Two Take Charge of Quest for More Fire in Literature

Asunny day at the beach and a good book are supposedly as compatible as summer nights and insultingly stupid blockbuster movies. But before you select your novels--or if you’re resisting the idea this year, thinking, instead, about picking up one of those itty-bitty TV sets--it is imperative to let some fine authors regale you with their own ideas about fiction.

In the July Esquire, author Edward Hoagland rounds up just about every living American writer, herds them into the corral of their own limited visions, then berates them for indolence and brands them all cowards.

Hoagland’s essay is not entirely dissimilar to Tom Wolfe’s much debated call for what he termed social realist fiction.

These are tumultuous times, Hoagland writes. Yet it takes a Czech playwright breezing into town and reciting Jefferson and Lincoln to wake people up to the fact that some writers have a higher calling that exchanging witticisms with Oprah.

We should be ashamed, Hoagland writes. “Is it easy to picture one of our expensive writers, a Tom Wolfe or a William Styron, voluntarily leaving his dacha and going to prison under any circumstances for his beliefs?”

No, he rails. Authors and critics alike have lost their moral force, their sense of ethics, their willingness to judge and be judged.

“Literature is the study of life; Tom Jones’s, Anna Karenina’s, Madame Bovary’s,” Hoagland says. Then he asks, almost pleadingly: “Did you once read books in order to learn how to live? And do you still? Don Quixote’s epic issues and gambits, Balzac’s kaleidoscope of vitality, Henry James’s cat’s cradle of nuances? . . . You longed to live with a whoosh like Jack London, be loopy like William Saroyan, be lean like Stephen Crane. . . .”

But our writers aren’t fulfilling our needs. Instead, Hoagland says, we find them “hyperventilating, posing for People.”

So what to do? One possibility is to retreat back into times when real literature was still being created.

Judging from “Giles Goat Boy” and his other novels, author John Barth does not share Hoagland’s exact perspective on artistic duty. But he does share Hoagland’s infectious enthusiasm for literature.

In the July Harper’s, he makes a pitch for a certain type of literature that has passed from style in our age of factoids and sound bites. He calls this particular type of book the “maxi-novel” the “big read”--or, with the real whoppers, “mega-novels.”

These are the tomes of Proust, Joyce, Rabelais, Tolstoy, Cervantes and Garcia Marquez. These are literary worlds that readers can inhabit for “prolonged, sustained emotional sound-and-light shows.” These are “huge engrossments in midst of which we may find ourselves wishing they would never end. What will we do when this story’s over?”

The core around which Barth builds his engrossing essay is the story of a Sanskrit text, “The Ocean of Story.” It’s a tale of tales within tales told in parts by a poet who writes in his own blood a story that he burns page by page as he reads it--even though his recitation is so compelling that an audience of forest animals forgets to eat for months on end.

But that’s another story. To make this long story short, suffice to say Barth concludes his piece with an echo of Hoagland, with a paean to the “exhaustive but inexhaustible, exhilarating novel; the long, long story that, like life at its best, we wish might never end, yet treasure the more because we know it must.”

Readers who think they need priming, though, before plunging into a “Remembrance of Things Past,” might warm up with some excellent short stories magazines offer this summer. The finest fiction for the money may be the summer issue of Story, which contains 100% short fiction by writers like Bobbie Ann Mason.

Meanwhile, the August Wigwag, conceding that summer heat “sometimes gives way to peculiar ideas about fun,” commissioned three short stories that begin and end with the same sentences. We won’t give away the endings, but the beginnings of the three stories--which we strongly advise you to read--are an interesting sentence from the letters of Flannery O’Connor: “Anybody who gives anybody else any advice ought to spend 40 days in the desert both before and after.”

REQUIRED READING

* The title of Memories magazine suggests a sort of sappy nostalgia. As the August-September issue of the magazine demonstrates, however, not all memories are fond ones. “Burn Baby Burn” is a dramatic, sobering look at the 1965 Watts riots. Karl Fleming, then a Newsweek reporter, vividly re-creates the climate of racism and reckless despair that fanned the fires. The Times’ Ron Harris presents a mildly encouraging look at Watts today. But the bottom line of why part of the city burned and may burn again is stated in the main piece: Watts was and is “invisible to white Los Angeles. . . .”

* After decades of accepting scraps of leftover praise from national restaurant critics, Los Angeles has finally been declared the No. 1 restaurant city in the nation. The July Money magazine attributes Los Angeles’ ascension to four things: our city’s soaring wealth, abundance of fresh produce, rich ethnic mix and reasonable prices.

* Employing a three-part polling technique, U.S. News and World report has come up with another one of those “Best of America” catalogues. This time, though, the findings contradict the prevailing wisdom that the American public is a crass mob that worships soap opera stars. “The public figures Americans respect most are not . . . media wonders but people who stand up for what they believe in, overcome adversity to achieve their goals, aim high in what they do and work hard for the long term. The winners: Jimmy Carter, Spike Lee, etc. But readers are ill-advised to start holding their heads too high: America’s Funniest Home Videos” also made the list.