Curtis White's Critical Reads

Curtis White has published seven earlier books of fiction, including Memories of My Father Watching TV. His non-fiction includes The Middle Mind, The Science Delusion, and We, Robots. His essays have appeared in Harper’s, Village Voice, Orion, Salon, Tricycle, and Playboy. Curtis will discuss Lacking Character on Saturday, 4/21, 3pm at 57th Street Books.

Gargantua and Pantagruel, by Rabelais - Rabelais’s giant heroes are so large that whole worlds can exist in their mouths, complete with the towns of “Larynx and Pharynx, which are two great cities such as Rouen and Nantes.” A direct inspiration for Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, but funnier and even dirtier. For writers, one of the principle joys to be discovered in Rabelais is the comedy of the inventory list, most notoriously Gargantua’s list of soothing torchculs (ass-wipes), culminating in (spoiler alert!) the neck of a goose.

Jacques the Fatalist, by Denis Diderot - Written in homage to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Jacque the Fatalist is about a Master and his servant Jacques during a long trip by horse (where they are going or why is never clear because, as Chuck Berry sang, they had “no particular place to go”). Jacques is something of a philosopher who advocates an extreme form of determinism. He believes that everything that happens must happen because it has been “written up yonder” not by God but through the idea that once the material world is set in motion everything that follows follows of necessity. But mostly what follows is comedy.

The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens - Diderot’s recipe for novel writing was: “Take four chapters of Don Quixote; a well-chosen paragraph of Rabelais; mix all this with a reasonable quantity of Jacques the Fatalist and change these drugs as needed.” Traveling through the English countryside and pausing at coach houses along the way, the windmill-tilting Pickwick (our picaro) and his Sancho Panza, the inimitable man-servant Sam Weller, provide humor, pathos, and outrage. The novel contributed to the destruction of Fleet Prison for debtors and the reform of the “poor laws.” Whimsical and ungoverned by any known convention of novel writing, Pickwick is Dickens’s first and sunniest work.

Cosmicomics, by Italo Calvino - Boccaccio’s tradition of the Italian folk tale is here delivered by way of postmodernized post-Newtonian physics. Sublimely smart, brilliantly angled, and oddly elegiac in its musings on desire, loss, and the nature of love.

At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O'Brien - For most students of English literature, the funniest book in the language. As Dylan Thomas put it, “This is just the book to give your sister—if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.” If you’ve been looking for a novel about a pooka, an Irish sort of devil, look no further.

Aberration of Starlight, by Gilbert Sorrentino - One of the truly great Irish novels written by an Italian-American. Funny, endlessly inventive, and really sad. For me, an irresistible combination. Its reputation as metafiction belies the fact that it has some of the most memorable characters in the recent history of the novel.

The Ace of Lightning, by Stephen-Paul Martin - The one obscure book in this list, it ought to be a national treasure, but I’m afraid Martin will have to settle for it being one of my favorite books of the last few years. A series of interconnected variations on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria just prior to World War I. Perhaps it has something to say about the relationship between fiction and history, but it’s difficult to do that heavy lifting when the storytelling is so deliriously pleasurable.

About Lacking Character: The man Paul Auster called “A master of bewitchments” and a founder of the fiction collective returns to the novel after 20 years.

In the spirit of “transcendent buffoonery” Curtis White’s miraculous return to fiction is fun in the extreme. When a masked man arrives in N—, Illinois bearing a letter and claiming its contents a matter of life or death, the small town–and the fabric of reality–will never be the same.