Tea at Trianon: Andrew Klavan’s Experimental Fiction

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, March 29, 2020

Andrew Klavan’s Experimental Fiction

From First Things:

Several years ago, Klavan embarked on another experiment: a novel in the form of a podcast. Then someone suggested that the podcast could be turned into a book—or, as it played out, a trilogy. The first volume, Another Kingdom (the title of which is also the name of the trilogy as a whole), was published a year ago, and I wrote about it here. The second volume, The Nightmare Feast, is just out.

You recall those YA novels by Klavan I mentioned? They were quite obviously—brazenly, even—written primarily for boys. Now imagine those boys some years later, about the age of Austin Lively, the thirty-year-old would-be screenwriter who is the protagonist of Klavan’s trilogy. Such readers, I speculated when Another Kingdom was published, are the ones Klavan has most immediately in mind for this project: not all young men, of course, but the many who seem to be drifting, seem to have lost their way. And this in no way implies that other readers (seventy-plus old men like me, for instance, not to mention women of all ages) will find nothing of interest here. In fact, the “lostness” of many young men these days, much analyzed in various sharply differing contexts, is a particular case of the lostness, the fallenness, that all humans share.

If you’ve read Philip K. Dick, you’ll recall his fondness for shuttling his protagonists back and forth between different realities (sometimes accomplished by positing parallel “time-streams”). This is at once powerfully disorienting (evoking the uncertainty about bedrock reality that most of us experience from time to time) and—for the reader, as opposed to the character who is being jerked around—very entertaining, sometimes comical. Near the start of the first book in the trilogy, as I explained last year, Austin Lively passes through a doorway in Hollywood “and suddenly finds himself in a vaguely medieval setting (‘Galiana’) and in immediate peril. Before long (via another doorway), he finds himself back in Hollywood. And so it goes through the course of the book, back and forth.” That pattern persists in Book Two, The Nightmare Feast. And the trick never goes stale: Disorientation and comedy are perfectly balanced. (Read more.)

From HIT:

Alfred Hitchcock had a big influence on me, and he was always the first guy to use some new development in a creative way: sound, color, slackening censorship. He didn’t just use it, he worked with it. I love writing prose and when I started out, novelists were the top of the creative food chain. Who would be the next Hemingway and so on.

That’s changed.

The novel reaches fewer people now, very few young people. But at the same time, these new technologies have come along. I’d be crazy not to use them. Plus, it forces me to examine what my strengths are, which will make the transition, which not. I preach this kind of creative flexibility to other artists, so yeah, I want to practice it myself. (Read more.)