Monday, December 7, 2009
Preston Brooks: Flaming A-Hole or no?
Personally, I disliked Preston Brooks as a character, and would have liked to see him get his comeuppance at some point. Even by the end of the book I wasn’t convinced he wasn’t just a bloviating windbag. However, the book sets him up as a sort of voice of truth. In his television interview, Preston Brooks says, “Writing is a cudgel I wield to chase away the brigands who would burn down the precious things of the human heart.” That moment makes Pete realize that Brooks, and very likely all novelists, are “con artists.” Is he right?
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I think they're con artists in the sense they're selling a product they can't possibly follow up on: truth. It's all--even what you jot in your little diaries, dearies--fiction once you jot it down. I suppose the writer who can show a specific-enough, worldview-confirming truth that resonates with enough people will be successful, but he's still a bullshit artist.
ReplyDeleteFollow-up question: Who's Preston based on? Nick Boyle's obviously Tom Clancy (who actually owns a fucking tank), Pam McLaughlin's Patricia Cornwell (I think), but Brooks I never could put a finger on. Theories?
ReplyDeletePersonally, I don't buy into the whole "art is truth" thing. Sure, fiction is often inspired by fact, but I don't think that anyone really reads a work of fiction in the hopes of discovering some BIG TRUTH ABOUT LIFE. We read to be entertained, and sometimes the things that entertain us also make us think. Maybe we don't all have to get so hoity toity about it.
ReplyDeleteEven nonfiction is partly fiction because 1) no storyteller can help coloring facts that pass through the filter of her own perspective, and 2) writers write to entertain, and the truth is rarely as entertaining as our twist on the truth. That's why I never really saw what the big deal was about "A Million Little Pieces." So the dude did fictionalized some stuff. So what? Anyone who actually expects a true story to be 100% truth is expecting something that isn't possible. Perspective, ego and our imperfect memories won't allow it.
A writer friend of mine recently said something along the lines of "I don't believe in non-fiction as a concept." I don't think of it as meaning Art as Truth, that everything written needs to be factually true or represent some truth. If you write honestly and without bullshit, whatever is produced, even fiction, is *True*. (Cue Keanu: "Whoa.)
ReplyDeletePreston Brooks is Jim Harrison or Cormac McCarthy, an honest earthy curmudgeon of a writer who has met some commercial success. I don't think Hely really means it as an insult the way he does with the other writer caricatures. He's a foil to Pete, I think. Also, to muddle things more, I think Hely did the best he could to make the quality of the work presented as Brooks's and as Tarslaw's as indistinguishable as possible.
I think it's really easy to write Pete off as an asshole and I think that is what Hely wants. But I really enjoy the arc of the character and how he does become disillusioned. It seems to me that Pete's character begins by thinking that all "good" literature is bullshit being slopped upon the masses. The fact of the matter is that instead some of it is bullshit and some of it IS really quite good. Pete is just too cynical at the novel's start to notice. However, we know at the end that Pete knew the full series of events (and his subsequent revelations) when he STARTED telling the story, as we're told this is all "memoir." I enjoyed the moments where he revealed to the reader his self-awareness of his bullshit. Mainly this was illustrated through his "Brief Note" on pg. 165 before Part 2 and in his bit to end the MFA Reading Chapter, my absolute favorite passage in the book (the entirely to page 231). Partcularly: "Because they believed that getting a story right, holding it, was a holy duty. They seemed to believe that getting a story right could save the world somehow. Or at least make you a better person. And to fail to tell a story honestly was sacrilege. The story I had put down, whatever it was, wasn't honest. It was a fraud. For the first time, I wondered if that was a kind of crime." You can call that cheesy if you want, but that's what Pete would call Preston Brooks.
I thought of P.B. as Nicholas Sparks. Everyone knows how sappy he is, and how people fall all over his stories. By the way, the story idea for the Notebook really makes me puke. I don't have to read it or watch it. Just to mention it, I can feel the stomach acid creeping up. He may be a great guy personally. He may believe everything he writes. It may be honest and true. If I read it I may even get teary eyed, but then I'm sure I'd puke. Are we really so devoid of our own feelings that we need to have books wake up our tears? I would argue the fact that P.B. is a big seller actually means that people who read his books are more devoid of feeling than those who read other types of books. That's the argument that I would have made to him during the battle of the writers.
ReplyDeletePeople read books to experience something that they have not, or can not. I can read "junky" because it does not hit close to home. It's an adventure.
ps. I don't think he's an A-Hole.
ReplyDeleteI also thought of "A Million Little PIeces" when I read this book. My first reaction to the big controversy was "who cares?" But the passages where Pete reflects on truth in writing, and telling the story "right," and how at least Nick Boyle and Pam McLaughlin "believe in" what they're writing, made me understand why people got so mad about "A Million Little Pieces." They felt like they'd been manipulated, duped by the author, and nobody likes that.
ReplyDeletePete called any writing that elicited emotion from readers a "con." It's easy to roll our eyes at the things that make other people well up with tears, but we hardly ever roll our eyes at our own emotions. To us they are completely true and honest. So we don't want to find out that our true outpouring of emotion was prompted by somebody who didn't believe a word he wrote.
I've given it more thought, and I'd like to refine my initial comment about art and truth and bullshit. I'd also like to take a break from composing syllabi.
ReplyDeleteA question: if art, real, capital A Art isn't truth, then what, do tell, is?
An example. Gauguin and van Gogh. In the late 1880's they lived together in this little hovel in Arles, Fr. The Yellow House, they called it. Lots of easels, lots of debauchery.
During their time together, Gauguin bullied van Gogh around in terms of drinking and sexual prowess. His paintings were always more expensive, he always got the cuter prostitute in the brothels they frequented together, he got more contemporary acclaim from critics and observers alike. And this whole time? Van Gogh loved him for it. Admired his "wild" spirit. Resented him not a whit. Gauguin was to van Gogh as Hemingway was to Fitzgerald. Kissass lackey.
But in both cases: who endures?
I've read Hemingway and I love him (and I know many of you have, too), but more of my freshmen and people in my life have read or at least know of Gatsby in proportions that trounce Papa, and that has to be for a reason.
As it is in other art forms. Gauguin, who quit his family and a "normal" life as a stockbroker to do art and who eventually fled to Tahiti to paint (and it's worth noting, bang) the natives, has come to define the gap between pre-modernism and post-Impressionism and injecting, however clumsily, Western art with a primitivism I really do appreciate. He propelled art in a new direction, one we're still hewing to and one that operates in the mainstream and not on the fringes. Art owes Gauguin, no doubt.
Van Gogh, on the other hand, belongs to us all. Anyone can look at a van Gogh and fucking get painting. He takes stuff we all know of, can describe, and he is better than the sum of all of us at describing that thing. With paint and oil and canvas.
Writers, the best ones, do that same thing too, but with the words we don't bother to assemble that way. Which seems even harder. Scotty F. told us about a dude who tried to act fancier than he is. Who doesn't know that guy? Relatedly, how many bullfighters you know?
Instead of exotic Tahitian bricolage babyladies, Vince turned his late-in-life artistic eye to...the sky. Nothing extravagant, evocative, remotely "shocking." Just the night as he saw it from his asylum window. A starry night.
"Starry Night." Describe it better. I have a hard time. And yet, it's the most exquisite painting I've ever stood in front of. And I've stood before a few Gauguins. And I get a lot out of standing in front of paintings.
After a more serious consideration, my thing is this: art, actually, is truth, because truth is universal...enough. The best of the shit that endures is populist, perfectly executed, and pedestrian. That's why Pete takes a dude and his Grandma and a love interest and puts 'em on the road (mixed with WWII Grandpa flashbacks): he's covering as many angles as possible.
"Truth" is a sticky concept, to be sure, but I should say that to me it means "fidelity to reality." And as one of every single person ever who looked up at the night sky and thought about something bigger than himself, I think van Gogh and his art got at that kinda truth more than his buddy Paul.
Who may or may not have actually sliced his buddy's earlobe off with a fencing foil, if books are to be believed.