Thursday, April 2, 2020 — 6
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
The other day I was cursorily perusing my
housemate’s New York Times, and, amidst the
portents of apocalypse, I came across an agitated
letter to the editor in the book review.
“Confirming a trend I’ve noticed with
annoyance on bookstore shelves,” the man
wrote, not one, and not two but “fully three”
of the novels reviewed
last week had writers as
their protagonists. This
isn’t counting Elizabeth
Tallent’s memoir, which
is also about writing. Four
books, each written with
what this man seems to
see as the same sort of
unforgivable myopia, the
same sort of decadent
navel-gazing, a literary
inbreeding that can only
be a dead end. “Based
on
the
reviews,”
the
man continues, “all the
aforementioned
writers
appear to be frustrated
in some way.” It’s unclear
whether he means the writers depicted in the
novels or the writers themselves, though, of
course, it can be difficult to separate the two at
times. “Maybe they could find some satisfaction
in writing about people with a job title different
from their own,” the man writes. “There are lots
of us out there.” By this point it’s mostly clear that
the man wants the writers who have published
novels to write about something else now; though
I like the idea of him offering advice to the fictional
characters of books he hasn’t read; for if these
characters have the misfortune to be created by
writers, they can at least avoid another level of
recursion.
Petty as it is, his accusation isn’t unfounded:
A lot of debut novels I’ve come across recently
do seem like a frustrated writer’s attempt to
exorcise their process. This can produce good art,
of course: The process of becoming a writer is an
extended mundanity that transforms itself into a
psychodrama if you let it. While we all know that
writing is mostly just fiddling with characters
and situations and sentences and above all the
proverbial “ass in chair” that we are all so very
good at avoiding, it can be fun to pretend that it’s
something else. For my
part, I confess that literary
fiction about writers is
like candy to me. Maybe
that makes me elitist by
someone’s metric, and I
don’t care.
Another thing our irate
epistolarian might have
missed: A lot of people
with more humble “job
titles” are also writers
and (depending on how
you want to look at it)
vice versa. Lily King’s
fifth novel, “Writers &
Lovers,” is a novel about a
writer who also works as
a waitress, and a lot more
time is spent on waitressing than on writing. It’s
a job title that is starting to make Casey, the first-
person protagonist, seem a little ridiculous: She’s
31, an age that functions as a pivot. Here, one is
faced with the reality of adult life and the fading
of the exuberance of your twenties; there are
suddenly considerations of stability. To persevere
as an artist requires a certain amount of fortitude,
especially if, like Casey, you haven’t found much
success as an artist yet. She’s been working on her
novel (provisional title: “Love & The Revolution”)
for six years, in the process going between
cities and boyfriends all over North America
and Europe. She’s ended up in Cambridge,
Massachusetts after a bad breakup, is working at
a restaurant on the third floor of a Harvard social
club and living in a tiny room sublet from her
brother’s sadistic friend Adam (who at one point
tells Casey “I just find it extraordinary that you
think you have something to say”). King might
want us to see Casey’s stubborn perseverance as
heroic, but it also seems like Casey is doing this
simply because she can’t be happy doing anything
else. The recent death of her mother in a freak
accident has left Casey emotionally fraught and it
becomes increasingly clear that her novel, which
incorporates elements of her mother’s biography, is
a way for her to cope at least as much as it is a work
of art that she eventually wants to finish and show
people. Casey’s character isn’t self-dramatizing in
the slightest; she instead has a talent for noticing
things about people, picking up on intentions and
empathizing. Casey feels everything in a way that’s
contagious. A lot of sentences in this book start
with “I love…”
Additionally, King shows us how complicated
this kind of life is to sustain while maintaining
one’s sanity; we see how Casey has to adapt her
mind to at least two playing fields, that of the
service worker and that of the aspiring artist. She
goes from writing her novel in the mornings to
working at the restaurant in the afternoon to going
on dates with other writers or going to literary
parties at night; each space requires a particular
use of language, a particular code. The restaurant
itself is a kind of microcosm of the double
consciousness she has to sustain on a larger scale
in the rest of her life — she ducks into the kitchen
and has to deal with the crass behavior (and
sometimes harassment) of the cooks, then brings
food to the restaurant’s wealthy patrons, doing her
best to charm them.
This theme of double consciousness is further
elaborated by that most quintessential of novelistic
tropes — a love triangle. Like all good fictional love
triangles, each vertex represents a possibility for
Casey’s life. She meets Oscar, a 45-year-old author
who runs a regular writing workshop, when he
comes into her work with his sons for mother’s day.
They are, in a slightly morbid fashion, celebrating
Oscar’s dead wife. Casey charms Oscar’s sons, and
he takes a liking to her. Through being around
Oscar and his endearing children, Casey starts to
imagine a life for herself that settles nicely into
adulthood but might mean giving up her writing.
Also in the picture is Silas, a regular attendee of
Oscar’s workshop who spurs intense physical
passion in Casey but has boyish qualities, not the
least of which being that he tends to vanish for
weeks at a time. Her struggles to choose seem
increasingly like a referendum on her life: a gentle
fade into the responsibilities and small joys of
adulthood or the continuation of the sometimes
messy process of trying to make it work as an artist.
In the meantime, so much happens. Casey
has reams and reams of backstory to intersperse
this mostly straightforward plot with; there’s
also, of course, the business of writing and
getting published, the mundane struggles of life
exacerbated by precarity (a cancer scare, sexual
harassment, her landlord threatening to sell out
her apartment, etc.). In many ways, King has
a maximalist approach to realist fiction, one
that seeks to capture life as it is lived. Life tends
to pleasantly overwhelm plot. The jumble of
situations, the huge chaos of characters (I counted
26 after the first chapter, and more keep getting
added later) and the endless backstory started to
feel like the point after a while. In the face of the
luminous digression of King’s style, the writing
that Casey does often ends up being the least
interesting part, though I was definitely rooting
for her success.
I feel as though accusations like that of the
writer to the New York Times assume that writing
about writers is necessarily self-involved, that
writers treat their work as uniquely heroic and
deserving of attention. It’s not like anyone has
to respond to an accusation of self-involvement
(really, who isn’t self-involved?) but King’s writing
ultimately feels very generous. Casey’s ambitions
give the plot of the story a motivating force, but it’s
by no means what makes the novel compelling.
On writing about writers and ‘Writers and Lovers’
EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer
BOOK REVIEW
TV NOTEBOOK
What cop TV reveals about our relationship with police
ANYA SOLLER
Daily Arts Writer
Over spring break, I spent the day at my
grandparents’ house watching old shows from the
1960’s. I hadn’t seen many of them before and was
excited to laugh at the fun fashion and the era’s
simplistic, slapstick comedy. After a few episodes
of “Bewitched” and “Green Acres,” the channel
transitioned into that night’s marathon of “The
Andy Griffith Show.”
While I wasn’t as familiar with other shows,
I knew the basics of this one. Sheriff Andy Taylor
(Andy Griffith, “Matlock”) protects and serves the
small town of Mayberry while raising his young
son, Opie (Ron Howard, “Arrested Development”).
After the first episode about the town’s beauty
pageant ended, I felt I got the gist. Sheriff Andy and
the people of Mayberry are sweet and kind, with a
tendency toward endearing eccentrism.
The next episode was about two old ladies
secretly running a moonshine business while
turning in their competition to the sheriff so they’d
get more customers. It was an adorable story to
be sure, but one particular moment caught me
off guard. When arresting one of the moonshine
producers, Sheriff Andy doesn’t read him his
rights. It took me a moment to remember Miranda
warnings weren’t implemented in arrests until
1966, five years after the episode aired.
Police procedurals have been a staple of
American TV since the mid-1950s with shows like
“Dragnet” and “The Untouchables” but the more
modern, slightly grittier version of cop shows came
later with 1980s classics “Hill Street Blues” and
“Miami Vice.” These programs popularized the
format while amping up the stakes for an audience
now keyed in to crime thanks to the 24 hour
news cycle. Perhaps the most influential police
procedural of all time, “Law and Order,” is the best
example of how crime-themed TV reflected (and
affected) the American public.
“Law and Order,” and its successful spin-off
“Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” each have
upwards of 20 seasons and are known for their
hallmark style of including stories “ripped from
the headlines.” With more serious storylines and
a loyal audience, these series could explore more
difficult and controversial topics than “The Andy
Griffith Show” could ever dream of. The comfort
of small-town justice is entirely absent in modern
police procedurals which tend to examine the
most frightening aspects of our society and deeply
flawed legal system.
As I sat in my grandparents’ house, wondering
how there was ever a time before Miranda rights,
I wondered if there was something deeper at play
in Mayberry. In the past few years, one particular
scene circulated the Internet in which Sheriff Andy
remarks, “When a man carries a gun all the time, the
respect he thinks he’s getting might really be fear…
I don’t carry a gun, because I don’t want the people
of Mayberry to fear a gun. I’d rather they respect
me.” The quote garnered much attention from
gun control advocates who lauded his nonviolent
sentiment, but in the context of the arrest scene I
watched, that positive message is complicated.
The people of Mayberry trust Sheriff Andy. But,
the world of Mayberry is not as complicated as the
worlds depicted in “Hill Street Blues” or “Law and
Order.” The world of “The Andy Griffith Show”
doesn’t exist anymore, and in fact, it never existed
at all. There was no idyllic, peaceful small-town
America. At least, not one that wasn’t plagued
with other issues of racial discrimination or the
oppression of marginalized groups. The trust
citizens of Mayberry had for their sheriff was partly
because of the town’s lack of serious crime but also
because he looked and acted like them.
This mutual respect and admiration, while most
obvious in early examples, is a common thread
throughout American police procedurals. “Law
and Order: Special Victims Unit” often challenges
this assumption by addressing issues that affect
disadvantaged
communities
and
emphasize
the fallibility of law enforcement. But for all the
empathy Olivia Benson and her team elicit, they’re
still cops. They sometimes arrest the wrong guy
or harass suspects. In one episode, one of the SVU
detectives shoots an unarmed, Black teenager and,
though he regrets his actions, he is still considered
the protagonist of the show.
Therein lies the conundrum of police-themed
TV. Do we frame cops as trustworthy heroes
because we trust the police or because we wish
we did? In a time when police brutality and lack of
accountability are daily news stories, our cultural
obsession
with
crime-related
entertainment
presents a distinct juxtaposition between how we
feel and how we want to feel. In “The Andy Griffith
Show,” the suspects trust the sheriff to respect them
without a statement of their rights. But that’s not
how things work. We need civil rights, we need to
be innocent until proven guilty, we need protection
from abuses of the law.
As we continue to watch shows that idealize our
relationship with law enforcement, as a country we
need to consider why we need the scripted format
of TV to comfort us in this way. Do we just like the
mystery and entertainment of crime stories and
cops are the incidental protagonists? Or are we less
interested in the lives of people in Mayberry and
more invested in heroes like Sheriff Andy? And
if the latter is true, what does that say about us? If
we continue to glorify the ideal while ignoring the
reality of our justice system, change will remain on
screen, just beyond our reach.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
For my part, I confess
that literary fiction about
writers is like candy to
me. Maybe that makes
me elitist by someone’s
metric, and I don’t care