{"id":10467,"date":"2013-12-02T01:40:09","date_gmt":"2013-12-02T05:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=10467"},"modified":"2013-12-05T17:26:28","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T21:26:28","slug":"rivka-galchen-the-late-novels-of-gene-hackman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2013\/12\/02\/rivka-galchen-the-late-novels-of-gene-hackman\/","title":{"rendered":"Rivka Galchen: “The Late Novels of Gene Hackman”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here<\/a> to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0webpage (this week\u2019s story is available only for subscribers). Rivka Galchen\u2019s \u201cThe Late Novels of Gene Hackman\u201d was originally published in the December 9, 2013 issue of The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Click<\/a>

Click for a larger image.<\/p><\/div>\n

Trevor<\/strong><\/p>\n

While I read “The Late Novels of Gene Hackman,” I am going to be quiet this week. This story is modeled on Roberto Bola\u00f1o’s “Last Evenings on Earth,” a story I love and reread in order to post here. As I put that post together, I realized that mostly what I was doing was praising Bola\u00f1o, not evaluating Galchen’s story, which I just didn’t like. Betsy, however, did. Not only that, but in the comments below she does an exceptional job comparing and contrasting the two stories. I simply have nothing constructive to add.<\/p>\n

Betsy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rivka Galchen\u2019s \u201cThe Late Novels of Gene Hackman\u201d is a bit of a Rorshach test. There are enough disparate elements in it to attract a variety of readers, as well as a slightly hallucinatory quality that comes from being on a trip or being at a party or being old, all of which comprise the setting for most of the story. I read it through at one go, didn\u2019t quit on it, enjoyed bits of it quite a lot, although I wondered the whole time where it was going. For instance, I liked some of the company, the old ladies in particular: Q, the hostess (Real Humans<\/em>), as well as the old feminist who knew a lot about birds.\u00a0There\u2019s a young writer as well and some men, not to mention the presence of Gene Hackman in the background.<\/p>\n

A bit of biography about Hackman (true or not) sets the inquiry of the entire story:<\/p>\n

When his old teacher saw him working as a doorman in New York, the teacher said he\u2019d always known he\u2019d amount to nothing.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The speaker contributes another bit of information about Hackman that she had always believed but which may not be true. Accurate perception seems elusive here; understanding seems to be approximate.<\/p>\n

I like Galchen\u2019s work. Part of my attraction to her fiction is that I know she trained as a doctor, probably to please her parents, and studied psychiatry, probably to please herself, and then quit the whole thing to become a writer.\u00a0I feel an attraction to her persona. She has a persona poets would die for.<\/p>\n

I also really, really liked her story, \u201cThe Lost Order,\u201d which was completely hallucinatory.<\/p>\n

In “Gene Hackman,\u201d a young writer (J) has gone on a junket to speak at a conference in Key West. She has taken her widowed Burmese step-mother, Q,\u00a0because Q seems a little down. The young writer appears to like her step-mother, perhaps because Q is quite hands-off, quite undemanding, quite self-sufficient. Q groups up at a party really well and makes easy conversation with whoever is at hand.<\/p>\n

Listening to Q talk at length about the peculiar health situation of a friend, J remarks about Q\u2019s oblique manner of communication:<\/p>\n

Now J was worried that Q didn\u2019t have health insurance; this was how her secrets usually manifested, like a tuba sound straying into a pop song.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s the human limitation of half-knowing that seems to interest Galchen. She seems to accept the necessity of listening like a psychiatrist as the requirement of understanding: listening for the wrong notes, listening for the threads. The limitations of perception are the province of Henry James, and so I remind myself that the difficulties Galchen presents are the same difficulties James presents, and I like James enough I would take him with me to a Desert Isle. Well, I would prefer to have the entire oeuvre, if I were stuck there.\u00a0I have the feeling that Galchen\u2019s work, when it is accumulated, is going to inform on itself in a similar way, and I look forward to that.<\/p>\n

An additional thread in this story is that the connections are approximate and off a beat: J\u2019s mother is her step-mother; the expensive omelet turns out to be cheaper than the one down the street; Key West used to be fashionable, now it\u2019s full of fat people; a person may experience relative comfort or discomfort depending on how thin or fat their company is; a patient is discovered to be missing a part, (but which part?); Gene Hackman writes novels (who knew?); a step-mother may be the real mother. So J, who is the speaker, may be half-reading her step-mother\u00a0— but which half is correct?<\/p>\n

In this story, a character at a cocktail party says, \u201cIncidentalomas. That\u2019s what you\u2019re trying to say. That lots of things are just incidentalomas.\u201d\u00a0He\u2019s talking about little cancers that go nowhere. Galchen is talking about how human communication contains lots of bits that actually go nowhere. It\u2019s finding the big pattern or the crucial wrong note that matters. Or the crucial right note.<\/p>\n

So I notice that toward the end J says of Q:<\/p>\n

She couldn\u2019t find her!<\/span><\/p>\n

Then she found her.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As if the key thing is that we are always looking for that knowing assurance, and that it comes and goes.<\/p>\n

But as I said, these Galchen stories have a Rorshach quality. You may see something entirely different here.<\/p>\n

Galchen\u2019s Page Turner interview with Willing Davidson is interesting in light of the discussion we have been pursuing regarding one writer using another writer\u2019s story as a model (here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Galchen says that a story by Roberto Bola\u00f1o (\u201cLast Evenings on Earth\u201d) is the starting point of this one. She says that the Bola\u00f1o story \u201ccoerces the reader into the son\u2019s fairly melodramatic take on life, a take which it then undermines. That story was my model.\u201d\u00a0Galchen flips the sex from father-son to mother-daughter, and she blurs Bola\u00f1o\u2019s story further in other ways.\u00a0The title is very different, as a starter. I sense that she means the Bola\u00f1o story is a jumping off place, particularly in the sense, she says \u201cof that Bola\u00f1o sort of arc\u201d.<\/p>\n

This seems a comment from The New Yorker<\/em> on how to use a story as a model.<\/p>\n

It will be interesting to hear from people who have read the Bola\u00f1o already.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker\u00a0webpage (this week\u2019s story is available only for subscribers). Rivka Galchen\u2019s \u201cThe Late Novels of Gene Hackman\u201d was originally published in the December 9, 2013 issue of The New Yorker. Trevor While I read “The Late Novels of Gene Hackman,” I am going to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[94,314],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-10467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-yorker-fiction","category-rivka-galchen"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-2IP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10467"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10510,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10467\/revisions\/10510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10467"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=10467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}