In the first few years of the 1980s, it became difficult to publish aesthetically ambitious writers, or to publish and market them well. Independent publishers were in tough shape: Grove had imploded, and New Directions was treading water. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux was a notable exception.) Nonprofit publishers such as Coffee House, Dalkey Archive, and Graywolf didn’t yet exist or weren’t publishing fiction. And the conglomerates, hemmed in by the major bookstore chains, shareholder value, rising interest rates, and the recessions of 1980 and 1981–82, were investing in blockbusters and formulaic series to the exclusion of what now needed the name “literary fiction.” By labeling a title as such, one put it in an emergent category, a new genre, a beacon by which artistically minded publishers, booksellers, and consumers could find one another.
In 1984, an ambitious young editor, Gary Fisketjon, told Publishers Weekly that “it’s hard to publish literary fiction well.” He often couldn’t, and when he did, it “sold so poorly in hardcover” that it “never even went into paperback.” Part of this was the fault of the bookstore chains. Waldenbooks, for example, typically bought books with a print run of at least 20,000 copies, far more than most noncommercial novels could meet.
It’s nearly impossible to spend time in London without seeing a number of traditional ‘ye olde’ English pubs: “Ye Olde Mitre,” “Ye Olde Watling” and the curiously named “Ye Olde Cock Tavern” are just a few. It may seem that these places are real relics, or at least their names themselves are written in an ancient language—but they are not. “Ye olde” is in fact a pseudo-archaic term; no one ever said “ye olde” except in imitation of an imagined speech of the distant past.
But that’s not to say it has no roots in the past.
All of us living things have to find out where we are and where we are going. Earth’s first cell had only a dim chemical feel for its immediate liquid surroundings. But it multiplied fruitfully, and the animals that flowed from its lineages are able to navigate whole seas and continents. Birds have developed an inner sense of the Earth that allows them to traverse entire hemispheres. By animal standards, these are impressive feats of orientation, but they are crude compared with those that human beings have achieved. Our most sublime such effort is a global collaboration to build, over the course of decades, a network of more than 30 radio observatories that work together to situate our planet within a mind-bending volume of space.
The British travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin held that there are two categories of writers: “the ones who ‘dig in’ and the ones who move.” “There are writers who can only function ‘at home,’ with the right chair, the shelves of dictionaries and encyclopedias, and now perhaps the word processor,” he observed. “And there are those, like myself, who are paralyzed by ‘home,’ for whom home is synonymous with the proverbial writer’s block, and who believe naïvely that all would be well if only they were somewhere else.” I like this notion. It seems to have an air of true insight about it. When I read Chatwin, for instance, I detect the shuffle of his restless feet traversing ancient causeways, just as, when I read Melville, I smell salt air.
One might think that we better know the writers who “dig in” than those who “move.” That is to say, we can picture them at their desks, in their studies, working. Proust’s cork-lined room and the bed in which he composed his masterpiece affords one an imaginative notion of the writer’s interior world, if not the creative effort itself. Place matters to the imagination. I have frequently, while traveling, attempted to enhance my reading imagination by linking favorite writers to place. Once, for instance, while in London traipsing around Bloomsbury, I sought out Virginia Woolf’s home. The expected brass plate bolted to the building corner confirmed the find. But the house is not open to the public, and is now converted office space. I was reduced to peering in through a barred street window. There were computers and furniture, a woman in a beige sweater pounding away on a keyboard and the flurry of activity one associates with commerce. I tried to imagine Woolf there but failed—a “dug in” writer who slipped through my fingers. The failure was particularly poignant in light of her famous observation, “A woman is to have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
On January 5, 1975, when Guinevere Turner was seven, the world was supposed to end. She grabbed her favorite toy and donned a fancy dress, but the spaceship to take Turner to Venus never arrived. Turner’s new memoir, When the World Didn’t End, follows her life as she grows up with the Lyman Family, an apocalyptic cult spearheaded by Melvin Lyman, a self-proclaimed prophet. She lives in close quarters with around 60 other children and 100 adults on a compound in Kansas where she roams free in sorghum fields nibbling mulberries. Everything about Turner’s childhood seems idyllic. And in many ways, it is. The urban hippie commune offers a cozy youth—a beautiful setting with goats and blooming jasmine. Belonging. Structure. And hope, despite the converted school bus being painted with the words “Venus or Bust.” Cults often excel by providing what is missing from prospective members’ lives. Some young individuals, like Turner’s mom, who joined when she was 19 and pregnant with Turner, are attracted to what they think will be carefree, free-thinking living. People don’t join cults—they join communities.
“She had worms in her brain,” a character in Alison Rumfitt’s “Brainwyrms” decides when faced with his mother’s increasingly transphobic zeal. “It was easier to think of it in those terms than to admit that his mother genuinely hated him.”
Given the book’s title, it will not be a spoiler to reveal that this character’s mother is, in fact, host to a parasitic virus that is eating her brain. Is that better or worse than more familiar forms of virulent transphobia? Same difference, the novel suggests.
While this book is not for the casually interested reader — Hirsch is a college professor likely writing for his industry-obsessed colleagues after all — it promises to entertain and educate movie lovers wanting to know more about the evolution of the film industry.