The Literary Review articles from September 1998

The Literary Review archives from September 1998

Introduction: Author! Author!
September 22, 1998... As a young reader of fiction, I enthusiastically welcomed Holden Caulfield's statement in J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye that certain books, when you finish them, make you wish you could call up and talk to the author. As a young...

Beginnings.
September 22, 1998... In order to get started, he went to live alone on an island and shot himself. His blood, unable to resist a final joke, splattered the cabin wall in a pattern that read: It is important to begin when everything is already over. This maxim,...

On "Beginnings".
September 22, 1998... We were in England at the time. Long before computers. Long before photocopying machines. We had been moving house at least once a year, moving country nearly as often, dragging along kids and books, art objects and toys and culinary tools and...

If They Knew Yvonne.
September 22, 1998... to Andre and Jeb 1 I grew up in Louisiana, and for twelve years I went to a boys' school taught by Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious order. In the eighth grade our teacher was Brother Thomas. I still have a picture he gave to...

A Man Named Father Clarence Stanghor.
September 22, 1998... A man named father Clarence Stanghor, the Chaplain at the University of Iowa's Student Chapel, in a very real sense helped me write this story. I was in the writers' workshop there at the time, and he and I became friends. He used to come over...

Public Appearances.
September 22, 1998... The governor's wife thought the governor was looking especially well this evening. As she stood before the mirror in the hotel suite bedroom, fastening her pearls, he appeared next to her in the gilt frame. The force of his presence, more than...

The Kind of Woman Who Could Get Away with That.
September 22, 1998... Reflections in 20/40 Hindsight on My Story "Public Appearances" The Governor's wife: How come nobody seems to believe it when I say she isn't me? I am not she: grammatical proprieties seem, if anything, to reinforce the impression of...

Family.
September 22, 1998... Zach had been splitting wood most of the morning down by the shed when he first sniffed the familiar scent of his father who had died five years ago in a mining accident. It was early spring. Pale green buds fuzzed the birches along Amos Ridge...

Garbage-Disposal Imagination.
September 22, 1998... "There are three rules for writing the novel," W. Somerset Maugham once observed. "Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." The same, I'm here to tell you, is true about the short story. If that weren't the case, if in fact there were three...

Too Cool.
September 22, 1998... Triple E is broke. He cruises the streets of Gunnison searching for someone to roll. Jeanne has a buck and some change. Ava has two dollars. Tom has three. The car is almost out of gas. It has been a jittery day moving through the mountains,...

Concerning the Excerpt from the Novel Too Cool.
September 22, 1998... The first chapter of Too Cool is a fictionalized version of the time three friends and I went west in a stolen car. We were on our way to California, land of warm beaches and sunshine. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision. I had decided not to...

Nine-Inch Heels.
September 22, 1998... Where did we meet? The health club. She was on the stairmaster in a hot pink leotard and black tights with matching pink socks, looking sexy and a little silly, earphones on her head, cracking her gum, striding like a maenad, dyed-platinum...

Sources for "Nine-Inch Heels".
September 22, 1998... How could Cher be on the stairmaster listening to the score from Pulp Fiction and in Trader Joe's browsing through the wine section? She moves fast and she's anti-linear. Speed is one of the keynotes of the story. No slack. Why the...

L'Homme Moyen Sensuel.
September 22, 1998... Stefan and Lida talked to the cook while she sliced sorrels and onions and split chicken breasts and melted butter and mixed it with bread crumbs in saucepans the size of bathtubs. Lida even asked the cook to join them upstairs in a folie a...

Facing the Invisible Sphinx: About the Writing of "L'Homme Moyen Sensuel".
September 22, 1998... The Famine of 1932-33 stretches out across the consciousness of everyone of Ukrainian ancestry like a sphinx whose riddle, proposed to the infrequent passerby, is: Why does no one see me? Or rather: Why are you the only one who does? I'm afraid...

If a Man Truly in His Heart.
September 22, 1998... There were two cars parked at the Lamar County jail when Eldon got there, Sheriff Boyd's and a state highway patrol. When he parked his patrol car next to the state car, shut the engine off, Eldon heard their radio going softly, logging a coded...

Origins of "If a Man Truly in His Heart".
September 22, 1998... The story's origins are very directly rooted in my experience of life in the state of Mississippi, where I lived from 1970 until 1975, teaching on the staff of the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers graduate program in...

Diehl: The Wandering Years.
September 22, 1998... In the end Diehl went back to Santa Barbara. He drove the Datsun up the coast highway from Oceanside, through Los Angeles, Ventura, and Oxnard; he listened to the radio and watched the surfers in their black suits, bobbing in the water, waiting...

Writing the Story.
September 22, 1998... We're talking invention here, maybe presented as memory, but nevertheless after all this time, almost twenty years since the story was published, let alone written, invention is what we have left. The why of writing Diehl is simple; I was a...

New Family Car.
September 22, 1998... A snow day for Steffie's high school and my car's transmission problems have marooned us inside, unexpectedly together. Steff and her friends were sprawled on beanbag chairs in the adjacent dining room, which has no dining table, only audio...

Speak, Memory, But in a Whisper.
September 22, 1998... Dear Tom-- Oh dear, memory. I do wish I'd gone back to my room at the castle that day last summer, I'd wish I'd gone right back after our boozy lunch at the Wink and written this essay. Because that's what we talked about at lunch: your...

What Does God Care About Your Dignity, Victor Travesti?
September 22, 1998... Happy is the man whom God correcteth; therefore despite not thou the chastenings of the Almighty. --Eliphaz, Job 5:17 Victor Travesti stood beneath the bus shelter, tall, hands easy in the slash pockets of his trenchcoat. The coat hung...

Fortune, Fate, God, Kipling, Robert Crumb, A Broken Radio, and the Father of My Friend Who Tortured Turtles.
September 22, 1998... Commentary on "What Does God Care About Your Dignity, Victor Travesti?" "What Does God Care About Your Dignity, Victor Travesti?" came to me in two phases. In the first phase, riding home from the office on a bus one evening, gazing...

Carnival for the Gods.
September 22, 1998... It was the first time Dusty had ever backhanded her, and it was not just the blow, the pain, the blood from her lip flowing saltily into her mouth that gave Alta the shock: it was the sense that something fatal had struck at the roots of her...

Carnival for the Gods: Reveling in the Image.
September 22, 1998... Carnival for the Gods:--call it the grandiose scheme, one man's leap of imagination, this dream of Dusty's to create the ultimate celebration at the heart of the city. More than just a circus, but circus and carnival in one, pushing the notion...

Wherever That Great Heart May Be.
September 22, 1998... MY GRANDFATHER DONALD BUSKIRK deserves a footnote in America's literary history and this is it: he once offered a bribe to Herman Melville. This would have been Melville of the 1870s, Herman Melville the customs inspector, with the walks...

"Links": "Wherever That Great Heart May Be".
September 22, 1998... Every great artist has a sad life story, but Melville's is sadder than most--writing Moby Dick one day, working as a customs inspector (the nineteenth century's equivalent of an airport security guard) the next. Anyone who flirts even casually...

Acknowledgments.
September 22, 1998... The stories featured in this issue appeared earlier in publications by the following publishers or will be forthcoming in new works: Duff Brenna, Too Cool (Nan Talese/Doubleday, 1998) Francois Camoin, "Diehl," in collection entitled The...