Pages: 320
Publisher: n+1
Released: February 2014
Guest review by Melanie Page
In issue 10
of n+1 magazine, Chad Harbach
proposed that there are two cultures of American fiction: what is born of MFA
programs and the writing that comes out of New York City (and those who
specifically live in the city). A number of folks responded to Harbach and his
idea’ thus, the book was born. Slate
calls the debate between two groups “phony”
while The New York Times calls the
collection “serious,
helpful and wily book” despite some flaws.
MFA vs NYC is a collection of essays,
personal experiences, and answers to questions. The authors range from
successful, well-known authors like George Saunders and David Foster Wallace to
those less known who have yet to publish. Overall, the collection is unbalanced,
shallow, and draws upon a limited group of people.
Harbach’s collection is broken
into sections: MFA, NYC, The Teaching Game, Two Views on the Program Era, and
The Great Beyond. A number of essays have little introductory pieces before
them, pages that are completely black with white text. Here, writers provide
answers to the same questions (probably a survey emailed out to participants).
These moments are like writers stepping into a confessional booth on a reality
TV show: they are private, written as if spoken, and often express frustration.
The same writers appear in different sections, such as student-soldier Matthew
Hefti, who describes why he signed up for the Army after 9/11. A benefit (not
the reason he enlisted) was that Hefti’s MFA program would be paid for. Thirty
pages later, he describes what it’s like to go from Iraq to the classroom with
students different from him. Then, 227 pages later Hefti appears again to
describe how his writing is changed by the violence and death he sees. The most
memorable person in the collection, Matthew Hefti’s words must be sought out
across hundreds of pages. While reading, I would flip through the book, seeking
out the all-black pages, just to find cohesion in the authors who answered the
questions.
Instead, the big space is
reserved for essays, and I couldn’t help but notice that at least four of the
authors were associated with n+1,
including Harbach, Emily Gould (who spends a lot of time describing her
cat Raffles), Keith Gessen (Gould’s boyfriend, who also talks about Raffles),
and Carla Blumenkranz. The phrase that kept coming to mind was “literary
incest.” Of course Saunders and DFW drawn in readers, but the other authors
should be selected from a diverse pool of writers across the nation. The
collection suggests that there is n+1,
and then there are the other guys--some from New York, and many from Iowa. And
that’s the problem: with the number of MFA programs ever increasing, why is the
emphasis still on Iowa? The MFA workshop produces a variety of writers
depending on the faculty, location, individuals accepted, and if it’s high- or
low-residency.
While some of the essays have a laid-back tone, others are
highly academic in a way that made me struggle, thus another reason the
collection seems unbalanced. After reading about Raffles the cat twice, readers
get Elif Batuman, who expresses ideas like, “This is the kind of literary
practice James Wood so persuasively condemned under the rubric of ‘hysterical
realism’....Diachronicity is cheaply telegraphed by synchronic cues, and
history is replaced by big-name historical events, often glimpsed from some
‘eccentric’ perspective....” Huh? I felt like I needed a class just to read
Batuman, and, to some extent, Fredric Jameson, both of whom are responding to Mark
McGurl’s text The Program Era--though
readers of Harbach’s collection don’t have the context.
Imagine if Chad Harbach had put out a call for submissions
seeking essays that describe the MFA experience, the writer-in-NYC experience;
what new perspectives would he have encountered? Would his thesis differ from
that of the 2010 essay that started it all? If you look to n+1, you won’t find out, at least not in this collection.
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