Mark Athitakis Newsletter #30
So I took a vacation. A vacation from the newsletter, you may have noticed. My hiatus was partly a function of an uptick in work, and partly a function of my ongoing thinking about how healthy it is or isn't to write for free. I guess I've decided it's healthy enough, for now, to write this.
But I went on a vacation-vacation too: Last month, my wife, 8-year-son, and I spent a week driving through California, starting in Gold Country (memorable for a chilly but revivifying dip in in the Yuba River), then down to Sacramento, then San Francisco (where I was the subject of an interview that may or may not wind up in a documentary; more anon, maybe), then down to Monterey and Salinas. Steinbeck country.
The stop in Salinas was something of a last-minute decision---the only destination of interest there for me is the National Steinbeck Center, a smallish museum near the smallish downtown drag, and I'm not much of a Steinbeck fan. I dutifully read Of Mice and Men in high school, and I've read The Grapes of Wrath twice---the first time not very seriously after college, feeling a bit superior to its straightforward plotting. My second pass came about ten years ago, after I spent some time working on a project about Richard Price's novel Clockers. David Simon---ex-Baltimore Sun journalist, creator of The Wire and Treme, man with seemingly bottomless reservoirs of time with which to tussle with far-right dipshits on Twitter---has said that Clockers is “to the cocaine epidemic of the early 1990s as The Grapes of Wrath is to the Dust Bowl.” My second read after that didn't make me love Steinbeck more, exactly, but it bolstered by feeling that the social novel---the simply written social novel---has its uses, much as Woody Guthrie's songs about the Okie migration have their uses.
Still, I arrived at the museum mostly thinking of Steinbeck as an artifact, a remnant of the time when a novel had more power to bring the news than it has in generations since. (FDR explicitly pointed Americans to it, saying, "I have read a book recently. It is called The Grapes of Wrath. There are 500,000 Americans that live in the covers of that book"; even Reader-in-Chief Barack Obama didn't work so hard to draw a line between fiction and policy in his much-parsed summer reading lists.) The museum doesn't do much to alter that impression. After watching a brief video about Steinbeck's life, visitors are sent across a courtyard to the museum proper, which mostly presents Steinbeck's life and works as if trapped in amber. There are historical artifacts about Steinbeck and the migrants and cannery workers he wrote about, some bemusing---he carved a box out of mahogany to contain the manuscript of East of Eden he delivered to his agent. There are some videos of film versions of his work, with compare-and-contrast displays about the distinctions between the book and movie. There's some information about the controversy Wrath stoked, and a cubby that included a typewriter, which took some explaining to my son.
If you're a fan of Steinbeck, or just a fan of novels, it's worth a peek if you’re in the neighborhood. But it was peculiar to feel such a strong disconnect between a writer's work and his meaning---an almost effortful evasion of the question of why Steinbeck might matter today. Because he can. Driving from Monterey to Salinas, you'll pass a lot of farmland, and on our drive we passed a few groups of workers hustling double-time to gather up crops. Migrants, likely; underpaid, undoubtedly. Relevant to the messages that Steinbeck wanted to send about society and labor, assuredly. But the museum doesn't speak to that beyond pointing to his roots in the region.
Indeed, it avoids making much of an argument for reading Steinbeck, excepting his famous-writer bona fides. (Nobel Prize! Film adaptations!) It wouldn't be so hard, I thought, to replace some of those videos of movie and theater performances with present-day writers who might make the case. Simon, perhaps; wouldn't Bruce Springsteen spare a few minutes? I think of the working novelists who've made migrants and/or California part of their work---Valeria Luiselli, Elaine Castillo---and think clearing space migrant stories now would make the museum more meaningful and less of a museum.
Of course, I have no expertise in running a museum, and don't know what it takes to get people through the doors. (And to be fair, the Center hosts an annual festival with more forward-thinking programming.) But it seems that Steinbeck, perhaps more than any of America's famous mid-century novelists, deserves the kind of attention a living writer receives, the writer whose ideas remain in play today.
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Like I said, I’ve been busy. Mostly with writing. Among the pieces I'm proudest of lately: A feature for Humanities on Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, with an emphasis on the peculiar cultural life Wright cultivated in the Arizona desert. An essay on the works of Howard Norman, read through the filter of his peculiar interest in the ghost story. Reviews of Jess Row's White Flights, an excellent set of essays on race and American fiction, Karl Marlantes's Deep River, a hefty social novel about unionizing loggers, Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, a slim social novel that's one of my favorites of the year. I've also been doing some teaching.
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Among the better essays I've read since I've been away: Chavisa Woods' essay on how we've gotten Valerie Solanas wrong; Lili Anolik's oral history of the literary culture of Bennington College in the 80s; Emma Hunsinger's exquisite coming-out memoir, "How to Draw a Horse"; Jody Rosen's deep-dive into the Universal Studios fire; William Langiewiesche's stemwinder on Malaysia Airlines flight 370; Rachel Cusk's essay on Yiyun Li's devastating storytelling; Claire Lowdon's defense of John Updike; Chris Dennis' up-from-addiction essay, "Eldorado, Illinois"; and Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison, written months before her death but capturing the virtues and power of her innovations more strongly than any of the encomiums that I've read in the past week or so.
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Will I be back to a weekly routine on this newsletter? Find out next week! I'd like to, but we'll see. In the meantime, I’ve missed hearing from you; one benefit of writing for free, at least, is that you get more interesting email; drop me a line at mathitak@gmail.com.