FALL 2008
With the publication of Lay of the Land in 2006, Richard Ford completed the Frank Bascombe trilogy that began with The Sportswriter and Independence Day . The trilogy's range of tone and profundity of theme, its narrative skill and its understanding of the American cultural landscape, have evoked comparisons to John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy and Faulkner's Snopes trilogy. In this interview with Harold K. Bush, Jr. and Fred Arroyo , Ford speaks at length of why he wrote Lay of the Land as he did and why certain subjects, such as permanence and acceptance, dominate the fiction. "I had to come up with a language for acceptance that's different from just accommodation," he remarks, "since accommodation can occur without acceptance. This is one of the things novelists can do; they can reburnish and refurnish the way we use language." Ford also speaks about his sense of community and nation, about Christianity and the sacred, about Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, and Chekhov, and about how he writes a sentence that is distinctively his own.
Jocelyn Knowles set out in the 1940s to shape a literary career for herself. She moved to New York City, got a job with the Saturday Review of Literature , and wrote a couple of short stories that attracted the interest of influential people in publishing. (Their interest in her was extra-literary as well.) In the memoir in this issue, "My Interview with W. H. Auden," she relates the comic adventure of tracking down the great poet for an interview and the uncomfortable hours in his presence that ensued. Her cautionary tale, a valuable piece of literary history in its own right, will strike a familiar chord especially in women writers beginning their own careers.
An avid diary reader, Kathryn Rhett had the unpleasant experience of reading her sister-in-law's diaries after the sister-in-law died of cancer. "The diaries cast little lightning bolts of blame and anger around the family. As I read, I dreaded seeing my name. Lucky me, I wasn't important enough." What is the nature of a diary, what do we want from it, as writers and readers? Does it help us lead a better life, or compel us to a more narcissistic one? What happens when we stop keeping a diary? Is that good for our writing, or does it mark the end of our vital inner life? "The Last Word" undertakes these and other fundamental questions about one of the most popular literary forms.
A bit past the middle of his journey, Nigel Gearing found himself in a tangled wood:
I had reached my mid-forties--an age I had never envisaged nor indeed could recognize even now as its physical attributes (the need for reading glasses, the urge to get up and pee in the middle of the night...) increasingly forced themselves on my attention. All of a sudden my roads through life had revealed themselves as unreflectingly wayward: no wife, no children, and few enough of those grands amours the memory of which consoles certain childless spinsters--male or female--in their bleaker moments.
A distinguished British playwright, Gearing attended a reunion of his graduating class at Cambridge University , which became an opportunity to exercise gifts of social satire as he tries to comprehend what became of his former friends and of his own lost youth.
"How much could a city with a history over a thousand years old really change in ten or fifteen years?" Chris Thornton asked himself. He had taught in the 1990s at American University in Cairo and revisited it this year to get a fresh sense of this very significant site, "the place where the temperature of the Middle East is taken." Changes he found, in the heightened security presence, in the profusion of American goods in the stores, in the wave of religious conservatism. "Believe me, you wouldn't know the place," a friend tells him. In this essay, Thornton wanders the streets of Cairo speaking to its citizens, taking note of its new look and feel, its new-century anxieties amid ancient architecture. A teacher (in Abu Dhabi) and a writer on Middle Eastern topics, he presents a vivid description of a cityscape of enduring fascination.
Fiction : Two stories on parents and children. Jacob M. Appel shows us a schoolgirl smart enough in biology to make a distressing discovery in a lab experiment; Dana Kletter traces the conflict of interests between a mother and daughter in the bitter after-memory of European culture.
Poetry : A suite of six short poems on the subject of love, by William Baer, Steven Coughlin, Molly Fisk, Garth Greenwell, Melissa Kwasny, and Courtney Queeney . Also, new work by Mark Belair, Carrie Luke, Khaled Mattawa, Christine Rhein , Sandra M. Gilbert , and Robert VanderMolen
Reviews : Michael Anderegg on the art of interviewing screenwriters; Myles Weber on a new biography of David Mamet and how a recent U-turn to the right by Mamet subverted his biographer
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