off to see the wizard

Looks like Harper's won this round in the battle of the Millhauser. Somewhere Deborah Treisman is shaking her bony fist while Ben Metcalf chuckles in glee. Becuase the Steven Millhauser story in the April Harper's, "The Wizard of West Orange," is, to my feeble mind anyway, superior to the eh story of his that ran in the NYer recently. Let's just not even go into why, in a world full of interesting and worthy writers, the two main magazines in this country that actually still run fiction are publishing the same writers again and again. Let's just not even worry about that for a second. And, I totally agree with Fields, who commented here some time ago that the NYer publishes some deadly boring fiction. Too many stories about regretful old men, if you ask me. Bleh.

Anyway "The Wizard of West Orange" is creepy and evocative and thought-provoking, an examination of science and the senses. It's almost like these two stories were two versions of the same thing, two different explorations of the same topic (the way sensory perceptions work or don't work) -- the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. "WWO" is the puzzle-y, thinky, intricate, idea-driven twin (inkeeping with the fiction Harper's tends to favor, no?), and "History of a Disturbance" is the more emotional, down-to-earth twin (and thus maybe more New Yorker-y). I think I mean that.

I tend to go for that intricate, thinky stuff. Writing that is almost like a puzzle. Vladimir Nabokov and David Mitchell come to mind. The kind of writing that is like nothing so much as a Victorian scientific chart -- detailed, mind-bending, beautiful. But then, I understand peoples' objections to it -- that it's cold, that it's unemotional. I don't think this is entirely true, but it's also why I can't only read that kind of thing (also, it strikes me that there is something very male about this kind of writing) but must sometimes dip into novels and stories that are more human, more baldly emotional, for lack of a better term. The Alice Munros and Jane Austens of the world. Then there is the coveted middle ground -- books that manage to do both. By this I mean something like Virginia Woolf, maybe Amy Hempel, almost Haruki Murakami if he would ever tie up his fucking story lines.

Does this make sense? I hope that it does. One needs better terms for these things. Are there terms for these things that I just don't know about, or can't think of right now? I assume so.

Of course the ultimate goal is to do this, to write something that tickles the brain in that delicious "Pale Fire"-y way, but is as emotionally satisfying as "Pride and Prejudice." To write something that makes the reader close the book at the end with a satisfied sigh. No problem, right? Yikes. Anyway, I have just managed to explain to myself the book I just wrote and the book I'm now trying to write, and why they are so different, and what I am trying to do in them (and probably failing miserably, but whatever). Thanks for indulging me.

(Oh, and while I'm at it. Remember the nice things I was saying about the new NYer website? Harper's, you need to get your game up. Your website navigates like a wheelbarrow in a field of mud. It's horrible. Please. Though I see an ad in this month's print issue that promises a shiny new website coming soom, with something called a "weblog"! What's this? Must be a new thing the kids are into! Nifty!)