The life lived in the external or internal world of a writer

When promotional material for Cult Writers: 50 Nonconformist Novelists You Need to Know fell into my inbox, I couldn't resist comparing its contents against my own mental list of quirky writers and literary obsessions.

Written by Ian Haydn Smith and illustrated by Kristelle Rodeia, this volume covers a decent cross-section of slightly off-mainstream literature available to the English reading public. Some of the writers are better known for their poetry or essays, but all had authored at least one novel. (For those interested, the publisher's page reveals the full list of writers.)

Note: The contents of my digital review copy differ slightly from the public list (swapping out five entries). I truly hope Eve Babitz and Joan Didion made the final cut over Joseph Heller and James Joyce.

I've read 32 of them, and obsessed over several of them throughout various phases of my life (though only one served as namesake for a pet cat).

Women writers are relatively well represented (23 of the 50). Regarding language, 18 of them do not write in English. All but 12 writers are dead.

Only one author had I never heard of (Juan Rulfo).

Each entry is topped by the writer's name and dates, with a pithy descriptive label, like "Chronicler of the Weird" (Murakami) or "The Literary Outlaw" (Genet) or "The Experimenter" (Lessing). Some of these are repetitive, not particularly insightful, arguably not even accurate, but I'd be hard-pressed to come up with better options — that's a tough exercise.

The entry covers a combination of biography, publication history, and public reception — it sticks to objective fact rather than attempt to offer insight. There is little attention to any particular work, but in most cases a style is attributed to the author — "Southern Gothic" (McCullers) and poetic Confessionalism (Plath) — and their work is described in broad thematic strokes. Every entry is complemented by an illustration of the author (that's Bulgakov below, and can you guess who it is on the cover?), and some of them feature quotations.

The book is indexed (mostly people, institutions, publications, and prizes) and includes a list of key works for each writer.

But how do you define the cult status of a writer anyway? Without setting hard and fast criteria, Smith focuses on the fervour of their readership and their transgression of genre boundaries.

However, for all its focus on their work, this book is ultimately about the creators. Which raises another question: is a cult writer defined by the work they produce or the life they have lived? As you will glean from the portraits included here, the answer is: both. More specifically, it depends on the life lived in the external or internal world of a writer.

(Umm, what? I think I disagree.)

I would dispute the status of some of the writers included (and here my own biases will be laid bare).

One stumbling block for me is that I don't think it's enough to have authored a cult book to be considered a cult writer. To me, you're only a cult writer if, having experienced your work, I'm compelled to search out and devour everything you've ever written.

By my thinking, JRR Tolkien does not fit the bill. The world he created is massive and influential; Middle Earth inspires worship, but Tolkien does not. Besides, he is too obvious and too present in our culture to be a discovery — cult status is reserved for the special, beyond mainstream.

Pauline Réage authored but one book, The Story of O. She is, I think, unfairly labeled here as "the sado-masochist author," diminishing the sexual paradox of liberation in slavery that it explores and the controversial brand of feminism it inspires. While I think her novel is an important one and it enjoys elite status, the author, anonymous for years, remains essentially unknown.

Ken Kesey. Really?

And Ayn Rand. Does anyone read her seriously after high school?

But I was pleased to see Chris Kraus in this company (whose work I only recently discovered, and yes, I am compelled to explore more).

And then there are the inevitable oversights.

Smith justifies some of his choices in the introduction: "Thomas Pynchon stands in for other experimental writers such William Gaddis, Roberto Bolaño and David Foster Wallace." Even while they're all postmodernists, and often maximalists, they're quite different. I suspect Pynchon is less prevalent on college campuses today than the others. But maybe not. (Smith acknowledges, "Times are changing and so should this list.") Since the entries tend toward the biographical with only a minimal attempt to place these figures on the literary landscape and describe their significance and influence, the idea that one writer might stand for a group isn't strongly conveyed. (I would've chosen Bolaño to represent this group, because he resonates more strongly with this millennium's readers.)

Smith nods at a few other writers that didn't make the cut (I would have included Mark Z Danielewski over several of the others).

The one writer missing who, in my view, absolutely ought to be here: Clarice Lispector.

Despite my quibbles, I love lists, and I think Cult Writers makes for a great coffee table book. It has smallish dimensions but the illustrations are a lot of fun. It's not the kind of book you read cover to cover; you flip through and learn a random fact, reminisce over the copy of Cortázar your ex gave you, be inspired to finally read Train Dreams.

I'd happily bestow this book on the right college student, possibly annotated to better mould their mind.

Whom would you include in a list of cult writers everybody needs to know?

A salad of despair

Yet at least he had believed in the cars, maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bring with them the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, of supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust — and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10c, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the market, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a grey dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes — it made him sick to look, but he had to look. If it had been an outright junkyard, probably he could have stuck things out, made a career: the violence that had caused each wreck being infrequent enough, far enough away from him, to be miraculous, as each death, up till the moment of our own, is miraculous. But the endless rituals of trade-in, week after week, never got as far as violence or blood, and so were too plausible for the impressionable Mucho to take for long. Even if enough exposure to the unvarying grey sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else's life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest.

— from The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon.

The life of a used car salesman sounds terrible.

Another world's intrusion into this one

Bulgarian edition, 1990

This book is funny and messed with my mind in a most wonderful way. I have no idea what to make of it, and I loved it. The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon. This is my first Pynchon.

It preys on a paranoid sense of conspiracy, both in the protagonist, Oedipa Maas, and the reader.

How strange it is to be reading the words "REPORT ALL OBSCENE MAIL TO YOUR POTSMASTER" while standing in the metro waiting for the doors to close, and at the last moment a young man who bears a striking resemblance to Putin should jump in, squeezing in behind my shoulder. He's wearing a standard-issue Canada Post jacket. I read about the Scope bar, and upon arriving at work I'm asked to proofread an ad for a conference called SCOPE. There's bourbon everywhere. Several(!) articles I read during the week reference Stockhausen, and Bakunin.

Oedipa Maas has been named executor of the estate of an old boyfriend. As she reviews his assets, she stumbles onto a massive conspiracy regarding the American postal system extending prior to the Civil War (an alternate history of which is also presented). She finds secret signs everywhere, but she herself is not comfortable with all the coincidence, and considers that it may all be in her head.

We are treated to a Jacobean revenge play, its variant editions, and an investigation into its origins that takes Oedipa to a used bookstore, a publisher, and a university professor. There's a scheme to recover bones for the purpose of making cigarette filters. The Yoyodyne corporation. A perpetual motion machine.

"You know what a miracle is. Not what Bakunin said. But another world's intrusion into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there's cataclysm. Like the church we hate, anarchists also believe in another world. Where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the soul's talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without effort, automatic as the body itself. And yet, señá, if any of it should ever really happen that perfectly, I would also have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle. Like your friend. He is too exactly and without flaw the thing we fight. In Mexico the privilegiado is always, to a finite percentage, redeemed — one of the people. Unmiraculous. But your friend, unless he's joking, is as terrifying to me as a Virgin appearing to an Indian."

There's a whole wiki devoted to this novel, and I read alongside it for a while. It was the note regarding Oedipa's shrink, Dr Hilarius, that caused me to trust in my own reading. The annotation gives a summary of Pope Saint Hilarius. But I truly don't see a need to look beyond the obvious: as a name, Hilarius is plain hilarious, only slightly more latinate and therefore doctory.

At some point I had to consciously decide not even to try to make sense of it all, let it wash over me, enjoy the ride. "Like all their inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive."

It reminds me of the best of Auster and the best of Murakami, but more self-assured, smarter. Wackier, yet in a seeming contradiction giving the impression of being more grounded in the real world. It feels loaded with possibility, and with possible interpretation.

Polish edition, 1990

There are a couple odd references to cancer. "The rest of the bones were used in the R&D phase of the filter programme, back around the early fifties, way before cancer." Did cancer not exist in the early fifties? Is it a symbol for communism? Some other sickness afflicting America? (Norman Mailer said, "Cancer is the growth of madness denied.") At another point, Oedipa lumps cancer together with things she doesn't want to think about. Is she turning a blind eye to some social responsibility? Or is she in denial about a personal, physical cancer? Is that what Maas is? Maybe it's merely her marriage that is the cancerous mass.

"There's a certain harassed style," she said, "you get to recognize. I thought only kids caused it. I guess not."

One reading of the book posits that it's one long acid trip. Dr Hilarius had wanted her to take part in a study, but she didn't trust him, and didn't take any of the pills her prescribed her (but perhaps this is a wish manifest through LSD, not reflecting reality).

The titular crying is that of an auctioneer. When lot 49, the dead man's collection of forged stamps, is put on the block, Oedipa hopes it will draw out a representative of Trystero, proving its existence once and for all. But the book ends as the auctioneer is clearing his throat. So the reader will never know. I feel Oedipa crying at this moment too, the way only a painting can make her cry.

Have you read The Crying of Lot 49? Do you have a theory?

Review in The New York Times (1966).
Review in The Quarterly Conversation.
Gallery of cover art.

No apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic

Mujer Saljendo del Psicoanalista, Remedios Varo

In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central paintings of a triptych, title 'Bordando el Manto Terrestre', were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape. What did she so desire to escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: and what really keeps here where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstitions, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disc jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

— from The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon.

As with many references in The crying of Lot 49, I didn't know if Remedios Varo was real or fictitious. Real, it turns out. Her paintings are real.

I don't recognize her work as anything I've come across in the past; how can I have lived my life without knowing her? Whimsical yet dark. Feminist. Several of her works would feel at home within the world of The Crying of Lot 49.

I have a particular fondness for Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst (above), as if she's pulled the cobwebs from her mind, and they are the psychoanalyst.

Oedipa Maas's shrink, Dr. Hilarius, has been trying to recruit her for an LSD study, but she has resisted. She doesn't trust him. I haven't entirely figured out Pynchon's attitude to women, or at least to this woman protagonist. It may not be important. But I have the feeling it is.

Bordando el Manto Terrestre, Remedios Varo

Has a painting ever made you cry?

On not buying books

Yesterday for lunch I went to the bookstore. Food for thought, food for the soul. Usually I just like to browse, just being in a bookstore brings me comfort (and I'm lucky to have recently found a non-big-box-chain store near my office — I blame the shifting streets of Old Montreal, like mischievous Hogwarts staircases, for keeping it hidden from me for so long), but yesterday, uncharacteristically, I splurged on impulse.

I have tried to keep in check the acquisition of books, but when displaying my spoils back at the office (just three books), a coworker, having witnessed me purchase books on two occasions and at other times open packages of books, called me on this delusion of mine.

Since September,

• The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle — because a review made me want it, it's Lovecraftian
• Le Chat, Georges Simenon — to practice my French
• The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon — because I've been planning to read it for years, so finally now
• The Door, Magda Szabó — because I wanted Iza's Ballad (because the name) but it wasn't available, and NYRB Classics books are beautiful
• Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau — because it's exercises in style, so I can argue that it's related to my work
• The Familiar, Volume 2, Mark Z Danielewski — because volume 1 was exhilarating, and it's fascinating as an object
• The Hand, Georges Simenon — because I'd never heard of it, and since it's not available in Canada it's that much more precious
• The Invisible Library, Genevieve Cogman — because it was on all sorts of books-to-watch-for lists and it cost less than 2 dollars, and it might be about a library
• The Last Days of New Paris, China Miéville — because Miéville is one of the few authors about whom I feel I must own his entire oeuvre
• The Loney, Andrew Michael Hurley — because I had it on a list somewhere, I don't know why
• Monday Starts on Saturday, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky — because now available in English, plus it's an excellent title
• So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood, Patrick Modiano — because I'd never heard of it, and I felt a connection to Modiano this summer, and it was shelved in the thriller section
• The Vegetarian, Han Kang — because I've been wanting to see what the fuss is about, but it wasn't available at my library, and I know I can hand it off to someone afterward

And before September, the last time I purchased a book was August, and before that was June. If you don't count the travel guide I picked up in July, along with some other vacation-reading material.

That's not counting the books I've purchased as gifts for other people, which typically occasion an oh-I'll-just-pick-up-a-little-something-for-myself-then-too moment, which helped contribute to the above.

Some of the above books were rationalized in a my-birthday-is-coming-soon way, and then an it-was-just-my-birthday-so-of-course-I-should-treat-myself way.

I'm proud to be using the library more regularly this year (quite suddenly they have a decent selection of ebooks), and when I'm hankering for something new I'm likely to browse NetGalley review copy offerings. At least some of the books listed above are ebooks (for which I'll rarely allow myself to spend more $5). I have not listed here the free ebooks I've acquired.

But believe me when I say it's not a spending problem so much as a space problem. I've become adept at slipping books in and overlooking them mentally; physically, it's a bit more challenging. Surely I'm a victim of book creep — the steady but so-slow-as-to-be-almost-imperceptible advance of books from designated shelves and corners onto most surfaces of my living space.

Me not buying books? Not very good at it.

Hold it tightly by its little tentacle

"I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy."

"Cherish it!" cried Hilarius, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be."

For a few weeks now I've been scouring local bookstores for a copy of The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon. I have some Pynchon on my shelf that I mean to get to some day, but now, now! — since that episode of Mad Men with Pete Campbell on the train reading The Crying of Lot 49 — I have to read that Pynchon first, and now.

Were it available as an ebook, I'd have downloaded it by the time that episode's final credits had finished rolling.

By an amazing coincidence, the day I've coordinated my schedule to make a lunch-hour trip to a particular bookstore on which I'm betting to have an actual physical copy is the day I receive news that Penguin has struck a deal with Pynchon, and his books are available digitally as of today.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Mad Men effect played a role in nudging both parties to reach an agreement.

See also: Why the Hell is Peter Campbell Reading The Crying of Lot 49?