Nathan Larson: Diving into Dewey Decimal’s World

Akashic Books

I’d made tentative plans earlier this summer to interview Nathan Larson for one of the Beatrice ebooks, and when we couldn’t quite get our schedules to sync up, I knew I still wanted to get him talking about his first two novels, The Dewey Decimal System and The Nervous System—the opening salvos in a “dystopian noir” series set in a post-disaster New York City, where an amnesiac veteran who’s taken it upon himself to safeguard the main Public Library building gets dragged into a bunch of other messes and, as your noir heroes do, pushes at them over and over until he provokes traumatic outbursts. If you’re not from the city, you’ll have to take my word for it, but Larson gets the street-level details meticulously right; even in post-disaster condition, you could navigate the city by his descriptions, no problem. (The scope of what happened to the city—and the world—is unclear, though there are hints throughout the two books of a string of coordinated incidents; there are also several hints about Dewey’s pre-disaster past, though those clues haven’t quite gelled together yet.)

Here, then, is Larson’s take on his shift to fiction writing after (or, rather, in addition to) a productive music career that includes playing guitar for Shudder to Think back in the ’90s and subsequently composing film scores.

Y’all, I am brand spanking new to this writing game, and don’t pretend to have any answers with respect to how it’s done. Like any creative endeavor, it seems to have something of the esoteric about it, and when it flows it feels very much like one has tapped into some sort of cosmic cloud of information for which the author serves as conduit. There’s nothing new about this description; greater minds than mine have waxed upon the subject. It’s exactly the sensation I’ve experienced working as a musician, so I’m not a stranger to this thing—but I find it fascinating to observe this phenomenon at work regardless of the medium.

Of course this kind of hippy shit occurs about 5 percent of the time, and the other 95 percent is pure slog and persistence. It’s work, it’s a jobby-job. And this too is exactly like making music. If I’ve learned anything about writing, whether I’m speaking about prose or film scores or songs or whatever, it’s that you have to sit down and do it, and you have to finish it, and it will suck, and then you go back and make it not suck, to the degree that you are willing and able. Seemingly, it’s that simple. And I believe one of the only barriers between a project that will forever languish and a project that will see completion is to overcome this fear of sucking, to work through it, to dodge the inner censor who will tell you you are worthless and have no business writing a fucking book/song/film score, that you should just put it down and do something else. This voice can be very strong and overwhelming, and to tramp it down is no simple thing.

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5 August 2012 | guest authors |

Let the Hate Flow Through You

Slate has run an article by Jacob Silverman bemoaning “the mutual admiration society that is today’s literary culture, particularly online,” because authors connecting with their readers, and with each other, is going to ruin everything.

“if you spend time in the literary Twitter- or blogospheres, you’ll be positively besieged by amiability, by a relentless enthusiasm that might have you believing that all new books are wonderful and that every writer is every other writer’s biggest fan. It’s not only shallow, it’s untrue, and it’s having a chilling effect on literary culture, creating an environment where writers are vaunted for their personal biographies or their online followings rather than for their work on the page.”

“Not to share in the lit world’s online slumber party,” Silverman continues, “can seem strange and mark a person as unlikable or (a worse offense in this age) unfollowable.” He seems to be suggesting that panning a book is seen as bad form, “making it harder and harder to hear the voices of dissent—the skeptical, cranky criticisms that may be painful for writers to experience but that make for a vibrant, useful literary culture.”

That’s right: Silverman says negative reviews keep literary culture from becoming irrelevant.

Silverman does get much of the backstory to this issue right, particularly when he talks about how the alternate literary discourses that have flourished in the online era created a siege mentality among that class of people who reviewed books for mainstream media outlets. And it’s true that there are reviewers, and review editors, who prefer to accentuate the positive. (In fact, I’ve written for such outlets, including my current freelance contributions at Shelf Awareness and a recently concluded gig with the USA Network.) Where he goes wrong, I think, is in believing that there’s a problem that needs solving.

After all, there’s still plenty of negative reviewing out there, if you put in a little effort to look for it. Hell, Jonathan Franzen gets panned, and he’s supposed to be the darling of literary culture. Even online book lovers, who Silverman accuses of “cloying niceness and blind enthusiasm,” are known to get in on the criticism. Now, let’s stipulate for the record that there’s currently a “movement” online in which people are so put out by criticism that they’ve taken it upon themselves to shame negative reviewers into silence—but it’s also pretty well established that we recognize those people as assholes. For the most part, I think you’ll find that reasonable, sane people who like books and participate in online forums like what they like, and if you don’t like what they like, they’re fine with that—unless, of course, you’re stupid or condescending about it, like, let’s say, a literary snob who thinks it’s still au courant to snark about chick lit. Then, you’ll get the smackdown you so richly deserve.

I can’t speak to anybody else’s motivation for choosing to write positive book reviews over negative ones, but this is where I’m coming from: Life is too short to waste on books I don’t like, unless I’m getting paid to read them. I do make exceptions for some books that make our culture actively worse by their existence, but for the most part, I’m content to tell you about books and writers I believe matter… and why I believe it.

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3 August 2012 | theory |