Middlebrow: The 2 Poles of Wednesday Martin's "Primates of Park Avenue"

The publicity for Wednesday Martin's Primates of Park Avenue got off to a sensational start, with an excellent op-ed in the New York Times that managed to be both salacious and feminist alongside a tonne of press about the book's more titillating details. But then, with the book's release, things went a bit off the rails. The Times ran a scathing "Reporter's Notebook" piece questioning both the book's facts and its politics, and the New York Post went further, poking several holes in the book's chronology and suggesting that entire scenes had been fabricated. When the Post's accusations proved to be largely correct, the book's publisher, Simon & Schuster, announced that subsequent editions of the book would contain a disclaimer explaining that liberties had been taken with certain facts.

Compared to the op-ed that preceded it, the book itself is largely disappointing. Much of the op-ed's feminist critique of wealthy Manhattanites is lost in a haze of self-justification and Martin's increasingly unlikely attempts to claim outsider status in the world of the super rich. Martin's hook is that she is a kind of amateur anthropologist studying the foreign world of the Upper East Side. This theoretical framework, however, is very thin and is more often condescending than insightful. Martin's anthropology, though, gives overt expression to an internal tension within the book: that between exoticism and universalism. In so doing, Martin provides a particularly clear example of a narrative structure key to middlebrow entertainment.

At one pole, Martin's anthropological conceit requires her to represent the Upper East Side in as exotic terms as possible. If she is really to be an anthropologist teaching us about a foreign tribe, then she needs to convince us these people are meaningfully different from both us and her. Thus, much of the book is given over to hyperbolic (and vague) descriptions of the dizzying cultural differences between lower Manhattan and the Upper East Side and, later, between the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side. Those of us from other parts of the world may find it hard to believe that moving a few blocks within the same borough of the same city constitutes field work, but Martin continually insists on the dizzying culture shock she faces at every turn. The cars are different; the clothes are different; the way they pick up their kids from school is different; the way they exercise is different; etc. Never mind that the language, religion, geography, and food are the same--Martin suffers through months of culture shock. (This is a kind of provincialism perhaps unique to New Yorkers; only Woody Allen has been caused such psychological trauma by switching subway lines.) Tellingly, Martin does not spend much time analyzing the economic differences between Manhattan neighbourhoods. Doing so would likely reveal that the most meaningful difference between different New Yorkers, that of money, is largely irrelevant to her; she was super-rich all along, and thus is hardly a foreign observer of these other super-wealthy moms.

At the same time that her anthropological framework insists on exoticism, however, the way she deploys it erases all differences between not only people, but all primates. After describing each strange Upper East Side ritual she discovers, Martin turns to an analogous behaviour amongst some non-industrial culture or, more often, amongst some other species of primate. From there, Martin makes her most surprising move. She does not analyze the similarities and differences between the Upper East Side ritual and that of its anthropological analogue. Instead, she just asserts that they are identical and moves on. Thus anthropology is deployed to level all differences, not only between cultures but between species. The aggressive displays of female baboons are not an interesting point of comparison to the way women buy purses in New York; for Martin, they are the exact same thing, full stop.

The levelling of all difference reaches its climax in the book's final section, as Martin describes the loss of her third child during pregnancy. After conceding that there exist enormous differences in infant mortality rates between the global poor and the global rich, as well as between antiquity and today, Martin goes on to assert that all mothers' emotions (including those of non-human primates) are grounded in the same fear of a loss of a child. Thus individual and cultural differences are subsumed by something even broader than human nature--some kind of (gender-specific) primate nature. Martin may be exponentially better off than even an average American mother but, trust her, all mothers feel the same way.

These are the poles of Martin's anthropology: first she exoticizes a group of people; then she erases that exoticism so we might see that, deep down inside, we are all the same. This is the basic structure of really bad anthropology. But, more importantly, it is also the structure of a certain kind of middlebrow entertainment. The travelogue in which the narrator lives amongst an exotic tribe only to discover that we are all human; the sitcom which ends with the family reunited in the living room; the folksy Readers' Digest joke set on a distant army base: all three depend for their narrative logic on a quick trip into discomforting difference before a safe return to a generalized humanness. The specifics of Upper East Side life aside, Martin's main contribution to letters may have been to provide a strikingly frank example of this narrative progression.

Should Essays Be in Novels?

In one sense, the 1960s wave of postmodern writing was about stripping things away. Could one write a novel without coherent plot? What about a book with no rounded characters? Is it possible to write a mystery without narrative resolution? Could one write the start of a novel without the ending? While this is obviously not the only impulse in that first generation of postmodern writing, it is a theme that ties together figures as diverse as Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, William S. Burroughs, Donald Barthelme, and Gabrielle Garcia Marquez. All were conducting simultaneous experiments in writing stories without attributes that seemed key to writing stories. What, in the end, is the plot of Naked Lunch? Is the baroque mystery of The Crying of Lot 49 ever resolved? Is there any Vonnegut character who matters beyond the dialogue he utters? (As an experiment, try finding a great line in Slaughterhouse-Five and dropping it at random into the mouth of a character in Bluebeard. My money says that you won't notice the switch. This is not to insult Vonnegut, but rather to highlight what he is able to accomplish without the traditional mechanics of character.) This experiment in stripping away reached its logical endpoint with the Oulipo school: novels without the letter "e"; novels with only one scene; and, in Oulipo mainstay Italo Calvino's later work If On A Winter's Night a Traveller, a novel with only the first chapter.

If that generation of postmodernism was about stripping away, there is a more recent effort at altering the form of the novel, this one interested in crowding out. Take, for example, the novels of the late W. G. Sebald. In some respects, Austerlitz is postmodern in the 1960s sense--while there is some semblance of a plot, the plot is hardly the point; much of the novel seems to drift in the way a Paul Auster novel drifts. This plotlessness, however, is not the result of stripping away plot. Rather, the plot is crowded out by long expository passages on architectural history and the history of the Nazi ghetto system. At least to me, those are the memorable passages of the novel. Something similar takes place in the two novels thus far published by Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole. In Everyday Is for the Thief, long passages are given over to the architectural history of Lagos; in Open City, the most memorable passages come from digressions on art history and the spectacular closing set piece on the history of the Statue of Liberty.

What I would like to suggest is that these expository passages function something like essays and, to the extent that they are essays, the essay form is finding a home within the contemporary novel.

To be sure, there is at least one obvious difference between an essay embedded in an novel and an essay qua essay: The novel-embedded essay comes from the mouth of a fictionalized narrator. Do we know that such an essay presents true information? Why should we think that what Cole's narrator tells us about the history of the Statue of Liberty and ornithology is at all true? Why should we believe Sebald's version of Czech history when it is in the middle of a fictional work?

But, then, that experience of questioning is not terribly different from the essay as we have known it previously. When Annie Dillard tells us about her experience flying with a professional stunt pilot, we have questions about the fidelity of her recollections; we wonder if she can really remember such precise sensory details about an event so far in the past. Those questions are part of the aesthetic complexity of the essay form. Right back to Montaigne, the essay presents us with an interplay between the character of the author and the factual matter being recounted. It is at least arguable that this interplay is what makes an essay an essay in Montaigne's sense of the genre.

When a novel takes on the essay form, this complexity is heightened by a textual layer not overtly present in the traditional essay form: in Cole and Sebald we have 1) a seemingly nonfictional essay, 2) a fictional narrator, and 3) a real author. If we are being precise, those three levels also exist in any nonfictional text. In general, though, nonfiction ignores the middle level, while the novel foregrounds it. In a traditional essay we assume there is a true story recounted by a real writer. But of course in any act of writing there is a narrator--that is as true in a history textbook as in Mrs. Dalloway. However, we tend to ignore the fictionality (or, perhaps, "textuality" is the better word) of nonfictional narrators. We just see the text and the author. In a novel, the fictionality of the narrator is foregrounded, and thus another layer of textual and epistemological complexity is introduced.

If the chronology I laid out at the beginning of this essay is correct, these are early days for the novel-embedded essay; perhaps the aesthetics of foregrounding the essayistic narrator are still to be worked out. If the essay might develop further in the hands of novelists (and Cole's essay for The New Yorker on the    Charlie Hebdo shootings, "Unmournable Bodies," suggests it might), the novel might also benefit from the crowding out effect of embedded essays.

The Old College Try

I originally wrote this essay for Ming Pao Weekly, where it appeared in November, 2014.

I am going to read some terrible essays this month. Of course, as a high school English teacher, that is my job. And, of course, I will also read a few brilliant ones. But what makes this month's terrible essays special is that they will all be written for one purpose: to get into an American university.

            While we hear a lot about the failings of America's schools, America remains home to most of the world's best universities, and this fall thousands of Hong Kong students will try to win a place in one of them. As the Wall Street Journal reported in September, their parents will do what they can to ensure their success; Hong Kong donates more money to American universities than any other foreign country.

            Applying to an American college can be a byzantine process. Of all its odd elements, the most opaque is the "college essay." In its most common form, this essay is a 650-word personal statement answering one of five very broad prompts. This year they include recounting an experience of failure and describing a place where you are "perfectly content." The goal of the essay is, as a guide from the College Board suggests, to provide "a clear sense of who the writer is and what he cares and thinks about."

            You do not have to be an analytical philosopher to see some troubling assumptions here, and this is the first reason students struggle with this task. Why does a university want to look into my soul? Don't you just need to know if I am a good student or not? If the university is judging me as a person, which aspect of my personality should I put forward? And, wait a second, how am I supposed to accomplish this act of soul bearing in 650 words? Virginia Woolf may have done that once or twice but this is hardly a reasonable goal for the average 17 year old.

            These difficulties are multiplied for Hong Kong applicants. How is someone raised here supposed to figure out which qualities an American college wants to see? That is a big cultural gap to navigate. For those without perfectly fluent English, the risks get even higher. Is one awkward adjective going to signal an English-as-a-Second-Language learner and doom the application to perdition? Given the tiny numbers of students admitted to top American schools, you can imagine the pressure created by these sorts of guessing games. You can almost hear Hong Kong students shouting, "Just look at my high school transcript! That will tell you what kind of student I am!"

            The second reason students struggle with the college essay has to do with the word "essay" itself. Hong Kong students are, in general, great at writing essays in the sense that we use that word today: using evidence and analysis to support a thesis. Unfortunately (and this is the part nobody tells you) that is not what "essay" means in this case. Here, essay is used in its much older, French form meaning "to attempt" or "to try." We still have a version of this word in English (to assay), though it is rarely used.

This version of the essay falls somewhere closer to what we today mean by "memoir": A writer takes some small observation or recollection from her own life and builds a philosophical idea upon it. It is not meant to be a closely reasoned argument, but rather an idea or theory the writer is trying out: hence "to assay." 

            These kinds of essays are still around. David Sedaris, who was in Hong Kong in September for Story Worthy Week, writes comic versions of them, and the best of stand up comedy gets close to them. Podcasts like This American Life and Radio Lab do audio versions of the essay. While the genre can still be found here and there, however, it is far from the poems, plays, and novels that form the vast majority of a high school student's literary education.

Thus the college essay asks students to write a thing they have probably never studied, like asking devoted classical violin students to write a country song on the final exam.  And, I think it is fair to say, the Hong Kong student is asked to write in a self-revelatory mode much closer to the American cultural mainstream than to our own.

This essay you are reading isn't the kind of essay that ends with a clear solution to that problem. But you have a better shot at success if you know what you are aiming for. So, America-bound students, download This American Life and double-check your adjectives. It won't get you into Harvard, but it might make for a better essay.

What Do We Mean by "Informational Text," Exactly?

Much of the controversy surrounding the Common Core has been both nakedly political and embarrassingly provincial, the kind of "how dare those fat cats in Washington shove this down our throats" talk that gives the rest of the world an excuse to laugh at America. Within the language of the standards, though, is an odd inconsistency that speaks to a real dilemma about the purpose of language arts education and the ideology of literary analysis. From kindergarten through grade 5, reading standard 10 calls for students to read an appropriate range and complexity of "informational texts." Beginning in grade 6, however, the standards shift terminology without explanation; now students are asked to read an appropriate range and complexity of "literary nonfiction." Why the shift?

The Common Core declares its mission to be "preparing America's students for college and career." (This phrase is built right into the logo.) In terms of career readiness, the phrase "informational text," the phrase used only until 5th grade, is probably the better term. If informational text denotes a text meant to be processed for its content rather than its formal complexity, then surely the vast majority of workers read much more informational text than they do, say, poetry. Indeed, outside of language arts teachers and humanities professors themselves, it is difficult to think of a profession in which reading for formal complexity rather than information is at all common. I would prefer my airline pilot to have gleaned the key steps of the landing procedure from the manual before she proceeds to analyze the manual's sophisticated imagery.

What is perhaps more surprising is that "informational text" is the better term for college readiness as well. One of the biggest shifts from high school to university English is a shift from reading obviously literary texts (meaning, primarily, novels, poetry, and drama) to reading theory and criticism. It is not impossible (probably not uncommon) for a student to graduate high school never having read a word of literary theory, and then be faced on Day 1 of English 101 with Jacques Derrida (or, at least, Terry Eagleton). In English programs that work in the rhetoric or professional writing traditions, this bias toward informational text is even more pronounced. At Carnegie Mellon (where I taught for 2 years), the English 101 program is built around 8 weeks of argumentative and historical writing before the first introduction of a literary text. And the most common complaint is that incoming students have no idea how to approach criticism; they are used to John Steinbeck, not John Stuart Mill.

So, if informational texts will make up most reading for most people in college and in their careers, why does the Common Core switch to the narrower term "literary nonfiction" after the 5th grade? And why do they insist on it so strongly? Corestandards.org states directly in its "Key Design Considerations" for English Language Arts, that "Fulfilling the Standards for 6–12 ELA requires much greater attention to a specific category of informational text—literary nonfiction—than has been traditional." The Common Core is, in general, leery of directly mandating how its outcomes are to be achieved, so this comes as close to a direct order as anything in the Common Core Standards.

One possible reason is that literary nonfiction allows language arts teachers to appear to address the concerns of colleges and workplaces (that students do not know how to read difficult informational text) without really changing much. After all, if literary nonfiction is taken to denote primarily long-form journalism and historical writing, it is still narrative text. You can use all the usual techniques for studying a novel and simply add that these events really did happen. I'm not sure that a student essay on In Cold Blood would be much different if the class had been told the book was entirely fictional. If the goal is really to get students ready for college-level reading, shouldn't we be dropping the New Journalism and pushing students to read criticism and philosophy instead? (And there are ways to do just that. See Tim Gillespie's Doing Literary Criticism.)

But that is maybe too cynical an answer. Teachers wanting to push students toward informational texts need a path to get there, and literary nonfiction may be it. Literary nonfiction, as hybrid a genre as its name suggests, allows students to push into the world of informational text without suddenly losing all of the genre markers they are used to. In Tom Wolfe, we still have characters, settings, and plots; but we also have some actual historical events. In this sense, literary nonfiction may be the ultimate value-added teaching tool: you get everything you get with a novel plus it's true! (Or, at least, it claims to be true.)

Here, though, is where the ideological stakes get a bit higher. High school English programs are grounded in the formalist approaches of the New Criticism, and a bedrock assumption of the New Criticism is that it is the form of the text that matters. For the New Critics, we are not supposed to care whether MacBeth was a real king who did all of that stuff. We are supposed to care whether the pattern of clothing imagery holds together in an aesthetically pleasing way. To put it another way, truth claims are largely irrelevant to New Criticism. (The only truth claims that do matter are the very generic, "human nature ones"--truths about love and redemption and suffering.) If high school English abandons that position, it will be abandoning one of the key tenets of its own founding philosophy. 

This might be a great thing. An adherence to New Critical principles has certainly foreclosed a million interesting questions in high school classrooms over the years. Why not let students ask what Keats knew about the astronomy of that bright star or whether Upton Sinclair got the meatpacking details right? We might find some interesting answers to those kinds of historical, contextual questions, questions that go unexplored when teachers direct students to analyze metaphors and character development instead.

Those are interesting questions. But once you go down that road, you have a new set of problems. Because if we are no longer reading for form--if we are reading for history or philosophy or science--then what is the point of reading fiction at all? Why not just read great nonfiction? Because you can always analyze its form it you want to. Unless language arts teachers can answer those questions in a convincing way, the Common Core's slippery use of "literary nonfiction" may open up a path (at least a theoretical path) to the end of high school literature as we know it. And, in a world with far more great works of nonfiction than any of us will ever have time to read, maybe that's okay. If students graduated high school having read the essays of James Baldwin rather than Harper Lee's novelization of some of those same issues, would the world be a worse place? I am not sure it would.





References

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014). English Language Arts Standards >> Reading: Informational Tex t>> Grade 5. In CoreStandards.org. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RI/5/

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014). English Language Arts Standards >> Reading: Informational Tex t>> Grade 6. In CoreStandards.org. Retrieved  from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RI/6/

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014).  English Language Arts >> Introduction > Key  Design Consideration. In CoreStandards.org. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-  Literacy/introduction/key-design-consideration/

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014). English Language Arts Standards >> Reading: Informational Tex t>> Grade 5. In CoreStandards.org. Retrieved      from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RI/5/

Gillespie, Tim (2010). Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts.  Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Crime: Notes on Serial Season 2

What We Talk About When We Talk About Crime: Notes on Serial Season 2

Serial, Season 1 has been great fun. But has it done anything more than bring podcasting up to the level of a good Law & Order episode: pretty young woman murdered; ex-boyfriend as obvious suspect; alibi; alternate suspect; pop-philosophical discourse on the nature of crime and truth? Or, maybe, Serial doesn't even rise to the level of Law & Orderbecause, let's face it, that last episode was a let down. The D.A. giving a brief treatise on epistemology as we fade to credits is one thing when we know how the case ends; it is somewhat less satisfying absent the narrative conclusion and when we are left only with the sudden deus ex machina of a heretofore unmentioned serial killer on the loose.  So, as fun as it was, there are questions about the lasting merit of Serial, Season 1. Serial, though, did do something rare: it narrativized its own genre. And that critique of the true crime genre itself is what Serial needs to retain in Season 2.

There are lots of ways of thinking about crime, but consider for the moment 2 of those modes, one legal and one novelistic. To take the latter first, we often feel the need to understand crime on the psychological terrain of the realist novel. This impulse emerged well before the history of modern true crime, at least as early as Crime and Punishment. There we see Dostoevsky interested almost not at all in the victims of crime or the cultural or economic forces leading to crime, or even crime as it is usually manifested in minor acts of theft, assault, and vandalism. What he is interested in is the psychology of the murderer. Hundreds of pages are given over to the subtle shifts in perception and rationalization that might lead an otherwise normal young man to commit murder. Thus an event which might be understood in any number of ways is pushed onto the particular terrain of psychology, the terrain most home to the realist novelist.

What Dostoevsky did in fiction was taken up with a vengeance by the first generation of book-length true crime authors. The last 3 quarters of In Cold Blood are not so much about understanding the crime (we already know who killed the Clutter family and, at least in broad strokes, how they did it) as they are about understanding the inner workings of Perry Smith: How does a sensitive young man develop into a killer? The same is true of Mailer'sThe Executioner's Song, true crime's other major award winner. Though Mailer is more interested in cultural issues than is Capote, the emphasis remains squarely on understanding the psychology of Garry Gilmore. At psychology's logical endpoint, we find true crime's obsession with serial killers. Here, generally in the lowest brow of true crime, the apparently least normal of human minds are explored ad nauseum for some insight into how they work.

There are differences between the realist novel's version of psychology and that of true crime. Where the realist novelist generally focuses on the average and the bourgeois, the true crime writer looks for the lurid and the exceptional. But the basic psychologizing principle remains in place. As Jane Austen explores Mr. Darcy's mind, so Ann Rule explores the mind of Ted Bundy. In each case human consciousness is a focus in a way it is not in, say, historical writing or fairy tales. And thus true crime places crime on the psychological terrain of the novel.

At the same time we try to understand crime as psychology, however, there exists also a pull toward the discourse of law. If we are sometimes interested in thoughts and consciousness, we are also often interested in facts, evidence, and procedures. Here is the terrain of CSI and the first and last acts of a Law & Order episode. How do the police figure it out? How do the lawyers prove it? Will the judge allow the coerced testimony? Where the novel craves the subtleties of the human brain, the law craves the clear rules and hard evidence of the courtroom.

True crime holds these two discourses in tension. It tacks back and forth between the novel and the law, sometimes obsessing over the mind, sometimes cataloging the evidence. In the best works of True Crime (like In Cold Blood) this oscillation gives the text its pace and its structure: Are you bored with Perry's diary? Then let us return to the careful police work of Al Dewey.

The genius of Serial was that it narrativized this generic tension. Though, as the narrator, she took her turns at legal investigation, producer Sarah Koenig for the most part played the role of the novelist. Right from episode 1 she psychologized the crime, wondering how someone who sounded and behaved like Adnan could be guilty of such an act. She talked about jealousy and wondered if Adnan possessed a flawed character: were his youthful thefts from the mosque evidence of a criminal tendency deep within him? Adnan, on the other hand, objected strenuously to this kind of discourse, speaking for the law as the only way to understand the crime. He resented any discussion of his character and asked only that his case be adjudicated on the facts. Memorably, he became frustrated at the assertion that he seemed like a nice guy; he would rather his psychology be left entirely out of the discussion. In this way Adnan, the convicted felon, became the voice of the law, speaking for the very discourse that had found him guilty. And Serial became true crime about true crime; in it's two principal characters it pitted against each other the antinomies of the genre to which it belongs.

The key to Serial, Season 2 will be its ability to maintain this level of meta-discourse on top of the narrative requirements of standard true crime. And this is why Slate's listof 5 possible cases for Season 2 is a bit off the mark. Each of their cases bears the salacious, titillating, mysterious marks of true crime at its finest. However, none quite leaps out as an opportunity to address the larger stakes at play when crime is narrativized as entertainment.

This is such a case out there, though. The current child sexual assault case at Jakarta International School has everything Serial needs. There is a salacious crime; an investigation rife with errors to interrogate; rich, beautiful people brought low; and all of the sexy details you could want about opulent expat life. But there are also discourses at war here: Indonesian notions of law versus American ones; poor people's justice versus rich people's; Muslim ideas versus Christian; and, maybe best of all, Indonesian notions of American psychology versus American notions of Indonesian psychology. If Serial is to continue rising above the radio plays and true crime from which it grew, it will need to continue narrativizing its own role in these narratives, talking about how to talk about crime and punishment.