Reading in LA

It started with the New York Times Business section, with this arresting  photo of Ruth Madoff. The piece was published on Monday to coincide with the release of Truth and Consequences: Life Inside the Madoff Family. The book wasn’t written by Ruth and Andrew Madoff, but they collaborated closely with the author, Laurie Sandell, and it’s their picture on the jacket cover, not her’s. Ostensibly, it’s their story.

And it seems to me to be the quintessential American story: the swindling sociopath, the pampered blonde wife and two handsome sons. There’s the scandal, of course, but there’s so much more inherent: the Madoffs’ story is about victimization, and fidelity, ownership, and familial loyalty, money, power, vilification, capitalism, courtship and divorce, mental illness, publicity and celebrity, the take-down, the tell-all.

Everyone knows what happened to Bernie Madoff, and probably the bare bones of the fallout, too: his confession to his sons, Ruth’s exhaustive support of her husband (until just recently), the couple’s failed double suicide, the Shakespearean familial rifts, the media’s almost maniacal lampooning of the entire family, the eldest Madoff son’s suicide on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest.

I knew about all these things too, but I didn’t know, for instance, that Ruth had been with Bernie since she was 13 years old. She’s 70. I didn’t know that before her first-born child succeeded in ending his own life, he’d already tried once, and failed, after which he’d begged his mother to cut ties with her husband. She didn’t. I also didn’t know that Ruth still refuses to file for divorce. Or that she’s only breaking her interview ban now because Andrew asked her to help him promote this book, and the last time she didn’t do what one of her sons wanted…

There’s something here that’s begging me to tease it out. Leaving aside the inevitable question of whether she really didn’t have a clue as to what her husband was up to for all those years, what interests me is that there’s something more American about Ruth than perhaps anything else in the Madoff saga. I think her story just must satisfy something I’ve been missing in novels of late: dogged, fiercely real, undeniable character.

That’s why I bought the book, and will review it here. Y’all know I can’t resist an American epic.

I’m 28 years old. I’ve read Roth and Pynchon and Barth and so on, but those authors never had any immediacy for me. It’s not the generational gap itself, in terms of the Novel’s conventions or context, that keeps me at a remove from them, but more that I always knew I wanted to write, and so was keenly aware of the milieu that I would follow directly.

That was, for a teenaged me: Rick Moody, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Mary Karr, among others.

And so this piece at NY Mag, about those writers and their friendships, feels quasi-religious, inasmuch as The Virgin Suicides, The Ice Storm, and The Liars Club (to this list I would add perhaps only Wonder Boys, in terms of personal significance in the mid-late 90′s arena) were religious texts for me.

It’s so gratifying, so thrilling really, to read about these writers as young people (while panicking that they were not, in fact, young anymore), floundering around in failed or failing marriages, struggling with addiction and depression, trying to figure out how and why to write, and gripping to each other with equal parts bitter jealousy and ardent love.

The rivalrous friendship between Franzen and Wallace is the stuff of lore by now, but it’s interesting to read about the earth that each of them broke in the wake of each other’s successes and failures.

“The key message that passed between them,” as Costello sees it, “was that every ambitious writer struggles.” He adds, “Failing to write wasn’t failure. Jon made it a credential. For Dave, who was naturally a solipsist and scalded by self-doubt, this was a salvific message as to which he needed hourly reassurance.” 

If you read one thing this week, this month, read this piece.

This morning, it occurred to me that maybe the reason you see so many people reading in New York is because there are so many people in New York. Maybe the reason you see more people reading on the subway here than you do in Los Angeles is because there is a subway, and people use it. Most of the people use it. And one of the only things to do on the subway is read.

Could it have less to do with the type of person who lives in New York ,and more to do with the sheer amount of them? And the time they spend sitting and standing in trains, waiting to get to wherever they’re going?

Imagine it had nothing to do with writers or publishing or Hollywood or universities or any of that. Imagine it was just math.

On car trips, my brother and I used to play a game called Dead or Alive, which we found (still find) hilarious. It’s pretty basic. You name someone whose mortality status is questionable, and the other person has to answer, as fast as they can: dead or alive?

Ted Copple: dead or alive?
Miles Davis: dead or alive?
Leonard Nimoy: dead or alive?

I was reminded of our game this week. I’m reading Nicholson Baker’s U and I: A True Story, a non-fiction, self-exploratory book about his relationship, as a reader, to John Updike, a living writer whom Baker admires.  In it, he pins down something I’ve been grappling with in the midst of my highbrow/lowbrow considerations, namely that there’s something distinctly and instantly more “highbrow” about reading a writer who’s dead. But the inverse can also be true…

Now, I read mostly living writers. My interest is (mainly) contemporary American fiction. Sometimes I get chastised for this by people who consider the “masters” the only writers worth reading. I always respond by saying that, while I give the classics their due credit, there is something far more dynamic, something far more…living, in reading living writers.

Here’s what Baker writes:

“The intellectual surface we offer to the dead has undergone a subtle change of texture and chemistry; a thousand particulars of delight and fellow-feeling and forbearance begin reformulating themselves the moment they cross the bar. The living are always potentially thinking about and doing just what we are doing: being pulled through a touchless car wash, watching a pony chew a carrot, noticing that orange scaffolding has gone up around some prominent church. The conclusions they draw we know to be conclusions drawn from how things are now. Indeed, for me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. The dead can be helpful, needless to say, but we can only guess sloppily about how they would react to this emergent particle of time, which is all the time we have. And when we do guess, we are unfair to them. Even when, as with Barthelme, the dead have died unexpectedly and relatively young, we give them their moment of solemnity and then quickly begin patronizing them biographically, talking about how they “delighted in” x or “poked fun at” y – phrases that by their very singsong cuteness betray how alien and childlike the shades now are to us. Posthumously their motives become ludicrously simple, their delights primitive and unvarying: all their emotions wear stage makeup, and we almost never flip their books across the room out of impatience with something they’ve said. We can’t really understand them anymore.

Readers of the living are always, whether they know it or not, to some degree seeing the work through the living writer’s own eyes; feeling for him when he flubs, folding into their reactions to his early work constant subauditional speculations as to whether the writer himself would at this moment wince or nod with approval at some passage in it. But the dead can’t suffer embarrassment by some admission or mistake they have made. We sense the imperviousness and adjust our sympathies accordingly.

Yet in other ways the dead gain by death. The level of autobiographical fidelity in their work is somehow less important, or, rather, extreme fidelity does not seem to harm, as it does with the living, our appreciation for the work. The living are “just” writing about their own lives; the dead are writing about their irretrievable lives, wow wow wow.”

I hadn’t thought about it in this way, hadn’t considered the strange incongruity of our affections toward deceased writers, at once granting them an untouchable esteem, and infantilizing them. See David Foster Wallace for recent example of this phenomenon.

Quick. John Updike: dead or alive?