This is sort of related to Toochi-Toochi's post below and I could've posted it as a comment but I am feeling exhibitionist, which is rare, so I thought I'd seize the feeling and run with it.
I'm not going to blame MFA programs because I don't think they're the only, or even the main, cause of this phenomenon but so much recent stuff I read is oh-so-clever, such smooth talk, such lithe vocabularies, and so little else -- it's been so long, so very long, since I've read anything recent that made me cry. Is it just me? Am I just not finding the right books? This has been an obsession of mine for a while. I keep coming back to it; I may have already posted about it here but I am too lazy to scroll down and see if I did and anyway almost no one posts on here so it's not like I'm taking up space that someone else wanted and besides only 3 (three) people still read this thing so it's not like I'm taking up too much collective time either.
I like to cry when I read. At the ends of books, in the middle, even at the beginning if it feels earned (actually, if it doesn't feel earned, I *don't* cry, so I guess I don't need to qualify that). I cry while reading *children's* books, not just the obvious ones like Charlotte's Web and Watership Down (homeless bunnies! Who doesn't cry for them?), but even The Railway Children, The Wind in the Willows, certain bits of The House at Pooh Corner. So it's not like I'm a hard sell. But more and more it seems that sentiment has gone out of fashion, or that all sentiment is dismissed as melodrama, or that emotion can only be approached with irony. Maybe it's the South Asian in me -- maybe I'm hard-wired to love emotion writ large, on the Bollywood scale: loud, wet tears, sadness that kills, fury that makes people gasp. Oh, don't get me wrong, I think Bollywood simply transcribed makes for ATROCIOUS fiction, and there are a few writers who do write like that, all of whom I despise, yes, despise. But the other extreme seems like such a poor and dry place. I'm tired of tongue-in-cheekness and McSweeney's and stories from the point of view of quirky misfits doing strange and quirky things that don't change anyone's lives.
I'm feeling curmudgeonly, it's true. But on a less curmudgeonly note, I looked at P. Ho D.'s novel, just at the dust jacket, and it left me feeling hopeful. I haven't read it yet but I am hopeful that it might make me cry. Has anyone here read it? I am a total sucker for wartime romance. It almost always makes me cry, all that impetuousness and fatalism. I cried and cried and cried when I read _The Heat of the Day_ (Elizabeth Bowen, you must read it if you haven't) and I cried at _A Very Long Engagement_, which almost everyone else hated and the critics panned for being cheesy. So maybe PHD's book will make me cry, and then I will feel better about the state of contemporary literature.
If you've read anything lately that made you cry, let me know. I'm making a list.
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8 comments:
Thank you, bangde111111, I can't wait to receive that best browser fo' me. I'll be visiting your blog post-haste. Maybe it'll make me cry.
cheese! the squeeze and i were just talking about this issue last night--about sentimentality and how much we both love it and have no patience for people who dismiss it outright. i saw a guy (maybe on tv?) wearing a shirt that just said 'sentimental' and, even though it was kind of clever, i liked that shirt very much.
lately, the art that makes me cry is not a book but the hbo show 'the wire.' 'the wire' is like an insanely engrossing novel on tv (or dvd in our case); it's complex and beautiful and completely devastating. i cry (sob is the more appropriate verb) whenever i even *think* of a particular episode from season one. has anyone (of the supposed three reading--make that four--hi bangde111111!) seen this show? please watch it.
the squeeze suggests 'graceland' by chris abani as a possible tear-inducer. the books that have made me sad lately haven’t left me weepy, more just hollowed out. i finally read ‘disgrace’ and not long after read vendela vida’s new book ‘let the northern lights erase your name,’ which i found gut-wrenching, but maybe too cold to allow for tears. (i still loved it though.)
maybe for a post rather than a comment, but i think it’s unfortunate that mcsweeney’s has become shorthand for the kind of soulless cleverness you discuss in the post, cheese. I think mcsweeney’s, and the people associated with it, are certainly responsible for some cleverness for its own sake, but are also concerned with genuine emotion and with sloppy snot-ridden tears and stories that inspire said tears.
i saw phd’s book in the bookstore the other day, but only had the chance to read the back cover (i was working). i hope you’ll read it and share your thoughts. i bought laura k’s new book ‘be mine’ the other day but haven’t started it yet. i’m on an antonya nelson kick that cannot be curbed. i’m also reading ‘there’s a boy in the girl’s bathroom’ by louis sachar, in large part because my friend jenny told me she reads it to her elementary school students every year and it makes her cry every time. i’ll let you know if it has the same effect on me.
PS happy valentine's day. i love robotdinosaurswithhumanhearts!
Me and bizness and bangde111111 (actually I think that's N. Delb.'s codename) are going to have us a wee discussion here.
Oh man I totally agree about McSweeney's; in fact no sooner had I hit "publish" than I knew that I had been unfair and the reason I had been unfair was only because ONE recent story had annoyed me and continued to rankle. The story in question had a lot of really good writing in it but left me feeling empty (as opposed to hollowed out, which is harder to achieve and almost as desirable as weepy -- Disgrace is SO hollowing!). But yes, there have been other McSweeney's stories that have reduced me to, well, not quite sobs, but at least a damp-eyed state.
I'll have to check out "The Wire" if and when I get a chance, bizness, because your last recommendation (Arrested Development) brought us to a turning point in our intellectual development. No, no tears there (though *almost,* when Theodore Fünke cries in the shower in his cut-off shorts), but what I mean to say is that I trust your recommendations. Tell the squeeze that I have been meaning to check out Graceland for a while, too (he's the second person to recommend it), and someone else was talking up Vendela Vida's book just last week....
I did say I wasn't a hard sell, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder if maybe I am, and maybe I don't cry about the same things many other people do. I didn't cry at The Squid and The Whale, which many people found devastating -- I just found it annoying. It's not that I am immune to the small tragedies of our daily lives and think only war and genocide deserve tears, so I don't know exactly what it is. But lots of stories leave me feeling like that movie did. Like I *should* feel sad for these characters, but I just don't.
Don't you agree, bangde111111? Hasn't it been a long time since you've had to hide your tears with your fedora in a dark movie theatre?
Bizness (since this is basically a private exchange between us), did you get my letter in Vermont? I hope you did. The mail has been very erratic lately. It makes me feel like I am living In Olden Times.
Speaking of letters, bizness, did you get my email I sent in response to yours eons ago?
PS. Yo bangde111111! long time, bro.
hi small ones. i miss you!
i don't know if I can say I love sentimentality in fiction, though i do love emotional punch me in the gut stuff, and i think sometimes the absence of the latter is a result of fear of the former. (this, of course, is a question of semantics, but I think of sentiment as bad and emotion as necessary and good) I think so many times writers want to be oh-so-snarky, oh so detached that they end up hating their characters, laughing at them, and this, to me, defies the entire purpose of writing. Blogs are for laughing at people, perhaps but serious fiction should do much more. And maybe our blog-o-sphere is permeating what we're reading in fiction, this sort of totally self-aware, self-absorbed bourou-bourou, which is very sad.
Oh, how I do love a good cry in a book, and I look forward to PHD's book, too, which I just got. Oh, but wartime love stories, how wonderful, and there's a reason they just keep getting told, don't you think? But, I'm getting off track here, and wish I could remember the last book that made me cry. I hope, cheese, your book will make me cry. I hope my book makes you cry. Bizness, your stories always make me cry. Masticated stories make me want to sob and laugh hysterically, which is a very good thing.
And right now, my book is making me cry, though perhaps not in the way I'm looking for.
but back to sentimental: I guess what I mean by that is that sentiment seems to be trying to evoke emotion simply through an elaborate, purple display of language, yet empty, while emotion results from the actions and words and interiority of the characters; i think of sentiment as emotion in its cheapest form, distilled and diluted. But true emotional resonance is what kicks us in the gut after we read something, the kind of thing that makes us sob and sob. Nami read a fantastic story at her reading (you can find it in Witness, though I don't know the issue offhand), and it was so fantastic, so wonderful, and the ending just had me sobbing in my chair. I've been thinking about it for days. I guess that's the last thing that made me cry.
I'll have to think about this, for your list, cheese.
Oh, Antonya Nelson! How I adore her, too. Have you read Living to Tell yet? Good stuff.
Oh yes, I'm reading some surprise endings in my Creative Writing class, which, too, are making me cry. This year, I didn't give the Jerome Stern Things Not to Do lecture, because I thought perhaps it was too rigid, but I certainly am regretting that decision...
books that have made me cry, both in the past and recently:
Nancy Willard, Sister Water and also and especially her series for children about Anatole, Sailing to Cythera. Some one please get ahold of a seven year old so I can send you those books.
In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje
parts of Charles Baxter's The Feast of Love still make me cry, even though I've been teaching it for two years now, and likewise Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, which I have read several times.
I cried through sections of Emily Barton's Brookland: "Oh, this is grief, Prue thought as she walked down the lane to the distillery--this soft December afternoon, overcast and mild. She had thought her heart could not bear one more hardship..."
Sentimental! Good!
Also, I think Dave Egger's new book What Is the What might make me cry, based on a passage my brother sent me, which I will quote here in its entirety, hoping it doesn't give too much away, but I don't know:
"Whatever I do, however I find a way to live, I will tell these stories...I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don't want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist."
Is it possible that Eggers was so on guard against his own sentimentality for so long after A Heartbreaking Work that he found other, lighter, quirkier stuff more appealing and now he's unwittingly spawned a movement that he has since surpassed and that he's coming back around to real feeling?
Not that I'm awash in tears out here, but February makes me cry more than usual, I think, or maybe that's just the sub-zero wind blowing grit in my eye. But I'd like to second Bizness's comments about The Wire, not that I've seen it, it's on my list for sometime soon, but that TV and movies seem, lately, a much easier way to access sentimentality, or intensity of emotion than words do sometimes, maybe because there are too many words in my life. Student words, teacher words, eventually all the words leave me numb and I cried a little bit at the end of the Office this week, and in Pan's Labyrinth, and also I want to REALLY recommend George Saunders's essay in the Best American Essays 2006 about Dubai--it's amazing and I cried after reading it, also. Whew. I'm going to mop my floors and make some tearwater tea. bande1111111 is here and later I'm going to test his resolve against sentimentality by watching Steel Magnolias. weep weep.
Okay something made me sob and sob and sob so much onto my laptop that I fear I may have caused it irreparable damage (really: now the monitor blacks out without warning every now and then). It was the New York Times article about recently-discovered documents relating to Otto (Anne's father) Frank's desperate attempts to get his family out of Europe before the Holocaust. The frantic letters to his friend in America, the cautious replies. The almost-perfect, excruciatingly polite English.
Why does that story still make me cry? How come it's not a cliché? Did I cry because it's not fiction? Because it's handwriting on yellowed paper? God, I'm so predictable!
Anyway, I forgot to say this in my post, but it actually was the whole REASON I wrote that post, and I remembered after reading Toochi-Toochi's comment: you lot, all of you here, YOU have written stuff that makes me cry. So it's do-able. So why aren't more people doing it? You all need to get published so that more people can clean out their tear ducts.
Thanks, Toochi, for the distinction between sentiment and emotion. I agree.
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