September 7, 2007
Washington, DC

“I’ve always liked listening to the radio…That’s one of the reasons why in a lot of my books there’s somebody listening through a wall to somebody talking. Somebody’s always talking in another room. Maybe that’s the radio.” — Ernest J. Gaines

I don’t trust a library without a radio in it. In the Big Read’s book-jammed office right now, I’m listening to Scott Joplin’s “Solace,” marveling at how all his melancholy, plangent numbers mean so much more to me than years ago, when I only had ears for “The Maple Leaf” and Joplin’s other, more upbeat rags.

Radio’s much on my mind these days, since this coming week marks the premiere of The Big Read on XM, our new national weekday show. In case you haven’t heard, XM Satellite Radio is airing each of the Big Read audiobooks in turn, courtesy of Audible, Inc. Each book will be bracketed beforehand by the NEA-produced CD devoted to the novel in question, and after by a roundtable discussion of the book amongst me and a couple-three distinguished fellow readers — all ringmastered by XM Sonic Theater’s book-besotted host, Jo Reed. The first episode airs Monday at 2:30 am, 10:30 am and 4:30 pm Eastern time. (Bear in mind that Pacific time, as we used to say in California, is three hours behind and roughly a decade ahead.)

The first book will be Fahrenheit 451, read by Ray Bradbury himself. Over at XM last week, I joined in a wide-ranging, provocative conversation about Fahrenheit with Readers Circle member Nancy Pearl, Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card, XM’s own Kim Alexander, and the sainted Jo. This, plus an interview about the show with XM’s Bob Edwards (taking a holiday from our fortnightly movie chats), and a few extra minutes of me jawing about the Big Read in general. All in all, not a bad way to get the word out to those few scattered Americans not yet doing a Big Read or following this blog with fanatical zeal.

Carson McCullers

The Big Read on XM represents just the latest chapter in the long, happy marriage of radio and literature. Dan Brady wrote in this space the other day about the recurrence of bridge-playing in several of our books, but radio may be even more pervasive. Most famously, Bradbury presents radio in Fahrenheit as an insidious force, anticipating the Walkmen and iPods with his descriptions of “seashell” or “thimble” radios “tamped into” oppressed citizens’ ears. More benevolent are characterizations of radio in both The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in which classical music broadcasts become Mick’s solace and salvation, and A Lesson Before Dying, where Jefferson’s jailhouse radio gives him one tenuous nighttime connection to the outside world.

These two literary uses of radio strike me as ultimately truer to life than Bradbury’s cautionary one — though radio’s visual inheritors have a lot more to answer for. Unlike later electronic media, radio (whether delivered via satellite, computer, or crystal set) has one crucial thing in common with literature. It cultivates the very skill that too many educators today find alarmingly absent from their classrooms: the ability of students to make up their own pictures…

August 28, 2007
Washington, DC

Did you see that piece in the New York Times last week about JT Leroy, the abused-kid-turned-truck-stop-hooker who transformed himself into an acclaimed writer of literary fiction — until he turned out to be a female freelance writer who’d transformed herself into the totally fictitious JT Leroy? It’s a bottomlessly interesting story, one I may return to for the ideas it shakes loose about the pernicious practice of reviewing author’s bios instead of their books.

For now, though, I’m curious to look at literary fame and its possible effects on productivity and talent. The 21 Big Read authors describe a pretty broad spread on the spectrum of literary celebrity, from Harper Lee at one end — so retiring that she effectively retired at 35 — to Leo Tolstoy at the other, of whom it was once said that Russia had two tsars, and that Tolstoy was the more illustrious of the two.

Somewhere in between is Ernest J. Gaines, who scribbled in obscurity until Tracy Keenan Wynn adapted The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman for CBS, maybe even until Oprah Winfrey anointed A Lesson Before Dying with the gilded halo of her first initial. In a recent conference call with our inhouse NEA book group, Gaines sounded like a remarkably modest man, unimpressed by his accolades and — maybe for that reason — one of very few writers whose later books surpass their precursors.

Then there’s Marilynne Robinson, who takes her sweet time. In 1980 she published Housekeeping (which also recently joined the Big Read list) to rapturous reviews. She didn’t come out with another novel till 2004’s Gilead, which won her the wide readership that had previously eluded her — and the attention that she in turn had eluded.

Four famous writers, four different reactions to fame. Harper Lee ignores it and falls silent. Tolstoy revels in it as a younger man, then walks away. Gaines works hard, succeeds, then works even harder. And Marilynne Robinson gets it right the first time, raises a family, teaches, and then comes back as if she’d never been away.

Why does success paralyze some writers, help others by giving them time to write more carefully, and leave others almost unscathed? When all else fails, look at the books:

1) At the end of To Kill a Mockingbird, the sheriff argues that “taking the one man who’s done you and this town a great service an’ draggin’ him with his shy ways into the limelight — to me that’s a sin.” Should we be entirely surprised that Harper Lee shares Boo Radley’s aversion to the limelight?

2) In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the title character enjoys the trappings of bourgeois success until he finds himself entrapped. Is it any wonder that Tolstoy reveled in his own fame until at midlife, like Ivan, he finally heard the soft, crunching tread of the one reader nobody ever snows?
3) Or look at Gaines. The protagonist of A Lesson Before Dying works at a thankless job until he finds a way to love it. Is that so different from his creator, who plugged away at fiction for years until success, when it came, was almost beside the point?

4) One more and I’ll stop: Marilynne Robinson, whose Gilead consists of letters from an elderly, ailing father to the young son he won’t see grow up. You don’t have to be obsessed with the lineaments of literary reputation (in other words, you don’t have to be me) to read that novel as a meditation on what it’s like to write a book as wonderful as Housekeeping and then wait, in vain, for the childlike gratitude such an achievement deserves.

Okay, I’ll stop. There’s an entire branch of voguish pseudo-French criticism waiting to be christened that would read each new book as a writer’s further rumination on his or her own flickering renown — careerisme? — but I’ll not christen it today. Just know that good writing, whether pseudonymous, anonymous or just unsung, is always synonymous with hard, selfish, lonely work…