(from today's SF Chronicle)
Mentors, Muses & Monsters
30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives
View Larger ImageEdited by Elizabeth Benedict
(Free Press; 278 pages; $24.99)
Rumors of literature's death have been greatly (OK, slightly) exaggerated. Ditto recent proclamations that the anthology is even more rigorously mortis than the endangered lone-authored book.
The heyday of the anthology (that literary umbrella under which a group of writers huddle, reflecting on the same subject at the same time) began with a big bang in 2002, when the post-feminist group-rant "The Bitch in the House" became a surprise runaway hit. The literary-industrial complex - formerly known as publishing houses, some of which were actually housed in houses, back when their purpose was actually publishing books, not pumping profits into insatiable multinationals' maws - did what every successful corporation does. They found the thing that was making money for someone else, and copied it. A slew of "Bitch" copycats followed. As often happens with books (as well as cola drinks), the imitators were less popular than the original. "R.I.P. Anthology," the Molochs of Moneymaking declared.
Luckily for us, the publisher of "Mentors, Muses & Monsters" didn't get the memo. This anthology is that rare gem, a collection whose whole is greater, even, than the sum of its parts. Where else could you read musings-about-muses, accompanied by juicy tales from deep inside the writing life, by 30 of the best minds of our generation, all between the covers of one book?
Novelist Elizabeth Benedict (the collection's collector) writes a moving paean to her mentor, Elizabeth Hardwick: "On my own with Miss Hardwick, as I called her, I handed over four or five pages every time we met. I'd watch her read them in her wooden swivel chair, her auburn curls brushing her cheeks, lipstick always freshly applied. She liked but did not love what I wrote."
Jonathan Safran Foer, author of "Everything Is Illuminated," writes, "I was sixteen when I first met the poet Yehuda Amichai. It was the summer after my junior year of high school. I was still the star of the film of my life ... If I'd met Amichai at another moment ... it's unlikely that I'd be writing about him now. Or writing at all."
Julia Glass shares a delicious behind-the-scenes confessional of her terrifyingly intimate relationship with the unidentified "Deb," who edited Glass' best-seller, "Three Junes." In a particularly poignant interchange, Glass worries to Deb that she'll lose control at a book reading and start crying. "If you cry," Deb reassures her, "you'll sell ten more books."
The socially engaged, poetic novelist Sigrid Nunez writes about living with Susan Sontag's son - and with Sontag. That famously lazy slouch Joyce Carol Oates, who apparently found time to knock out her essay in the 45 seconds between finishing her last book and starting the next, writes about the absence of mentors in her writing life. Even her husband, she says with a mysterious lack of rancor, declined to read her fiction before or after its publication.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Jane Smiley dishes the vaunted Iowa Writers' Workshop. "I lamented that I wasn't a genius, would never be a genius, the years of genius were long past (I was twenty-seven). Barbara (twenty-four) kept reading our workshop stories for the day. She knew I would get over it ... Because of the parties. We had parties for everything."
In "Mad Hope and Mavericks" local heroine ZZ Packer offers a painfully personal homage to her guru, James Alan McPherson. "Before reading McPherson's work," she writes, "I hadn't realized how much I tensed up at reading any depictions of blacks, whether by white or black authors."
Before books, anthologies and I die, I'd love to share a raucous, hilarious, uplifting last supper with all 30 of these incisive, funny, candid writers. Barring that eventuality, reading "Mentors, Muses & Monsters" satisfies the craving for candid, high-minded literary conversation - and with half the calories.
Meredith Maran is the Oakland author of "Class Dismissed." Her next book, "My Lie," will be published in 2010. E-mail her at books@sfchronicle.com.
