Milton Glaser in his studio in New York City. Photograph: Neville Elder/
Milton Glaser, groundbreaking I ❤️ NY designer, dies aged 91
Glaser’s bold logo, created for free in 1977, helped boost New York’s image and he was also part of the team that founded New York magazine
Milton Glaser, the groundbreaking graphic designer who adorned Bob Dylan’s silhouette with psychedelic hair and summed up the feelings for his native New York with “I (HEART) NY,” died Friday, on his 91st birthday.
The cause was a stroke and Glaser had also had renal failure, his wife, Shirley Glaser, told The New York Times.
In posters, logos, advertisements and book covers, Glaser’s ideas captured the spirit of the 1960s with a few simple colors and shapes. He was the designer on the team that founded New York magazine with Clay Felker in the late ’60s.
His pictorial sense was so profound, and his designs so influential, that his works in later years were preserved by collectors and studied as fine art.
But he preferred not to use the term “art” at all.
“What I’m suggesting is we eliminate the term art and call everything work,” Glaser said in an Associated Press interview in 2000, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted an exhibit on his career. “When it’s really extraordinary and moves it in a certain way, we call it great work. We call it good when it accomplishes a task, and we call it bad when it misses a target.”
The bold “I (HEART) NY” logo – cleverly using typewriter-style letters as the typeface – was dreamed up as part of an ad campaign begun in 1977 to boost the state’s image when crime and budget troubles dominated the headlines. Glaser did the design free of charge.
Dylan, Milton Glaser, 1967. Composite: Milton Glaser, 1967 (c) DACS / Victoria and Albert Museum
His 1966 illustration of Dylan, his face a simple black silhouette but his hair sprouting in a riot of colors in curvilinear fashion, put in graphic form the 1960s philosophy that letting your hair fly free was a way to free your mind. (For him, though, it wasn’t a drug-inspired image: he said he borrowed from Marcel Duchamp and Islamic art.)
The poster was inserted in Dylan’s Greatest Hits album, so it made its way into the hands of millions of fans.
Glaser was born in 1929 in the Bronx and studied at New York’s Cooper Union art school and in Italy.
In 1954, he co-founded the innovative graphic design firm Push Pin Studios with Seymour Chwast and others. He stayed with it 20 years before founding his own firm.
The Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum awarded him a lifetime achievement award in 2004. In 2009, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
“I just like to do everything, and I was always interested in seeing how far I could go in stretching the boundaries,” he said.
WHAT AGATHA CHRISTIE CAN TEACH US ABOUT BRAZIL: TRANSLATED LITERATURE AND CULTURAL DYNAMICS
Vanessa Lopes Lourenço Hanes Pós-Graduação em Estudos da Tradução (PGET) Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina 1611 / A Journal of Translation History No. 98 / 2015
Basis and framework
British writer Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was (and is) a unique phenomenon in literary history worldwide. Due to this, from the perspective adopted in this study, a topic such as “Agatha Christie in Brazil”, just like “Hemingway in Europe” or “Tolstoy in Germany”, might be envisaged from the point of view of what Goethe termed as “World literature” (for more information on Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur, see Eckermann (1930). But, considered this way, such topics are never simple, since the entire issue of world literature is never simple. As a matter of fact, not even the supposedly “less broad” concept of “national literature” is a simple one. And it certainly is paradoxical to talk about world literature without first considering the concept of national literature.
At first, the idea of world literature sounded almost blasphemous, mainly because the Nation-State strongly cultivated the idea of a national literature. At the end of the 18th century, Goethe linked the idea of national literatures with particular cultural traditions, but only after the second half of the 20th century literary theoreticians and comparatists such as René Étiemble (1975) and Jonathan Culler (2007) discover that the very concept of literature was hardly any older than the idea of national literature.
‘I’ve contributed to Holocaust education in rural France, that I think is my greatest achievement’: Michael Rosen. Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert
This much I know
Life and style
Interview
Michael Rosen: ‘The incredible NHS saved my life’
The children’s author and poet, 74, talks about surviving coronavirus, enjoying getting older and moping all weekend when Arsenal lose Donna Ferguson Sunday 28 June 2020
I’m only alive because my wife and our friend who is a GP had a sense that I was on a downward spiral with coronavirus and got me to A&E. But I’ve got no recall of being critically ill it because I was in an induced coma. I’m only finding out now how the NHS saved my life while I was in intensive care for nearly seven weeks.
The NHS is an incredible feat of the imagination – complete strangers care for you and this means that it is social medicine and social health at its best.
My earliest memory is sitting on a beach. I was two and a half. I can remember sitting there, with my legs apart, looking at the sand. It’s hot and I’m not very happy.
I’m the child who came after. There was a baby who was born between me and my elder brother, and he died. I only found this out when I was 11. My mother was very protective of me. If my dad or my brother took the mickey out of me, she’d say: “Leave him alone, he’s tired.”
I was a massively happy child. My brother and I were given a huge amount of freedom to go off and play outside. Yet my parents were also very concerned, some might say over-concerned – they poured over every detail of our lives, our homework, our hobbies and so on. I felt total unconditional love from both of them.
The closest I ever came to death, before Covid-19, was when I was 17. I was walking along the wrong side of an unlit road and a car hit me, breaking my pelvis and my leg. A few inches to the left or right, I would have been a goner. I rolled into a ditch and the driver drove on. Later, he went to the police, who couldn’t find me. They were just about to leave when they heard me talking in the ditch. I was apparently wide awake, talking. But I’ve lost this from my memory. It’s completely gone.
Most people would be surprised to learn how much a football match can matter to me. I can watch a match and feel my heartbeat racing. And if Arsenal lose, I can feel completely devastated. It’s pathetic – it can ruin a whole weekend.
I’ve been arrested twice. Once was for demonstrating against the Vietnam War in 1968 and pushing against the police in front of the American Embassy. The second time was for occupying a hairdresser’s, because the hairdresser was operating a colour bar and refusing to cut black people’s hair. I was charged with obstruction and had to pay £2 fine.
If I could go back in time, I’d visit the period between 1900 and 1914. There was a huge revolution then in ideas and thought around psychology, literature and art. Everyone thought they’d learned from the lessons of the terrible wars of the 19th century, that war in Europe could never happen again. I’d live in the optimism and excitement of that time, just before the First World War.
I don’t mind getting older. I’m 74 now, and people keep discovering me, which is very nice. They go: “Oh my goodness, you do this or that, and you’re quite good at it.” I think to myself: “Well, I’ve been doing it for 50 years.” But I don’t say it. I keep schtum.
Be curious is the best advice I’ve ever been given. It came from my dad. He also said: be bold. I think that was quite useful.
My greatest regret is not recognising that my son had meningitis. I put him to bed with what I thought was a high temperature and flu. I didn’t know and couldn’t see that he had the beginnings of septicaemia. Then I went to bed. I was the only one in the house. I can still see that moment I said goodnight to him for the last time, I can see that just in front of me. These moments are split seconds. The fragility of life is recognisable in them.
It helps me to think about my son’s death as something that happens to living people and things. I place it in that category, as part of the inevitable biology of us. My feelings about him, my sense of loss… I’ve separated them off.
I cried when I was researching my book, The Missing – realising that if my French relatives had just had a few more hours, they would have got on the boat and been safe from the Nazis.
I discovered that a teacher in the French village where my uncle Martin was arrested is taking children to a local museum, to show them pictures of Martin. The idea that I’ve contributed to a bit of Holocaust education in rural France is, I think, my greatest achievement.
I get arrangementitis. It happens to me when I’ve got so many arrangements, so many timings, so many possibilities of trains and timetables. I can get overwhelmed by that. It’s not the rushing, so much as the thinking ahead about all the many things I’m doing over the next few days, and it just sort of piles up. It can make me feel weary, like I’ve got a mountain to climb. It gives me a funny kind of tired feeling just underneath my eyes.
I am an optimist, definitely. There’s no point in pessimism, because all that happens is you feel pessimistic – and then you die. You’ve wasted your life. So you might as well be optimistic.
These Are the Hands: Poems from the Heart of the NHS, foreword by Michael Rosen, is out now, £9.99
The following piece appeared in Brick 76, and as the introduction to the 2005 edition of Charles Portis’s True Grit, published by in the U.K. by Bloomsbury Publishing and in the U.S. and Canada by Overlook Press.
Brick 76
Posted on January 1, 2005
It’s a commonplace to say that we “love” a book, but when we say it, we really mean all sorts of things. Sometimes we mean only that we have read a book once and enjoyed it; sometimes we mean that a book was important to us in our youth, though we haven’t picked it up in years; sometimes what we “love” is an impressionistic idea glimpsed from afar (Combray . . . madeleines . . . Tante Léonie . . .) as opposed to the experience of wallowing and plowing through an actual text, and all too often people claim to “love” books they haven’t read at all. Then there are the books we love so much that we read them every year or two, and know passages of them by heart; that cheer us when we are sick or sad and never fail to amuse us when we take them up at random; that we press on all our friends and acquaintances; and to which we return again and again with undimmed enthusiasm over the course of a lifetime. I think it goes without saying that most books that engage readers on this very high level are masterpieces; and this is why I believe that True Grit by Charles Portis is a masterpiece.
I have known of Leonard Cohen since I was twelve. My babysitter used to play the album Songs of Leonard Cohen on our hi-fi, over and over again. I didn’t understand the songs, but I sang along. I didn’t know what love was, but his songs pointed the way. “So Long, Marianne,” “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye,” “Suzanne” . . . the songs sent me to his poetry. I bought Selected Poems of Leonard Cohen and memorized his words. His poems are vivid on the page, but spellbinding when you hear him read them. That voice.
Leonard Cohen was born in Montreal in 1934, and lived in that city until the mid-fifties. He first made his mark as a poet, with the collections Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956) and Spice-Box of Earth (1961), the latter of which brought him international acclaim. He moved to Hydra, Greece, in 1960 and during a seven-year period there, published another collection of poetry, Flowers for Hitler (1964), and the novels The Favorite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). It was not until he was thirty-three, however, that Cohen transformed into a singer/songwriter. Judy Collins recorded his song “Suzanne” in 1966 for her album In My Life, and when the album went gold in 1967, she encouraged Cohen to make the transition to public performer. She brought him to sing live for the first time at a Vietnam protest concert on April 30, 1967, and although Cohen, too shy to continue, walked off the stage halfway through “Suzanne,” Collins and the audience convinced him to return, and he completed the performance to raucous applause. That year he released his first album, The Songs of Leonard Cohen.In the nearly thirty years since his debut as a troubadour, Cohen has recorded thirteen other albums, including Songs of Love and Hate (1971), Death of a Ladies’ Man (1977), Various Positions (1984),and Ten New Songs (2001), and he collaborated with Anjani Thomas on her album Blue Alert,which will be released this year. McClelland & Stewart is also publishing a new collection of his poetry and drawings this spring, entitled Book of Longing.
I wonder why I am up here on this stage when I’d rather be at home, when being at home would be so much more comforting. And I wonder why all of you are sitting there in the audience, when so many of you would also be happier at home.
At home, you can wear your pyjamas. No one is going to snub you or disappoint you. At Trampoline Hall, you could be snubbed or disappointed. The whisky is not cheap. It is less depressing to think the same thoughts you thought yesterday than to have the same conversation you had last week. Few of us will get laid. Why did we go out? My father never goes out. His emotional life is absolutely even keel. He is a deeply rational person. He doesn’t see the advantages.
For photographer Dave Watts, it’s as if family life has gone back in time a little since the pandemic hit… Tim Adams Sunday 28 June 2020
D
uring lockdown, family life has sometimes established a different time and space. Dave Watts took this photograph of his daughter Minna, five, on the daily walk he and his wife, Frances, a landscape artist, have taken with their three young children. Watts and his family live on the edge of a town in Somerset, where he works as a commercial photographer, but when jobs dried up in April and the kids were home from school the days took on a less predictable, sometimes magical shape, one he has tried to capture.
“There is a network of footpaths and we fell into doing the same route every day,” he says. “Probably about a mile and a half, always quite a leisurely pace. The children got into the habit of stopping in the same places to play. Because it was at the end of such a long dry spell, this place was dusty and Minna loved that; she throws herself into being busy and messy.”
In some ways, shrinking horizons have perhaps taken children across the country back in time a little – with not much traffic on the roads, and long days to fill.
Watts started his career as a travel photographer based in London, before moving back to Somerset, near his childhood home, when his eldest child was born. The weeks of relative confinement have been a bittersweet time, he suggests – the fears and liberation of an empty schedule. The family has been sustained in part by Frances selling some work through the Artist Support Pledge. “To start with there was a lot of anxiety, with the pandemic and the lack of income, but then there were also these lovely sunny days outside with the kids,” Watts says. His pictures capture some of that contrast – the poignancy of living in the moment, and trying not to wonder what comes next.
Drawn from life: why have novelists stopped making things up?
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Edward St Aubyn – authors are using their own life stories in their fiction. Does the boom in autofiction spell the end of the novel, asks Alex Clark
Sat 23 Jun 2018
“T
hat was the morning that white people finally realised the president of the United States was a white supremacist, he’d as good as said so, there was a cartoon in the Guardian of the White House with a Klan hood over the roof. Why were people surprised, weren’t they listening to anything? ... People weren’t sane anymore, which didn’t mean they were wrong. Some sort of cord between action and consequence had been severed. Things still happened, but not in any sensible order, it was hard to talk about truth because some bits were hidden, the result or maybe the cause, and anyway the space between them was full of misleading data, nonsense and lies.”
So says Kathy, the protagonist of Olivia Laing’s novel Crudo. Yes, a novel – not, as that passage might indicate, an essay or a piece of political journalism. Who is Kathy? She is part Laing, the author of non-fiction titles The Lonely City and The Trip to Echo Spring, in the summer of 2017, as she observed the world around her and prepared to get married. But she is also the late American novelist Kathy Acker, whom Laing audaciously fuses with her present-day character. Crudo slips sinuously between “Kathy” the pre-millennial icon of the American counterculture and a 21st-century woman on the brink of multiple life changes. The action slides from a luxurious holiday in Italy to Korea, Grenfell, Steve Bannon’s resignation, a priest giving a sermon in Italian “in which the word WhatsApp was frequently discernible”.
Suddenly this kind of “autofiction” – fictionalised autobiography that does away with traditional elements of the novel such as plot and character development – is everywhere. Thumping on to your desk in the form of the last volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s epic account of his life, My Struggle; touching more lightly down in the case of Kudos, as Rachel Cusk completes her elegant trilogy in which a novelist, “Faye”, journeys around Europe absorbing the stories strangers and acquaintances tell her; in Motherhood, in which Canadian writer Sheila Heti dramatises her own interrogation of what it might mean to choose – or choose not – to have children. Édouard Louis’s History of Violence, Delphine de Vigan’s Based on a True Story, Joanna Walsh’s Break.up, Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose series – these books don’t simply use the biographical details of their authors’ lives as inspiration, but also to disrupt and complicate our experience of story and subjectivity, to find a new way to describe reality at a time when, as Kathy says in Crudo, it is “hard to talk about truth” and perhaps even harder to write it.
Olivia Laing. Photograph: Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images
In the perpetual present of social media, when personal presentation, on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, is everything, these autofictions offer an alternative, experimental narrative of self. They are attempts to reshape and repurpose a literary form, and their sudden popularity speaks to the idea that to capture 21st-century experience writers must breach borders – blend fiction, memoir, history, poetry, the visual and performing arts. One passage in Crudo juxtaposes buying paint from Homebase with a Nazi march in Charlottesville, the machine gunning of refugee ships in the Mediterranean and Hiroshima; a mixture of the everyday, the concurrent violence of elsewhere and traumatic Big History.
“L’autofiction, c’est comme le rêve; un rêve n’est pas la vie, un livre n’est pas la vie.” Serge Doubrovsky, the French writer and theorist whose 1977 novel Filsis widely credited as the first work of “autofiction”, provides not a definition but an elaboration: autofiction is as a dream; a dream is not life, a book is not life. But what manner of dream might it be?
Edmund White – author of both autobiography and of novels that call on real-life incidents – draws a line between the two forms. “To me there’s a very clear distinction between autofiction and autobiography,” he told the magazine Asymptote. “I’ve just finished my third autobiography, the first two being My Lives and City Boy. I try, in those books, to be true and accurate. I believe in truth, I don’t buy this bullshit that everything is fiction, I think that’s silly. Most people know that the truth is something like a horizon; it’s something you head toward. Maybe you never get there, but at least you have a sense of direction.”
By contrast, for White the liberties that writers of fiction can take with truth – compressing events, creating composite characters – are a way of freeing them from the charge of lying by, paradoxically, making things up. It’s not an unusual stance for such a writer to take, and nor does it contradict analyses that approach the question from a slightly different angle, such as that of the short story writer Lucia Berlin, who told the New Yorker: “Somehow there must occur the most imperceptible alteration of reality. A transformation, not a distortion of the truth. The story itself becomes the truth, not just for the writer but for the reader. In any good piece of writing it is not an identification with a situation, but this recognition of truth that is thrilling.”
That idea of transformation might jar with those familiar with the toe-breaking weight of My Struggle, in which, it appears, no detail is too minute to exclude (“I went into the kitchen, took the plastic container with the meat sauce out of the fridge, then the spaghetti, divided it between two plates and started heating the first one in the microwave …”). And yet, its mundanity is its manifesto. You think this is dull? Knausgaard seems to ask. What about me? I have to live it and write it.
Where does this leave invention? The question of its meaning and value seems to grip the current tranche of autofictioneers, keen to probe the hierarchies and hypocrisies that impose themselves on writing. Long have aspiring fiction writers been told to write what they know, only to find themselves criticised for lacking imagination. In other words, give voice to your subjectivity but avoid narcissism; make it up, or we’ll think you can’t. Tell the truth, or we’ll think you’re a liar.
Many forms of writing are a push-me, pull-you of cloaking and revelation. In a public discourse that privileges the performative – in politics, in our social lives, even in our friendships – the idea of what one conceals and what one shows becomes ever more urgent and telling. But the effects of that idea do not always fall equally. Female writers and writers of colour, for example, are bedevilled by the expectation – from readers and critics – that their work is based in the reality of their own lives; what follows is a treasure hunt for the “real” in their imagined worlds, and a diminution of its importance.
Stories of intimate life and family relationships become “domestic”. Aminatta Forna writes a novel set in Croatia but finds it shelved in the “African section” of a bookshop. Man Booker prize-winner Marlon James has spoken about the constraints this places on the freedom to imagine, which is partly why his next project, Dark Star, is a fantasy epic that he has described as “an African Game of Thrones”.
Karl Ove Knausgaard. Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer
The writer Chris Kraus, whose novel I Love Dick explored infidelity, desire and jealousy through such a layering of techniques and perspectives that it was almost impossible for the reader not to feel giddily promiscuous, rejects the term autofiction: “I would never use that term. It’s such a strange term. It’s applied to my work, and to a lot of other people’s work, but I would never use it. There are so many examples in the history of literature of a male first-person that’s used pretty closely to the identity of the writer, and we don’t call it that. The corny beat example, Jack Kerouac, we don’t call that autofiction. Herman Melville, do we call that autofiction? All of American realism that’s written in the first person – we don’t call that autofiction.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Recall how quickly Knausgaard’s series and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels were hijacked into a reductive attempt to assess the differences between male versus female “telling”. Knausgaard: accretion of detail so exhaustive as to mesmerise, or stupefy, the reader in the service of recapturing the vast psychic shifts of childhood becoming manhood. Ferrante: the mystery of female friendship conveyed by appropriation of the soap opera or family saga.
But in fact Ferrante’s work derives its strength not from a belief in the dynamic power of story and character but from a deep ambivalence towards them. Its key descriptive target, Lila, eludes the figure of the writer, Lenu; having literally disappeared at the beginning of the quartet, Lila is defined as much by absence as presence, haunted by a sense of a dissolution of the boundaries between herself and the world, constantly re-presenting as vamp, moll, businesswoman, mother, controller and controlled. In one strand of the story she is an anti-Cinderella, creating a shoe that will liberate her but that is then stolen by the men around her.
Ferrante’s work is a fairytale that reveals the social order, much as Angela Carter’s does, and what happened outside the text – her refusal to share her own identity – became part of that fairytale. A woman who will not submit to being known in even the most basic of biographical details is a woman who understands that it will never stop at that; that absence is the only route to self-preservation but one that might, even then, fail in the face of an outraged desperation to uncover the real.
But how does the real cope with writing – the translation of observable fact, transient sensation, other minds, into words? In her memoir/essay/manifesto The Cost of Living, Deborah Levy recalls a scrawl over a typewritten diary entry from decades previously, “featuring the word it”.
It begins with knowing and not knowing, a glass of milk, rain, a reproach, a door slammed shut, a mother’s sharp tongue, a snail, a wish, bitten fingernails, an open window. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is unbearable.
What, Levy wonders now, is “it”? The presence of the glass of milk leads her to her most recent novel, Hot Milk, of which this might have been some faint precognition; a single word, a feeling of indeterminacy and strikingly symbolic objects – door, snail, window – that eventually cohere into a narrative. “The appeal of writing, as I understood it,” she notes, “was an invitation to climb in-between the apparent reality of things, to see not only the tree but the insects that live in its infrastructure, to discover that everything is connected in the ecology of language and living.”
Later, she writes humorously of being usurped as an object of interest when men in the street stop her to ask about the workings of her e-bike; dutifully, she provides an explanation of its speed and motor, ruefully realising she has become a minor character in her life.
To write autofiction, however, requires a willingness to treat oneself as the central character, a countercultural celebrity, and this is probably what has sparked resistance to it. It requires ego, it demands the bold determination to make a mark. In the case of Cusk, that started some time ago, when she wrote about motherhood and divorce in A Life’s Work and Aftermath and faced a censure that declared itself on behalf of the unknown others – the children, the husband – in her story. It seemed a convenient moment for such scruples to arise in a culture otherwise fairly used to the blithe incorporation of others’ lives, and it brought to mind Virginia Woolf’s imagined objections of those who would thwart female creativity in Three Guineas:
But to sell a brain is worse than to sell a body, for when the body seller has sold her momentary pleasure she takes good care that the matter shall end there. But when a brain seller has sold her brain, its anaemic, vicious and diseased progeny are let loose upon the world to infect and corrupt and sow the seeds of disease in others. Thus we are asking you, Madam, to pledge yourself not to commit adultery of the brain because it is a much more serious offence than the other.
Somehow, one felt, Cusk stood accused of selling her life and her brain, and her subsequent trilogy, in which the writer effaces herself and thrusts forward others’ words, can stand as a response to that accusation.
As Kraus argues, when it comes to the reading of literature, who speaks and what they decide to say is critical, and often contested. Speech in Cusk’s trilogy is a charged affair, presented in a variety of ways: the narrator’s indirectly, her interlocutors most usually within speech marks. At the beginning of Kudosshe creates a conversation between Faye and her overseas publisher, who is explaining how his company has returned to profitability via a combination of sudoku and deprioritising “literary” novels. Musing on the tendency of online commenters to award the likes of Dante a one-star review, he argues that Dante can look after himself. “It was a position of weakness, he believed, to see literature as something fragile that needed defending.”
Faye counters that his attitude seems cynical, and that one should stick up for Dante “at every opportunity”, regardless of whether he needed it or not. The publisher’s response will be recognisable to all those who have attempted to interrogate the ready-made opinion of an authority figure:
While I was speaking my publisher had been stealthily removing his eyes from my face in order to look at something over my shoulder, and I turned to see a woman standing at the entrance to the bar gazing around herself nonplussed with her hand shading her eyes, like a voyager peering into foreign distances. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘There’s Linda.’
Writers, then, need strategies to meet the darting eyes of those too powerful, or otherwise occupied, to listen to them. In the current flowering of autofiction, it is noticeable how many women are coming to the fore, but also how some of those women – largely white, highly educated, often influential in other creative spheres – already occupy zones of privilege.
Rachel Cusk. Photograph: Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert/Getty Images
Writers of colour, working class and queer voices have also needed to find ways to break free of the strictures of the realist novel. Claudia Rankine makes a distinction between the “self self” and a historical self, and is determined to subvert the American lyric tradition in order to describe what happens in the gap between the two. Adelle Stripe’s fictional re-creation of the life of playwright Andrea Dunbar, Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, and memoirist Michelle Tea’s novel Black Wave are other examples. Both books are unimaginable without the freedom to disrupt the form – what Louis has spoken of as a way to confront the bourgeois attempt to contain violence and threat within a safely defined frame.
But we should be wary of creating false oppositions between different kinds of novel, or of assuming that realism cannot pose a threat to the social, political or aesthetic status quo. The critic Jonathan Gibb recently wrote of his reservations about the reception of autofiction as a new form that knocks previous forms aside, and sends us to “a place where to write a good old-fashioned novel, with rounded characters, and realist description, and manufactured plots, is, oh dear me yes, something that is beyond the bounds of tastefulness. As if to write a traditional novel is akin to producing ‘likable’ characters”.
Perhaps the writers of autofiction, he wonders, simply want to move on from that somewhat refined style, and “to push the novel towards the speculative, the philosophic, the contingent: the novel as scattered notes, Wittgenstein with characters”. Gibb argues that he likes both, and doesn’t want to choose between them. And, indeed, we do not have to. Just as long as we can persuade publishers to find room among the sudoku books.
Cusk’s Kudos is also the name of an imagined college award presented to outstanding students, and her novel writhes with characters trying to define and measure what success might be – a particularly unfathomable problem when it comes to art. One of its most wry moments comes when Faye encounters Ryan, whom readers will recognise as a hotshot young Irish writer from Outline. At first, witnessing his gaunt figure and his walking stick, she imagines that he has fallen ill, despite once believing that people like him “lived their lives with impunity”. Not a bit of it. Ryan has shed weight, gained a co-writer and a transatlantic accent, and relaunched himself as a bestselling commercial writer (the walking stick is simply because he tripped getting out of a taxi).
During their conversation he describes editing a starry charity anthology that led to a “mind-blowing” auction for serial rights. “‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘the economics of it meant we couldn’t ask people like yourself for contributions, since the whole point of it was to make money and as I say, we needed the big names for that.’” Kudos indeed.
