WARREN ADLER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Warren Adler, whose 50 novels included The War Of The Roses, from which was made a hit film, is online at the Guardian; you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. Of course the movie is what the hook for the obit was -- it's odd that such a successful and prolific writer should have such a low-profile output.

It is pretty much as I wrote it--but one thing was edited out. I have to confess I had never come across, in my time as a crime fiction reviewer, any of his Fiona Fitzgerald novels. They sound intriguing, and almost a natural for development on TV. I mentioned that, but what was cut out was the fact that the adapter is currently Eric Overmyer--who was the showrunner and adapter of Bosch (and was working on Man In The High Castle as well.) That would bode well.

In Adler's own biography, he mentioned that his classmates at the New School for Social Research included Marion Puzo and William Styron; when I wrote Thomas Berger's obit I recall writing the same thing. So I wonder if they ever overlapped, or if they somehow moved in different circles. I also wondered if Berger's The Neighbors (1980) might have been an influence on War Of The Roses?

Adler is good with set-ups, and it was impressive to me just how prevalent the theme of broken, dangerous or twisted relationships was at the heart of his books, whatever their genre. That he was such a devoted family man shouldn't surprise anyone, but making fiction out of the opposite, repeatedly, is something remarkable. I read a piece he wrote for the magazine of the American Association of Retired People, from which I drew that final quote, and it was very moving: told from a point of view of his own loss, you might say victimhood, and it seemed to me a cruel way of his having to go through what he put so many characters through.

It was also fascinating that, in his first career as a DC PR, he should have advised Nixon (on how he could win the Jewish vote) and been the man who gave the Watergate complex its name. Because of course the Guardian obit I had written just two days before Adler's was that of James McCord, leader of the Watergate burglar's, whose confession was the key to Nixon's being brought down. A strange bit of
synchronicity.

E.L.DOCTOROW: THOUGHTS ON MY FRONT ROW DISCUSSION

I was on BBC Radio4 Front Row yesterday, discussing E.L. Doctorow with Samira Ahmed. Although I was saddened by his death, it was a privilege to be able to convey some of my enthusiasm for his work, and for him as a person, to a wider audience. You can link to that broadcast here; our segment starts about 16 minutes in, but really it's worth listening right through from the start, it's that good a programme.

Doctorow's work is always about relations of power—whether class, financial, racial, physical or whatever, and how the imbalance of those relations is at the core of the American experience, if not the core of the American Dream. It is always about the problems of America, the way those at the bottom experience the City on A Hill. It's easy to miss, because the stories themselves are so engrossing, the characters so well drawn: his historical figures blend with his invented ones, reinforcing his insistence that he was not writing historical fiction. Take The March, published when he was 74. It's as good a Civil War novel as anyone had written in a long time, but at heart it's about the way, even before the war was over, the rebellious southerners were being welcomed back into the fold, and the newly 'freed' slaves were being found a status not much different from slavery.

I met Doctorow once, at a debate organised by the New Yorker (with whom I was on good terms at the time, though never good enough to sell them anything) and the Sunday Telegraph at Cheltenham Ladies College, probably about 25 years ago. I was standing by myself at the pre-debate reception, and two guys standing next to me drew me into their conversation. 'Hi, I'm Joe, this is Ed,' one of them said, and a few seconds later I dissolved into fan boy status as I realised I was talking to Joe Heller and Ed Doctorow. It was one of the finest half-hours I've ever spent: the discussion never got near literary gossip; it covered real topics, and had mobile phones been invented I would even now be bombarding you with selfies.

Doctorow was maybe the last of the politically involved novelists from the time writers of fiction (and excellent non-fiction) were considered important pundits, rather than retreating to academia and ceding the high ground to the screeching beltway hacks who now populate the airways and leech into print. He was younger than Vonnegut, Mailer, or Vidal, but like them he accepted a public presence. He and his Kenyon classmate Paul Newman helped keep the Nation, America's pre-eminent left-wing weekly, afloat for years, and Doctorow contributed many fine essays to it. And like Mailer, and Roth (who is two years younger) he may the last of that generation of novelists educated in New York's public schools and then WASPy private colleges. I mentioned on Front Row that Doctorow's academic career reads like a character from a Philip Roth novel (Marcus, from Indignation, actually).

What was important from Doctorow's time at Kenyon was his study with John Crowe Ransom, one of the godfathers of 'New Criticism'. There's an interesting essay to be written about how New Criticism's analysis of Modernism helped generate Post-Modernism. Mailer and Vidal followed the modernist greats, with Vidal picking up a post-modern sort of irony; but Vonnegut and, with less flash but more variety, Doctorow, clearly embraced a post-modern sense of narrative. I mentioned how Doctorow's narrative strategies changed with each book: Loon Lake, perhaps the most extreme example, might be compared with John Hawkes.

But it was Doctorow's sense of history that inevitably defines his writing. John Updike hated Ragtime, saying Doctorow was 'playing with helpless dead puppets...in a gravity-free faintly sadistic game'. But I can't think of a writer less sadistic to his characters. One often has the feeling the author wishes the characters could be something other than what they are, but that what they are is simply too powerful, too real, to change. The famous story about staring at a portrait of J.P. Morgan by Edward Steichen to 'research' his character rings absolutely true. It's also why I like his first novel, Welcome To Hard Times, so much. Many of the obituaries repeated the line that the book started out as parody, but even were that Doctorow's original intent, his sense of parody became one of deconstruction. I look at the book as a precursor to Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, and Berger's novel as a sort of precursor to Doctorow's bigger novels. The film of Welcome To Hard Times isn't great; Burt Kennedy's scripts were always better when someone else directed them, but you can see Henry Fonda gets what the book was about. In passing, it's odd how that great wave of post-modern novelists: Heller, Doctorow, Vonnegut, Mailer, Berger, Barth, Pynchon, were either ill-served or served not at all by Hollywood. I sometimes wonder if too many of Doctorow's novels end in melodrama and violence, and if those genre novels he edited at NAL did affect him, but it occurs to me that an imbalance of power in society is almost always enforced by violence, and protested by violence. Hard Times is about what happens when society is ill-equipped to deal with rampant evil; that's a classic western trope, but Doctorow's idea is that it is really endemic in our society.

I mentioned the New Criticism; Doctorow was a fine editor at New American Library and Dial Press. His obits mentioned the big names he edited, everything from Mailer and Baldwin to the unlikely pairing with Ayn Rand. But Ed Brubaker wrote today about how it was Doctorow who commissioned Jules Feiffer's The Comic Book Heroes; the first serious study of comics, and one that looked wryly at the America those early super-heroes represented. I mentioned to Samira that World's Fair might be my favourite of Doctorow's novels, and I spoke of the sense it gives me of the time in which my parents grew up; but I realised too that part of my pleasure in that book is the way our knowledge of what became of the world since then burnishes our memories of 1939. It was published in 1985, as if to say, look what we came out of, look at how high our hopes were, and now you want to turn the clocks back to the age of greed?

I ought to explain as well that I don't consider Waterworks his best novel, but in its style and structure it may be his best piece of prose writing. I haven't even mentioned Billy Bathgate or The Book Of Daniel, either of which might head many people's list of favourite Doctorow books, but we do mention them in the Front Row talk. I recommend his short stories too, and especially his essays, which approach literature and politics with the same caring that he shows his fictional characters. He gave a graduation address at Brandeis, and after the college edited the copy for its magazine, The Nation published it in full. It was almost a Jeremiad, an effort to remind the students of the world they were about to enter, and remind them more of what they could bring to it with the learning they had just received. Couching his words in almost literary theory, but using an uncharacteristic vituperative approach, he talked about how we were seeing a 'national regression to the robber baronial thinking of the 19^th century—nothing less than a deconstruction of America...as if we were not supposed to be a just nation, but a confederacy of stupid murderous gluttons.'

THOMAS BERGER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Thomas Berger is up at the Guardian online; you can link to it here. It should appear in the paper paper soon. It is pretty much as I wrote it, except that my final line was omitted, which I thought was a shame, since it was a quote from Berger: 'real life is unbearable for me unless I can escape into fiction.'

I may have been a little harsh in calling him a 'recluse'. He appears to have been, like JD Salinger, not trying to avoid the world, not a hermit, but merely fed up with the business of the literary world, and trying to avoid its distraction. Like Salinger, he appears to have been very much a part of his small-town community. And unlike Salinger, he produced his fiction steadily.

That fiction was something he, and the reader, could escape into. You often got the sense in his novels that he was following not the plot, or the character, but the way the prose sounded, what he might call 'the tone', and that if you were not in tune with that you might be missing a great deal. He was a playful novelist (though that term would probably make him bristle, as he was deadly serious about it) in the post-modern sense.

A number of writers have claimed that Little Big Man is not his best book, which is fair game. But a few years ago in the Guardian someone named Tom Cox outsmarted us all by saying it was 'far from Berger's best novel'. On the contrary, what the picaresque epic style does is allow Berger to mix his tones, and the changes fit so well with each of Crabb's tales it keeps the reader involved.

Sometimes I got the sense, as in Teddy Villanova that Berger was trying to say something about the hard-boiled genre itself that I wasn't getting, or that wasn't particularly new. But it is that need to comment on, if not deconstruct, with his fiction, that reminded me of the Coens, and made me think they would be well-matched with a novel like The Feud.

I read somewhere that Berger was one of the last major novelists who served in World War II. James Salter springs to mind as one who is still with us, but I am hard-pressed to think of another. I tend to link Berger with slightly younger writers who dove into what the critics began calling meta-fictions, like Barth or Pynchon.But it's not a strong parallel because truly he was one of a kind.

MODERN WESTERNS: MARIELLA, ACE & ME ON OPEN BOOK

I was on the BBC Radio 4 programme Open Book today, with host Mariella Frostrup and the writer Ace Atkins, to talk about westerns. The hook was two radio adaptations of western novels which will air on R4: Elmore Leonard's Hombre (you can see my take on the book, which I read recently, here), at 2:30 next Saturday 23rd, and Jack Schaefer's Shane the following Saturday. You can find programme on IPlayer here, for at least the next week, and it will be repeated on Thursday 21/3 at 3:30pm --it's a good listen, with Kate Atkinson preceding us, and an interesting discussion of betting on the Womens Prize for Fiction. Which, had I heard it, might have prompted me to note that westerns serve, for America, much the same function as costume drama does for Britain; it's way of reassuring the present by showing its roots in the past.

This was a discussion that was immense fun when we recorded it in the studio, and it's also one that could have go off in any number of directions--I could easily have traced the western through Fenimore Cooper's Deerslayer through Melville's Confidence Man to Nick Carter--the dime novel western hero who becomes Nick Carter the detective later on--but Ace drew the comparison, of 'gunslingers moved to town', which made it unnecessary.

We might also have delved a little further into the connection between movies and novels, in reverse perhaps, because as Ace made clear, movies influence writers' own concepts of the west as much as books used to fertilise Hollywood's west. I probably ought to have made clear another distinction: westerns were a major part of the pulpy and slick magazine fictions just as film was coming into being--The Great Train Robbery, after all, was the first narrative film--but the movies' immense appetite for westerns was expressed primarily in B features, serials, and the like--John Wayne made many forgettable westerns in between Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail and John Ford's Stagecoach. Then television did the same thing in its early days--wringing the genre dry to the point that from the middle Sixties onward, we get western films that are in many ways commentaries on the genre and its conventions.

One thing that was cut was the question of what our favourite western novel actually is: Ace chose True Grit (our discussion of which also fell by the wayside) and I was torn between True Grit, Warlock by Oakley Hall and Little Big Man by Thomas Berger. Have a listen to the programme as it stands; you'll like it.