Brooklyn gentrification novelists have always alleged that aesthetics, not class, unite and divide their borough. Not so, Amy Sohn tells us  in her new novel Prospect Park West. What matters is money, and in Park Slope white people have it. Sohn's privileged characters do not pretend otherwise, nor do they deny their status as gentrifiers. At the end of the novel, a successful actress decamps from Brooklyn's Gold Coast to Manhattan; another woman receives her comeuppance when, after putting a down payment on a long-coveted apartment, she discovers that the school district has been rezoned. Her son must attend PS 282, two-thirds black, one-third Hispanic, and "the worst kind of school there was: too bad to be good but too good to be bad."

Sohn, the least self-avowedly serious of Brooklyn writers, is the only one who can afford to be so honest. In a genre that emerged in the 1960s and '70s, when droves of middle-class men and women moved to the borough to restore its Italianate brownstones and Victorian row houses, her more literary peers remain unable to take their eyes off the window-dressing. As Brooklyn has changed, so has the gentrification novel, and today's writers are more likely to romanticize grimy dive bars than cornice moldings. Still, taste continues to be presented as the force that defines city life. In the gentrification novel, questions of wealth and race are rephrased as inquiries into authenticity and what it means to be a true New Yorker. 

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More than half a century ago, Randall Jarrell was invited to speak at an academic panel on "The Obscurity of The Modern Poet." The problem the panel's title obviously implied was that "the Modern Poet" had adopted a strategy of willful difficulty, shunning the common reader. Jarrell began his talk with a cheeky misreading, saying that after hearing of the panel's subject,

I was delighted, for I have suffered from this obscurity all my life. But then I realized that I was being asked to talk not about the fact that people don't read poetry, but about the fact that most of them wouldn't understand it if they did: about the difficulty, not the neglect, of contemporary poetry. … Since most people know about the modern poet only that he is obscure—i.e., that he is difficult, i.e., that he is neglected—they naturally make a causal connection between the two meanings of the word, and decide that he is unread because he is difficult. Some of the time this is true; some of the time the reverse is true: the poet seems difficult because he is not read, because the reader is not accustomed to reading his or any other poetry.

I thought of Jarrell and the conflation of difficulty with neglect after reading Time book critic Lev Grossman's rather unfortunate consideration, in last weekend's Wall Street Journal, of the Obscurity of the Modern Novelist. "Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard," would make a fine, snarky dismissal of Grossman's argument, were it not the actual title the Journal had given to the piece. Read More

When the reading is over and the inevitable question-and-answer session begins—and there's nothing wrong with that, of course—the question invariably arises. "When exactly did you start writing?" 

Clancy Martin. How to Sell. FSG. May 2009.

Edgardo Vega Yunqué: 1936–2008

Blake Bailey. Cheever: A Life. Knopf. March 2009.
Blake Bailey, ed. John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings. (Library of America, No. 188.) Library of America. March 2009.
Blake Bailey, ed. John Cheever: Complete Novels. (Library of America, No. 189.) Library of America. March 2009.

John, your reputation in American literature is very, very shaky. God knows what will happen to it. —Jean Stafford to Cheever in 1978

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One of this novel's minor but telling peculiarities is the narrator's extreme reluctance to resort to proper names, and to describe the book in its own preferred style would be to avoid for as long as possible any mention of the author's name or the title of his book. True, we learn (or seem to learn) from the first sentence that the main character bears the last name of Sorger, but in German this is as good as allegorical—Sorger means one who takes care or has cares—and the man's given name in any case doesn't come up for some fifty pages. Read More

Just as the '90s witnessed the American canonization of one important foreign writer—W. G. Sebald—the current decade has seen the same happen to the wandering novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño, who spent his boyhood in Chile, his youth mostly in Mexico, and who died in Spain in 2003, at the age of 50, after a decade of Stakhanovite productivity. His massive novel 2666, unrevised at his death, is only now appearing in translation, earlier books like the monologue By Night in Chile, the tragic mockumentary The Savage Detectives, and that vicious counterfactual lark Nazi Literature in the Americas having already secured the highest praise. Bolaño's canonization has taken place so rapidly and completely, and with so little demurral, that one can only reluctantly pile aboard the bandwagon. But Bolaño is the real thing, as urgent, various, imaginative, and new as any writer active in the last decade. The question is: why not canonize anyone else? Why reserve for him the once-in-a-decade beatification? Read More