what difference does it make to writers if public figures deny responsibility for their own actions?

At Penn this semester I'm teaching memoir, as I do (until next spring, when I'll be teaching the art of literary middle grade and young adult fiction). But I am also overseeing two adult linked short stories projects, a responsibility that has me working very hard to ensure that I bring more than intuition and experience, preference and instinct to these young writers. It doesn't actually matter that I, years ago, published many short stories or that I publish novels with young protagonists at their heart or that I have reviewed, for papers like the Chicago Tribune, many collections of stories. A deep grounding in the history of critique is also a prerequisite for this teaching job, I think. Readers' guides for well-chosen works. Deep dives into craft books and craft conversations.

When we say yes to doing something, anything, we have to commit to doing it fully. And so, I read, take notes, suggest, and ponder.

This week while reading Charles Baxter's immaculate Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction, I came across these words:

What difference does it make to writers of stories if public figures are denying their responsibility for their own actions? So what if they are, in effect, refusing to tell their own stories accurately? So what if the President of the United States is making himself out to be, of all things, a victim? Well, to make an obvious point, they create a climate in which social narratives are designed to be deliberately incoherent and misleading. Such narratives humiliate the act of storytelling. You can argue that only a coherent narrative can manage to explain public events, and you can reconstruct a story if someone says, "I made a mistake," or We did that." You can't reconstruct a story—you can't even know what the story is—if everybody is saying, "Mistakes were made." Who made them? Everybody made them and no one did, and it's history anyway, so let's forget about it. Every story is a history, however, and when there is no comprehensible story, there is no history. The past, under these circumstances, becomes an unreadable mess.

Incredible words, right? Written as if they erupted just yesterday, but they did not. Burning Down the House was first published in the 1990s, and Baxter begins this chapter, called "Dysfunctional Narratives," by talking about Richard M. Nixon.

What am I saying? Why I am putting this here? Because I suspect that the exhaustion so many of us are feeling right now is at least partially bound up with our sense of extreme confusion regarding the narrative we are watching unfold. How do we keep pace with it, untangle it, read it, learn from it, responsibly act on it, and keep moving in our own daily lives? How, especially, if so much of what is happening now rocks us with its strange familiarity (to use another concept Baxter later explores)? But weren't we here, already, once? Are we repeating our past?

Writers have responsibilities. As parents. As partners. As friends. As teachers. As assemblers and testers of narratives. As entertainers. As chroniclers of human (non-partisan, non-polarizing, finally binding) beauty. We are called upon to pay ever closer attention, and fatigue sets in.

And then we pick up a book by a writer like Charles Baxter. We think about what we will teach and how we will write. How we will carry the wisdom forward and on.

We carry forward, too, by the grace and goodness of friends. That work of art, that EXPLORE, in my office window there, in the photo here, was the gift of a Juncture memoir writer named Tracey Yokas. It has sat here, Tracey, right here, where I daily see it, since the moment I brought it home.

A sign of goodness. An unconfused narrative. Explore. Keep going. We can do this.

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Burning Down the House/Jane Mendelsohn: Reflections

Long before the current unkempt presidential election season was set into play, the novelist Jane Mendelsohn (I Was Amelia Earhart) was embarked on her fourth novel, the story of a New York City family whose wealth is the product of intense (even monstrous) real estate dealing.

The family patriarch is Steve Zane. His "... office towers, malls, skyscrapers, housing developments, business contacts, political connections" have yielded tremendous, soul-darkening privilege. They have set decay—often violent decay—into motion, against the backdrop of sizable luxury.

Everything is in jeopardy in Burning Down the House (Alfred A. Knopf, March 31, 2016). The scheming son has had it with the father. The adopted child is self destructing. The Eastern European nanny who has emerged from a terrifying kidnapping and years as a sex slave is asked to revisit the terrors of her past. People are disposable. And when Zane—now older, now reflective, now negotiating the tenderness of unexpected affection—seeks at last to draw a moral line, it may (or may not) be too late.

Fearlessly deploying past and present tenses, multiple perspectives, and the smack of white space, Mendelsohn creates a harshly glinting (a Mendelsohn word) milieu.

Here is Steve Zane himself, for example, on the savages now destroying our world.

What we are confronted with in today's world are cruel degenerate people with no sensitivity or psychological awareness. Savages with no feelings. Maybe it's always been this way, but it's worse now. They are in charge. We are talking about people who are so numb to their fellow human beings that they think they know better how everybody should live. And do you know what happens to people who know what's best for everybody? They destroy the world. That's what they do. They dismember and disembowel the individual and boil her flesh and entrails down in a stew with everybody else.

Here a character elucidates artistic ambition, envy, and ego:

They'd followed his successful career as if they were bird-watchers and he some common pigeon who had inexplicably been accepted by a flock of rare eagles. They no more believed in his talent than they believed that they themselves might be untalented. Over the years they had won prizes and fellowships and commissions and professorships. They had been invited to lecture and appeared in numerous footnotes. These achievements had been like snakebites on their egos, swelling them out of proportion to the rest of their beings so that their sense of importance bulged and tottered on top of them like extra heads, as if they were monsters in a fable, muzzled, drooling, snouted, skin split to reveal pink bone and yellow ooze.

Like Lidia Yuknavitch, Mendelsohn brings a rare poetic sensibility to indecorous circumstances, a loveliness of language to odious characters. There's no hedging of any bets here, no softening of the tale, no hitching of this plot to a book-club formula. Obscene wealth and uncured ambition are often ruinous combustibles. Mendelsohn, in Burning Down the House, will not pretend that they aren't.

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