To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Fictional Fun

From PRI, public radio -international, it's to the best of our knowledge, pension -flemming. If you want a new novel to get a lot of buzz, it helps if the book is a bit outrageous and not to mention obsessively self -conscious, but is serious fiction getting too caught up in the latest fashions. You want your art to be hip and seem cool to people you want, people to like the stuff, but a great deal of what passes for hip or cool is now highly, highly commercially driven. And it's David Foster Wallace, one of the most original voices in American fiction. He says, the challenge for many writers is to find a voice that's both ironic and deeply felt. Today, in a special fiction edition, we'll talk about everything from the revival of the short story to Australia's new Wunderkint. We'll also peel back the covers of Chick -Lid and what's with all those pink covers anyway. Chick -Lid in a way is like comfort food, okay? Like when you buy the Stofers frozen dinner with fried chicken and mashed potatoes, like you want fried chicken and mashed potatoes. And I think that those pink covers are a way of signifying, okay, smart, witty, unhappy hero and who is going to get happy by the end of this book, that's what you're going to get.

Are you one of those people who's nursed a secret dream, writing a novel, maybe getting a story published in the New Yorker? There's still no better showcase for short stories. After all, it's the magazine that launched Chiever than Salinger. More recently, masters like Alice Monroe and Laurie Moore. A few years ago, the magazine picked a new fiction editor, the young and hip, Deborah Treesman, who just happens to be married to a rock musician. So is the New Yorker changing its stripes? Steve Paulson was curious. So he sat down with Deborah Treesman and one of her star writers, George Saunders, who's written the acclaimed short story collections, Pastor Allia, and Civil Warland in Bad Decline. Deborah, let me start with you. Is there still such a thing as a New Yorker's story? Well, that's the million dollar question that I get asked and that everybody else who works at the magazine gets asked. And I'm actually not sure that there ever was such a thing as a New Yorker's story. If there was

no one agrees on what it was, people think it was Dorothy Parker. People think it was John Chiever. It's this very, you know, or Bane, or it's a bourbon, angst story, or it's a story with a big epiphany at the end. And in fact, even in those days, the magazine was running things that were quite different from that. It was running Chiever. It was also running Bartholomew. It was running. Oh, Harriet was running people who were much more traditional. So it was very, it's always been a mix. Well, let me ask it another way. Then would you stay away from certain kinds of stories that other magazines might publish, whether it's McSweeney's or Harper's or name your publication? Well, there is one sense of responsibility that I have in this job, which is that I'm publishing stories for an audience that's around a million people. If I were publishing at a magazine, which I've done in the past with a readership of 5 ,000, 5 ,000 people who want something very specific, I could be much narrower in my selections, whereas publishing for a wide audience, you have to be aware of certain things. It has to be a satisfying read on certain levels. It has to have a beginning and an end.

And it has to feel like a story. What you can do for smaller audiences, sometimes I think is, in a sense, give a writing sample. Well, George Sonders, let me bring you into the discussion. You've been publishing lots of stories in the New Yorker and you were probably exhibit A in terms of how stories have changed in the New Yorker. I mean, a lot of your stories are kind of fantastical, and I mean, they certainly veer away from, I suppose you could call them a realistic tradition of at least what I associate as the old New Yorker's story. I am the barbarian at the gate. Well, how do you see that? Well, my experience with the New Yorker was, it started in 92, and it was actually the first issue that Tina Brown edited, and I think they were looking for a monkey boy a little bit to sort of mix it up, and they had, it was an issue with John Uptike kind of a before and after, you know, good, not so good. So I was happy to be there, but I think, and that first issue, I remember big fights about contractions, because the story was kind of in this slingy vernacular, and also swear words were a bit

of an issue. And the editing process went on, I think, for about four months, it was a really long kind of thing. Well, I'm curious, for instance, about your story, CEO, which originally appeared in the New Yorker has recently been enthologized in the anchor book of New American short stories, and well, just to give a taste of it, I mean, this is about a very poor family just trying to make ends meet, and there's an older woman who was very kindly who dies, and then seems to climb out of the grave by herself and comes back and turns into a battle axe and starts ordering her family around to sort of pull themselves out of poverty while various limbs in her body are falling off. And so why is that not in New Yorker's story? I don't know, I don't know, I'm getting the whole premise here. Now, I'm guessing that 30 years ago, this story never would have made it in the New Yorker, right? Well, look, I wasn't there 30 years ago, but I actually, I don't know for sure, but I don't think that the imagination in that story would have been barred from the magazine. There might have been issues with certain obscenities that appear in that story in other parts. In fact, even

Alice Monroe has told me that she had trouble with obscenity in her story being censored. So yes, there are certain differences, and I would say that the magazine has definitely loosened up. No, I'm curious about how the whole business of fiction works. I mean, how you deal with a story once it comes in. Is there a lot of editing that goes on? Well, it runs the whole gamut. Some stories come in and seem to be fully working on their own terms, and we'll end up arguing about some punctuation or some words here and there, and they'll run pretty close to how they came in. Some stories come in and seem to not quite be doing what they're trying to do, but that goal is within reach. So often we'll talk to a writer at that stage and say, I think this isn't landing right. We're not feeling satisfied with this, or this character somehow doesn't fit here or work here, and suggest a revision. Do you ever have those conversations with Alice Monroe or John Updike? I don't edit John, but I have definitely had them with Alice. Yeah, she's written new passages,

we've moved an ending to a beginning. Alice is like many people, actually, surprisingly receptive to editing. Well, George, what's been your experience on being on the other side as the writer? Well, my experience has been that I go as far as I possibly can. I'm really kind of obsessed about revising and revising, so when I send it, I'm positive it's perfect. And then when they take it, I'm even more convinced. And I say, this will be the time, there'll be no changes. And then Debra will send me a galley. And again, I don't know how she works with other writers, but what I love about our relationship is it's very zen. I think we never talk about the theme of a story or the concept of the meaning. It's just all done with cuts and suggestions and it's all paring it down, making it more and more concise. Yeah, and often, you know, a joke will get cut. But it's in three incarnations and she'll pick the best one, say, or just that feeling of having a passage that's not so bad and gets hacked back by 20 % and suddenly, it's what I really wanted to do. But in the process of writing, you get attached to certain things, internal rhythms and so on. So you can't quite hear that there's a better version

of that passage. And then the really beautiful thing is during that process, the other stuff, the themes and the meanings and the emotion and the pathos, those all get heightened, but through this process of precision, I actually just really love it. George, have you had any stories rejected by the New Yorker in recent years? Sure. So even though you're very well established now, they don't take everything that you offer. Thank God. Everyone concerned. Deborah, I'm sure a lot of aspiring writers wonder if you ever publish unsolicited manuscripts. It has happened. It has happened. It does. Oh, really? It's happened. It happened with George. It's happened with quite a few people who we publish frequently now. Can I say it happens a lot? No. But that's, I think, a nature of something that's happened in the business, which is that people who want to write are much more aware now that there's a system there. So what's the system? Do you ask writers to, do you have a story that you're working on that you want to

give to us? Oh, I often do that. Yeah. And we often do that with people that we haven't published, who we've read and look interesting. But more often somebody who's trying to be a writer and who's starting out and who thinks that they have a talent in this day and age, they go first to an agent. So there are some things that come in through the slash pile, which is what we call it. In fact, there is one not so long ago, within the last six months, I think it was by a woman called Gina Oshner, who'd actually already published her first collection of stories, but we didn't know of her. And I think at that point, she didn't yet have an agent and she just sent it in. She sent in a story which one of the assistant editors read and didn't think was quite there, but he wrote back to her and asked to see more. And that's more often that's the process that we don't actually take the story that's come in this way. But it, someone who reads it, spots the promise, writes back, and then a correspondence happens. And it might not be the next story, the next story, but it might be three stories away. How many unsolicited stories do you get, let's say, in an average month? I've seen that slash pile. There is an actual slash pile. Yeah. It's pretty big. Yeah. These days, they're coming in through email mostly.

I'm not sure, you know, we don't sit there and count them, I would guess it's something like 500 a week. 500 a week. Three to 500 a week. And does someone actually look at all of them? Everything is red. I've seen that too. We have assistants, we have interns, but everything is red. Wow. How much do you pay for a story in the New Yorker? Well, there's a, um, can you just say loads? I wish, you know, I wish it were more loads. For a very long time, there's been the dollar award formula. Some writers are on contract with us, in which case the pay scale is different, but, uh... So it will depend on who the writer is. We have with a certain number of writers, you know, about 30, maybe 40, something that's called a first look agreement, which is everything they write, they have to run by us first before they can send it somewhere else. We have to write a first refusal, I guess. And those writers get paid on a different scale. So it depends on how many stories a year they publish, they get a bonus for publishing more than one story. Let me, let me expand the conversation, so to talk not just about the New Yorker, but the short

story in general, my sense is that there's been a real revival in the short story, that it's kind of an exciting time to be a short story writer. And if you appreciate this kind of fiction, it's a good time to see all the different stuff that's being published. Now, George, is that your impression as well? Yeah, it is, but on the other hand, I think back to, uh, even in the 80s, when I was starting out, that was pretty, you know, carver and Tobias Wolfen. And so if you look at stuff since, at least since I've been around, there's a constant revival. There's constant feeling that this is an incredibly, uh, American form that is really, really good at adapting to the moment. Even though, I mean, the conventional wisdom is no one can make a living just from writing short stories. I mean, if you want to make a living just as a writer, you better write novels. Yeah, this is the problem that I run up against because all of the people that I, who's writing I love and I love to publish are pressured by their publishers and by their agents to write novels. And often we'll have someone who might have been able to rely on for two or

three stories a year will suddenly disappear for five years while struggling with a novel. And really we'll get nothing from them. And it's very frustrating because you had this sense of security, oh, there's this writer who does wonderful short stories. And not only are they not very happy because they're trying to write novels, which they don't have experience writing. But they disappear from view and they leave us empty handed. I've actually found it maybe a less good time for short stories in the last few years because this, this has seemed to happen over and over again. Are these two different kinds of people, those who write short stories and those who write novels? Obviously there's crossover, but my sense at least is the really great short story writers are usually not great novelists. True. Well, I can only speak about those two people in myself, which is the novelist one doesn't exist so far. But it's because I don't really understand what might be beautiful at that pace. There's something about my style that's inherently, I think it's sort of like you, you know, you, one of those wind up toys, you wind it up, put it on the floor, and it goes under the couch. That's it. You know, that's kind of my aesthetic. So I could sort of maybe understand how

a person might be in novels, but for me on my sense of beauty has to do with brevity and compression and so on. What's the answer to that? I think that there are people who do both well and who are actually quite controlled about it, but they're definitely using different muscles to do the two things. I'm thinking of TC Boyle, who he'll send me 10 stories in a row, and then he'll say, this is my last story for 13 months and during the next 13 months, I'll be writing a novel and say next September, you'll have the next story. And it actually will arrive, I mean, almost to the day, when he says, and then he says that there'll be nine more stories, and then I'll be writing a novel. And then in eight months, you'll have the next story, you know, and it's, it's, wow, he really has this organized. He's killing me. He has a schedule. He has a schedule. And the novel's quite different from the stories, you know, he has this very compacted style in his stories, which he gets to expand on in the novels. So what, why doesn't that compacted style work for a novel as well? Is it just too hard to carry that through at a full length of a book? Well, often a story is trying to do one thing, and that one thing might not be enough for

300 pages. A novel seems to have to branch off in different directions and then say, have five threads and then pull those five threads together. I, I've been reading Google that Dead Souls is such a great novel. And I think part of the, the way the novel works is that you implicitly give the novel's permission to go into a room and kind of stretch and look around a little bit. And if you want to describe the Nicknack cabinet, you both understand that that's part of the fun. Whereas for a well -made story, I think the Nicknack cabinet is never relevant. You know, unless there's somebody hiding in it, but it's not, if it doesn't have a function, at least in my aesthetic, we understand that that is, that's local color and we don't like it. So I think there's just a tiny adjustment in the mind that says, okay, I've got some time. Feel free to go to the, the cabinet, whereas in the story and certainly in the, my model of the story, you're looking for kind of sleekness that you can only get by cutting the cabinet out. Even if it's there and even if it's, it would be kind of cool to describe it in three sentences. There's something kind of electric about deciding to, to not, it's, it's a minimalist, I

think, I think. Fascinating. Thank you, both very much. Thank you. Thank you. George Sonders' books include Pastoralio and Civil War Land in Bad Decline. Deborah Treesman is the fiction editor of The New Yorker. They spoke with Steve Paulson. If I were a volcano, I would want you to jump, jump into my yellow. You person made of bones. The ghost of Rita Gonzalo performed by the band One Ring Zero and written by Dave Eggerts, one of the new contributors to The New Yorker. Coming up, one writer boars into the unsavory side of the male psyche. You can walk into a building and

there are two female receptionists, but one is clearly more attractive than the other and the man will hope that the more attractive one is going to serve him. Now this is insane because his interaction with the woman will be maybe ten seconds, but he wants the more attractive of the two women to say, please take a seat. I'm Jim Fleming. It's to the best of our knowledge from PRI, Public Radio International. One of the more audacious novels I've come across

recently is by the Australian writer Elliott Perlman, the book's called Seven Types of Ambiguity. It's a story of obsessive love told by seven different narrators. The book raises a basic question. Can we ever know the truth when everyone has a different way of telling the same story? Here's one of those narrators trying to size up Simon, the novel's main character. He was thinking of writing something on the work of his hero, the literary critic William Empson. You might remember Simon going on about Empson, the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, but it's all lost on me. He bought me a copy, to put it simply, or perhaps, symbolistically. It seemed to be an analysis of the effects a poet may achieve consciously or not through the use of ambiguity. I couldn't get through the book. I suspect Simon knows this. As far as I was concerned, there were more important ambiguities than the ambiguity of poetic language that Empson talked about. There's the ambiguity of

human relationships, for instance. A relationship between two people, just like a sequence of words, is ambiguous if it is open to different interpretations. And if two people do have differing views about their relationship, I don't just mean about its state, I mean about its very nature, then that difference can affect the entire course of their lives. Elliot Perlman, reading from his book Seven Types of Ambiguity, Perlman says the idea for the novel came from his other career. I'm a lawyer, a trial attorney, a barrister in Australia. But before I was, well, I was already a lawyer, but I was cloaking for a Supreme Court judge, and we would listen to murder trials. And it struck me that frequently, you know, you'll see on television on a program like Law and Order, the outcome is determined with a great degree of certainty through DNA evidence,

blood sample, a fingerprint, something like that. But frequently, in my experience of criminal law in Australia, and I suspect it's the same everywhere, the verdict is determined by a jury based upon their collective assessment of different relationships. And you're asking 12 people to determine whether or not they think a certain event happened, you know, most crimes of violence actually happened between people that know each other. And so the relationship between the two people is extremely important to determine whether or not jurors think it's likely that a certain violent event was intended. I was curious about this because what you're saying is that we make judgments based upon the stories we hear. Absolutely, yeah. And not only that, something that occurred to me as well in practicing law

is that there is a tendency for most people to think that the first version of a story is the correct one. But it means this. There's always a bias in favor of the prosecution because the prosecution presents its case first. And that's not a flaw in the system. It has to be that way. I mean, in order to answer a charge, someone has to lay the charge, make the accusation. And what it means is that when the jury hears a different account, say, the defense account of the crime, they're already thinking, hmm, that doesn't sound right to me because I've already heard this story before in this version, slightly different from the previous version. So it must be wrong. We should get out of the story that you tell in seven times of ambiguity because I'd give you the chance, I guess, to tell us the story first so that we can make any judgments based on how true that is. It's a story with seven narrators. And there is,

or perhaps there is a crime at the root of the stories that are told, right? Look, there definitely is a crime. But what I've tried to do is make it so that the person that commits the crime, and he's a character named Simon, is very sympathetic and largely morally innocent. But in the strict letter of the law, he's guilty. Without giving away too much of the plot, this is a man who is a school teacher. He's lost his job as part of the downsizing of teachers that happened in an epidemic in Australia. And he's obsessed with his college sweetheart because at the time that they were a couple, it was practically the highlight of his life. Everything seemed to be going well, and nothing has gone too well after that. And he fixates on her, and he runs into her by chance. And he sees that she has a small son, and he starts to do research, or

really stalking. And he takes matters into his own hands, which lead to consequences that affect many people in the book. And the novel asks various questions, and one of the questions it asks, I hope, is, is it possible to love or care too much, and it becomes a pathology? One of the ways in which you pursue that is between Anna Simon's unrequited love, and her husband, Joe, who is, who ought to be a sympathetic character after all, he is the father of the son who was kidnapped taken away. But you never do get much sympathy for this guy. Well, Joe is the kind of guy that women dread, I think, and they hate to wake up and realize that they've married someone that turns out to be a guy like Joe, and he's the kind of man that men try, he has instincts that men try to stifle from about the time they're 15 onwards. Certainly by the time they leave college, if they go to college,

they're hoping that they've tamed this beast, but the thing about Joe is that he's never really tamed. Maybe you could give us an example of that. There's a scene, well, not too far into the book, that kind of defines the kind of man Joe is. Sure. Do I want a coffee? I want a coffee or a juice. I wish someone would tell me, there's a place on Chapel Street with incredible waitresses. One of the guys at work was talking about it. What was it called? I'm too old for the music they play here. Christ, it's not even music, but once you're here, you can't ask them to turn it down. You're lucky if they serve you after that. You're paying for it, for everything. Can I help you, sir? The waitress asks. I don't know if this is the place they were talking about at work, but if it isn't, I might start talking about it. She can't be more than 15. Already so

nasty, even as she offers to help me. Every year they bring out a new model. I'm depreciating. Done too many miles. It's unfair. She could help me. What juice seems to hit the spot today? I ask her with a smile. I hear myself ask that question. It doesn't actually make sense. It doesn't mean anything except that I've already begun rehearsing. I've begun rehearsing for a role as one of those middle -aged arseholes who saunter into trendy coffee shops and cafes alone on weekends, wearing veined brown leather jackets, with a recalcitrant newspaper tucked under one arm, an ostentatious car keys tossed and caught in the other hand, calling too loudly to a girl, what juice seems to hit the spot today, which doesn't actually mean anything. Does she think that I can't see what's ahead of me? She makes no suggestions. She reels off the juice list from the blackboard menu on the wall. I could have done that. Doesn't she want a tip? Doesn't she know how it's meant to

go? And she'll wonder why I pay for it. She'll feign outraged to hear that I pay for it. I have to pay for it. Oh, excuse me. Could you put some ginger and lemongrass in with that? Damn right, it's not a problem. She's gone. She's away, clearing another man's table. He's about her age or certainly closer to it than I am. Closer to it than I ever was. He's unshavened. I find him ugly, she doesn't. Actually, he repulsors me, but not her. What does he drive? What does he make? What can a man so young possibly make that he can sit here and get it a smile like that? Sit here without a trace of panic. He'll let the pay for it one day. Sure as hell. I can't hear what they're saying. I can't understand what they're saying. She can tell that I pay for it. What can she tell? It's funny listening to Joe, isn't it? You hear him say things and think

things that, well, as you say, every man, stop trying to think at the age of 15. Look, it's true. I've tried to describe this to women, actually. It's a terrible thing, but it's almost a biological thing. Any man that claims he's never felt this way is probably not being honest. I'm talking now about heterosexual men, but you can walk into a building and there are two female receptionists and they're going to buzz you into another office and you walk up to them and they're both engaged in something, a telephone call, but one is clearly more attractive than the other. The man will hope that the more attractive one is going to serve him. This is insane because his interaction with the woman will be maybe 10 seconds and unless he's some kind of monster, he's not going to engage, he's not going to try and flirt with her. He's there on some kind of business or for some other reason or maybe it's a dental appointment, but he wants the more

attractive of the two women to be the one to say, please take a seat. This is ridiculous, but Joe acts on this sort of thing. He will find the more attractive of the two and despite being married, he'll try to see her or he'll even try to extend the conversation for another 90 seconds. It's quite pathetic, but it's something I think inherent in male behaviour. It's Elliot Perlman talking about his novel seven types of ambiguity. Perlman lives in Australia where he practices law and writes books. Okay, so if that's the scummy side of men, what's the weakness of women? Is this it? I decided to take control of my life and start a diary to tell the truth about Bridget Jones, the whole truth. Resolution number one, obviously we'll lose 20 pounds. Number two, always put last night panties in the laundry

basket. Equally important, we'll find nice sensible boyfriend to go out with and not continue to form romantic attachments to any of the following. Alcoholics, workaholics, commitment, phobics, peeping toms, mechlamaniacs, or pavettes. And especially, we'll not fantasise about a particular person who embodies all these things. Bridget Jones' diary is a prime example of what's known as Chick Lit, those funny and somewhat racy stories devoured by legions of women. Jennifer Weiner is one of the star writers of Chick Lit. She's written three novels, good in bed, in her shoes, and little earthquakes. Each became a big bestseller and was then optioned by Hollywood. Now, what you may not realise about Jennifer Weiner is that she went to Princeton, where she studied creative writing with such luminaries as John McFee, Tony Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oats. So, and Strange Shamps wanted to know what Jennifer makes of her less than literary reputation. Does it bug you when you're talked about as a Chick Lit writer?

Well, here's the thing. On the one hand, on the other hand, because on the one hand, it is incredibly galling because I have this very fine education that my parents paid a lot of money for. You know, and I have books with sort of symbolism and illusion and literary references and wit. And I like to think that they're nicely written and that they're sort of, you know, interesting chewy reads. But I remember when I wrote good in bed and I took the manuscript home and I gave it to my mother and I was, I was so on pins and needles that she was going to be offended by some of it. And she's like, no, I loved it. It was a real page turner. And I'm like, a page turner. What are you talking about? Page turner. This is literature, Fran. It's writing fiction. Okay, a page turner is kind of a put down. It felt a little bit like a put down, but I've kind of made my peace with it. It's like, I write entertainment with a capital E instead of literature with a capital L. And that's okay. You know, there's, there's a place for everyone. So for people who aren't even that familiar with the term or haven't figured out if they read chickland or not, what is chickland? Okay, if you've read a book with a

pink cover and a purse or some high heel shoes on it, you might have read chickland. And if there is a heroine in her 20s or early 30s and she's unhappy in her job and she can't find the right guy and she has this crazy dysfunctional family or maybe it's a crazy dysfunctional workplace and sort of a loyal sidekick best friend. And she gets a happy ending. You might have read chickland. So is this, is this genre fiction? The new form of romance novel. That's one reading of it that this is sort of a postmodern version of the fairy tale romance where instead of, you know, corsets and nights on white horses, it's girls with Starbucks cups navigating the perils of the office space. And is it? You know, it's very, very interesting. I tend to believe that chickland is it's very own thing where there are elements of the genre romance, elements of the romantic comedy, but that there's also something kind of

fresher and newer about it. The goal of romance, as far as I'm remembering my days of reading Harlequins is, you know, to find the guy and have a couple great sex scenes and live happily ever after. And I think that with chicklet, the goal is finding your place in the world. It's finding autonomy and where you belong and who you're going to be when you grow up. And if you get the guy as a part of that, that's a wonderful thing. But I mean, there's plenty of chicklet books that end with the heroine riding off into the sunset by yourself, you know, it's sort of, yeah, there are with a one -way ticket to Thailand. No, no, no, they don't all end with the guy. A lot of them do, you know, but I think that that's sort of a convention since Jane Austen's time. That's such a, there is a kind of hidden politics to the personal politics to them that these maybe are, you know, post -posed feminist books in which the happy ending may include a guy, may not. Yeah, I think that that's true, but I think that, again, the guy isn't the ultimate goal. I think that in a lot of cases, certainly the subset of chicklet that's been called assistant lit where you're talking about the devil wears

prada and the nanny diaries where the happy ending is getting rid of that awful boss. You know, it's like, maybe there's a guy, maybe there's not a guy, maybe there's a suggestion that there will be a guy, but it's sort of throwing off the shackles of oppression, which is very different than anything you'd find in genre romance. What about the setting? Because in genre romance, there are genre settings also, you've got your western romances and your regency romances. Right. And all the chicklets, it's all London in New York. You've got Prada and Manolo Blondock and shopping for handbags and Starbucks in New York City. Well, there are a lot of New York. There's a lot of London. There's a lot of chicklet heroin with jobs and publishing because I think a lot of chicklet authors initially had jobs and publishing. I mean, that's one way I've sort of been able to distinguish my books because they take place in Philadelphia, which is not New York, as the editor of the New Yorker pointed out not only when I tried to, like, I sent them a query about a story I wanted to do in Philadelphia and they were like, well, geographically speaking, I never felt so low. It was like I lived in

Jersey. It was just really very hard to take, but there's a lot of big cities. And I think that that has to do with kind of an urban tribalism that goes on in chicklet where you have your touchstones, you have your Starbucks, you have your, you know, Shishi boutiques where the heroin buys her clothes and you have a lot of men. So what's with the covers? Why are they always pink? Why are they always pink? Well, probably there's some marketing genius somewhere who's done like a whole bunch of research about like if it's pink, they will buy it. But does this, does this bother you? Because seriously, I, I'm probably somebody who might read chicklet and hasn't read as much of it as I might have partly because I don't really want to be seen walking out of the bookstore with those covers. Oh, well, you, you, listen, you're looking at a woman who wrote a book called Good and Bed. I mean, how do you think I felt knowing that people are going to have to carry that around? I, I think that chicklet in a way is like comfort food, okay? Like when you buy the Stofers, Rosendinger with fried chicken and mashed potatoes, like you want fried chicken and mashed potatoes, you don't want to open it up and find that you've gotten Salisbury steak by accident. And I

think that those pink covers are a way of signifying, okay, smart, witty, frustrated, unhappy hero, and who is going to get happy by the end of this book, you know, the Mr. Right, the Mr. Wrong, the crazy family, the, the urban setting, that the pink is a way of sort of signaling. That's what you're going to get. And there's going to be some shopping and hopefully there's going to be some funny stuff. And, you know, would you like to see this field, the chicklet field change or move or develop in any way? I mean, if you were going to look for these sorts of books, what would you be looking for? I would be looking for something that felt fresh and realistic and spoke to me as a reader. But I do think that the genre will evolve as the writers get older and have other stuff going on in their lives. I mean, like my first two books, Good and Bed and in her shoes were sort of the single girl books. And little earthquakes, it's the single girls get married and have babies. And what's that all about? And I got married and I got a baby. I might be closing up shop. I'm not sure. But I think that there's a natural evolution

that will take place. And I think the other interesting to become 45 and write the middle -aged chicklets. Well, that's out there too. It's called Henlit. You're kidding. I'm not. No. Henlit. Henlit. Well, it's when the chick gets older. I think I need to find some. Who's writing Henlit? Elizabeth Buchan wrote the Revenge of the Middle -aged Women, Lorna Landvik, Angry Housewives Eating Bonbons. A lot of anger, a lot of rage in those titles. It's kind of funny to me. But the Red Hat Club, you know, it's out there. Is there a male version of this? I don't. Why don't we put down men's, why isn't there dicklets? There is. There is. It has been crashingly unsuccessful. There were a couple books that came out last year. One was called Booty Nomad, and one was called the Love Monkey, and they crashed and burned. Nick Hornby can pull it off. The guy who wrote high fidelity and about a boy. But well, first of all, I think it's something like 80 % of fiction is bought by women. So you're looking at a very small slice of the pie if you're aiming these books at men. And if you're trying

to appeal to the chicklet audience and say, okay, here's what's really going on with these guys. Here's how they think. Here's what they're doing. You can read these books and come away kind of horrified. It's like, you know, I didn't know it was as bad as all that. You know, and it's a hard thing to pull off. And I'm not sure that there's the the market for it really. I mean, certainly the, you know, the books that came out trying to do sort of the guy, chicklet, just didn't do well at all. Jennifer, thank you so much for talking today. Thank you for having me. This was fun. Jennifer, why don't you talk to them strange ships. Jennifer's written three novels, good and bad in her shoes and little earthlings. Why is the master of postmodern hippas getting a little

tired of living knee deep in ironing? It's also relentlessly corrosive to the soul and everything is parodied and everything is ridiculous. David Foster Wallace, up next. I'm Jim Fleming. It's to the best of our knowledge from PRI, Public Radio International. National support for to the best of our knowledge is provided by Powell's books, an independent bookseller since 1971, presenting Powell's books dot blog, a window to the world of literature, authors, and up -to -date book news on the web at

Powell's dot com. There's no writer quite like David Foster Wallace. His stories can dazzle you with their run -on riffs on just about every subject imaginable. His essays are famous for their long footnotes and up -rorious displays of his own neuroses. But for all the talk about his playfulness and sheer virtuosity, David Foster Wallace is very serious about the mission of fiction, as Steve Paulson discovered. Consider this passage from a short story called The Soul Is Not A Smithy. I had begun having nightmares about the reality of adult life as early as perhaps age seven. I knew even then that the dreams involved my father's life and job and the way he looked when he returned home from work at the end of the day. The nightmares themselves

always opened with a wide ankle view of a number of men at desks in rows in a large, brightly lit room or hall. Some of the men were older than others, but they were all obviously adults. People who drove and applied for insurance coverage and had high balls while they read the paper before dinner. His arrival was always between 542 and 545, and it was usually I who was the first to see him come through the front door. What occurred was almost choreographic in its routine. He removed his hat and topcoat and hung the coat in the foyer closet. Claude his necktie loose with two fingers, entered the living room, greeted my brother, and sat down with the newspaper to wait for my mother to bring him a high ball. In the foyer, turning from the front door while his left hand rose to remove his hat, my father's eyes appeared lightless and dead. His face was not at all like this on weekends off. His eyes when he turned from the door didn't scare me, but the feeling was somehow related to being scared. His hat went on the hat rack, his coat

shouldered out of, then the coat was folded over his left arm. The closet opened with his right hand, the coat transferred to that hand while the third wooden coat hanger from the left is removed with his left hand. There was something about this routine that cast shadows down deep in parts of me I could not access on my own. Looking back, I suspect that there was something of a cover your eyes and stop your ears quality to my lack of curiosity about just what my father had to do all day. But I do not believe I knew or could even imagine as a child. They for almost 30 years of 51 weeks a year, my father sat all day at a metal desk in a silent fluorescent lit room, reading forms and making calculations and filling out further forms on the results of those calculations. The nightmares were vivid and powerful, but they were not the kind from which you wake up crying out and then have to try to explain to your mother when she comes what the dream was about so that she could reassure you that there was

nothing like what you just dreamed in the real world. It's wonderful, thank you. So evocative. Did you have that kind of dread when you were a kid? I think in a country where we have it as easy as we do, one of our big dread vectors is boredom and I think little edges of despair and soul -level boredom appear in things like homework or particularly dry classroom stuff. I can remember the incredible sorting relief of when certain teachers would say we were going to watch a movie in grade school and it wasn't just a hedonistic oh we're going to have fun. It was a relief from some kind of terrible terrible burden I thought. So I don't know maybe. It was funny because as I was reading that I was sort of thinking back to my own childhood and my father was a professor and he would typically go on up into his study close the door and I don't know what he did but I just I remember thinking when I was pretty little that this doesn't seem like fun to have to sort of do this night after night and I didn't want to become like that. Of course I sort of have become like that because you know I go

home and you know I have my own homework as well but I'm wondering if that resonated at all for you. I know one of my little family stories that mama was tells us that on the day and second grade when we all had to talk about what our fathers did for a living I said my father didn't do anything for a living he just stayed home and rode on yellow paper because he was a professor too. I know that part of what interested me in the story was trying to remember what I thought about what my parents did when I was a child because when you're a child I don't think you're aware of how incredibly easy you have it right you have your own problems and you have your own burdens and chores and things you have to do but yeah I think my intuitions were very much like yours I think when they went into these quiet rooms and had to do things that it wasn't obvious they wanted to do I think there was a part of me that felt that something terrible was coming. But also of course now that we're putatively grown up there's also a lot of really really interesting stuff and sometimes you sit in quiet rooms and do a lot of drudgery and at the end of it is it is a surprise or something very rewarding or a feeling of fulfillment. You know what I find interesting about

what we've been talking about and also the passage you just read is your public image as a writer is you're typically described as one of the leading figures of the the postmodern hip ironic generation of writers now in their 30s and early 40s but I read somewhere that you really think of yourself as a realist. You know these various classifications are important for critics right you have to form different things into groups or else you have to talk about a trillion different particulars. I don't know very many writers who don't think of themselves as realists in terms of trying to convey the way stuff tastes and feels sort of to you. I mean a lot of stuff that's like capital are realism just seems to me somewhat hokey because obviously realism is an illusion of realism and the idea that small banal details are somehow more real or authentic than large or strange details always seem to me just a little bit crude. The truth of the matter is when you're in an interview

you have to say all kinds of stuff I don't really know what I am and I don't think very many writers have any idea what they are. You just try to do stuff that feels alive to you. Well I'm wondering about for particularly people of our generation I think we're roughly around the same age of both in our early 40s whether there's a certain cultural landscape that you feel most compelled to write about. I know that when I was in graduate school those of us who wrote very much about what used to be called pop culture or advertising or television were really scorned by our older professors who saw that stuff as kind of vapid and banal and lacking a kind of platonic timelessness and I remember it was a really big source of conflict because in lots of ways we just didn't get what they were saying. I mean this was our world and our reality the same way you know the Romantics world was trees and babbling brooks and mountains and blue skies so I think probably if there's yeah I'm 42 if there's something that's distinctive about our generation is that we've been steeped in media and marketing since the time we were very very small

and it's kind of a grand experiment because no other generation in the history of the world you know has been that mediated what implications that has I don't know but I know it affects what seems urgent and worth writing about and what kind of feels real in my head when I'm working on it. Well I think the other piece of that is a lot of this commercial world I mean whether it's movies or I don't know advertising even you know it's really it's pretty compelling you know it's entertaining and I suppose from a writer's perspective you might want to feel like if you're going to write about this stuff you have to be entertaining too. Yeah well there's that danger the other danger is kind of to reprise an early 20th century painting thing where once there was photography the interest in you know Mimesis and painting really kind of disappeared and everything got really abstract it's a real problem I don't have a TV anymore but you know when I'm doing something like this and I'm on the road I watch TV in hotels and I'm appalled by how good the commercials have gotten they're fascinating they're funny they're hip they've got trunk lines into my you know high school level anxieties and desires in a way that the commercials I grew up

with never did you know what it is is a lot of them are the hip cynical cool people I went to college feeling intimidated by who are now making two million dollars a year figuring out how to do this stuff and they've gotten very very good at it. Well I have to ask you about another one of your stories the suffering channel which among other things deals with a new kind of reality TV show that shows real life episodes of torture and murder and rape and and all of that is that sort of your your vision of what might happen in some you know dystopian future I don't know that it's that I think to the extent that I understand reality TV it has a certain logic and it's not hard to take that logic kind of to its extreme I think celebrity autopsy while childhood friends of the celebrity sit around talking about whether or not the celebrity was a good person while his or her organs are being excised would be the kind of the terminus of that logic but the question is how far we go at some point people have figured out that even if viewers are sneering or talking about in what poor taste stuff is

they're still watching and that the key is to get people to watch and that that's what's renumerative and I think once we lost that shame hobble only time we'll tell how far we go I mentioned this essay that you wrote I think it was back in 1993 about writing and sort of what various fiction writers are up to and one point you made is that irony tyrannizes so the implicit message of irony is I don't really mean what I'm saying and you went on to suggest the next generation of rebel writers might ditch irony in favor of sincerity and I think I'm quoting here who treat plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions with reverence and conviction who is chew self -consciousness and hip fatigue and I guess is that a critique of your own kind of writing I don't know that it's that I mean the thing even sounds dated to me now I think it's less that than an articulation of the thing you were asking me about before is you know what is it like to be working really hard

on the stuff at age 42 having been marketed to all your life I mean because you want your art to be hip and seem cool to people you want people to like the stuff but a great deal of what passes for hip or cool is now highly highly commercially driven you know and some of it some of it I think is important art I think the Simpsons is important art on the other hand it's also in my opinion relentlessly sort of corrosive to the soul and everything is parodied and everything is ridiculous maybe I'm old but for my part I can be steeped in about an hour of it and then I sort of have to walk away and look at a flower or something I think if there's something to be talked about that thing is this weird conflict between what my girlfriend calls the intersap you know the part of us that can really wholeheartedly weep at stuff and the part of us that has to live in a world of smart jaded sophisticated people and wants very much to be taken seriously by those people but can you hold those two impulses simultaneously no but I think my personal opinion and what I tell my students is that if if they're

suffering involved in art or however you want to say it right now this is the form of the suffering is to be the battleground for the war between those two kind of impulses neither of which are stupid neither of which are wrong but it's not at all clear to me how to marry them and I don't think it's been at all clear since about the 1950s I just think it's where we're at is that what you're trying to do in your fiction to sort of get at those two impulses within the same work the same story for the purposes of this conversation I'll say yes but sitting sitting in a bright quiet room in front of the paper it's much more odd does this make me want to throw up does this seem real is this the sort of thing the person would say it's much more kind of bone headed and practical than that you realize this right there's something very artificial about once the books all through galleys and you know now I'm engaging in critical discourse about it I might be right but it's very different than what it's like actually to do the things sure that I mix total sense the stuff that's in my mind as I'm doing it as

far less sophisticated than this David Foster Wallace talking with Steve Paulson his latest collection of short stories is called oblivion it's to the best of our knowledge I'm Jim Fleming you can buy a tape of this program by calling the radio store at 1 -800 -747 -7444 ask for the show fictional fun number 4 -3 -A if you'd like to comment on what you've heard just send a email through our website at www .ttbook .org we'd love to hear from you to the best of our knowledge is produced at Wisconsin Public Radio by Steve Paulson Doug Gordon and Strange Shamps Charles Monroe Kane Veronica record and Mary Lou Finnegan with engineering help from Marv Nunn and Carrillo and PRI Public Radio International