Windows in the House of Fiction
by Steve Kistulentz
Rick Moody is the author of the novels Garden State, which won the Pushcart Press Editors’ Book Award, The Ice Storm, Purple America, and The Diviners; two collections of stories, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven and Demonology; and a memoir, The Black Veil, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. He has also received the Addison Metcalf Award, the Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The following interview is excerpted from The Southeast Review Vol. 25.1, our 25th anniversary issue, published winter 2007. Click here to hear Rick Moody reading from The Diviners.
SER: Several years ago you interviewed
for a teaching position here at Florida State, yet you have
written about your own misgivings about graduate creative
writing programs, most recently in The Atlantic Monthly,
where you offered some specific, prescriptive advice on how
to avoid the least-common-denominator effect that many graduate
creative writing programs seem to inculcate. If you could,
just by fiat, impart a new pedagogical approach upon the graduate
workshop, what would a Rick Moody-inspired apprenticeship
look like?
RM: That’s a loaded question from the outset because part of the problem for me is the existing structure of the graduate writing workshop itself. To impose my pedagogy on a form that I think is flawed from the outset is problematic. But I will say that right now, I have one student, a thesis student at Columbia, and I think pedagogically that relationship is quite sound. I think one-on-one is a good way to impart your ideas about what fiction is, and to try to pass along some of that so someone else may make good use of them. My problems are with the workshop. For the record, I don’t see that piece in The Atlantic as prescriptive, I see it as diagnostic, for want of a better word, as to the flaws in the system.
I do think the workshop has come to dominate instruction in fiction writing and now it seems that there is no way around that approach. And yet I think that there can be other models. Low residency, for example. The vast majority of low-residency work tends to be done in relationships that are not traditional workshop relationships. A student-teacher relationship exists but it is dramatically different from that 14-to-1 dynamic in a traditional workshop.
SER: But doesn’t that one-to-one model rob the apprentice writer of the chance to develop those relationships with peer readers? Isn’t one of the most valuable parts of the workshop developing those lifetime connections with writers at the same stage in their development. What happens to those individual students after the thesis is complete, or what happens to the low-residency student after the semester is complete?
RM: In some ways, the community is the important vehicle for the writing program. And that resource is still available to you after you get your degree. If you build your foundation effectively, which I certainly did at Columbia—there are people, Helen Schulman is a great example, and David Means was there, Jill Eisenstadt—many of my peers have remained close friends and readers, and this was especially the case in the first ten years or so after I originally got out of Columbia. But the workshops themselves were so negative, competitive, and counter-productive. Having friends available to read my work was often more valuable than the workshop itself. But in that case you are paying thirty thousand dollars, or whatever, taking out enormous loans, in order to have friends. What is the workshop for then?
SER: Most writers who have been through the workshop experience have a great story about their lack of acceptance in workshop or by a magazine. I’m thinking here of the famous Harry Crews anecdote, when he received a rejection letter that read, “Fire is the great refiner, son, and I suggest you burn this.” So what was the worst reaction your work received in a workshop?
RM: I don’t want to name names but my first semester at Columbia I did have an instructor who said “I don’t have anything to say about this story. Why don’t you guys talk about it.” That story later got published in The Antioch Review, not changed substantially.
SER: This fall seems to be the end of a season of manifestos. Perhaps it began with the B. R. Myers essay in the May 2005 Atlantic Monthly, which asserted that we were listening to the death rattle of the postmodern novel. Now, we’re in the middle of an ongoing debate between Ben Marcus and Jonathan Franzen about the role of experimental fiction. It seems to me that what Ben Marcus is saying is that the world needs less of the safe and familiar, close, third person point of view domestic novel (of which Franzen’s The Corrections is essentially a series of short, third person narratives). Is this a debate in which you’re willing to publicly take sides?
RM: I find the whole kerfuffle a little tedious, but I’ll try. Ben does go to great pains in the essay to say that The Corrections, for what it is, is extremely effective. I think that he intends on narrowing the particulars of his essay to Franzen’s piece about William Gaddis, “Mr. Difficult,” from The New Yorker. In truth, I detested that piece. I found it inexplicable. And I don’t actually think that Franzen believes that stuff, either. I think he just likes to provoke.
Yet I think it would be possible to come up with an attack on “Mr. Difficult” that was less, slightly less hysterical and more a point-by-point response, a kind of rapid response model that would do a better job of rebutting the argument of “Mr. Difficult.” And actually The Believer published a letter around the same time by this guy called Andrew Ervin, in the September (2005) issue, that does just this by quoting Adorno and some others. Ervin proceeds point-by-point against Franzen’s piece, and I thought his was a more effective piece of rhetorical writing. Ben’s essay is beautiful literature and it really sings in spots, but it’s so emotional that it doesn’t do that great a job of eliminating the problem.
SER: Isn’t it ironic that Ben Marcus is asking for a literature that takes more risks? Because if you draw an SAT-type analogy, Franzen is to Cheever or Updike as Marcus is to William Gaddis. The distance in innovation between these pairs is very similar. Do you think Marcus intended to call for a return to fiction that abandons the ironic stance, or a call for a return to postmodernism, or was he asking for more fiction that is innovative on its own terms?
RM: I’m not sure. What I want is for the house of fiction to have many windows. I think that there’s a window that will suit Jonathan Franzen just fine. Meanwhile, I am so far from being a recommender of the post-ironic. I find that whole argument (“What we need is post-ironic literature!”) vulgar and pedantic, brought to you by joyless “Morning Edition” listeners whose tote bags are too small to carry a range of items. It’s not where I’m at at all. I think comedy is great and it’s joyful and celebratory and because joy is a legitimate human emotion it belongs in fiction as much as anything else. As I experience Ben, I think he’s just saying, Look, you can write your realistic novels, that’s fine, but just don’t tell us that we’re not allowed to experience delight and excitement about innovative fiction. Which is exactly what “Mr. Difficult” did. It said, You can’t possibly like these so-called status novels; you are just reading them because you think they are a feather in your cap. That’s the part that I take issue with. Because for me, JR is an incredibly fun book to read. I read it like I read comic books, every day, all the time. Life was an interruption.
SER: There seems to be an almost sense of shame among readers about tackling a big book. More people read The Crying of Lot 49 than any of the books in the Pynchon oeuvre, especially Gravity’s Rainbow. People tackle White Noise or Libra instead of Underworld. Why the fear of the big book?
RM: Book reviewers, because they have too many assignments ahead of them, panic at the sight of these big books. They rarely want to review or recommend them. I ended up reviewing Mason and Dixon for The Atlantic for the simple reason that they couldn’t get anyone else to do it. I think that’s a real problem. If the first rank of reviewers, such as it is, isn’t recommending these books then it’s hard for the readers out there to know what they are getting into.
SER: But the marketplace makes it a lot easier for a book like Infinite Jest to be published as a third book in someone’s career, rather than the first. What needs to happen so that, in the Rick Moody-model workshop, apprentice writers are taking risks and writing big books instead of perhaps tailoring their ambitions to the marketplace?
RM: I tell people never to think about the marketplace at all. I think it’s soul death to be writing with a consciousness of the marketplace. You have to write what you have to write. And I hope there are some obsessive, would-be experimentalist writers out there who are producing 1,500-page manuscripts as their first novels.
RM: That’s a loaded question from the outset because part of the problem for me is the existing structure of the graduate writing workshop itself. To impose my pedagogy on a form that I think is flawed from the outset is problematic. But I will say that right now, I have one student, a thesis student at Columbia, and I think pedagogically that relationship is quite sound. I think one-on-one is a good way to impart your ideas about what fiction is, and to try to pass along some of that so someone else may make good use of them. My problems are with the workshop. For the record, I don’t see that piece in The Atlantic as prescriptive, I see it as diagnostic, for want of a better word, as to the flaws in the system.
I do think the workshop has come to dominate instruction in fiction writing and now it seems that there is no way around that approach. And yet I think that there can be other models. Low residency, for example. The vast majority of low-residency work tends to be done in relationships that are not traditional workshop relationships. A student-teacher relationship exists but it is dramatically different from that 14-to-1 dynamic in a traditional workshop.
SER: But doesn’t that one-to-one model rob the apprentice writer of the chance to develop those relationships with peer readers? Isn’t one of the most valuable parts of the workshop developing those lifetime connections with writers at the same stage in their development. What happens to those individual students after the thesis is complete, or what happens to the low-residency student after the semester is complete?
RM: In some ways, the community is the important vehicle for the writing program. And that resource is still available to you after you get your degree. If you build your foundation effectively, which I certainly did at Columbia—there are people, Helen Schulman is a great example, and David Means was there, Jill Eisenstadt—many of my peers have remained close friends and readers, and this was especially the case in the first ten years or so after I originally got out of Columbia. But the workshops themselves were so negative, competitive, and counter-productive. Having friends available to read my work was often more valuable than the workshop itself. But in that case you are paying thirty thousand dollars, or whatever, taking out enormous loans, in order to have friends. What is the workshop for then?
SER: Most writers who have been through the workshop experience have a great story about their lack of acceptance in workshop or by a magazine. I’m thinking here of the famous Harry Crews anecdote, when he received a rejection letter that read, “Fire is the great refiner, son, and I suggest you burn this.” So what was the worst reaction your work received in a workshop?
RM: I don’t want to name names but my first semester at Columbia I did have an instructor who said “I don’t have anything to say about this story. Why don’t you guys talk about it.” That story later got published in The Antioch Review, not changed substantially.
SER: This fall seems to be the end of a season of manifestos. Perhaps it began with the B. R. Myers essay in the May 2005 Atlantic Monthly, which asserted that we were listening to the death rattle of the postmodern novel. Now, we’re in the middle of an ongoing debate between Ben Marcus and Jonathan Franzen about the role of experimental fiction. It seems to me that what Ben Marcus is saying is that the world needs less of the safe and familiar, close, third person point of view domestic novel (of which Franzen’s The Corrections is essentially a series of short, third person narratives). Is this a debate in which you’re willing to publicly take sides?
RM: I find the whole kerfuffle a little tedious, but I’ll try. Ben does go to great pains in the essay to say that The Corrections, for what it is, is extremely effective. I think that he intends on narrowing the particulars of his essay to Franzen’s piece about William Gaddis, “Mr. Difficult,” from The New Yorker. In truth, I detested that piece. I found it inexplicable. And I don’t actually think that Franzen believes that stuff, either. I think he just likes to provoke.
Yet I think it would be possible to come up with an attack on “Mr. Difficult” that was less, slightly less hysterical and more a point-by-point response, a kind of rapid response model that would do a better job of rebutting the argument of “Mr. Difficult.” And actually The Believer published a letter around the same time by this guy called Andrew Ervin, in the September (2005) issue, that does just this by quoting Adorno and some others. Ervin proceeds point-by-point against Franzen’s piece, and I thought his was a more effective piece of rhetorical writing. Ben’s essay is beautiful literature and it really sings in spots, but it’s so emotional that it doesn’t do that great a job of eliminating the problem.
SER: Isn’t it ironic that Ben Marcus is asking for a literature that takes more risks? Because if you draw an SAT-type analogy, Franzen is to Cheever or Updike as Marcus is to William Gaddis. The distance in innovation between these pairs is very similar. Do you think Marcus intended to call for a return to fiction that abandons the ironic stance, or a call for a return to postmodernism, or was he asking for more fiction that is innovative on its own terms?
RM: I’m not sure. What I want is for the house of fiction to have many windows. I think that there’s a window that will suit Jonathan Franzen just fine. Meanwhile, I am so far from being a recommender of the post-ironic. I find that whole argument (“What we need is post-ironic literature!”) vulgar and pedantic, brought to you by joyless “Morning Edition” listeners whose tote bags are too small to carry a range of items. It’s not where I’m at at all. I think comedy is great and it’s joyful and celebratory and because joy is a legitimate human emotion it belongs in fiction as much as anything else. As I experience Ben, I think he’s just saying, Look, you can write your realistic novels, that’s fine, but just don’t tell us that we’re not allowed to experience delight and excitement about innovative fiction. Which is exactly what “Mr. Difficult” did. It said, You can’t possibly like these so-called status novels; you are just reading them because you think they are a feather in your cap. That’s the part that I take issue with. Because for me, JR is an incredibly fun book to read. I read it like I read comic books, every day, all the time. Life was an interruption.
SER: There seems to be an almost sense of shame among readers about tackling a big book. More people read The Crying of Lot 49 than any of the books in the Pynchon oeuvre, especially Gravity’s Rainbow. People tackle White Noise or Libra instead of Underworld. Why the fear of the big book?
RM: Book reviewers, because they have too many assignments ahead of them, panic at the sight of these big books. They rarely want to review or recommend them. I ended up reviewing Mason and Dixon for The Atlantic for the simple reason that they couldn’t get anyone else to do it. I think that’s a real problem. If the first rank of reviewers, such as it is, isn’t recommending these books then it’s hard for the readers out there to know what they are getting into.
SER: But the marketplace makes it a lot easier for a book like Infinite Jest to be published as a third book in someone’s career, rather than the first. What needs to happen so that, in the Rick Moody-model workshop, apprentice writers are taking risks and writing big books instead of perhaps tailoring their ambitions to the marketplace?
RM: I tell people never to think about the marketplace at all. I think it’s soul death to be writing with a consciousness of the marketplace. You have to write what you have to write. And I hope there are some obsessive, would-be experimentalist writers out there who are producing 1,500-page manuscripts as their first novels.
