You Don’t Love Me Yet v. New England White
presented by
ROUND ONE
You Don’t Love Me Yet
v. New England White
Judged by Jessica Francis Kane
TMN Contributing Writer Jessica Francis Kane’s first collection of stories, Bending Heaven, was published in the U.S. and the U.K. Her work has appeared in a number of publications, including McSweeney’s and the Virginia Quarterly Review, and has been serialized on BBC radio. She lives in New York. Connections to this year’s competitors: “Brock Clarke and I have emailed a few times, a correspondence that began after I read a short story of his in the Virginia Quarterly Review. I met him at a reading in New York where a drink of his choice was discounted at the bar. A $5 martini in New York! If that does not make me beholden to him, I don’t know what does. Brock and I also share the conviction that to have to specify a ‘gin’ martini is a crime.”
Recently in the small, suffocating world of short story contests, there was a bit of a flap. Zadie Smith, judging the Willesden Herald contest, decided not to award the prize. None of the entries was good enough, she said.
Well. The Rooster may not have such a fancy name. We may not have a single celebrity judge (actually we have several), and we certainly don’t have £5,000 to give away—but it is a contest nevertheless and the point of a contest is to choose a winner! From the best available options. Bestow encouragement, money, a live rooster, anything, on the writer whose next work you want to read. It’s unfathomable to me how anyone could see this differently. What harm could possibly come to your precious contest by just following the rules, choosing a winner, and hoping for a better batch of entries next year?
Fortunately for me, the Rooster does not have such a precious view of itself. It stands, in fact, against preciousness, so I will choose a winner of this round even though I didn’t care for either book. I’ve read and loved some of Lethem’s earlier work, so I was surprised by You Don’t Love Me Yet. The jacket copy declared “a raucous romantic farce” from the “incomparable Lethem.” Incomparable I agree with, but the promise of farce began to confuse me. I must be missing something, I thought, about halfway through. Long-married and raised on classical music, I was prepared to blame myself. But how in touch with romantic comedy and the alternative band scene should you have to be to enjoy a book? Shouldn’t it be the author’s job to make them irresistible? He almost had me with the Aparty, the book’s best section. Our apathetic, nameless band is asked to play, silently, at a party to which everyone will arrive with their own music and headphones (think “apart, y”). A funny idea, but after the Aparty, which goes, of course, terribly awry, the band’s sudden success derails the book as much as it derails the band.
Reading New England White was my first encounter with the work of Stephen Carter and after a disheartening few days, I found a way to enjoy it: I opened it each night the way you might tune into a bad TV show. I’d check-in for a chapter or two just to see what predictable thing the characters were going to say next. The book is supposed to be relentlessly suspenseful. I’d say that’s a nice euphemism for repeated foreshadowing. And I know Carter has interesting things to say about race relations in America, but how can you concentrate on them when they’re surrounded by silly prose: “Julia was kicking herself, and not only because she and Mary might both be dead in five minutes.” Don’t you just hate it when you’re about to be dead in five minutes?
So, two disappointing novels but the Rooster must go on! For me it comes down to this: I will read what Lethem writes next. I would not encourage Carter to write another work of fiction.
Advancing:
You Don’t Love Me Yet
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
KEVIN: I enjoyed New England White more than Jessica did, which is to say that I enjoyed it at all. Stephen Carter tries to write ambitious books about contemporary race and politics and then also tries to structure them around a mystery plot, which is an honorable idea. Every year I argue that books themselves aren’t either genre books or literary books. It’s the expectations of the reader that define them. Lots of writers work the DMZ between literature and genre with varying degrees of success (Lethem has attempted it frequently himself), but I’m afraid one of the obstacles to the success of any book is the expectation of the reader. If they pick it up expecting Robert B. Parker they’re going to say, “This is way too slow.” And if they pick it up expecting Thomas Pynchon they’re going to think, “Where are the funny dudes in the balloon?”
I don’t think that was Jessica’s problem here—I think she just didn’t enjoy it—but Carter writes about upper-class African Americans, a group underrepresented and under-examined in contemporary fiction, with terrific detail and insight. I think his voice is an important one. Maybe I’ll concede that suspense plotting is not his strongest suit.
As for foreshadowing, I once taught a writing workshop to a group of about a dozen adults, all of whom claimed they wanted to write “literary fiction” and we were discussing specifically how you move plot along and I made a reference to foreshadowing and one of them raised her hand and said, “What’s foreshadowing?”
I asked the rest of the class of aspiring novelists if they could give an example and got shot in the forehead with blank stares. So maybe Stephen Carter does a little too much foreshadowing only because the rest of the literary world is doing too little of it. Or maybe they’re just not teaching Shakespeare in high school anymore.
Anyway, wouldn’t it be funny if, without even knowing it, Jessica’s mention of Zadie Smith and the Willesdon Herald contest turned out to foreshadow future events in this very Tournament?
Gasp!
JOHN: Jessica appears to not only loathe New England White, but the paper it’s printed on, the glue it’s bound with, and even the carbon the ink was made out of, and bravo to her for saying so. I actually appreciated Zadie Smith’s openness about her responses to the finalists for the Willesden Herald contest as well. In both cases, I admire the candor.
And of course Zadie Smith was roasted for sharing her thoughts—not as roasted as that baby in The Road, but she was generally cuffed around for being elitist, clueless, and successful. In fact, it seemed as though the resentment flowed most strongly because Zadie has already “made it” to the top of the peak and was therefore obligated to reach a hand down and drag someone to the top with her, regardless of how she viewed the quality of the candidates. (Note that she put up the prize money out of her own pocket, so it’s not as though Ms. Smith is trying to strangle developing writers in their cribs.)
I bet I could dive into the Willesden Herald contest pool and find something I think is brilliant, but the point is that Zadie Smith didn’t and said so without, to my mind, being B.R. Myers-style hurtful or dismissive of the work that had been submitted. For me, it illustrated one of the fundamental tensions of public discourse in our society, namely that we seem to thirst for “honesty” and “authenticity” and yet we don’t want too much honesty. As you note, with your defense of New England White, it’s entirely possible to agree to disagree.
Except about the relative merits of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Barack rulz, Hillary droolz, and that’s all there is to it.