In which Tingle Alley concludes a dialogue with Rake’s Progress on Salvador Plascencia’s novel The People of Paper. Catch up on the conversation here (scroll up from the bottom).

Giveaway: First person to email me with People of Paper in the subject line will also get a copy of the novel to call their own. Please include your mailing address in the email. Update: The copy goes to Laura S. of Anapolis.

Well, my friend, I am back from salty, sulfurous Charleston — there’s a paper mill somewhere outside the city and the sulfur smell drifts in over the ocean; also a strong musky scent of carriage-horse urine hangs in places in the streets; peculiar twitching but comforting smells all … they should have me write the brochures! — and just reread your note and am glad to find that you are as clear and slightly impatient with the obvious as always, although I don’t think you admired my cracking of the • | | | • • • glyph nearly enough.

You ask what sense I make of McEwan’s formulation of the novel as Local. I saw what he was getting at there, though it’s more problematic than he seems to be allowing (insert obligatory proviso that he’s speaking the extemp. and shorthand of a verbal interview here). I read the comment as a criticism of the fallout from pan-magic-realism; that is, writers working in the shadow of people like García Márquez and Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter (to name a few), and adopting and emulating techniques from their books, regardless of locale and fittingness. So if you love these writers not wisely but too well, so to speak, you might get a little antic in your prose, you might make a spare character ascend into heaven, or present a mélange of languages or high & low cultural reference points. All of these techniques probably a false overlay to the story of, say, a cashier in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Where he (McEwan) was talking about the “top-down process,” I’d put it another way, in that, the problem with this type of writing can be that it’s based on other authors’ literary worlds, not life, not your own perceptions — you’re wearing your influences too prominently on your sleeve.

What’s odd is that McEwan fingers García Márquez himself as guilty of this whereas I’d say that García Márquez is about as local a writer as one could hope for. It’s his imitators that can be suspect — that is, they can pick up his techniques and plonk them down in any old locale. (My working title for a mess of a novel I wrote back in my 20s was SOMBFABLAMR — Some of My Best Friends Are Bad Latin American Magic Realists; it was set in Wisconsin and a cock-eyed stillbirth it was.)

Two tricks McEwan and Smith’s exchange doesn’t account for:
• What do you do with a writer like Rushdie whose work is predicated on a (realistic) conception of the world as ménage, as migration, as melting pot? How does one write a local novel in a globalized world?

(See Pankaj Mishra’s critique of Shalimar The Clown in The New York Review of Books for an excellent, thought-provoking amplification of what I’m trying to get at here; via James Tata.)

• Also, as you allude to with the gritty longshoremen, a “realistic novel” can be as false as anything else. It too can work “from the top down,” instead of up from the genuine impulse. If I’d written my novel in my 20s in pale imitation of Kent Haruf, say, instead of García Márquez — taciturn, decent characters dredging out the barn, solitary figures laboring under gray skies, gum wrappers at the edge of the parking lot, blah blah — it may have been harder to spot, but it would have been just as false. So when one writes “locally” one struggles to get past the received opinion of one’s own locality. If you’re a Midwesterner: The Lake Wobegon woes. If you’re a Southerner: Dead mules.

To bring this back to Salvador Plascencia, I was corresponding with a reader about the book, and he said that he objected to Nathaniel Rich’s review of People of Paper, in The New York Times, which he (my correspondent) felt came at the novel from what amounts to “a top down” reading, that is with a preconceived idea of what he (the reviewer) would find in a novel by a Latino writer — and so expecting grittiness (it’s the SoCal Latino experience!), the reviewer treated the novel’s experimentation as a sort of external contrivance to the grittiness, instead of as the bones of the book. Rereading the review, I’m not sure I agree — the bulk of the review’s jammed in a tight two grafs so it’s hard to tell if Rich is saying that the novel’s experimentation just doesn’t pay off (a reviewer’s right to object) or if he finds the experimentation extraneous (and so is at odds with the book at its core) or if he just finds experimentation in general a bore (so shouldn’t probably be reviewing an experimental novel, no matter how much the Times loves to lump reviews of novels written by authors of the same ethnicities together). I don’t know — Rich should start a blog with an unlimited word count to discuss the issue.

Something we haven’t jawed about is Plascencia’s style, which is idiosyncratic and lovely. The sentences of the novel are fairly declarative and clean, and they’re concerned a lot with describing physical action and the sensations of the physical world. A lot about this novel is disorienting, and I think this style is essential to the reader’s overcoming that disorientation and the novel’s eventual success: The physical keeps the reader rooted in the landscape, in the locality of the novel, even as that landscape — with the flower chewers, and lead turtles – seems at first completely unfamiliar.

As an ode to the author’s hometown, El Monte, it strikes me that the book’s a wonderfully perverse evocation of McEwan’s construction of the novel as Local.

Well, thanks, T. Rakewell. It’s been fun. A friend wrote me to say she’d picked up the novel; her email said “wow.” And over here I see “hrm.” Which just about sums it up, doesn’t it?