Thursday, October 17, 2013

The Problem With How Movies Are Released And Its Relation To Why Movie Criticism Sucks These Days

The New York Film Festival wrapped up this past weekend, and it made me realize that the current model of film distribution/presentation is at best antiquated and at worst totally stupid.

Festivals like NYFF play a lot of so-called "art-house films" (an anachronym if I've ever heard one; when's the last time you went to an "art house"?) and the way these get released to the public hasn't changed in decades: Play the festival circuit, then open in 4 theaters in NYC/LA, then maybe open in a few multiplexes, then a few more if the numbers are going in the right direction. Needless to say, unless the film is a hit, most people in the country have to wait until the video release to see these movies, which could happen a year or more after that initial festival screening.

This is dumb.

There are plenty of movies I'd like to see that were at NYFF, but I'll have to wait months for them to be available. Why are movies like this? With what other artistic medium are we prevented from experiencing the finished product for such a long time? Imagine if a novel was released and only people in New York City and LA could read it. Or if an album dropped and you could only listen to it at a certain venue at a certain time. These scenarios are preposterous, but for some reason are accepted when applied to film.


I propose a very simple idea: a movie gets one release date, and on this day it is released simultaneously in theaters, on DVD and Blu-ray, and through VOD services like iTunes. This is the omnipresent release strategy every other mainstream artistic medium has adopted in the 21st century, and movies are lagging behind with a severely outdated system.

What are the plausible reasons for keeping movie distribution the way it is now? Let's tackle each one:

"Movies cost so much that a lot of hype has to be built up about its release in order to make its money back."

Ok, assuming this is true, is the "platform" strategy really the best way for films to maximize its intake of money? One of the films I really wanted to see at NYFF this year was THE WIND RISES. Disney (or Disney-owned Miramax) has been in charge of the domestic distribution of all the Miyazaki films since PRINCESS MONONOKE and they’ve always employed a platforming strategy (film festivals, limited release, bigger release). What kind of lucre has this resulted in? Take a look….

Domestic grosses:

PRINCESS MONONOKE: 2.3 million
SPIRITED AWAY: 9.9 mill
HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE : 4.7 mill

PONYO actually opened "wide" (927 theaters; SPIRITED AWAY topped out at 714 at its widest) and unsurprisingly grossed the most at 15 million. These are, frankly, piss-poor results. All this strategy has done is withhold the films from Miyazaki fans while Disney desperately tries (and fails) to convince other people to see something they don’t want to see. (Can you even think of another product with a publicity strategy that does everything to entice uninterested people at the expense of its actual fans?) And I’m sorry but you can't tell me that making the movie available to everyone in the US at once—in the form of $10 movie tickets, $20 Blu-rays, $7.99 VOD rentals—wouldn't result in more money. Maybe in the past the platforming strategy was necessary, but in our broadband connected world, this is not the case anymore. The acceptance of online streaming and emphasis on consumer choice has fundamentally changed the way we watch TV, and it's time for the same change to be made for movies.


"Movies were meant to be seen in a theater."

This is another thing that was true once, but no longer. Once theaters switched to digital projectors, they could no longer claim that they were offering a unique experience, or even a "correct" one. Everyone's home set-up now deals with the same pixels as movie theaters, with the same simulated 24fps. There is no more film being run through projectors with its dreamlike shutter clicking away—a moot point anyway since most movies aren't being shot on film. And consider this: The hot tech in movie theater video projection these days is 4K, a resolution that will be standard in consumer TVs within 2 years. Home presentation of movies isn't only "just as good" as theaters these days, it’s better. Besides, think about other media again. Does the music industry demand people listen to new music in optimal conditions, to preserve the “integrity” of the experience or whatever? No, they let people buy it (or stream it) and listen to it however they want, whether it's on vinyl coming out of gorgeous speakers, or hideously compressed mp3s coming out of $5 earbuds. Not only that, but everyone has accepted any of these options as legitimate means of consumption. Only those afflicted with the most distasteful snobbery would insist that someone who had only listened to an album in mp3 form hadn't actually listened to the album yet. And speaking of snobs, we come to a final reason movie distribution is the way it is....

"It allows a bunch of people to feel superior to others and write a bunch of meaningless reviews."

This seems to be the only real reason the current system is in place. (This and each individual festival's vested financial interest in keeping it going.) All these advance screenings allow the press and those in major cities to feel really special for a few months. Having attended a handful of advance screenings, I know this feeling well. There’s no question that if I lived in NYC, I’d have seen those films at NYFF. So, ultimately, I don't hold it against people for doing something I'd partake in given the opportunity.

That is, unless they write reviews immediately afterward.

Reviews of art should be a good-faith interaction between reviewer and reader. The sometimes elusive reason for writing is crystallized when writing a review; it is abundantly clear you are writing for another person, because only a "touched" person opines to nobody, to nothing but air. (Whereas in other forms of writing this distinction is a bit hazier: one might say that writing down the truth is eo ipso "of worth," regardless whether anyone is reading it, cf. Hemingway's definition of good fiction being one true sentence after another....But I seriously digress.)

So when it comes to reviews of a movie that played at a film festival 24 hours ago, it invites the question: who could these early reviews possibly be for? When someone reviews a movie that 99% of the people who want to see the movie won't watch it for months, what's the point? What good is writing a review of HER now? The truth is that that person is writing the review solely for other film critics, trying to impress them and appear cool to everyone else. It's no wonder that film critics these days seem more cloistered and snobby than ever.

Of course, the critic can rebut that people will be able to track down his review after they've seen the movie (in 4+ months).  My response to that is: If the audience for your piece isn't going to read it for 4 months, why not write it 4 months from now? I think we’d all agree that time spent on almost anything—especially writing—makes that thing better. But the fact is your average movie critic places a premium on being first to comment on something and to make some sort of judgment, and this rush to add to the noise comes at the expense of insightful, considered writing.

A concrete example of this: I watched UPSTREAM COLOR on blu-ray, about five months after its premiere at the Sundance film festival. I was struck by the movie and wanted to write something that would contribute to the discussion. I wrote an essayish thing that concentrated on something very narrow: The similarities it shared with Kieslowski’s BLUE. Now, a quick Google search reveals that I wasn’t the first one to notice these similarities. Ray Pride, writing for Movie City News, wrote about it right after he saw the movie at Sundance. The thing is, he briefly mentioned it and moved on. My piece was 1,700 words and offered a far more detailed look.


Now maybe Mr. Pride didn’t have anything else on the subject. If I had to guess, he was just citing all the allusions he could remember as quickly as possible in order to be the first to do so, which is something that all film critics do these days. But here we are, not even a year removed from Sundance, and people looking for more information on this particular connection don’t really care about a brief mention by someone just trying to meet a deadline. My blog post is rightly at the top of the search results on the subject.

I’m not even saying my piece is particularly great. I’m not a film historian or anything. (This is not false modesty; I thought the essay would be a lot better when I first began it but quickly found that I lacked the in-depth knowledge required to make it truly incisive.) But it is a hell of a lot more developed than Mr. Pride’s cursory mention. Of course, I had many advantages that Mr. Pride didn’t: I was able to see the movie more than once, revisit certain scenes, and use screencaps to support my thesis. Having the Blu-ray as a reference was overwhelmingly useful when sitting down to write a critical piece, and I found myself with the same benefits typically afforded those who write critically about other art forms. I had the movie available to me in the same way music critics have the album they’re writing about on hand.

In a way, how silly is it that most movie reviewers watch a movie exactly once and don’t go back over it at all before writing their reviews? Imagine a music critic listening to an album exactly one time, or a book reviewer not having the book around to either quote from or double-check a reference. Put simply: how insightful can we expect film critics to be after only one viewing?

Someone arguing this might point out that critics have been operating this way since time immemorial. And some of them were quite good. Pauline Kael—who notoriously refused to see a movie more than once—wrote some of the best film criticism of all time, dropping insight that is still valuable to read today. And she did it on a weekly basis.

Well, I hate to break it to all you contemporary film critics: None of you are Pauline Kael. She was a one-of-a-kind genius, a brilliant writer who just happened to write film criticism. Kael should not be regarded as just another critic with an innate ability shared with lots of other critics, but rather as an outlier with the uncanny ability to be both perspicacious and illuminating, all under a time crunch. Not everyone can do what she did, in fact she might be the only one who could do what she did. Which is why most critics would be better served waiting a few months and really thinking about a review they will feel a lot more responsibility for, since many more people will be reading it.

The public discourse about film these days reeks of some kind of weird elitism. Upon a worthwhile movie's release, there always seems to be a sharp division between people who have already seen it months ago at some film festival or during a limited release in NYC/LA and those who are getting the opportunity to see it for the first time. For better or worse, any voice can be disseminated as easily as the next, and those who see movies first have the opportunity to not only drive the discussion but exhaust it as well, so that by the time a film is available to 99% of the population, it feels stale and stripped of relevance.


It’s because of this situation that film is no longer a cultural touchstone. For something to be important to a culture, it has to have the participation of the culture. It has to be readily available to be experienced and discussed with other people. Without that wide involvement with the general public, we are left with a small group of self-styled arbiters of taste who do nothing but make facile judgments in an attempt to seem cool to others in their group.

This is a real shame because film criticism is very important. Good criticism shows us the way to great art. The passionate critics of the Cahiers du Cinema made us see Hollywood stalwarts like Hitchcock and Ray in a new light, and critics like Kael explicated the value of the Nouvelle Vague.

With no genius critic in sight, I suppose all we can do is implore the current crop of critics to take more time to write their criticism, in the perhaps futile hope that they get better. It would also help to change the mindset that has made writing about movies nothing more than a way to advertise how cool one is. A lot of critics just need to stop writing, stop talking, and stop thinking about movies altogether. Of course, you won’t be able to tell this to the people who truly love cinema. But it’s also easy to convince yourself you love movies when in reality all you love is the feeling of talking before anyone else can get a word in. If all you care about is when review embargoes are lifted, that's a good indication of where your true interest lies. Also, I would ask all the critics or wannabe critics who attended NYFF this question: If every movie you saw was available to everyone in the country on that day, either in the theater or on a Blu-ray disc or as a download, would you still have seen it? If the answer is “no”—or even if there is the slightest hesitation on your part—then I would say you should get really introspective for a minute and be prepared to confront some truths about yourself you might not like.

DHS

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Some Things I Want To Say About David Foster Wallace

   It was a Sunday like any other. After catching up on some morning chores, I started reading the local paper. It was September 14, 2008. Despite the headlines about Sarah Palin and the escalating financial crisis, I remember being in a good mood.
   My girlfriend called. She was out and about, driving around, and we chatted about this and that as I casually flipped through the newspaper, skimming the articles. My girlfriend pulled up to a drive-thru to get something to eat and asked if I wanted anything. I told her I didn’t, and she said she’d call me back in a minute after she was done ordering. I said “Ok” and we hung up, pleasantly enough.
   I turned what little attention I had back to the newspaper. It really was a lazy Sunday, the kind of day when it’s hard to focus on anything.
   I flipped to the obituaries. Gregory Mcdonald, the writer of Fletch, had died a week earlier and for some reason was given prominent space in that day’s paper. His obit took up half the page, above the fold, and there was even a picture of him. Uninterested, I started to turn the page over. Right before the page disappeared from view, three familiar words caught my eye: “David Foster Wallace.” I stopped. I remember being momentarily confused as to why his name was in my local paper, and I think it was a half second later when I realized it was positioned below Mcdonald’s obituary, this realization hitting me while I was reading the complete headline, which stated in bold typeface: “David Foster Wallace, 46, Found Dead.”
   And then my world went black.
 

 
   It is December of 2006. I’ve made the delightful discovery that the 10th Anniversary Edition of Infinite Jest is a mere $10, cover price. This leads to a no-brainer decision: I’m going to buy this book for everyone I know for Christmas. And just like that I’m going around to all the bookstores in the area (back then there were multiple options) and cleaning them out of all their IJs. At a single Barnes & Noble, I carry an armload of four up to the register. Lugging them back home, I put them in stacks on my table, and the sight of all these IJs gives me great pleasure. I have serious doubts about whether they’ll actually be read, but it amuses me to think that I’m distributing a dangerous samizdat that will sit on people’s shelves, dormant but dangerous, ready to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting reader someday.
  I buy a packet of smiley stickers and put one on the cover of each book.


 

   I didn’t pass out or anything like that. The world went black because I had immediately shut my eyes. It was involuntary. I did not consciously make a decision to close my eyes—it just happened. I had never done anything like that before. In the past, I’d averted my eyes out of embarrassment and anger, but never horror. I think it’s something people do, though I’d never experienced it up until then. Days later, thinking about it, I realized why people shut their eyes when they’ve just seen something horrible. I think they’re trying to stop themselves from seeing what they’ve just seen. If they close their eyes fast enough (the thinking goes), the light reflected from whatever horrible thing they’ve just witnessed won’t reach their corneas, and then it’ll be like the thing never happened. I think that’s what I was attempting. I was trying to remain in a world where he was still alive—at least as far as I knew—if only momentarily.
   This attempt to insulate myself from the truth failed utterly. Water built behind my eyelids and I felt a welling-up inside me of something that started in my stomach and then enlarged like an inflating balloon, and I felt it extend upward through my chest and into my throat until finally I felt it at the back of my tongue, but it felt way too large to exit my body and before I knew it I was gasping for air. In-between taking big gulps of air, I was crying. Thinking about it later, I knew that I was sobbing—crying so hard that it was hard to breathe. This was another thing I’d never done before; I’d never been this physically affected by grief. This push-and-pull continued for many minutes, my body wanting to expel so many things at once while I gasped for enough air to keep breathing. It felt like drowning without water.
   Somewhere in this, I became aware that my phone was ringing. It was my girlfriend. I answered it. The first thing she heard was my sobs, and, instantly alarmed, she asked, frantically, what was wrong. I told her that I had just read something…I think I put it as simply as that: “I just read something.” It was obvious that it was bad, whatever it was. She said What? I told her David Foster Wallace was dead. And saying it aloud like that, of course I just broke down all over again.

 
   It is early 2005. I want to get into reading books. I’m not even sure why; I get in these moods sometimes. Anyways, I like art. I’ve been watching a lot of movies and listening to a lot of music, and now it just seems natural to get into reading books, specifically novels. It’s not that I never read. I read occasionally, a novel here and there (mostly ones that have been made into movies), but now I just really want to give them a shot on their own terms or something. I want to be aware of what is going on in the literary landscape, just like I am for movies and music.
  The problem is I know nothing about contemporary literature. So, as I often do, I turn to my friend, who is inordinately more well-versed than me in all the art forms, but especially literature. The guy devours books. He has books literally spilling out of his room.
   So I ask him, what contemporary authors are doing great stuff these days? I put it to him this way: “What author would you run out and get their book if it came out today?”
   He considers it for a moment, then tells me three names: Richard Powers, William T. Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace. I’ve never heard of any of them.
   After doing a little Googling, Wallace captures my attention the most. Powers and Vollmann are exceedingly prolific and it’s hard to tell where to start with them. Wallace, on the other hand, has only written two novels. And one of them, Infinite Jest, is clearly the one. It’s over a thousand pages. Even knowing nothing else about it, it looms over everything else. It is an undeniable monster, beckoning to me during a time when I found undeniability to be one of the most attractive qualities of good art.
   I circle around it a little, unsure whether to take the plunge. I do a little more research. I become fascinated by the fact that Wallace was only 34 when it was published. (He looks even younger in the author photo.) I play coy with my intentions, asking my friend about it the way you ask other people about your crush. I ask my friend one day, “What are the chances you think I could finish Infinite Jest?” (“Does she say anything about me?”) He takes a second, then says the odds are pretty good, once I get into it. (I know now he was lying; the odds of completing IJ are pretty bad for a person like I was at the time, viz. someone who didn’t read much. But the alternative is telling someone to not even bother, and I know I would never say that to anyone.)
   I wait a couple more days, then decide on the spur of the moment that I’m actually going to do it. I’m going to attempt to read Infinite Jest. I’m so caught up in the spirit of embarking on a new adventure that I don’t even want to wait the couple days it would take Amazon to send it to me. Instead, I go right to the nearest bookstore and buy an undiscounted, full-price copy.
   I start reading it that day. Over the course of the next two months, the book never leaves my nightstand and I slowly but surely make my way through it. It’s hard going at least initially, but I reach some sort of hump and get over it and I find myself on the descending side of this mountain of a book.
   My friend asks me periodically how it’s going. When I’m about 600 pages in, I tell him, You know, it doesn’t even matter how Wallace ends it. He’s built such an impressive object up to this point that the last 400 pages can be gobbledygook and it’d still be the most impressive book I’ve ever read. It’s so full and rich. Sure it might be over-stuffed but it’s one of those things that is amazing because of its excesses. You know, like Apocalypse Now. (All my references were movie-related at the time.)
   Of course, the last 400 pages were just as brilliant as the first 600, and many months later, after finding myself constantly thinking about it, I had to admit to myself that IJ was definitely my favorite novel of all time.
 

I wish there were more audio clips of him reading from Infinite Jest.

 
 

   She let me cry for a minute before gently saying, “For a second I thought something had happened to your parents.”
   Her comment pierced the grief-infused haze that I’d been mired in and I immediately saw the situation through her eyes. All she knew about David Foster Wallace was what I had told her about him. She knew he was my favorite author, but that was basically it. She’d never read any of his writing, and even if she had she wasn’t the type of person who put artists on some kind of pedestal, and she certainly wouldn’t be moved to such a display of grief as I was now evincing. She came from a tight-knit family and keening was reserved for those with whom one shared blood. (Or at least for very close friends.)
   Although I could not stop my flow of tears, I saw that her (unspoken, merely implied…or rather, inferred (by me)) position was basically correct; it was a little ridiculous that I was carrying on in such histrionic fashion about the passing of someone with whom I had never exchanged even a single word. Only someone with a somewhat charmed life—someone who’d never come within arm’s-length of true disaster, someone with no direct knowledge of tragedy—could be so moved by the death of a stranger.
   But I was that person, one of the lucky few who had never known true loss. I’d never had death enter my life; everyone I loved and cared about was alive and well. My family and friends—all alive and hale and doing well, which is how it’d always been for as long as I could remember. I’d never been shattered by the dreadful news of the passing of a loved one, and my reaction to Wallace’s obituary bespoke not only how important Wallace had been to me, but my emotional innocence as well.
   At my girlfriend’s words, I was confronted with this other subjectivity here in the midst of my anguish, and I became extremely self-conscious—something readers of Wallace know a thing or two about. I saw the blubbering mess she was picturing and I immediately began apologizing to her. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, I know this is ridiculous.” I’m still crying, I can’t help it. But I’m saying “sorry” whenever I can summon up enough breath to do so.
   She assured me that it was ok, that she knew how important he was to me, but I heard the skepticism in her voice. How do I begin to tell her that he was more than just some author I liked? How to describe for her that intensely intimate voice of his that made you feel like you were close friends? His stuff was completely devoid of the pretension and bullshit flattery and condescension that infect almost everyone else’s writing, even award-winning, universally respected writing. Reading his books made you feel like an equal companion of his (though you were still in complete awe of his intimidating mind).
   Added to this, I had listened to enough interviews to know that the mesmerizing voice he used in his books was really just his default setting. He talked exactly like he wrote. Nobody else did that. Even writers of the most gorgeous prose were usually reduced to hollow shells of their writing when they were interviewed. They would pause awkwardly and use stilted language and you would usually see them struggling to find the right word before falling back on safe platitudes and general bromides about writing or whatever they were talking about. Wallace might pause when faced with a particularly tough question (they were all tough for him), but when he opened his mouth out came fully formed and oftentimes revelatory ideas, precisely articulated in an extraordinary string of sentences. You felt like you were getting direct access to his brain when he talked, which was the same feeling you got with his writing. Incredibly, he was able to recreate the intimate voice of his writing in extemporaneous conversation. It just came naturally to him. (I’m positive his first drafts were marvels, better than everyone else’s fifteenth drafts.) So, to me, it was a simple formulation: To love the writing was to love the author, to love his words was to love the man, or so it seemed in Wallace’s case.
   This was why I was so affected by his passing, but I couldn’t find a way to express this to my girlfriend, so I just said “I’m sorry,” over and over again.   


I wish I wrote to him because it’s clear now that there was a pretty good chance I would’ve gotten some sort of response.
 

 

   It’s summer of 2007. With IJ still inhabiting my mind, I decide to tackle the rest of Wallace’s oeuvre. I’m going to read everything. The short story collections, the essays, even his textbook-like thing on the subject of infinity. All the in-print stuff is a given, but I also get Signifying Rappers for $6 on the Amazon marketplace. I also want to read peripheral stuff like interviews and profiles, so I buy the 1993 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction that features his long interview with Larry McCaffery. I get curious about how IJ was presented to the world when it first came out in 1996, so I buy a hardcover. (It has a tiny bit of iridescent foil on the cover like a special edition comic book.) I see a pristine first edition hardcover of The Broom of the System for sale, but decide $300 is too much to spend (Me in 2013: Argh).
   As I plow through the books all summer long, I find myself becoming more and more enthralled. I start tracking down audio interviews, video clips of him on Charlie Rose (I actually buy the DVD ($25)). I listen to the Bookworm interviews over and over again, absolute treasures. I listen to muddy recordings of readings and Q&As he did (one of which is so staticky that he can barely be heard, but I still get through it once).
   This is not enough, so I turn to the internet and find uncollected short stories, book reviews, essays. Also print interviews, profiles, analyses of his writing. I don’t want to read all this stuff on my computer monitor so I use my roommate’s printer to create hard copies. It takes multiple days and many hours to print out everything using the good ole inkjet. My roommate shakes his head. “So you’ve decided to print out the internet?” he asks.
   I end up with hundreds of printed pages. I put it all into the biggest binder I can find and separate them by subject with multi-colored tabs: Short Stories, Interviews, Nonfiction, etc. (A year later I will add another tab: Tributes.)
   I had a blast reading that summer. The best summer of reading I’ve ever had, and probably ever will.

 
I wish he did a Bookworm interview for Oblivion (instead of doing that shallower Connection interview).
 

 

   “How did he die?” she asked. I looked down at the crumpled newspaper in front of me—another involuntary action, crumpling the newspaper into a ball (Get rid of the evidence, it never happened)—flattened it out and read the rest of the obituary, even though it was unnecessary because I was pretty sure I knew how it happened. “Found Dead” is ambiguous and could mean many things: maybe something health-related (not likely for a still youngish former athlete) or maybe something more lurid like a homicide. But those possibilities are so out-there I didn’t even entertain them. “Wallace’s wife found her husband had hanged himself,” I read to my girlfriend, confirming what I already knew.
   In the following days, much was made of the occurrence of suicide in Wallace’s books, and it’s a point with which it’s hard to argue. There is a lot of suicide in his books. And Wallace was never particularly subtle about its inclusion. (He once wrote a story called “Suicide as a Sort of Present.”) The morbid subject matter is always front and center, never in the background, and it is sometimes a key plot element in his fiction. And so of course that’s all everyone fixated on for a while.
   I, on the other hand, in the first moments after learning of his death, thought immediately of a story he did called “Octet.”
  In this story, Wallace sets up a series of short scenarios he calls “Pop Quizzes” designed to “interrogate” the reader’s reactions to various heartbreaking set-ups, usually involving a double-bind of some sort. In one of the stories, a mother gives up custody of her child to her vindictive but wealthy former husband so that the child will grow up provided for and taken care of, and the text literally asks, right there on the page, whether the reader thinks she’s a good mother or not. Another (longer) scenario involves a man who’s on the outs with his dying father-in-law, but who decides to bury any animosity he feels and give at least the appearance of being present and supportive of his wife and her whole side of the family during this ordeal, and this support extends to his father-in-law who—make no mistake about it—detests his son-in-law just as fiercely if not even more than his son-in-law does him, and by doing the “right thing” the man is placed in an extremely uncomfortable and dishonest position by the end of the story when the old father-in-law has passed and the man, who alone knows his true feelings, is now expected to issue words of praise in the father-in-law’s name during some intimate post-funeral service with the father-in-law’s entire family looking at him expectantly. And the questions at the end of this “Pop Quiz” make clear the alienation and helplessness and loneliness the man feels at being put in this situation.
   About halfway through the story, Wallace breaks some kind of fourth wall and starts talking to the reader. It’s set up as another “Pop Quiz” (“You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer. You are attempting a cycle of very short belletristic pieces…”), but it’s clear that he’s talking about himself and “interrogating” you, the reader, directly. He explains that he’s in a swivet because this piece of fiction he’s working on—the thing you are reading now—just isn’t working. In fact it’s crumbling before his very eyes. He had intended to write eight short pieces that “demonstrate some sort of weird ambient sameness in different kinds of human relationships, some nameless but inescapable ‘price’ that all human beings are faced with having to pay at some point if they ever want truly ‘to be with’ another person instead of just using that person somehow” but that “five of the eight pieces don’t work at all—meaning they don’t interrogate or palpate what you want them to, plus are too contrived or too cartoonish or too annoying or all three” and he had to throw them out. (The skeletal outlines of a couple of these “failures” are described in a long footnote.) And now he’s faced with the last resort of just coming right out and asking the reader if she feels anything like what he feels, a feeling that he considers “urgent, truly urgent, something almost worth shimmying up chimneys and shouting from roofs about.” (In a footnote he acknowledges that this sounds pious and melodramatic.) And he’s also worried that coming right out and addressing the reader like this is going to look “pathetic and desperate” in the eyes of the reader and that he’ll look like “just another manipulative pseudopomo bullshit artist who’s trying to salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a meta-dimension and commenting on the fiasco itself.” It’s framed as a hypothetical course of action, but in actuality it’s one of those hypotheticals that are actually real propositions (“Suppose I were to ask you out…”), and it’s clear that Wallace is trying to see “whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like the same way [he does].”
   Or rather, it’s clear that that’s what he was trying to get at now. Back then, in 1999 when the story came out, all evidence points to people taking that story as an amusing little bit of “S.O.P. metatext,” even though he expressly tells you in the story that that is not what he is trying to do. But, y’know, nobody took him seriously because…well, irony, man.
   In fact, there always seemed to be some unbridgeable gap between what Wallace intended to convey with his fiction and what a lot of readers took away from it. For example, he said over and over that he considered IJ to be a sad book, and yet wave after wave of admirers extolled the book’s humor. Discussing his book of stories Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (in which “Octet” appears), he went so far to say that “everybody thought [Infinite Jest] was very funny, which was of course nice, but it was also kind of frustrating, and I designed this one so that nobody is going to escape the fact that this is sad.” Taking that into account, there is a certain sadness in reading the blurbs for BIWHM that call the book “bitingly funny” and “often funny,” with other critics proclaiming “it is fun, and often very funny” and “outrageously funny” and that it’s “damn funny stuff,” etc. There always seemed to be some misunderstanding or misinterpretation of his work, even by those who praised them.
   This is what I thought of moments after learning he had died. He was a writer who always took sadness as his subject. Always, even when people thought he was trying to be funny. But as sad and horrifying as this is to admit, it was like you couldn’t really see what he was saying until he killed himself. It was only then that you knew for sure that he really wasn’t kidding around with what he was writing about. He wasn’t doing that thing that so many other inferior writers do, trading on some general sense of “sadness” that often gets turned into cloying sentimentality in an attempt to extract a few tears from the reader, but only in the service of a crowd-pleasing redemptive ending. Sadness is also commonly deployed to elevate one’s opinion of the author: “Oh look how clever he is, pointing out all the ways the world is shit.” Both methods flatter the reader’s idea of “oh, there’s something wrong with the world, how sad,” and both end with the author and reader going their separate ways, basically happy and content, leaving the book behind, forgotten, as they go merrily on being consumers or well-adjusted citizens or whatever. Basically, it’s really easy to pay lip service to an idea of intrinsic human sadness and that’s why it’s really hard to take seriously sometimes. But Wallace was utterly serious about it. When he was making every attempt to get at an almost indefinable sadness in “Octet” and desperately querying the reader about her take on it, he wasn’t playing games. He was truly trying to describe a sadness he honestly felt. This wasn’t just some literary construction for him. And it’s impolitic to say this, and the implications are truly horrific, but we know he genuinely felt this sadness because he killed himself. We later found out about his clinical depression, the previous suicide attempts, the decades-long battle with his own biochemistry, but I know at the moment I found out about his death, it appeared that he had finally succumbed to the ineluctable sadness he had been trying to describe with nearly every word he wrote. It pained me to think of how acutely he must have felt this sadness, and it also shattered me to think of how his attempts to convey this sadness he knew so intimately had often been misconstrued, even by his most careful readers. As I sat there sobbing at news of his death, I felt all his themes of sadness and loneliness crystallize and take the form of a sharp point that proceeded to stab me in the heart.
   How could his fans not know he was suicidal? an outside observer might ask today. Considering all those stories about suicide? How could you not realize he was dangerously depressed? After all, he wrote a story called “The Depressed Person” that casually name-dropped dozens of antidepressants. How could you not see it?
   We didn’t see it. We had no idea. I don’t know why. It’s not that we didn’t believe him when he wrote about the sadness…that was something he enabled us to recognize all too clearly. Perhaps conditioned by the way other writers operate, we just didn’t think it was so firmly entrenched inside of him. Maybe we figured his books were having the same palliative effect on him that they were having on us. For those who loved his books, his prose perfectly limned the despairing sadness that was an intrinsic part of life while at the same time acting as a shield against it; by being so erudite, so insightful, so good, his books made us feel less alone and better equipped to navigate our own “skull-sized kingdoms.” But apparently, it was not enough for him.
    If we knew the ordeal he was going through, I guarantee we would’ve done something. I can picture a large contingent of his fans descending on his house in Claremont, putting themselves at his service, trying to give him some measure of comfort, holding candlelight vigils outside his home. I’m being 100% serious. Wallace fans are some of the most com-/passionate people in the world. You think we would’ve just sat back and done nothing if we knew he was in such constant pain? There’s no chance. We would’ve gone to California based on nothing more than the slim hope that we could do something for him, repay him in some small way for all he had given us. And there’s no doubt he would’ve hated it, he would’ve fucking hated it, all of us showing up unannounced like that. All that attention on him when he so eloquently made the case against solipsism and the cult of “me-me-me.” God, he would’ve hated a crowd of adoring and concerned fans outside his house. (Probably anyone would, actually.) But we wouldn’t have been able to help ourselves. Of that I am sure.

 
I wish he had felt well enough to write that piece on Obama and rhetoric.

 
   It is 2010. I am in a bus terminal, waiting for a friend due to arrive any minute. I’m passing the time by reading Understanding David Foster Wallace, recently rereleased by South Carolina Press in a new, updated edition.
   I’m sitting on one of those long benches. On the other end of the bench is a guy around my age. He’s also reading a book. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice the blue cover first. I look up and see the unmistakable cinder block heft, and I recognize those all-too-familiar one thousand, seventy-nine pages.
   I must admit, I’m more than a little excited. It’s the first time I’ve seen an IJ “out in the wild.” (I live in a rural area and I hear they’re usually indigenous to NYC subways.) I don’t even consider not talking to the guy.
   I make that half-reaching gesture people use to get someone’s attention and softly say, “Hey.” The guy looks up. I nod at the book in his hands and grin. “Infinite Jest.” I hold up my own book, cementing our solidarity.
   For his part, he doesn’t look too taken aback. He asks to see my book and flips through it, gauging his own interest. I look at his copy and notice the first bookmark (there are two, of course) is about 150 pages in. I ask him if this is his first time reading it and he says it is. I tell him it’s my favorite novel by far, gushing a little. He nods soberly and hands back my book. I ask him how he’s enjoying it and he says he likes it so far. He’s obviously not yet at the evangelical stage I am about Wallace and IJ. He has not really smiled during this interaction and I get the impression he’s one of those people who takes himself way too seriously, but I don’t care because I’m just happy to finally meet a random stranger who is reading the book.
   My friend’s bus arrives and I see him disembark. I gather my things and stand up. Before I leave, I say goodbye to the guy and tell him that I hope he enjoys the rest of the book. The last image I have is of him reading IJ on that bench. I wonder whether he finished it, and, if so, what his thoughts were.

 
Some things I’ve hated about the last five years: I hate how DFW has been used as a punchline for stupid jokes or as a sort of shorthand for describing a certain kind of highly self-aware writing but in a really reductive and usually sneery way. I hate how people who haven’t read IJ think it’s just some repetitive, too-clever-by-half, overly cerebral commentary on addiction and entertainment and whatever. I’m mildly annoyed at how people have glommed onto This Is Water and seem to know little else of Wallace’s work. I’m even more annoyed that people stay away from Infinite Jest and that other fans recommend reading “around it” or “building up to it.” (Would you have someone listen to Dirty Work, Steel Wheels, and A Bigger Bang before finally giving them Exile on Main St.? Just give them the best stuff immediately, I say.) I hate the jokes (“How do you know someone’s read Infinite Jest? Don’t worry, he’ll tell you”). I hate that he’s gone.

 
Some things I’ve loved about the last five years: I love seeing all the stuff we might never have been able to see: letters, manuscript pages, syllabi. I loved getting The Pale King, even if it wasn’t quite in the form we would’ve liked. All the audio interviews that were released because of the more widespread interest. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. Infinite Summer. But mainly all the posthumous writing. Though I will state what to me is the obvious: I would trade every bit of Wallace’s writing we got post-’08 for him just to still be alive and healthy again. And not necessarily because I want new work. Even if he didn’t write another word, even if no more books were published, I think I’d still derive some measure of comfort knowing that he was out in the world, just living his life.


   It’s hard to know how to end something like this. I have a strong suspicion these last few paragraphs will just trail off at some point. I’d feel uncomfortable making some grand final statement like “David Foster Wallace meant ______ to me, and always will” or something like that. It’s hard to even encapsulate how important he and his works are to me in under 6,000 words. A simple way of putting it is that he’s changed my life for the better. That’s a zero-BS declaration. Just reading Infinite Jest is like getting a solid liberal arts education. If you look up every word you don’t know and wikipedia every reference or concept you don’t understand, then Eggers is right: You will come out of it a better person. I’m not particularly intelligent, but if I hadn’t read IJ, I would be a lot dumber than I am now, that’s for sure.
   While it’s true that he’s fundamentally changed the way I look at the world, some of the ways he’s affected my life aren’t what you would call Profound or Earth-shattering. I don’t eat lobster anymore. And I’ve turned into somewhat of an amateur SNOOT. Inspired by Wallace’s passion for language, I’ve hit the books and now know much more about grammar than I used to. I mean, take a gander at that paragraph supra where I’m writing about preparing to tackle IJ. You can see how my writing was infected with solecisms and general carelessness before I read that book. There are dangling participles (“After doing a little Googling, Wallace captures my attention”), super casualisms (“Anyways”), careless placement of modifiers (“Wallace, on the other hand, has only written two novels”), noun-pronoun agreement problems (“What author would you run out and get their book if it came out today?”), s-v a.p. (“but it’s one of those things that is amazing because of its excesses”), wrongness coupled with awkwardness (“who is inordinately more well-versed than me in all the art forms”), etc. While this new-found awareness can sometimes result in a kind of writerly paralysis, I like to think that ultimately I’m better for it.
   There were some things I wanted to talk about earlier but wasn’t able to blend them into the piece in a natural way. I wanted to say how grateful I was that I read the bulk of his work—especially IJ—before 2008. Everyone reading his stuff now for the first time probably can’t stop the alarm bells going off every time suicide is mentioned, and I really don’t think that’s the ideal way to read the books. I also wanted to talk a little about the weirdness of learning about his death from a newspaper of all things, a local paper no less. This was 2008, not 1908. The internet was up and running. I guess everyone found out Saturday night…it must have been reported by various outlets. How did I miss it?
   I really don’t know how to end this. I will say I’m constantly reminded of him. I’ll see an unusual word and remember that I first encountered it in one of his books. Pynchon’s book comes out next week and I only got into Pynchon because of him. Hardly a week goes by when he isn’t mentioned in some book review or another. Nadal just won the U.S. Open, which set off an explosion of associations.
   I think I’m done for now.
 

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Just Like the Movies

NB: This will be an exercise in spontaneity. I’m just going to jot all this out and not revise endlessly and hope it comes out semi-coherent. I know I should probably do more blog entries, but I have a propensity to work on massive pieces instead of a bunch of little ones. This will be a littler one, I think. It’s also about movies, which I swore I was going to go cold turkey on writing about, since I feel I write about them too much. But hopefully it will be about enough other things to be interesting to people who don’t care all that much about movies.

A couple things piqued my interest recently. One was the review of Iron Man 3 I read in the NYTimes on Friday. The reviewer, Manohla Dargis, doesn’t really review the movie so much as ruminate on its place in the world we inhabit. Or, more accurately, she judges its appropriateness. For her, the action scenes of the movie too readily recall the recent tragedy in Boston, and the villains perpetrating acts of domestic terrorism are too similar to real-life counterparts for the movie to work as the piece of pop escapism it so clearly wants to be. (In all fairness to Ms. Dargis, the movie didn’t seem to interest her much on a very basic level, so she had to find something to write about.) One gets the sense that Ms. Dargis has been offended on multiple levels; she starts out by complaining about the excessive explosions and gunfire, then criticizes what she interprets as the movie’s cavalier approach to the events of 9/11 (she mentions the infamous date no fewer than six times in the review). This blasé attitude toward such a traumatic event is borderline unconscionable to her. While Ms. Dargis doesn’t completely abjure the use of “9/11 evocations” (or whatever) in movies, she just doesn’t want the events used all willy-nilly, without thought or consideration. The review seems to be a rallying cry of sorts: If a movie refers to 9/11, Ms. Dargis propounds, the events that took place should be explored, addressed directly and truthfully and significantly, and not just “exploited.” (There’s actually a certain pathos to her plea, because what she’s really saying is “Why can’t they just make good art?”)

Ms. Dargis also mentions something that I finally decided to look up: A couple weeks ago Steven Soderbergh gave a speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival that has been generating a fair amount of buzz. It’s basically a “State of the Union” address about the film industry. He starts out by relating an anecdote about this guy he saw during a flight who watched nothing but the action scenes of a bunch of movies, skipping ahead to the “good” parts: the car chases, the climactic gunfight, etc. Mr. Soderbergh is understandably disturbed at what he is witnessing, which is basically the desecration of an art form he has dedicated most of his life to. He then half-rues, half-accepts the current reality of Hollywood funding, which is that they feel more comfortable bankrolling a $200 million movie with costumed superheroes than they are funding a “mid-level” $35 million feature about real human beings (viz. exactly the kind of movie Mr. Soderbergh makes). You can see why Ms. Dargis brought this speech up, since her own points dovetail nicely with Mr. Soderbergh’s (“Why can’t they just make good art?”).

I’m not without sympathy for the arguments of Mr. Soderbergh (it really does seem that movies like Being John Malkovich, for instance, would never get funded today) and Ms. Dargis (the terrorist videos in IM3 had a chilling and arguably unnecessary verisimilitude that was perhaps a little out of place), and I do think something’s been up since 9/11. But I think they might both be missing the mark a little. Putting aside the fact that terrorists and explosions and toppling structures and falling bodies have been around in summer popcorn movies for a while now, way before 9/11 (e.g. go ahead and Youtube the opening scenes of Armageddon), I don’t think the problem lies in disturbing imagery or violent content in movies. The problem lies with narrative and our relation to it.

During and immediately after the events of 9/11, there was a general consensus on what the day looked/felt like. You heard it over and over: “It was like a movie.” That always struck me as odd. After all, nothing I saw on TV that day looked like something from the movies I really love and respond to, movies like My Dinner with Andre or Annie Hall or Before Sunrise. I know that’s not what people were talking about, but without adding a qualifier (“action movie,” “summer movie”) it did make crystal clear the benighted level at which most people considered something to be “a movie.” (Experiment: After your next magical date, turn to the other person and say the night was “just like a movie.” If the blank stare lasts longer than 5 seconds, escape while you can.)

But so if after 9/11 we were stuck in a movie brought to life, it seems important to ask what kind of movie. Well, the only type of movie where that level of destruction and devastation occurs is the mega-blockbuster. We weren’t in a quiet little chamber piece. This was a prototypical big-budget disaster movie. And all mega-blockbusters have common elements: a dramatic opening scene, clearly delineated heroes and villains, obstacles ultimately overcome through perseverance and innate ability, and a final and all-encompassing triumph over evil. And we quickly accepted that this was the story we were in, largely because it offered solace when nothing else made much sense. If we were in a narrative where the World Trade Center towers came down, so be it, but we would see that the rest of the story unfolded as these kinds of stories always do: with struggle, retribution, and eventual victory.

There have not been a lot of good pieces of art that have directly “taken on” the events of 9/11. I can think of only two. One, the movie United 93, is a pretty straight-forward reenactment of what actually happened; the filmmakers realized that the truth held more than enough power without adding anything to it. The second is Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man. It’s about a man and a woman who escape the towers on that fateful day and cross paths in the subsequent weeks. One of the major points of the novel, delivered with consummate subtlety and skill, is something I think we all realize but find it hard to articulate: 9/11 imposed narrative on us, where before there was none. There was not just the overarching narrative involving our fight against the enemies of Freedom, but it also affected our quotidian narratives in the small ways it impinged on our daily low-key existence. From that point on our lives were inextricably wrapped up in a story not of our choosing. We were in that movie where bad guys were out there, blowing stuff up, killing our fellow citizens. A world where there were clearly defined good guys (us) and clearly defined bad guys (them). This was our collective narrative, whether we liked it or not. Some of us embraced it, but a fair number of us were deeply unsettled. And I don’t think we were disturbed solely by our internal debate about the morality of war, or the abuse of national power, or things like that. We were, on a deeper level, really unsettled at living in a narrative that traditionally had ironclad concepts of right and wrong, good and bad—a world where everything is black and white, just like a summer movie. We were unsettled because we know the world is never black and white, that things are never that simple. There are shades of gray, ambiguities, confusion, uncertainties, doubt—all the things anathema to a big-budget popcorn movie.

Now, we know we are not in a movie, even if the post-9/11 world seems like one (and some, scarily, have been convinced it is). Most of us know that the last thing the world resembles is a straight narrative. That’s where Ms. Dargis’s view starts to fall apart. It shouldn’t matter how many explosions are in a movie or how many times 9/11 is supposedly evoked, we know it’s not reality. And we know this not because there’s a guy with an iron suit flying around, but rather because credits pop up, a story is told, and more credits roll. This is not particularly faithful to how life is, particularly the ultimate beginning and ultimate end parts. (Sure, we as individuals experience beginnings and endings, but life goes on before and after, plus we don’t have the luxury of analyzing how it went after we reach our ending, sitting in a coffee shop with friends, teasing out themes, arguing about the plot.) Narrative is faker than any fantastic alien a CGI artist can come up with. We impose it on our selves, or other events do, if they’re big enough. But it is not how the world works. In a way, that guy on the plane was watching something much closer to reality than narrative features depict (for what is the 21st Century so far but a series of contextless explosions?).

I’m not saying narrative is worthless. Nor am I advocating a proliferation of non-narrative films. (Besides, even the most “non-narrative” film has a beginning and ending and something inbetween, which ultimately constitutes narrative, no matter how scrambled up it may seem when the lights go down. (As Jean-Luc Godard is purported to say, “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”)) And I’m certainly not saying we should be the guy that just watches explosions. There are ways for art to engage meaningfully with these big concerns that both Ms. Dargis and Mr. Soderbergh seem to want movies to address, and something with a strong narrative will most likely turn out to be the artwork that does it. But we should probably stop expecting our art to be mimetic of the real world, or regarding a kind of simulacrumness as some gold standard for art. To paraphrase David Mamet, the goal of art shouldn’t be to recreate the conversation two people had on a bus this morning, the goal should be to have them say something better. Narrative is our chance to write, draw, film something better. Narrative can be edifying, illuminating, vital, important. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for life, and vice versa. Our lives are our own, and art resides outside, whether it’s an important cinematic masterpiece or just a dumb summer superhero flick. In the end, it’s all escapism.

DHS

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Carol DeChellis Hill: A Reintroduction


Carol DeChellis Hill circa 1970

A few weeks ago I was reading an old interview of my favorite author, David Foster Wallace. In the introduction, the interviewer, David Wiley, apprised readers who may be unfamiliar with Wallace’s work of the sort of writer Wallace is by comparing him to other similar writers. When it comes to Wallace, the list of his comparable contemporaries gets to be drearily repetitive as the same names get mentioned over and over (Vollmann, Powers, Franzen, etc.). So I was very surprised indeed when Mr. Wiley invoked a name I had never heard before: Carol DeChellis Hill.

I did a Google search and not a lot of information came up. Most of the search results were used book vendors selling her books. After rooting around a little, I pieced together that she had four or five novels, the first one written over 40 years ago. I was intrigued enough to pick them up to see what she was all about. Some of her books were out of print. A couple of them were available new on Amazon but as weirdly expensive paperbacks. There were no ebook versions. Using the Amazon marketplace and eBay, I picked up four of her books relatively cheaply, a small investment for what I hoped would be a worthwhile discovery.

As soon as her books started to arrive I dove in, and soon I began to get pretty excited. She was a really good, sometimes brilliant, writer. I started to devour her novels at a fast and steady clip. A couple of them I was convinced were masterpieces.

As I approached the last few pages of what I had initially ordered, I began really scouring the Internet for more information about her. I’m the type of person who loves reading about artists I admire. (Even if they are not traditionally “interesting”; for instance, I’ve somehow read three Salinger biographies. Three!) I love in-depth interviews, profiles, stuff like that.

So I was a little discouraged when the internet offered hardly anything at all about Carol DeChellis Hill. There was no Wikipedia entry, no website (official or otherwise), no author’s page on a publisher’s site. There were none of the standard social media outlets authors use for promotional purposes: no Twitter account, no Facebook, no blog. Not only that, no old interviews came up, no profiles…nothing. I couldn’t even tell for sure whether she was still alive.

I started tracking down all the miscellaneous writing she had done—the text for a photography book, a novelization of a movie, little short stories squirreled away in now defunct magazines—eager just to read more of her prose. While unearthing her more obscure work, I gradually came across stray bits of biographical information about her. I knew I was going to write little reviews of all her books when I was done, but at a certain point I realized I could supplement those mini capsule reviews with all the info I had uncovered about her. Doing so would create a one-stop place for people who newly discover her work to come and learn more about this unjustly overlooked author. So, with that in mind, this is as much of Ms. Hill’s story as I can piece together.

Before we begin, I will point out that most of the information about Carol DeChellis Hill that can be found on the internet is taken from her short bio in Contemporary Novelists,7th edition, a prohibitively expensive, 1000+ page compendium of author bios published in 2000:



Early Life

Carol DeChellis Hill was born Carol Sue DeChellis on January 20, 1942. (This is according to the CN bio, though there is compelling evidence she might've been born in 1939. See below.) She grew up in Westfield, New Jersey, and graduated from Westfield High School where she participated in many organizations including the literary club, dance club, and bridge club, as well as being involved with the school magazine. Her main interest, however, was theater and acting. During her senior year she served as president of the school’s theater troupe, the Mask and Mime Club, and she had a major role in the fall play, A Roomful of Roses. She was voted “Class Actress” in the senior superlatives.



                                   

After graduating high school, she attended Chatham College (founded in 1869 as the Pennsylvania Female College) in Pittsburgh, where she received a B.A. in history. She was very active in various communities and organizations. She was president of the Christian Association, a student counselor, member of the Chatham choir, and president of the Junior class. She was also an excellent student, perenially making the Dean's List.




After college she moved to New York City, where she became the assistant publicity director for Crown Publishers. Throughout the '60s, she was active in a couple different theater companies, including the Judson Poets’ Theatre, which became one of the first theaters that constituted what is now known as “Off Off Broadway.” In 1967, the Workshop Theatre at New York University produced her full-length play Mother Loves (which unfortunately I’ve been unable to track down).

Early Writings and First Novel

Carol DeChellis Hill circa 1970

The earlist piece of writing by Hill that I can find is a letter she wrote to the editor of The Massachusetts Review in 1965 (Vol. VI No. 3) concerning Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf?


The earliest long-form writing by Hill that I can find is an essay called “Theatre Without Ideas,” published in the journal New Politics, December 1965. (She is credited as Carol D. Hill.) It is a review of the play known as Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss. She is fairly critical of it; she writes that “[t]he play fails in dramatic terms primarily because Weiss has not created character” and that there is a “lack of originality in the ideas of the play itself.”



The earliest fiction by Hill that I can find is the short story “The Shameless Shiksa,” published in Playboy magazine, September 1969. (She is credited as C.D. Hill.)




It is about a young Jewish teenager named David who is working at his father’s fruit and vegetable counter in a New York City grocery store. He is mesmerized by an attractive female customer who regularly comes in and shocks everyone with her casual talk of subjects widely considered inappropriate for discussion such as female orgasm and the mechanics of insemination. She discusses these things in a matter-of-fact way (it is implied that her interest in these subjects is scholarly) and never in an overly salacious manner (even when she is egged on by others), which makes everyone in the store, especially the boy’s mother, look like prigs in comparison when they are left mortified by what she is saying. David is also embarrassed by her frank discussion of sexual matters, but he’s understandably fascinated by her as well and, predictably, she takes over his fantasies. In the aftermath of a chance encounter with her out in public, something happens that causes David to believe he has left adolescence behind for good. But his pronouncement of “Now I am a man” is more menacing than it is triumphant, as his coming of age isn’t facilitated by the object of his affection so much as it seems to come at her expense.


On May 20, 1970, Random House published Hill’s first novel, Jeremiah 8:20. According to the Contemporary Novelists bio, she was 28 years old at the time of publication. (Though she might've been 31, see below.) This 371-page novel centers around a 39-year-old protagonist named Jeremiah Francis Scanlon. He’s fat, balding, and socially maladroit. He lives in New York City and leads an uneventful life working as a bookkeeper. He resides in a boarding house filled with colorful characters, most of whom are indifferent to him when not openly scornful. Deeply unsatisfied in an indefinable way, Francis, as he is called most of the time, gets it in his head one day that the black community is hoarding the answers to life’s big secrets, and he proceeds to get a tape recorder and starts to surreptitiously record as many conversations between black people as he can get away with. It is from this point that he embarks on a path of discovery, both about the world at large and himself.

While the novel is written in the third person, about 80% of it is closely tied to Francis’s POV, with plenty of descriptions of what he is thinking. They are the thoughts of a not overly educated man, full of terms like “din’t” and “allus” (always), words lacking terminal g’s (“cleanin”, “somethin”, etc.), and mindless repetitions:

Having nothing to do when he got there, he rearranged the sachet his mother had insisted upon, among his socks, and looked for his book of crossword puzzles. He lay there for some hours, across and down, down and across, not caring really, whether he got it right or not. That was why, he knew. Milda always won it because she cared. He didn’t really. He woulda liked to beat her to it, but really he didn’t care. He lay back on the bed, opening and closing the night table drawer that contained his supply of butter cookies, and lay there munching in a vague and absent way as he stared hopefully out into the street, hoping faintly that he might see something there.
                         -Jeremiah 8:20, pg. 43

Francis is someone in whom exists a blend of naivety and idealism, a person who believes newspapers never lie, cops possess unassailable probity, and Moby-Dick is a true storynotions that people around him have no problem disabusing him of. He is, in many ways, that familiar figure who treads the line between charming naïf and blundering idiot. What makes him unique is that there is no clear indication that he should be the recipient of either our scorn or sympathy; readers will find their feelings about him change on an almost page-by-page basis. He can be by turns frustrating, piteous, funny, admirable, dull, and surprisingly insightful. He doesn’t exist mainly to prove an author’s tendentious point. In other words, he is that which all authors strive to create: a real, three-dimensional character.

While Francis’s voice is prevalent throughout, there are occasional moments when the book shifts to an overarching view of events, and in these moments it is capable of beautiful observation:

ARE YOU SCARED?
There seemed to be a strange stillness in the air after he said that and suddenly a waft of salt air so pungent to his nostrils that it stilled any further query, surrounded them. The fog rolled in obscuring the land with its wet heavy blanket, dragging almost clumsily, so slow, so stumbling was its advance, catching on each thing, then to lift suddenly, over a bush, like the perilous, inconclusive things raised by children, in small gusts and ebbing queries, answered occasionally through the distance by a lugubrious response, a tried and agreed upon thing whose occasional sounding it was believed, ensured the general safety. Real fog, however, the kind raised most persistently, would distort even the most practiced sound.
            -Jeremiah 8:20, pgs. 270-271

Jeremiah 8:20 is an ambitious novel, whose goal seems to be nothing short of encapsulating America, and it succeeds pretty well in doing so. Through Francis and the characters he encounters, Hill explores myriad topics including politics, office drudgery, sexual repression, race relations, war, and the age-old question of “How does one live?” The character of Francis and the heavily slanted-POV style of the novel seem to anticipate the characters and styles of novels published later in the ‘70s that are widely regarded as modern classics. You see aspects of Francis and his concerns mirrored in Bob Slocum (Something Happened by Joseph Heller, 1974), Harry White (The Demon by Hubert Selby, Jr., 1976), and Richard Nixon (The Public Burning by Robert Coover, 1977).

There is a building tension as the novel takes on theme after theme and loads them in significant and thought-provoking ways. Most narratives that attempt to filter everything (or at least everything important and vital) through a single character seem to inexorably inch toward a climax that involves either a nullifying apocalypse or a cleansing rebirth. It is a credit to the author's talent that the ending of Jeremiah 8:20 feels like both at the same time. The long and short of it is that this book is an amazing artistic achievement.

Below are four critical appreciations of Jeremiah 8:20, all of which elucidate the novel's merits much better than I ever could. First is a review by the late great John Leonard that appeared in The New York Times on May 21, 1970. Next is a review by Robert A. Gross from the May 11, 1970 issue of Newsweek. Third is a positive review (with some qualifications) written by Eugene Goodheart in the journal Midstream in October 1970. And last but certainly not least is a very perceptive appreciation written by the distinguished poet and professor Samuel W. Allen from the December 1970 issue of The Crisis.


  


Early to Mid-‘70s

Carol DeChellis Hill circa 1974


In 1973, Holt Rinehart published Subsistence U.S.A., a book of Bruce Davidson photographs with accompanying text by Carol Hill. The book contains long interviews with people from all over the country living in some kind of privationsometimes voluntarily, sometimes not—along with photographs of them. Hill writes little introductory pieces before each interview, describing the environment the person lives in (they interview people from California to Maine and everywhere in between) and the situation the person finds him or herself in. They interview hobos, hitchhikers, destitute families from down south, and hippies trying to live off the land, creating an affecting portrait of the perseverance of American people.


The short story “Gone” was published in the November 1974 issue of Viva magazine. While it is very short, it is well written and manages to be surprising while striking a poignant chord that hums after the final word is read. I think it may be the best 508-word short story I’ve read this side of Donald Barthelme.


In 1974, Random House published Hill’s second novel, Let’s Fall in Love. The story is a postmodern murder mystery that takes place in various locales around Europe. A pair of detectives are trying to solve the murder of an old lady who collected erotic esoterica, from antique dildos to 19th century erotic manuscripts. They eventually cross paths with a $10,000-a-night high-class courtesan and her acquaintances, some of whom have ties to Middle Eastern terrorist organizations. Eventually it is uncovered that the murder is part of a string of other unsolved murders that have something to do with the location of priceless paintings the Nazis stole and hid away during WWII.

The novel is as crazy and madcap as it sounds. It is also very entertaining and pretty experimental. Hill drops in what appear to be real New York Times articles, mixing truth into her fantastical narrative with intriguing results. There are also excerpts from real hundred-year-old erotic texts, statistics from modern sex studies and surveys, reproductions of paintings, and old magazine ads.

Some of the book is just flat-out funny, like when one of the characters decides she’s going to write an erotic novel and enlists the help of her friends:

   “Now everyone,” she called, clanking on a glass, “pay careful attention. First we have to define terms. Now we need terms for the male and terms for the female. The first question is, is the dirtiest word dirtier than the euphemism, and which is better for arousal?”

   “Certain words,” Anna said, “we know are dirty, i.e., prurient. They are: spread, if you follow it with the legs; if you follow it with peanut butter it’s okay; squat, usually, licked, usually.”

   “Sucked?” someone asked.

   “Oh, that one,” Anna said, “depends on how you use it,” and with that she leaned back, smoking a lollipop.

   “Now is penis better or dork better?”

   “Dork?” Lola said. “Ugh, is that a word for a penis?”

   “Yes,” Anna said, “it rhymes with pork, that’s what I don’t like about it.”

   “Scratch dork,” Lola said. Anna agreed. They sat for a while around the pool enjoying the cool breezes. Finally Rabbi Fennerman said, “What about schlong?”

   “Schlong?” Anna asked incredulously, “Don’t you mean dong?”

   “No, no schlong,” the rabbi insisted.

   “I like that,” Anna said, writing it down, and then she read the sentence out loud, “He put his schlong into…”

   “Wait,” Lola said, “put is too aggressive, try something more delicate, like place.”

   “Place,” Anna said, considering it. She looked around, taking a vote. Bacco nodded. So did Rabbi Fennerman. It seemed that they agreed that place was the thing for schlong.

   Anna started again. “I think we’re going to write a very good pornographic novel. Now listen to what we have so far, “He placed his schlong into…”

   “No no no,” Bacco said, “place is too polite, schlong has a very pushy quality.”

   “I think that’s an anti-Semitic remark,” Rabbi Fennerman said.

   “No,” Anna said, “I don’t like pushed his schlong into.”

   “Wait,” said Lola, “it’s not so aggressive if you change what he’s pushing it into.”

   “What do you mean?”
  

   “Well, if you have him pushing his schlong into her cunt, that’s very rough.”

   “Well, what do you want it in, her ear?”

   “No, some euphemism. How about pushing his schlong into her velvet glove?”

   “I don’t like velvet glove,” Anna said, “it sounds fuzzy.”

   “You’re right,” Lola said, sitting back and thinking it over. “If anything is velvet it should be the schlong.”

   “What about rose,” said Bacco.

   “Perfect,” said Anna, reading out loud, “He pushed his velvet schlong into her rose…”

   “No no, no,” Lola said, “you can’t say that.”

   “You can’t? Why not?” Anna asked.

   “You can’t because,” Lola said simply, “people don’t go around pushing things into roses. At least certainly not decent, honest, hard-working people.”

   “Well, he’s got to do something to it,” Anna said, “maybe pry. What about he pried open the rose?”

   “That makes it sound like a tin can,” Bacco said.

   “Um.”

   There was silence for a moment and then Lola said, “Maybe the rose could do something to him.”

   “Like what?”

   “Embrace,” Bacco volunteered.

   “Embrace?” Anna said questioningly.

   “Yes, good, good,” Rabbi Fennerman said. “The rose embraced his velvet schlong.”

   Anna was busy scribbling it down and asked him to repeat it.

   “ ‘The Rose and the Schlong.’ You know, that’s not a bad title,” Bacco said.

   “ ‘The Rose and the Schlong.’ ” cried Anna, “yes yes, it’s absolutely perfect.” And so they all agreed.

            -Let’s Fall in Love, pgs. 143, 146-47

With its elements of terrorism, sex, politics, and outré characters, Let’s Fall in Love reminds me of a DeLillo novel, something like Running Dog, Players, or Mao II. And like most DeLillo books, Let’s Fall in Love crescendos to a literally incredible ending, one involving characters miraculously surviving a plane crash and then having to escape an aborted séance in a moated castle in the Alps while evading gunfire and crocodiles. Overall, this is a solid and fascinating second novel. Side note: The cover of the UK release might be my favorite book cover ever:


Another short story of Hill’s, “Only Sleep With the Husbands of Friends,” was in the June 1975 issue of Viva. [Note: Although the CN bio says there is a story called "Lovers" in the April 1975 issue of Viva, there is no writing by Hill in that issue.] It is a highly erotic tale of a 30-year-old woman and her efforts to alternately resist and succumb to an Italian painter's charms.




An Unmarried Woman


In 1978, Avon released the novelization of the Paul Mazursky film, An Unmarried Woman. Actually, it says it was based on the screenplay, so Hill probably had not seen the movie before writing the novel. (Note: This book, as far as I can tell, is the first thing that credits her as “Carol DeChellis Hill” and not just “Carol Hill.”)

The book (and movie) is about a woman in her mid-30s named Erica who believes she has a good marriage until her husband announces out of the blue that he’s leaving her for a younger woman. With the help of her friends, she navigates the waters of being newly single while trying to guide her precocious teenage daughter through adolescence.

The movie is not talked about much these days (there is no Blu-ray, and the DVD is out of print but available on Netflix streaming) but it was popular with both audiences and critics at the time, earning over $20 million at the box office and scoring three Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best Actress for Jill Clayburgh. It was also named best film of 1978 by Roger Ebert.

The novel is written in that slick, easy-to-read style of books that seem like they were shipped directly to airport bookstores as soon as they got off the press. It is designed to be finished in one or two sittings. It is competently written, but something of a head-scratcher. I’d be interested to know the circumstances that led Hill to take this project on.

There are some key differences between the movie and book. The book has characters in it that were either cut from the movie or never made it past the early script phase. One of these characters is Erica’s mom, who doesn’t play a significant role in the story but her short scenes make sense because of course you’d call your mom if your marriage broke up. Another character that appears only in the book is Erica’s boss, and his only purpose seems to be so Erica can ask him for a raise because she’s worried about money now that her bread-winning husband is out of the picture (he is a stock broker and they were one of those vaguely wealthy Manhattanite families that populate virtually every movie that takes place in NYC). This is another major difference between the two: in the movie, Erica seems to hardly care about money at all, acting like her financial situation will remain unchanged even though she works as an underling at a not very upscale art gallery. My guess is that while having the character worry about money is certainly more realistic, it is not what Mazursky wanted the movie to be about, so he opted not to have the character express any concern at all. In the book Erica finds herself thinking about money every few pages in a very believable fashion.

Also, Erica’s daughter is way more erratic in the book, prone to wild mood swings, acting out more, etc. In the movie the daughter is a lot more placid and calm, evincing “maturity” in almost every scene. Again, I think the book is more realistic (the daughter is, after all, only 15 years old), but perhaps Mazursky liked the unconventionality of having an imperturbable teen daughter in a movie about divorce, especially since the girl they cast was clearly older than 15 and looked fairly mature already.

The last big difference between the movie and book (besides the ending of the movie, which would be difficult to duplicate in prose, especially airport-book prose) is that Erica has some pretty strong disagreements with her friends in the book, leading to hard feelings that persist for large chunks of the story, and are in some cases never fully resolved. In the movie the friends are pretty much unconditionally supportive of Erica, always there for her and always receptive to Erica’s emotional needs. In the commentary to the movie, Mazursky talks about how Erica and her friends were precursors to the characters in Sex and the City, and how it was almost revolutionary back then to depict a group of women as genuine, supportive friends and not conniving and back-stabbing and in constant competition with one another. Not that the friends in Hill’s adaptation were total bitches to each other, but there was a fair amount of contention interlaced with their good times together. It could've been that Mazursky wiped out any trace of ill will between the friends early on before they started shooting, or maybe it was a decision made during filming, or maybe Hill was just taking liberties with the story, changing things as she saw fit. I could see any of these being possibilities.

Writing Full Time

Carol DeChellis Hill circa 1985

Hill worked as a publicist and editor for many major publishers throughout the ‘70s. She attained her highest position in the publishing world when she became the vice president of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1978. She was also the senior editor at that company and edited many bestsellers, including Barry Goldwater's memoirs and The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need by Andrew Tobias. (He thanks her in the acknowledgments of the new edition published in 2011.) In 1980, she turned to writing full time.

In March of 1985, Holt, Rinehart and Winston published Hill’s fourth novel, The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer. (It was published in England in 1988 with the title Amanda and the Eleven Million Mile High Dancer.)


Amanda Jaworski, the book’s protagonist, is NASA’s premier female astronaut and about to be the first person to travel to Mars. Her specialty is particle physics, but she is no stuffy scientist. Instead, she is the kind of free-wheeling genius who has no problem gliding around her workplace on roller skates. She is a fiercely intelligent woman who also happens to fully embrace her femininity; she “liked strawberry sodas, high-heeled shoes, men, lipstick, convertibles, long hair, bright toenail polish, particle physics, quarks, entropy, speculations regarding the speed of light, Darwinism, and archaeology.” It is undoubtedly these unusual qualities of hers that attract the notice of two suitors: Bronco McCloud, a jet pilot oozing machismo, and Donald Hotchkiss, a dashing aerodynamic engineer. She spends most of her time with the more sensitive and giving Hotchkiss, but finds herself wistfully thinking of the more adventurous possibilities that McCloud offers:

She thought that for women, the likes of McCloud would hang them all. She knew she would give up everything for the joys of McCloud’s love. True this was no idle passion; this was no will-o-the-wisp thing without meaning. The meaning of this was this: with McCloud and McCloud only could she give herself fully. Why this should be she really didn’t know. But somewhere in his sweet momentariness, like the pause of a butterfly on a flower, Amanda found herself. The staunch reliability of Hotchkiss, Hotchkiss’s very depth, that he would rescue her if need be from the jaws of death itself—this life-giving action was totally ignored by the female heart. The female heart, she thought, if one approached it that way, was giving hell to time. No future, no past, only the now, snatched at the heat of passion, was the gentle sex’s way of saying fuck you to hands of time. Time, time, time, the enemy, time ending the race, the dare, the choice; women more than men, although all of them for sure, but women were timed: a time to bleed, a time to stop, a time to bear children, a time to stop; aspects of femininity were built so rigorously into a clock as to force an urgent stand against such a terrible oppressor. Now and only now—what a way of getting even. She didn’t understand it. She knew only this: it was a dangerous game and required an elastic nature Amanda knew she did not have.
   
                      -The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, pg. 61

In other passages, her analytical assessments of female concerns give the whole novel a feminist tinge:

She was thinking about that. And wondering what she would find on Mars. She was also thinking about women. She was thinking that despite all this emancipation business, men still ruled the earth. In most countries, in most places, men ruled. And most people in most countries thought that men had “the answers.” What bothered her was that women thought they should defer to men, that men should have the answers; or therefore, that women shouldn’t. She thought that women who acted like they had the answers weren’t sure deep down. Why, she wondered, was it so hard for women to be sure?

            -The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, pg. 153

Letter included with advance copies
of The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer

But soon there is hardly any time for introspection as the mechanics of the plot take over and the story progresses at a dizzying pace. It all starts on the cusp of her journey to Mars, when strange things start to occur. Her cat, Schrodinger, gains unnatural intelligence, allowing him to read in multiple languages. Amanda is visited by alien beings from millions of light years away. And unbeknownst to her, 10,000 Native Americans have disappeared without a trace in Texas. Soon Amandaalong with Hotchkiss, a boy prodigy, and a trained chimp named 342finds herself on a journey to Epsilon Eridani, a star 40 million light years away from Earth, in order to retrieve her cat, who has been stolen by a seemingly omniscient being called the GBC, or the Great Cosmic Brain. It is there she uncovers the existence of armies of red and blue robots intent on destroying the human race at the behest of the GBC, who turns out to have been the earth’s creator. She enlists the help of the mysterious Rastus and an inchoate entity called the Ooze to help her return to Earth and save it in the process. The story culminates, of course, with the appearance of an eleven million mile high dancer. (In the acknowledgments, Hill says she was inspired by a picture in The Cosmic Code by Heinz Pagel.)

Picture that inspired The Eleven Million Mile High
Dancer, from The Cosmic Code by Heinz Pagel
Characters and out-of-nowhere plot elements keep piling up in this science fantasy extravaganza. It never devolves completely into farce, but a light, comedic tone is maintained throughout, overlaid with a constant sense of wonder at the universe we live in.

In the mid-'80s, Hill wrote a couple book reviews for The New York Times, including one for Lorrie Moore’s first novel:

ANAGRAMS by Lorrie Moore. 225 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $15.95.

BY CAROL HILL

Published: November 2, 1986

IN Lorrie Moore's ''Anagrams,'' there's a fierce, hot eye that makes you wonder whether you're going to be stranded in the familiar desert of the modern imagination. But the book has a saving grace: Benna Carpenter - who is either a poet, teacher, nightclub singer, aerobics instructor or all of these - is appealing as the heroine of this extraordinary and often hilarious first novel. She sees the irony of her situation, describing her meetings with her imaginary friend, Eleanor, as ''The Great White Wine'' - ''whiney white people getting together over white wine and whining.''

Benna's closest real friend is a musician, Gerard Maines. Their apartments share a thin wall, and Gerard sits one night, dopey with love, fully dressed in his dry bathtub, waiting for Benna to return, yearning only for the sound of her toilet flushing. Gerard loves Benna, and she kind of likes him. This is their first attempt to make love: ''We ended up in my bed together, sort of, spastic and looped, doomed for failure, like two senile inventors in an upstairs room, lonely as spoons. The whole business finally seemed less an expres-sion of mutual attraction than a soft, noodly act of existentialism.''

Benna and Gerard eventually do become lovers, and she sits in a rinky-dink cocktail lounge where he sings and plays piano and dreams of becoming an opera star. Then Benna gets pregnant, the imaginary Eleanor sleeps with Gerard, and Benna has an abortion. Miraculously, the relationship between Benna and Gerard not only survives these events but becomes a deep, close friendship. Throughout all of this we are treated to Benna's reflections, which often take the form of quirky, fond musings on words: '' 'Have fun in Tunis,' I'd say as he disappeared off to rehearsals. I liked to say Tunis. It sounded obscene, like a rarely glimpsed body part.''

Words roll around in Benna's mind like Life Savers on a tongue. Beneath the sweet pleasure of play, however, we sense her need for something else, some deeper articulation that will exorcise distance, bring her love and keep her from death. Watching a flock of birds, she muses: ''From four blocks away I could see that the flock had a kind of group-life, a recognizable intelligence; no doubt in its random flutters there were patterns, but alone any one of those black birds would not have known what was up. Alone, as people live, they would crash their heads against walls.''

To avoid hitting the wall, Benna falls in love with Darrel, a black Vietnam veteran who is taking her poetry class. Race is something Benna tries to avoid through her almost magical belief that whatever separates us can be overcome if we find the right words. She assigns sestinas to her poetry class, writing on the blackboard the end words ''race, white, erotic, lost, need, love, leave.'' Darrel raises his hand and says that's seven words, not six. Benna erases ''love,'' then changes her mind and erases ''white.''

It is a loss in the novel that this particular relationship is not developed further. It's unfortunate too that the changes of place and point of view in the beginning chapters interrupt and confuse us, so that we move away from the story. Some of the early chapters read almost as if they were independent entities, and it may be that Ms. Moore's talents as a short-story writer, revealed in her collection, ''Self-Help,'' tempted her in that direction. These opening chapters are like a magnificent engine alone on its track. We watch, waiting for the hookup, which we get only in the last section of the book.

Here we meet a wondrous 6-year-old, Georgianne Michelle Carpenter, who is Benna's imaginary daughter. And it is here that so much of the power and impact of the novel begin to make themselves felt. George and Benna have a very good time: a sweet happiness flows between them as they watch the news, take showers together on Saturday mornings to the tunes of Broadway shows, dust the living room and revel in the intimacy of sickroom caresses and goodnight kisses.

Benna loves Georgianne intensely, and in this love, which is sustained only by words, we discover how much this novel is about language, about the power of sounds to slice through the darkness, and through meaning to join us. It is a tribute to Lorrie Moore's talent that the reader believes in Georgianne. UNEXPECTEDLY, Gerard dies, a brutal blow to Benna, who makes one last, painful effort to connect by visiting her lost, hapless brother, Louis. When she and Louis wind up watching a sitcom about a dog on Christmas day in a dreary Queens apartment, Benna's humor erupts in a swift, savage swipe: ''Her mind wandered. She thought of pets growing tired and committing suicide, what notes they would leave: 'Dear Benna: It's all a crazy game. Farewell, Max, Your Schnauzer.' ''

We think Benna may now have lost her real connections in the world. But we're wrong. There are stronger ties still. There are Benna's gifts, imagination and language - and there is the child, Georgianne. Benna's love for this child - like ''Anagrams'' itself - is a powerful example of how imagination can save us with temporary pleasures.

Henry James’ Midnight Song

Carol DeChellis Hill circa 1993


On August 31, 1993, Poseidon Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, published Hill’s fifth novel, Henry James’ Midnight Song. (She is credited as “Carol De Chellis Hill.”) It’s a murder mystery that takes place mostly in Vienna around the turn of the 20th century, and it features an array of real-life characters including Sigmund Freud, Henry James, and Edith Wharton, along with lesser known historical figures like Lexa von Aehrenthal and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

It is abundantly clear that Hill is well versed in this time period and the people involved. It is this knowledge that allows her to mold the truth for her own purposes in order to create a dazzling work of fiction. The book does not demonstrate absolute fidelity to historical fact, nor should it. (In a postmodern touch, a foreword claims that this is a “found text,” only lightly edited, and warns the reader that there are many chronological inconsistencies in the narrative. This unnamed scholar even goes so far as to point out some of the inaccuracies with footnotes.) In a work of fiction that uses historical figures, the author needs to be nimble enough to know when to deviate from recorded fact, lest the work turn into a collection of facts, which does not a novel make (not a good one, at least).

While it’s true that readers bring along certain unavoidable preconceptions when they encounter real-life figures on the page, Hill does not rely solely on these preconceptions to inform the characters. These are not stiff, musty cutouts from the annals of history. Instead, Hill augments what we may know about each individual (or think we know) with a strong authorial vision (and revision). Henry James and Edith Wharton are developed as any newly introduced characters are in a well-written novel. After that first frisson of recognition, we quickly discover them anew, as Hill does a great job in imbuing them with individual concerns, hopes, and dreams (most important in early 20th century Vienna). It takes remarkably few pages for them to become alive to us, to become characters we care about. In this way, Henry James’ Midnight Song reminds me of Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, another novel that used numerous real-life events and characters. Pynchon also resurrected his historical figures from safely embalmed history, vivifying them into extraordinary literary creations while deviating a fair amount from established fact. The lesson here seems to be that it’s easy to give writers artistic license when you feel secure with their ability at the wheel. While Henry James’ Midnight Song does not have the intimidating bravura of the pseudo-18th century diction Pynchon created for Mason & Dixon (making Midnight Song an easier and more pleasing novel for most readers, undoubtedly why there were some grand statements made about Hill’s achievement, such as the one made by Judith Caesar of the Philadelphia Inquirer: “[Henry James’ Midnight Song] puts Carol DeChellis Hill among postmodern masters as Thomas Pynchon, E.L. Doctorow, and Umberto Eco. She may even be better.”), there are certainly affinities between the two novels, including the literary device of telling stories within stories. (For what it’s worth, Henry James’ Midnight Song was released four years before Mason & Dixon.)

With this novel, Hill confirms the breadth of the wide-ranging talent she evinced with her debut novel 23 years prior. In some ways, Henry James’ Midnight Song feels like an encapsulation of the themes of all her previous major works. The book resonates with the sentiment expressed by one of the characters in Jeremiah 8:20, that literary works can somehow be truer than reality. The murder mystery mirrors the basic plot structure of Let’s Fall in Love, and one of the epigraphs of that book is quoted by a character in Midnight Song (“One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.” –Alphonse Bertillon, Founder, Bureau of Criminal Identification, Paris Police Department). The feminist concerns of The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer are reflected in the characters’ rumination in Midnight Song about the differences of male and female authorship of a novel, and there is open speculation about how history might’ve been different if Hitler had been born female. (One of the characters sees visions of the future Holocaust.)

But the main thing that unites Carol DeChellis Hill’s vastly different works is her voice, which is clear, lucid, and perspicacious. One gets the impression that these novels needed to be cared for by someone with the integrity to put aside ego and do whatever was necessary for the book, adopt whatever voice was needed, do whatever research the story required. As far as I can tell, they could not have had a much better steward than Hill, who was able to construct lasting, resonant novels that overflow with ideas and contain abundant pleasures for both the heart and mind.

Henry James’ Midnight Song came out in 1993, and there hasn’t been another Carol DeChellis Hill book since.

Post-1993

It appears Norton handled the paperback release of Henry James’ Midnight Song, and also did a re-release of Let’s Fall in Love and The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer in 1996. On the back of those books, it says Hill was living in New York City and teaching writing at New York University.

In the mid-'90s, Victoria magazine set up a "tea and conversation" with Hill and three other writers (Francine Prose, Judith Thurman, and Susan Minot). They discussed their work and writing process. Some of the conversation was printed in the September 1995 issue. Here are all of Hill's comments:

"Let me start by saying that I don't write from a quiet place within. I write from a miltary zone. A war zone all the way. With the exception of my first novel, my books have felt like wrestling an alligator.

I spent a long period of my life thinking there must be an easier way. I went out and bought a whole bunch of books called 'How to Write Novels.' I thought that maybe there was something I was missing. I went through the motions of trying to write in a very structured and studied way. I set my alarm clock. It didn't work. So I keep writing from my military zone.

For my last book I did a lot of research on Einstein, who ultimately didn't make it in as a character. Someone asked him what was the source of his creativity. He said, 'I get my best ideas anywhere among the three B's—the Bath, the Bed, the Bus.'

The three B's offer brooding time. Writers are not writing all the time. Often ideas are on the back burner, bubbling away. I had the original inspiration for 'Henry James' Midnight Song' twenty years before I wrote it. I read an uncharacteristic fragment of Edith Wharton's writing and I could feel a novel beginning. I took notes on subways and in the backs of cars and ignored them for years. When I went back to them it appeared that a murder had occurred in Sigmund Freud's study and that Edith Wharton and Henry James were suspects. I realized I had a novel I needed to write.

'A writer,' as the Polish author Czeslow Milosz said, 'cannot be really one person. A writer is more like a house without any locked doors. With unknown guests who come and go. A writer must only hope that these spirits who inhabit him or her leave benign traces and trails.'

I have a lot of thoughts that come up and I think, I'm not going to write that down. Writers spend a lot of time backing away from writing. But finally something comes up that is sufficiently powerful that you want to transform it. Then you realize, I am going to have to write this story in order to read it."

(The article included a caricature of Hill drawn by Richard Ely, included here for completeness's sake:)



In 1997, she was on the panel of judges for the National Book Award. They gave the award, somewhat controversially, to Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. (DeLillo’s Underworld, one of the nominees, was widely expected to win. Also published that year was Mason & Dixon, which was not nominated.) The panel that year was headed by the author Nicholas Delbanco. I spotted a copy of Jeremiah 8:20 online that Hill had inscribed to him, presumably before they, along with their fellow judges, were to start debating on whom the award should go to. The vendor selling the book included a letter Hill wrote to Delbanco. In a fascinating paragraph, she talks a little about the process of writing her first novel. She also gives her first impressions of The Puttermesser Papers, the Cynthia Ozick novel that was nominated. (As a DeLillo fan, I’d have loved to hear what she thought of Underworld.)



According to Amazon, Jeremiah 8:20 was republished on March 27, 2001, by an organization called the Author’s Guild. It is from their “backinprint.com program,” a print-on-demand service. According to their website, they specialize in making available again notable out-of-print books in new paperback editions. It appears the author, or someone representing the author, has to actively enlist their services to get a book reprinted. This edition of Jeremiah 8:20 is still available on Amazon. [Note: I actually have a bunch of these, so if you've gotten this far and are interested in CDH, email me a mailing address at dhsayer84[at]gmail[dot]com and I'll send you a free copy.]


Miscellany

Hill was interviewed by Don Swaim for his radio program Book Beat on April 24, 1985. The raw, unedited audio of this interview is available for download. They start out discussing The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, then Hill talks about how she became a writer.

Some of her papers are at Boston University, in the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. They appear to have a 4-page short story called “A Woman’s Story,” and material related to Let’s Fall in Love, as well as four drafts of Henry James' Midnight Song and something I've never heard of called You Must Remember This.... (Time to start planning a trip.) At least some of this material seems to be in the Natalie Robins collection. Natalie Robins, an author, is married to Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who was a major contributor to the New York Times (now retired). Maybe Ms. Hill and Natalie Robins were/are friends or acquaintances and the collection contains correspondence between them? (Note: Lehmann-Haupt called Henry James’ Midnight Song “dazzling” and an “extravagantly imagined new novel” but he did have major reservations about it in his New York Times review.)

The archives of The Westfield Leader, the local paper of Hill's hometown, contain many items of interest. There is an engagement notice on May 23, 1963, which says she will be marrying Herbert Hill that summer (and thereby acquiring the "Hill" surname). In the August 29, 1963 edition, it states that Ms. DeChellis married Mr. Hill at her home in Westfield on August 23, 1963. Herbert Hill was the national labor director of the NAACP at the time, a position he held until 1977. He died in 2004, at the age of 80. Strangely there is no mention of Carol DeChellis Hill in his obituary in the New York Times.  



In the July 16, 1970 edition of The Westfield Leader there is an article about the publication of her first novel, Jeremiah 8:20. It lists a few of the early accolades and favorable reviews the book received, and goes on to list some biographical facts about Hill. Note that the article states that she graduated from Westfield High School, class of 1957. This is confirmed by the yearbook I found. If her DOB from the bio in Contemporary Novelists is correct, she was 15 years old when she graduated. While this is not outside the realm of possibility, if she was the more conventional 18 years of age upon graduation her birth date would be three years before the bio states, in 1939, which would make her 74 today (if the date in CN is in fact correct, she turned 71 this past January). She also mentions working on Jeremiah 8:20 when she was 29 years old during the Don Swaim interview, which doesn't make sense if the CN bio is accurate (it claims she was 28 when the novel was published).


The article states that she is still married to Herbert Hill. At some point they must have divorced (Herbert Hill's obituary mentions that he married a professor named Mary Lydon in 1977) and she later married Jerry Albert, whom she thanks in the acknowledgements of The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer and Henry James’ Midnight Song. (One can probably safely assume that he is the "Jerome Albert" credited as the photographer of her author photos on the hardcovers of Let's Fall in Love and Henry James' Midnight Song.)

Final Thoughts

My excitement at discovering Carol DeChellis Hill’s work was quickly tempered by disappointment at the fact that hardly anyone seems to know who she is. Her obscurity in the literary world is a downright shame considering that her debut novel Jeremiah 8:20 is not only one of the best first novels of all time, it deserves to stand side by side with other well regarded books of the same era. Her subsequent books are also very good, and burnish what has been a distinguished oeuvre.

And yet there has not been another novel, or much word from her at all, in 20 years. Has she been working on something all this time? She was clearly not a “book a year” author, taking 7 or 8 years between her last couple books. But on that schedule, we should still have had two new novels since Henry James’ Midnight Song. Did she have no more to say? Did her inspiration fail to match her extraordinary talent? Or is she meticulously preparing a grand final project? If so, her first novel in 20+ years would be a major literary event, and a triumphant return of someone who should, if there’s any justice, be regarded as one of the most significant American novelists of the last 50 years.

DHS