. Friedland (1924)
I picked this up because I assumed it would be filled with insights into his writing process, a distillation of his much larger collection of letters into select, juicy nuggets of creative wisdom. It's not. The vast majority of it, actually, reads like gossip. In fact, you get the sense that Chekhov wrote these letters believing that there was no way in hell his survivors would ever approve the commercial publication of his private correspondence,* which can be characterized by their emotional erraticism, the sense that he found the state of modern culture entirely stupid, and his hatred of seemingly every other human being on earth (I laughed out loud at the harshness he doled out on this female writer for saying, "The aim of life is life itself," calling it bafflingly insincere, and then ending his tirade by basically saying, "Ah, she's a good lady"; there's also a very memorable exchange where he tells the head of a young writer's association that, no, he won't join their young writer's association because young writer's associations are stupid.) There's a much more recent collection of his "writings for writers" which edits things to give you only a spiritually uplifting picture of an esteemed, moral thinker, which is pretty much wholly anti-Chekhov, and which seems to me a book to cherish only if you happen to be dumb. As for this one, there are perhaps loads of grand statements (he really hated grand statements) to be made connecting his realistic fiction with the stunning emotional range of what is said here (in turns: wise, scared, demanding, childlike, mean, kind, horny, ascetic, probably drunk.) Though, for the purposes of writing instruction, maybe this should simply be considered an endorsement for the energizing, even inspiring, power of creative hatred. Three stars.
*I’ve read Flannery O'Connor's letters and in comparison, in hindsight, they now feel very, very, very carefully controlled.
"Fiction and the Figures of Life" by William H. Gass (1971)
I suppose if you have no interest in how literature is created, there's no reason for you to read this book, a collection of essays and book reviews straddling literature and philosophy. But there's something so thrilling about his writing style, to me, it's a bit of a shame if people don't experience it at least once. The best, most succinct way I can describe it is: it doesn't ever feel cheap, or chintzy or mass produced or even triple-gilded, overadorned, and when you run into writing that doesn't feel cheap your awareness of the sheer amount of cheap writing that surrounds our lives actually begins to feel overwhelming, in a somewhat suffocating way. And! If you happen to already have an interest in how literature is created, what you'll find are a number of stunning insights, too many to list, often philosophically spiked, that avoids aphorism, grandiloquence, inspirational cant, or even equivocation—you really get the impression of a person who's very thoroughly thought through something in an attempt to get as close as possible to the heart of the heart of his subject (he's basically what David Foster Wallace would be if David Foster Wallace were actually as intelligent as he taught himself to sound.) And if that seems somewhat trite—praising someone for actually thinking deeply about something before writing it down—again, you come out of the book feeling like that kind of approach, for whatever reason, isn't actually valued by anyone with a pen. After all, putting on a cheap show, as we've all seen by now, is a fairly easy thing for anyone and their mother to do. Five stars.
"Creating Fiction - Instruction and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs" Edited by Julie Checkoway (1999)
Imagine my delight upon seeing someone's recommended list of writing books and discovering that I had already owned five of seven—a validation of my instinctive ability to sniff out quality writing advice! That included this and the benefit of this book over others as far as writing instruction goes is you get a variety of teaching styles in one sitting—you don't just get one person's theory, you get about thirty of them! Some very insightful and high quality, some of them asinine: the advantage of confidently declaring yourself an "expert" in a field like creative writing, a field that very few people actually understand, a field highly susceptible to wistful, windswept sentimentality, is that the chances an impressionable young hopeful will listen to you with unquestioning, shining adoration are very, very, very high, which is an attitude that’s remarkably easy to exploit. Some of these writers seem guilty of that. But, because of the book’s scattershot nature, the chances you'll run into unusually considered and highly worthwhile wrinkles of narrative craft are also very high. So, on the whole, I think it's rather good. At the same time, I've read this book before, as an unquestioning, shining, young idolator. And I think I wrongly took away lessons from the more flashy, inspirational teachers than from the ones who preached classical, grinding restraint in a minor key. Now that I look back, I think it's their fault. Three stars.
"Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, Fourth Edition" by Edward P.J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors (1999)
It's a 500-page book about classical rhetoric, so I'll try to keep this brief. Maybe it's too late for you to become a stronger writer, but in the event your child shows a knack for words it might be a good idea to get this book on their radar. For some reason, I went through most of my life never once hearing about it, until it was referenced in an academic paper I was reading about advertising. Which means either the state of the humanities had been in decline for much longer than we thought, or narrow-minded parents were desperately dissuading their children away from writing as a career. I've found, if you dissuade a talented, budding writer away from a writing career, you're pretty much sentencing your peculiar, creative child to a long, sad, unfulfilled life (an unusually large number of these children grow up to be financially secure, emotionally damaged Asians.) So if you want to spare those kids a future, decades-long SSRI/Xanax dependency, just know this might actually be the best book on the nuts-and-bolts craft of writing I've ever read. (Sidenote: I can now recognize, thanks to this book, the advertising agency Fallon McElligott, in their heyday, more than anyone else, made use of classical rhetoric precepts in their work.) Five stars.
"A Little Book on Form" by Robert Haas (2017)
It's pretty excellent, packing a semester's worth of poetry instruction into 400 or so pages. If you go into it though, just understand it packs a semester's worth of poetry instruction into 400 pages. Four stars.