Dear Jay; Dear Todd

By TODD HASAK-LOWY and JAY NEUGEBOREN

Get ready for some more great online conversation. In the exchange below, authors Jay Neugeboren and Todd Hasak-Lowy discuss obsession, Nicholson Baker, Yaakov Shabtai, literary violence, silent films, and various other subjects. Click here for round one.

Dear Jay:

I have read Nicholson Baker, and The Mezzanine  (a short novel detailing everything its protagonist thinks about during an escalator ride) made a huge impression on me. I read Baker as I was first feeling the urge to write fiction, only I was paralyzed by the sense that nothing I truly understood was adequately unusual. Baker showed me that with the proper attention nothing is ordinary and trivial, or at least nothing is only ordinary and trivial. Another model for the obsessive streak in my writing came from the Israeli writer Yaakov Shabtai, whose 1977 novel, Zikhron Devarim (literally “Memory of Things,” but translated as Past Continuous) is, in the original Hebrew, a single paragraph, 270+ pages long. But Shabtai, unlike Baker, wrote about the big subjects: family, memory, and death. To use your language, he “bores endlessly into his givens” until they’ve become something else altogether. Reading his book, back when my Hebrew wasn’t so great, five long pages a day, not only shaped and enabled my own writing, but, simply put, changed how I see the world.

I suppose the obsessiveness in my writing oscillates between Baker’s preposterous fascination with, for example, shoelaces and Shabtai’s profoundly sober investigation of death. Where does that position me in terms of Jewish or American or even Israeli literature? I don’t know, but maybe my tendencies have something to do with growing up in the sometimes superficial Jewish suburbs of Detroit while identifying absolutely with the intense, if pretend, world of my socialist, Zionist summer camp. Trust me, it seemed absurdly incongruous back then, too.

“The American Sun & Wind Moving Picture Company,” the last story in your collection, continues to stick with me long after reading it. It’s a genuinely amazing piece of writing, one that just won’t leave me alone. This story employs a common enough strategy: blurring the lines between the real and the imaginary, in this case the real lives of a family of movie makers in 1915 and the movies they make. But you do at least two things here to make your story stand out from other similar works of fiction: first, you motivate this blurring from within (by making it about people who imagine things for a living); second, you relentlessly blur this line over and over until this fuzzy border becomes the primary reality of the story. Also, the immediacy of the narration—there’s no background, just dangerously improvised action right from the beginning—and your decision to make the youngest character—who is half artistic visionary, half helpless clairvoyant—the narrator gives this piece additional visceral power. I could say a lot more, but it’s time for some questions. First, where did this story come from and how do you understand it now? Second, this story is probably the least overtly Jewish piece in the collection, even though the family at its center is almost certainly Jewish. How did you come to decide to put this story last in the collection, and how do you feel about the more explicit Jewishness of the previous stories likely lingering in the reader’s mind as he or she arrives to this final story?

Yours,


Todd

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Dear Todd,

I stand in relation to “The American Sun & Wind Moving Picture Company” as the narrator of the story does to the stories he makes up for the family’s one- and two-reel films. I remain, as writer, fairly boyish in these matters. I close my eyes (or daydream) and snatches of stories—voices, details, images, scenes—appear. It is as if—not uncommon in our trade—I am seeing movies on the screen inside my head, and that my job is to translate them into words so that they are as clear and vivid to the reader as they are to me. But of course they are not truly clear until I begin to write. And then… ah, and then! For what gets me going above all is mystery: seeing some of a story, but having the rest of it lie in darkness, so that to begin to unravel the mystery, I have to write the tale. And once I do, guess what? More mysteries!

The proximate cause of the story, though, was my picking up a paperback remainder, The Shattered Silents: How the Talkies Came to Stay, by Alexander Walker, for a Springfield (Mass.) to New York train ride. I began reading, was transported to the early years of the last century, and next thing I knew I was imagining this family out on a lake, in the middle of winter, cranking a camera and behaving like a mad team of vaudevillians. (Also: I lived, for some years, across from a lake, and remembered an elderly neighbor telling me about how, when he was a boy, they used to carve blocks of ice from the lake.) You ask: How do I understand it now? I answer: I don’t. It continues to amaze—not that I wrote it, but that these people do the things they do, and that what happens to them actually (on the page, in my head) happens.

The story ends, as you know, in violence. (“Sometimes you get lucky,” one character comments while filming the carnage). Which brings me to a question for you. Several of your tales end in violence: the cashier and tourist at Yad Vashem; the vistor destroying his host’s super-hi-tech TV set when the Oakland Raiders lose to the Patriots; and—most notably—the bloody pummeling of the accused murderer in the title story. In all these tales, what seems lost in translation—a sense of ordinary, reasonable human connection—would seem to lie, also, at the root of the senseless, absurd, and disturbing violence. Your understanding of why this is so—of what causes this violence to rise up through the almost ordered formality, not only of the events, but of your prose?

Also, regarding formality: organizations, businesses, and formal gatherings are alive in your tales: Yad Vashem, the diet companies (“Will Power,” “Mediocre Foods”), the Oakland Raiders, the translation institute, organized reunions of friends and of family. In what ways do such amalgams fire your imagination? And—returning your question (so far unanswered) with mine—why is it that your least Jewish story, “The Task of this Translator,” in its resonance to the camps, the Holocaust, would seem your most Jewish story?


—Jay