Street Haunting May Shed Light on Clarissa Dalloway

When a certain type of novel is published, readers often wonder, to what extent is it autobiographical? And if the author is or becomes a literary celebrity, entire industries can develop around such questions.

Virginia Woolf, because of her difficult childhood, her episodic mental/emotional instability, her apparently sexually sterile marriage and her unconventional friends, has been the subject of endless inquiries along those lines – facilitated by extensive diaries and letters as well as her fiction, essays and critical works. There’s no shortage of fodder upon which to chew.

What, then, about Clarissa Dalloway? Where did she come from and how does she relate to the author herself? 

"George & Lizzie" (This review gives the story away)

Warning: this review of “George and Lizzie” gives the story away. Please don’t read it until after you have read the book. Contrary views are welcome.

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 If, on a lark, a bet or a dare, or perhaps because nothing else in life much interests her, a girl decides to have sex with all the starters on her high school football team, what can she expect out of life?

That’s 23 boys by the way – 11 on offense, 11 on defense plus the kicker – and one a week, every week until the “Great Game” is won.

Talking White

Regular readers, to the extent that there are any, know that I have been amusing myself in recent months by writing about various skirmishes in America's on-going culture wars.

With respect to literature, the conflict is mainly an attack on the status of whites, and particularly white males, as being inappropriately in control of how writing should be crafted -- what is good, what is bad; what is noteworthy and what is not; what should be included in "the canon."

The other day, I stumbled on another skirmish, from which I will present an excerpt without comment.

The Purpose of Fiction -- Revisited

If asked, most people would probably say fiction is a form of entertainment -- in contrast to, say, non-fiction, which would probably be identified as a form of enlightenment.

But fiction is arguably other things as well.

Nugyen Should Reconsider What Thanksgiving Is For

In the wake of his 2016 Pulitzer Prize winning novel "The Sympathizer," Viet Thanh Nugyen has donned the cloak of public intellectual, becoming a prominent voice in the intensifying U.S. culture wars. I previously wrote about his condemnation of alleged white-male domination of writers' workshops here.

But why stop there? Why not reform the Thanksgiving holiday as well?

In a recent piece in The New York Times, Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam, asks: "What is wrong with saying that Thanksgiving is about genocide as much as it is about gratitude?" That, in fact, is what he has been teaching his now four-year-old biracial son.

Fiction as Autobiography

Earlier this year, the New York Times Sunday Book Review ran a piece by Jami Attenberg entitled "It's My Fiction, Not My Life." I clipped it out when it ran and then lost it in a pile of papers.

Authors, Attenberg noted, are very frequently asked by readers how much of a story they have written is autobiographical. Some smile are willing to answer in one fashion or another, no matter how frequently they are asked. But many others are not so accommodating.

Getting Rid of Western Canonical Values

The literary canon -- essentially a list of books considered the most worthy of consideration -- has long been a pillar of Western culture even if there has been disagreement over exactly which works should be included.  But most have been written by white males and as diversity increases in the U.S. as a result of large-scale non-white immigration in the post-WWII period, that seems to be a growing problem: part of the "culture wars" I have increasingly been writing about.