Another kind of madeleine, please!

This morning as we drove to the farmer’s market, the windows rolled all the way down, Randy Cohen, the NY Times’ former ethicist came on NPR to discuss his new book, How to Be Good. He said something that has followed me through an entire, glorious, late summer day – followed me on a long run through the woods; eating a drippy peach in the shade; preparing a barbeque for out of town relatives, past a sinkful of dirty dishes, to the computer. Now. He said that despite believing that there is a universal ethical DNA that all humans share (paraphrased), the thing Cohen loved about ethics, about the question of how to be good was that there was never one correct answer. That honorable people would always disagree over what was ethical.

I just finished reading Sheila Heti’s much discussed book, How a Person Should Be. I’ve also just finished reading her disappointing piece in the LRB on Ben Lerner’s book, Leaving Atocha Station, which I read a few weeks ago. Because she is a woman and has been much praised, I badly wanted to love her. (Her post on the Believer site about astrology was so wonderful). How a Person Should Be was everything James Wood warned that the book might be for a reader – deliberately flippant, uneasy, slightly insulting in its coolness, in its cheap pleasures (the ‘play’ dialogue; the profane but frankly boring sex scenes). I was discussing the book with a dear friend of mine before I read it and he said he never felt that How a Person Should Be never really attempted to answer its lofty title. Now that I’ve read the book, I can say I disagree. The answer it seemed to relay was: Struggle. A dissatisfied, fits-y, struggle that consoles itself with the credibility of self-awareness, of knowing what struggle can be. Wood laments that Heti's book opts for "successful evasiveness" and "hospitality" over rigor. That winking, flirty, relatability is a familiar and feminine kind of seduction. And yet, I can’t disagree that the book is brave – it’s loose; it attempts to capture something about a contemporary diffidence that so many consumers of culture today seem to want to see laid out on the page. There are sections of lucid writing -- but they never "pierced" me as they seemed to have pierced Miranda July (she blurbed for the book). Most of the book just really depressed me.

Reading Leaving the Atocha Station, on the other hand, was an unexpected pleasure. It had all the surface elements of the kind of book I’m primed to dislike – an angsty, self-aware, protagonist whose undeniable intelligence is given over to self-scrutiny, to self-protection, cynicism; whose entire being is stippled with traits that I find unappealing in life and everywhere else. But! How I really enjoyed this book. How Lerner’s poeticism conquers the constraints of what a novel can be and transcends its parts to be something wholly compelling. In her LRB review, Heti trudges through every part of Lerner’s book, quibbling with this passage and that. She seems to have missed the point. The book altogether, the gestalt of the book, is something much more powerful than any event within the book. In Leaving the Atocha Station readers begin to sense the diffuse parameters of the narrator and the unending bind of anxiety, self-awarenes, intelligence – all those afflictions?/ characteristics that make up Heti’s protagonist in her own novel. Lerner has managed to evoke all those states of being through a fictional protagonist. In the tradition of great fiction writing, Lerner pulls off something artful. While his protagonist is affected, he doesn’t dress affect up; it is sincere affection and so we, as readers, are affected.

Perhaps I am being uncharacteristically harsh – but I really loved Jacob Silverman’s piece on the epidemic of niceness killing criticism and who reads this blog anyways? Hi Christopher!  Also, I’m really disappointed in Heti’s writing; in her allure; in her position as one of few contemporary women fiction writers sharing the microphone with lots of guys. When will anxiety stop being en vogue? Perhaps never. I laugh as I write this because I’m happy to say I've been reading Proust these days. And am loving it.