interviews March 20, 2015

Bookforum talks with Jacob Rubin

Writing fiction about an impersonator is like playing Russian roulette with an allegory gun. Those who survive, whose books don’t lapse into neat parables of the process of writing, tend to be brilliant. Examples include George Saunders (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline), Tom McCarthy (Remainder), and Pynchon (the reenactment of Alpdrucken in Gravity’s Rainbow). The latest is Jacob Rubin, with his new novel The Poser, about the rise and fall of a gifted impressionist.

Writing fiction about an impersonator is like playing Russian roulette with an allegory gun. Those who survive, whose books don’t lapse into neat parables of the process of writing, tend to be brilliant. Examples include George Saunders (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline), Tom McCarthy (Remainder), and Pynchon (the reenactment of Alpdrucken in Gravity’s Rainbow). The latest is Jacob Rubin, with his new novel, The Poser, about the rise and fall of a gifted impressionist. Unlike Saunders and McCarthy, The Poser doesn’t spring from Pynchon’s nylon paisley overcoat. Rubin’s book is less about the enactment

interviews September 12, 2014

Bookforum talks with Ben Lerner

10:04, Ben Lerner’s ingenious new novel, is a Sebaldian book made from starkly American material. As in Sebald, time haunts 10:04’s narrator, But instead of being haunted by an awful, crumbling past, à la Austerlitz, the narrator of 10:04 is swamped by a rising simultaneity; by pasts, presents, and futures happening all at once.

10:04, Ben Lerner’s ingenious new novel, is a Sebaldian book made from starkly American material. As in Sebald, time haunts 10:04’s narrator. But instead of being haunted by an awful, crumbling past, à la Austerlitz, the narrator of 10:04 is swamped by a rising simultaneity; by pasts, presents, and futures happening all at once. Hurricanes, real and fake, interrupt New York. Inequality spreads and mutates. A pigeon hilariously, sadly eats a Viagra pill. As the Lerner-like narrator tries to write and to help his friend conceive a child, the climate warms.

“In reality, of course, whenever one

culture August 25, 2014

Your Face in Mine: A Novel by Jess Row

Row’s brilliant new novel pursues a bold and roomy premise: What if you could change your race? Not superficially, with makeup and a wig, but by cosmetic surgery? This book feels new not only because it inverts and biologizes racial passing, but also because it takes seriously the last few decades of identity politics.

In reviews of works of fiction, the word “Chekhovian” tends to lie somewhere between “subtle,” “nonviolent,” and “boring.” If a story collection isn’t funny, it’s Chekhovian. If it’s wistful and no one smashes anything, it’s Chekhovian. Hearing the word makes one think that somewhere out there must be a hugely influential writer, Bill Chekhov, who lives in a constant state of lowkey sadness.

That said, the stories in Jess Row’s second collection, Nobody Ever Gets Lost (FiveChapters Books, 2011), recall one aspect of actual Chekhov. As with Chekhov, the more we know about Row’s characters, the

culture May 21, 2014

Lost for Words by Edward St. Aubyn

Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose series treated the many facets of pain—the birth of pain; the morbid, chemical pausing of pain; the psychological processing of pain; and the attempt to stop its intergenerational passage. St. Aubyn's latest book, Lost for Words, is mainly about the flight from pain through reading and writing. It is also a sporadically jaunty, often hilarious farce about a literary prize.

Edward St. Aubyn wrote his first novel shirtless, drenched in psychological sweat. In Never Mind, the fruit of that strain, we meet a number of characters, but only one or two—side characters—who don’t seem doomed. A father rapes his son. The same father murders a helpless injured person, and his friends don’t disapprove. One imagines a harrowed publicist gamely trying taglines: Why read a novel when you can read a drill? At the same time, St. Aubyn’s prose is so harsh and pretty, so funny and apt, that one reads helplessly on, reaching thickets of trauma less and less bearable.

In the ensuing

Alexander Benaim