Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists

by Larry McCaffery, Tom LeClair (Editor)

Modern fiction writers, including John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Toni Morrison, Diane Johnson, Stanley Elkin, and E.L. Doctorow, talk about their careers, influences, and works

Genres: Criticism

305 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Anything Can Happen provides a portrait of USofAian fiction from the 1970’s by way of interactions with 19 authors, some of whom are still knocking around upon the scene and others who perhaps deserve to be rediscovered. The interviews were all, nearly to a one, intelligent, engaging, sophisticated, and engaged with the variety of issues pertaining to the creation of fiction. Recurring throughout the interviews are a number of themes and questions: the status of moral fiction, a love for South American writers, the relation of cinema to the writing of books, jazz and improvisation, and the question of innovative and postmodernist techniques in fictioning. Of those authors with which I’ve been engaged in reading these past few years, the interviews are news to me, I’ve not seen them pop up on-line. And interest in four or more of these authors justifies picking up a copy of this collection. The diversity of style and discussion, and especially the high level of conversation and thinking represented in these interviews, makes it a must-have for anyone interested in questions about what fiction is.


The Rogues Gallery
Asterix [*] indicates my solicitation of you, that you bring to my attention any reviews you may have hidden away regarding the works of these authors. I don’t know squat about them.

A Dialogue: John Barth and John Hawkes -- This type of pleasant exchange, almost a Mutual Appreciation Society, between two authors of great merit, speaking about each others work and their own, is not something I see very often. Edifying. Not to be missed here is Hawkes’ retraction of his claim, at Barth’s insistence, that character, plot, and such are the true enemies of fiction.

A Debate: William Gass and John Gardener -- This debate is one of what is perhaps a short series of encounters between these two heavy weight writers about the question of moral fiction (Gardner) in relation to fiction as a beautiful play with language (Gass, but my formulation). Gass’ aeroplane, wrought of gold, will not fly, accuses Gardner. Gass responds with his hope that it will utterly convince the reader that it is flying, even as it sits stolid on the runway. The question of moral fiction recurs in nearly every interview in this collection.

Donald Barthelme -- Barthelme. (This interview is collected in Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme)

* Rosellen Brown -- Brown I had never heard of. Nor has any of my goodreads Friends. The Autobiography of My Mother sounds like a nice place to start. One of my interests in being on goodreads is to rediscover, both for myself and for my Friends, authors and their books which have disappeared from our literary landscape. Brown is a candidate for such an unearthing.

Robert Coover -- Coover. If you’ve got an interest in Coover, there’s a big book about his books on its way to press next month [March 2013]. Dalkey, of course.

Don DeLillo -- DeLillo. I suspect that we have here a fairly rare, early interview.

* E. L. Doctorow -- Doctorow has persisted for a period of time at the dim horizon of the school of fiction I’ve been interested in these past few years. So has Mailer. About neither have I heard much to suggest I ought to spend my time on their books. This interview did little to convince me. But then again interviews like those in this here book aren’t so much about finding books as thinking about books.

Stanley Elkin -- Perhaps my favorite interview in this collection if only for the stale reason that Elkin talks so much about what he thinks of his contemporaries, the kind of discussion which, in Barth’s essays, led me to discover so many writers which were unknown to me at the time. Now the people Elkin speaks of are my comfy comrades in literature. Here’s what he says about Barth (why not?):

Barth is wonderful, but the Barth I really admire is back there in the Golden Age of Barth. That is to say, the Barth of The Floating Opera, of The End of the Road, and The Sot-Weed Factor. The Barth who takes himself seriously as a metafictionist is a Barth who bores finally. There’s some great stuff in Lost in the Funhouse, and I suppose there are nice little pastiches in Giles Goat-Boy, but later Barth really is Barth for Barth’s sake.

And just for his own just deserts, “John Gardner is a bore, and he’s never raised an issue in his life, merely resurrected some. Tolstoy did it better in ‘What is Art?’ and didn’t have to bad-mouth his friends. Of course any work of art which is genuine is by necessity and definition moral.”

* Raymond Federman -- Federman is perhaps the most significant bit of discovery for me from this volume. Not only for his massively awesome remarks about masturbation, ie, “Remember, you always have to read masturbation in my work in its purely metaphorical or symbolic form. For me the act of masturbation is a positive act, even if most people think of it as ugly or dirty” (his holding-forth, spectacularly, goes on for seven-eighths of the page), but also everything else he has to say. But this guy ... I’ll dig up some of his books. As a child he escaped the Nazis, hidden in a closet by his mother, while the rest of his family didn’t.

William Gass -- This guy interviews like he essays. Never miss a Gass interview.

John Irving -- The Jonathan Franzen of his day. He’s even got his own anti-difficulty rant. Poor guy. But I’ve always had a slight interest in his Garp book ever since it counted as a dirty book back in my grammar school days. But his fiction’s probably smart, even if not my cup of tea. I hold no grudges (am I known for grudges?) against readers of Irving, nor those of Eco. [Please, proffer me no reviews for this guy. He’s available in every Goodwill store in town]

* Diane Johnson -- Aside from Mr Graye, none of my goodreads Friends know this woman. She co-wrote The Shining with Kubrick. I didn’t get any magic words from her about her books, but her interview is one of the most sophisticated in the collection, sophisticated in the manner of afternoon tea, sitting and listening; I mean sophisticated like my well loved, well remember, well read, deep thinking professor of my Literature and 20th Century Thought course, Mary Bender, was sophisticated; and I mean much in contrast to Gass’s pugilistic sophistication, taking his language to the mat.

* Steve Katz -- Huh?

Joseph McElroy --

Could you say a bit about your working habits?
McElroy: Oh, I would be delighted to. I really would. I steal paper and pens and that gives my imagination a more disembodied feeling. My materials are like my time. I have stolen paper from the university where I have worked, from stationery stores in New York, Boston, New Hampshire. I write in long hand and type early drafts on yellow paper. Yellow paper with black type is pretty vivid it seems to me. I have stolen pens from real estate agents, insurance agents, banks, friends, children, and my daughter Hanna.

This interview took place before Joe became an international superstar with the publication of his novel Women and Men. You may have heard of it.

Toni Morrison -- I’ve no idea if this interview has been republished elsewhere. If not, Morrison fans will want it. Morrison stuck out like a sore thumb in this collection. I think there are reasons for that. Not that she doesn’t belong, but that there should have been more like her, however you parse ‘like her.’

* Tim O’Brien -- The most dislikable character in the book. He is a writer of “substance.” He asks rhetorically, Why, if Gass is so interested in language, he doesn’t do philosophy of language instead of fiction. If O’Brien wants to write about morality, why doesn’t he do moral philosophy. Which is, I believe, the kind of thing which Gass once threw back at Gardener. The truth is that both rhetorical questions are stupid. Whether one is thinking about morality or about language, one thinks about them differently within the different modes of thinking which are philosophy and fiction. But from the interview, I’m not sure that O’Brien can tell the difference between philosophy and fiction if he believes that fiction needs to be about an idea, a philosophy, something substantial. At any rate, the least sympathetic interview. [a documentary about O’Brien: http://biblioklept.org/2013/04/22/tim... ]

* Ronald Sukenick -- I owe Sukenick one of his books read. One day.


[Gaddis was interviewed for this collection, but he would not finally allow its inclusion (what is the author but the dregs of his work. His interview was later published in Joseph Tabbi's [book:Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System|28452].

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

McElroy: I like books that try to push the reader into a strange state of mind in which everything has to be relearned. The language of 'Plus' is that of a consciousness that is discovering the world all over again. I set out to take everything away from a person and write a drama in which that person would begin with some essence which could not be taken away and rediscover the world and reconstruct the self.