And, just asking: what effect, if any, has all this had on the career of James N. Frey, who has written fiction and nonfiction (each, we think, under the correct category)?

And why has James N. Frey always used a middle initial despite the fact that he started writing years and years before James Frey? And what is James Frey’s middle intial?

Oh: C.

From the New York Times (”Book Deal for Writer Who Fabricated Parts of Memoir,” by Motoko Rich):

James Frey, the author who admitted making up portions of his best-selling memoir "A Million Little Pieces," has signed a new book deal for his novel "Bright Shiny Morning," with HarperCollins. The dollar figure was not disclosed.

So this, then, would be his third novel. High-O! (Read our credulous reviews of the first two.)

HarperCollins publisher Jonathan Burnham, who negotiated the deal, said that  "What matters is this is a very, very good work of fiction, and it very much stands up on its own."

We’ll see. To be fair, few people criticized Frey’s previous novels by saying they weren’t interesting. Most of them objected to the fact that the novels were said to be memoirs. So maybe he’ll be a great novelist.

Rich, however, finds that old habits die hard:

Reached by telephone before the announcement, Mr. Frey denied rumors that he had sold a short story collection, saying, "I have never written a short story in my life."

But Mr. Frey published a short story last fall in a catalog for an exhibition by Malerie Marder, a Los Angeles-based artist.

Found this via The Elegant Variation, labeled “Bitter Author Alert!“–Peter Sacks, author of Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education (Univ. of California), confesses that he is underappreciated:

Meanwhile, a thousand splendid authors, working in relative obscurity, have written a thousand splendid books that you will never hear about. We splendid authors dwell on the dark side of the publishing world, clinging to our precious bones of good news — a possible review coming up in a small magazine, a publicist who continues to answer our emails, a slight bump in our Amazon rankings. We wonder what it might be like to live on the light side, where A Thousand Splendid Suns shines so brightly that few inhabitants of American culture could possibly be unaware of it. For those of us on the dark side, however, we endure, hoping for just an ember of that warmth. That would be enough. That would keep us going.

I’m sympathetic to much of what he says. I, too, am disturbed by the constant dumbing down of discourse. I, too, wish more people wanted to read smarter books. And I think writers deserve to be paid at least as well as plumbers. But I question his implicit assumption that Writers of Serious Books have ever had it much better.

Right now I’m reading Blue Heaven (St. Martin’s Minotaur) a new thriller by C. J. Box, a writer whose commercial prospects are probably a bit brighter than those of Sacks. It’s an entertainment, but a damn good one, and, as usual, Box has a few nuggets of wisdom thrown in with the thrills.

In this scene, a 12-year-old girl asks a grizzled rancher about his work:

“You do all of this ranch stuff by yourself?”

“I do now,” Jess said. “I had to let my foreman go a couple of days ago.”

“What if you get sick or something?”

“Then things don’t get done.”

“That’s not fair.”

“It’s plenty fair,” he said. “Why wouldn’t it be? Folks aren’t entitled to a living.”

“It just doesn’t sound right,” she said, a little more unsure of herself.

“I’m not saying it’s right. I said it was fair.”

Earning a living by writing books is just as tough as earning a living by reading them. But to have time enough for either is a luxury–a point ironically lost on a guy who just wrote a book about the class divide.

Dave Eggers (What Is the What) seems to be one of those love-him-or-hate-him writers. Because his life story was so integral to the launching of his career, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to separate his personality from his product. He’s been called “Saint Dave”–and not by the lovers. But, setting his work aside for the moment, he sure seems like a decent human being to me. And I’d be surprised if any of his detractors have done as much for as many communities as he has.

Anyway, according to the Washington Post (”Author Dave Eggers Cops $250,000 Heinz Award“), he’s been given a bunch of money because he’s so good at giving away money (also, “philanthropist” now supersedes “literary entrepreneur” in his list of titles):

Author, philanthropist and literary entrepreneur Dave Eggers has become the youngest person ever to win one of the annual $250,000 awards from the Heinz Family Foundation.

Eggers, 37, used earnings from his autobiographical 2000 bestseller “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” to launch 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center in San Francisco for children ages 6 to 18. Since then, the center has replicated itself in five other cities, with another branch scheduled to open this fall in Boston.

“I think of it as a validation of the work that 826 does,” a grateful Eggers said in an interview. He said the $250,000 would be split evenly among the seven centers.

“Saint Dave”? If they don’t like his writing, fair enough. But it sounds like envy to me. Hell, I envy him. It’s not enough that he’s a talented, enormously popular writer–he has to be a nice guy, too?

In a brief article in USA Today (”Novels about 9/11 can’t stack up to non-fiction“), Bob Minzesheimer notes that nonfiction about 9/11 outnumbers novels by a staggering ratio:

Six years after the twin towers fell, enough non-fiction has been published about Sept. 11, 2001, to fill an entire section of a bookstore: 1,036 titles, according to Books in Print.

But novels inspired by 9/11 could fit on one shelf. There are only about 30, and none has seized the public imagination.

There have been, of course, some well-respected and well-reviewed 9/11 novels. (I gave Jay McInerney’s The Good Life high praise, and other Booklist reviewers have starred reviews of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, Jess Walter’s The Zero, and John Updike’s Terrorist.) Yet there seems to be this assumption out there that the 9/11 novel hasn’t been written. Will it be? Do we need it to be?

C. Max Magee makes some good points at The Millions:

…the subtext of these articles, and there have been many in many venues over the years, is twofold.

First is that the serious novel’s driving function is to make sense of our complicated world, to distill it to its essence so that years from now, when a young man asks how 9/11 felt, an old man can wordlessly slip a book into his hand. Second is this idea that every major event requires the culture to produce innumerable artifacts that are explicitly about that event. There are hundreds of films and TV shows that are primarily about 9/11, but where, the culture watchers ask, are all the novels?

Linking to an earlier post, he cites his own previous answer to the question:

I would argue that nearly every serious novel written since 9/11 is a “9/11 novel.” Writers, artists, and filmmakers, consciously or subconsciously, react to the world around them some way, and 9/11, from many angles, is incontrovertibly a part of our world. For example, even Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which is set in an alternate universe in which a temporary Jewish homeland has been set up in Alaska, is a “9/11 novel” in that it has internalized the post-9/11 sensibilities of shadowy government meddling in the Middle East and the feeling of an impending global and religiously motivated conflict. To expect a novel to explicitly place 9/11 into a context that offers us all some greater understanding of it is to misunderstand how fiction works, as Jerome Weeks implies. What we are really looking for (as ever) is a defining novel of our time.

Well said.

In The Biographer’s Craft newsletter, Charles J. Shields, author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (Holt), writes about how to write a biography when the subject won’t cooperate:

This led to a practice that became habitual. I was always polite and discreet, even when people questioned my integrity. “Why don’t you just leave Nelle alone?” they asked. I made it clear that I’m a gentleman interested in the life of an important American author. Although a few times I heard mean-spirited gossip that would have thrown shade on Lee’s character, I didn’t pursue it when, in my judgment, it was just that: nasty gossip. My standard of low-mindedness is Jerry Oppenheimer’s Just Desserts: The Unauthorized Biography of Martha Stewart. Oppenheimer describes, with dirty-minded glee, the night he believes Stewart lost her virginity. Frankly, who cares?

Extra timely because of To Kill a Mockingbird’s audio win at the Quills and because of the L.A. Times article (blogged last week) about reclusive authors.

Who can resist an honor with a moniker like the Henry Paolucci/Walter Bagehot Book Award? Not me, that’s for sure. Well, Andrew Roberts won it, for his History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 (HarperCollins). Read the press release here. (Warning! PDF!)

I’m pleased to help spread the news that Booklist Adult Books Associate Editor Donna Seaman has a very nicely redesigned site for her radio show, Open Books. There’s a nifty media player that allows you to listen to and download interviews of Michael Chabon, Sandra Cisneros, Jane Hamilton, Jamaica Kincaid, A. M. Homes, James McManus, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Pinsky, and many, many more (even a Booklist editor or three). Check it out!

In Sunday’s New York Times (”No Thanks, Mr. Nabokov“), David Oshinsky’s look at Knopf’s rejection file reveals that even a “gold standard” publisher makes some errors in judgment:

For almost a century, Knopf has been the gold standard in the book trade, publishing the works of 17 Nobel Prize-winning authors as well as 47 Pulitzer Prize-winning volumes of fiction, nonfiction, biography and history. Recently, however, scholars trolling through the Knopf archive have been struck by the number of reader’s reports that badly missed the mark, especially where new talent was concerned. The rejection files, which run from the 1940s through the 1970s, include dismissive verdicts on the likes of Jorge Luis Borges ("utterly untranslatable"), Isaac Bashevis Singer ("It’s Poland and the rich Jews again"), Anaïs Nin ("There is no commercial advantage in acquiring her, and, in my opinion, no artistic"), Sylvia Plath ("There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice") and Jack Kerouac ("His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so"). In a two-year stretch beginning in 1955, Knopf turned down manuscripts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, and the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman, not to mention Vladimir Nabokov’s "Lolita" (too racy) and James Baldwin’s "Giovanni’s Room" ("hopelessly bad"). 

Sometimes, trolling through the Booklist card catalog (ah, the sights! the smells! the feel of the cardstock!) we spot similar judgments that, with hindsight, are clearly off the mark. A few years ago, Bill Ott issued a mea culpa for our review of Charlotte’s Web:

The worst part of our review is that we ignore the barn altogether. White once wrote that his novel "was a paean to life, a hymn to the barn, an acceptance of dung." Unfortunately, Booklist was too busy worrying about symbols even to smell the dung, much less accept it. As I reread Charlotte this time, I was impressed once more with what a marvelous balancing act White manages. On the one hand, he was adamant about showing barn life as it really was, but on the other hand, he set himself an utterly unrealistic goal: to keep Wilbur out of the pork barrel. As a farmer himself, White had killed his share of pigs - that’s what farmers do - but he never liked it, and in Charlotte’s Web, he wanted to find a way to let one live. To do so, he was obligated to mix fantasy and reality, which required the help of a spider who was capable of being "both a true friend and a good writer." Introducing fantasy into a book intended to celebrate the reality of farm life was a dangerous move for White. In saving the pig, would he lose the barn? Will the manure still smell when the spiders become prose stylists? We know now that White’s barn was plenty big enough for both Wilbur’s manure and Charlotte’s bons mots, and we are profoundly sorry Booklist didn’t know it in 1952.

On Slate, Jess Row has a nice appreciation of Grace Paley (”Enormous Changes in Very Small Spaces“):

Perhaps the most unresolved tension in Paley’s work lies between her unyielding political idealism (raised by proud and combative socialist parents, she always described herself as a “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist”) and her acute, even overwhelming attraction to the perversities and self-contradictions of ordinary human life. Flannery O’Connor, referring to her own strict and radical Catholicism, wrote that “your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they are no substitute for seeing.” Like O’Connor’s, Paley’s politics seem to have sharpened her appreciation for the grotesque and grubby ugliness she encountered every day. She had a particularly acute eye for hypocrisy: Few writers have written as acidly about idealistic men practicing routine cruelty toward their wives and families. Yet - unlike O’Connor, needless to say - Paley worked for, and expected, the perfectibility of man, dedicating herself to global disarmament, ecological healing, the elimination of racism and poverty. How these two personalities - the keen-eyed and unforgiving observer, the rigid, unsubtle radical - coexisted in the same body is, to me, the mystery of her life, and her art.