I got there early and sat in one of the first few rows. As the auditorium filled, I spent the time talking to my friend, not paying attention to what was going on around me. But shortly before the reading began, once most of the audience had arrived, I noticed something odd about the members of the audience sitting in front of me and I looked around the room to confirm it: the vast majority of the audience was students.
Now, it might seem silly to find it odd that the majority of an audience for an event located on campus would consist of students–but when it comes to literary events in Ann Arbor, both on and off campus, this is very often not the case. In fact, just this Friday I went to a reading event located in East Quad whose audience was mostly middle age or beyond. Readings and book-signings generally attract the older crowd of Ann Arbor, even if that means taking a trip to campus.
But Justin Torres was different. For some reason, he attracted an unusual crowd. Now, I know his book, We the Animals, was required reading in at least one English class, but that wouldn’t explain the hundred or so students present. I was attempting to process this information when the reading began. Of course, hearing him speak made everything make more sense.
For starters, he is a very young and good-looking man–I say that not based on subjective preference, but from an objective standpoint, as he was named one of Salon’s Sexiest Men in 2011. But his youth extended beyond appearances. There were the things he said in between reading sections of his book–from the Beyonce reference to the statement about how despite taking off his jacket he was still “a professional human being”–which were things one would expect from the a college student, not a college professor. And there was something incredibly youthful about the way he spoke and the way he moved–there was this nervous energy within him and you could see that he wasn’t used to being up on that stage, behind the podium, staring out at us with us staring right back, as if he would prefer to switch places, to be the one sitting anonymous in a crowd of college students. This probably wasn’t his first event and since he is a professor, it certainly wasn’t the first time he stood up and spoke in front of a bunch of students, but this crowd, with its size and demeanor, was definitely not something he was used to.
I found the youthfulness of this event remarkable–it’s the first literary event I’ve been to that felt like it happened on a college campus, not in a community hub. And although I can appreciate getting out there and into the world (it is so very easy to forget that people not in the 18-25 age range do, in fact, exist), every once in a while, it’s nice to do something here that feels like it’s just us.
Author Sarah Freligh will recite poems this evening at Literati Bookstore. The event will take place as part of the Poetry at Literati series. Sad Math, Freligh’s newly-released collection of poems, recently merited the Moon City Poetry Award. Freligh has also written Sort of Gone (2008) as well as A Brief History of an American Girl (2012).
Tomorrow (11/12) at UMMA, Justin Torres will be reading and signing books. Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals and has published short fiction in numerous literary magazines (including The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, and many more). He currently teaches English at UCLA, but in 2016 will be the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig. His visit is a part of the Zell Visiting Writers Series.
David Mitchell is the kind of guy who can get a church-load of people to hear him speak in spite of $30 ticket. He’s the kind of a guy for whom this audience will sit in awe of, leaning forward to catch every syllable, laughing at jokes that were clever not funny. He’s the kind of author for whom this audience will wait more than an hour to have their books signed by him. He’s the kind of author fans go fanatic about, consuming his every written word (of the three audience members who asked him questions, two prefaced it by saying “I’ve read all of your books”). He’s the kind of writer who is always nominated for the Man Booker.
But he never wins. And for every fan he has that has read every single word, there’s a person who put down Cloud Atlas in disgust, halfway through. Not everyone loves him. Not everyone agrees that he’s great. There are many who think he’s a gimmick, a fraud almost, another popular fad. There are many who would not consider him or the works he write to be “literary.” While he might be popular, he’s not beloved–at least, not by all.
I’ll admit, I’ve never read any of his books (although, as a now proud owner of Slade House, I will), so I cannot attest one way or another about the merits (or lack thereof) of his writing. I did not find his reading particularly engaging, but in his defense, there are certain types of writing I find better-suited for the page, not the ear. And I did find the question and answer part of this event, intensely interesting–in fact, I think many of his answers help explain his position in the literary world.
Photo Credit: Literati
First, I must give some credit to Peter Ho Davies for being excellent at leading this conversation. As a writer himself, Peter knows the kind of questions to ask that will create an engaging and unique discussion. I’ve yet to be disappointed when Peter is involved in these question and answer sections.
Since David Mitchell’s latest novel, Slade House, and some of his previous work have dealt with ghosts or other fantastical elements, these were brought up in the discussion. In today’s modern literary world, such elements of “genre” writing are typically not well-received when written by a literary figure (or by a non-literary figure, but the literary world doesn’t tend to comment on those works)–they do not fit the current mold of literary and they will be treated as such. This is in spite of the fact, that as David pointed out, these were elements used by previous “greats” such as Dickens and Shakespeare. Instead of acting like he bestowed literariness on these ghosts and other supernatural things because he was the one writing them and not some “genre” peasant (as other literary writers have done in the past), David Mitchell called out the literary world’s attitudes on the subject matter by saying, “I don’t like the idea that mainstream literary writers are not allowed to go here and if they do, they are not taken seriously.” He did not treat “genre” or “genre”-writers as if they were beneath “literary.” He did not acknowledge “literary” fiction as anything other than another kind of “genre.” As someone who is often frustrated by the holier-than-thou attitudes of the literary realm, hearing an author like David Mitchell also express frustration was a great relief. Of course, this attitude of David might also help explain why the literary world has not fully embraced him.
Another important idea brought up in the conversation was the idea of world-building and how David uses it in his novels. None of his books are direct sequels of each other, but certain characters that appear in one occasionally appear in another. This is another decisive characteristic of Mitchell’s novels. Some people love how he is creating his own universe; others think it is a gimmick. When asked about creating his own universe, David described this as happening in three different stages–and to me, at least the first stage, seems like this did spiral out of gimmick. He stated that he did it at first “because [he] thought it was cool.” Now, admitting that you did something because you thought it was cool, at least in the serious world of literature, strikes me as very un-writerly. His second stage is not much better. This second stage was born out of a need for a fully-developed character without putting in the effort to create a character with a backstory and motivations and interests and independence and all that other junk that makes a character seem real. He explained this by saying that “writers are some of the laziest people on Earth.” As a writer myself, I would really like to disagree, but at the same time, there’s some truth there.
The final stage of David Mitchell’s world-building was born out of a desire to create his own Middle Earth. There’s something glorious and beautiful when it comes to building your own universe that operates by your own rules and full of your own creations and your own history that you can just keep adding to and adding to and nurturing for as long as you live and breathe and write. Both Peter and David talked about making maps of worlds unknown, undefined as children, worlds that were theirs and no one else’s–I’ll throw in that somewhere in the drawer of my childhood dresser is probably a dozen maps of worlds that I drew, named, crafted, and abandoned. Writers have this desire to create and that is why they write, why they are writers, but sometimes this creative desire is so potent that a single story or novel is not enough to get it out and there mustn’t just be sequels, there must be dozens of histories and characters and lands just off the page, so that for every page written, there are three pages unwritten. In his own words, David described his conflicting desires: “part of me wants to spend every creative voltage on something enormous, something cathedral size, something galactic–and I want to write stand-alone stories.”
I’ll say once again that I have not read any of David Mitchell’s books, but after the conversation between him and Peter Ho Davies, I can say that I have become absolutely fascinated by him and his ideas about writing and cannot wait to begin Slade House.
David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks and many more, is coming to Ann Arbor. In an event brought to you by Literati and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, David Mitchell will be reading (and signing) at the First United Methodist Church this Saturday. This eventis part of his book tour for his latest novel, Slade House.
You must purchase tickets prior to the event (sale ends 11/6 at midnight!) and at the price $30 for one or $15 each for two, the ticket prices seem quite high–but included with your ticket purchase is a copy of Slade House ($26), and given David Mitchell’s track record for writing interesting, out-there literary novels, this book will almost certainly be worth the money.
The event will be this Saturday at 6 PM (doors open at 5:15 PM, get there early) at the First United Methodist Church (120 South State St.).
Wearing a tight Naked Lunch shirt and sporting shoulder-length dreadlocks, Marlon James seemed younger than his 45 years. This matched the way he behaved. He jested. He threw shade. He smiled and laughed with us in a way that felt whole, like the words weren’t perfectly pre-planned, like there wasn’t a stage. Marlon James does not act like a college professor, at least, not like the ones I’ve had. Nor does he act like a writer who just won the Booker.
When he read, he read as if he were his characters, as if they were temporal beings making use of his body. There were two passages that stood out most (to me, at least)–possibly because they had the audience howling, but probably because they were raunchy and had there been children in the audience, it would have been best to cover their ears. The first of these passages was when one of his Jamaican characters described the various kinds and qualities of sexual relations she had with European men of various countries. They all had their positives and drawbacks and while no singular country rose above the rest, the French were definitely painted in the worst light. After Marlon finished reading this scene, one particularly interested member of the audience asked him how he knew all these things about having sex with European men. According to Marlon James, some parts of an author’s novel are autobiographical, some are not. “Parts.”
The second striking passage where when that same character (now a home-care worker in New York) was exchanging racist jokes with an old white man she was supposed to be taking care of. This being Ann Arbor, of course, the mostly-white audience only felt comfortable laughing at the jokes making fun of white people. But still, the scene was funny and most of us cackled with enthusiasm.
These–these sexual escapades, these racist jokes–were the words of Booker-Prize winning novel. These were the words, out of the hundreds of thousands of other words, that were chosen to win the prize. They might not be the words you expected. Even going in knowing what this book was about, they were not the words I expected. That is probably a good thing.
It is easy to get an idea in your head about what it means to be literary. It is easy to imagine a literary author as some pale shut-in hunched over his type-writer, clanking away at his latest masterpiece, surrounded by emptied, tea-stained mugs and pages and pages blotted with ink. When that shut-in finally emerges, it is easy to visualize him standing up to that podium, dressed in some sort of brown suit–maybe meekly smiling, maybe too haughty even for that–lowering his glasses and reading his words softly and solemnly as if reciting them at his mother’s funeral. It is very easy to fall into this trap, this idea of what a writer is.
Perhaps your own exact vision of a writer differs from mine here and there, but it probably exists and if it exists, Marlon James probably does not greatly resemble that image. Nor does his book resemble an easy definition of literary (although it is the lengthy tome favored by judges of literature), but despite not being Booker-bait, it still won. And it’s very good thing that a book like A Brief History of Seven Killings written by a man like Marlon James can win an award like the Booker, because ultimately the concept of “literary” and what is and what isn’t worthy is all arbitrary and always either expanding or shrinking, encompassing or excluding, and when the same award goes to the same people who write the same kind of books, it is easy to forget about the authors on the edge of literary, the authors with something else to say as they push and shove and scrape at that boundary, the authors we will remember fifty years from now because their book was different. It is important and exciting to see these different voices win these awards, to remember what else is out there.
I, for one, am greatly looking forward to reading (with Marlon’s voice in my head) A Brief History of Seven Killings.
