Literature, Social Misfits, and the End of the Ivy League

The renowned New Yorker Festival had more in store for Columbia students this year than ever before. Now in it’s eighth season, the festival is a literary and cultural feast: three days packed with interviews, readings, discussions, performances, demonstrations, and excursions held at various venues throughout the city; last Friday, the opening Fiction Night reader was Columbia’s own Daniel Alarcon,CC ’99, whose work has appeared in Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the New Yorker. He appeared for the reading dressed in jeans, a button down shirt, blue blazer, and white sneakers, looking like he could have just walked out of Butler. Even the festival’s trademark debate was centered this year on the topic “Resolved: The Ivy League Should be Abolished,” and featured Columbia art history professor Simon Schama moderating a lively, if not altogether serious, verbal jaunt between author Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Blink) and writer Adam Gopnik, both New Yorker staff writers. And while the debate didn’t reach any feasible solution (Gladwell proposed turning Harvard, Yale, and Princeton into luxury condos; Gopnik rebutted that such an extreme measure would be like wrecking the Parthenon instead of simply widening its doors), such events highlight what is truly wonderful about the annual festival: it allows us close-up peeks into the personalities of the writers whose works we read, reread, and read again. Here’s an insider’s look at some of this year’s events:

Lorrie Moore and Jeffrey Eugenides
There was something ironic about the way Lorrie Moore and Jeffrey Eugenides were sitting on Friday night. The two esteemed fiction writers graced the Ailey Citigroup Theater’s stage, along with a New Yorker fiction editor who served as moderator, for a discussion on conformity. All three sat in a row onstage, in identical camp chairs; all three crossed their legs the same way.

It was a tiny, unintentional move of conformity, but it was an appropriate one for the night’s conversation. Both authors are known for characters who, to say the least, struggle with issues of conformity—Eugenides’ most recent novel, 2002’s Middlesex, centers on a 15-year-old hermaphrodite, and the characters in Lorrie Moore’s short stories are often outsiders in seemingly normal, intimate relationships. In her opening comments for the evening, Moore expressed consternation at their topic assignment, saying she envied the subject given to Miranda July and A.M. Holmes to discuss the same night—deviants—and wondering what the difference between the two was. “Is it because our characters try hard to fit in?”
The evening was peppered with dry one-liners characteristic of each writer’s understated tone; Moore explained that in the Wisconsin town where she lives, there is an ordinance stating each resident’s grass must be mowed in the same direction, even though the orderliness it creates is visible only from the sky. “Because,” she concluded with tongue planted firmly in cheek, “that’s where God lives.” When asked how much he conformed as a writer to what he thought people expected of him, Eugenides replied wryly that when he set out to write a novel about a teenaged hermaphrodite, “I thought my mother would like it. Writers tend not to have a very good sense of expectations of the world.”

Considering the chemistry between the writers’ speaking and writing styles, along with the fact that they seemed to be good friends already, the event might better have been left as a simple, unimpeded conversation between Moore and Eugenides; the moderator seemed flustered and out of her element, and the night’s best moments occurred organically rather than in response to the structured questions.
One of Moore’s last anecdotes summed the discussion up perfectly. After a short exchange about their children, she related the story of a Career Day she attended at her son’s school. After all the effort put into her presentation on writing, she asked if there were any questions, and a lone student raised his hand. “Did you really write all those books?” he asked. When she responded that she had, he asked, “How did you make all the letters go in a straight line?”
- Alexandria Symonds

Miranda July and A.M. Holmes

At Friday night’s conversation on “deviants” between author/filmmaker/performance artist Miranda July and author A.M. Homes, Miranda July appeared and acted very much like a Miranda July character—that is, fascinating, mysterious, and a bit peculiar. Wearing a collared dress and black tights, she sat primly, perched on her chair, never raising her voice, and making tiny, contained hand movements as she spoke. The dichotomy between the two speakers was aesthetically fascinating—several feet away was seasoned writer A.M. Homes, most famous for her novel The End of Alice, comfortably leaning back in her chair and speaking with her hands, which flailed this way and that. It was clear that, of the two, July was the novice, but the audience awaited her answer to each question with bated breath nonetheless.

Having written a short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You and created the film Me and You and Everyone We Know, July’s resume is not long, but the delicate, doe-eyed woman has been “discovered,” coddled, fixated upon, and stamped with an “indie” label by critics and youth. It is because her work is at once accessible and off-beat that July has already become iconographic for this generation. She spoke of her creative process, explaining that when she is shaping an idea, she often is so inspired that she loses track of what it is she’s making—could this be a new form of art? Has anyone ever done this before? And when the elements come together, she steps back and realizes, “Oh, it’s a story.” Her creative brilliance appeared sheathed in the persona of a slightly awkward, nervous woman who does not hesitate to expose her vulnerability, without denying the fact that she is impressionable: “If I’m a superhero, that’s all I’ve got, right? That would be my power. The willingness to be vulnerable.”

A.M. Homes, invited to the “deviant” talk perhaps as a result of her willingness to write about controversial topics such as child molesters (The End of Alice), debunked the very idea of deviants early on, doubting the existence of normalcy as a construct. Speaking of her work as a writer on The L Word, the difficulty in having one’s book adapted to film (The Safety of Objects), and her affinity for writing in the first person from unique points of view, she was comfortable and animated on stage. Having only “worked” one year in her life (at Random House), she claims to be well aware of the risks involved in the unconventional life of a novelist, and the hard learned lesson that success cannot be expected with each publication. With a shrug and a grin, she concluded on Friday, “It lands where it lands.”

—Sarah Rapp

Ann Beattie and Jonathan Franzen Fiction Night

Brevity is not Jonathan Franzen’s strong suit. Friday night, he appeared with Ann Beattie at a reading at Cedar Lake Dance Studios in Chelsea. While Beattie read a beautiful and modest story—“Skeletons”—for 10 minutes, Franzen filled the audience’s eager ears for a full 40 minutes. The event was part of the New Yorker Festival’s Fiction Night, and a packed house listened as the two, whose writings have graced the pages of the New Yorker since 1974 (Beattie) and 1994 (Franzen), read and answered questions.

Beattie, whose novels include Chilly Scenes of Winter and Picturing Will, had an understated presence. Dressed all in black, she quietly strode up to the stage after an exuberant introduction. “Skeletons” might need a second reading to catch all of the subtleties: it is the story of a couple and the college student who lives in their apartment building, a sad threesome stuck in their habits. “Skeletons” is part of Beattie’s short story collection Where You’ll Find Me, and its skewed sense of time sends the narrative forward and back with little or no warning.

Franzen, the author of the celebrated novel The Corrections, brought a thick stack of loose paper to the stage with him: the heretofore unpublished novel Ambition. One member of the audience, covering the event for the Spectator, was disappointed to find Franzen, at 48, much older than she had pictured, all but shattering her hopes of—perhaps—marrying him. Ambition, which took, in Franzen’s words, “seven weeks of pulling teeth” to write, dealt with an Upper East Side couple struggling with the terms of its marriage.

During the question-and-answer section following the readings, one audience member asked the two writers where, despite the self-deprecation about their work that both displayed, one decides that their writing is good enough to make it into a living. After speaking of a writing competition he entered anonymously and won, Franzen said what this decision really requires is faith. Ending the reading on an optimistic note, he cited Bob Dylan: the profession, he said, wants “A Truckload of Faith to Get Me By.”

—Ginia Sweeney