MAINSTREAM MARKET

In the last twenty-five years there have been
important changes in the North American writer’s
market. Twenty-five years ago we still had great
editors in the publishing houses of New York: Pat
Kovici at Viking, Arabelle Porter at New World Writing
and later at Houghton Mifflin, Maxwell Perkins who
edited Thomas Wolf. We had all kinds of great people
like Mr. and Mrs. Knopf who began their mom-and-pop
publishing companies on the dinning room table and who
had an unswerving devotion to literature. Since that
time, these publishing heroes, great editors who
encouraged young writers, even supported them,
{as in the case of Pat Covicci at Viking who gave
Saul Bellow $10,000 a year, until his commercial
success with The Adventures of Augie March.) have
died out. And large corporations have bought
out publishing houses, so that, editors are
little more than cogs in the wheel of big
companies. essentially powerless when it comes
to making choices which involve risk,
such as investing in an unknown, not fully
developed talent. Publishing has become more
ruthless, less personal. And the competition is
fierce. Writers in America must compete with
writers in China and Japan. What we have
now is a world market. Consequently,
certain kinds of talent will go undiscovered.
Twenty-five years ago editors were more
a part of the process, where as now,
for the most part, it is the sales forces who
decide which book or author will fly
or go by the way side. It’s because of
Oprah Winfrey that Schlink, the author
of The Reader, was discovered and
became a popular success over night. And
that is a great thing. For she now
provides a counter force to business as usual.
She enters the living rooms of America and is
payed attention to, on a whole range of subjects.
She has a massive following. She opens her
mouth and people listen. Because of her influence, a
writer like Schlink, who is a fine writer, and
not a writer for a mass market, can reach a
mainstream audience. Such is not the case,
for example, with Penelopy Fitzgerald, who
was a writer in whom there was no great
commercial interest. But suddenly she
caught on in England and then could become
more of a viable commodity here in America.
The further influence, these last twenty-five
years, are the creative writing programs
that have cropped up all over the country,
creating an industry of writing so that there
are now training grounds for would-be
writers where they can learn more quickly
the tricks of the trade. Through intellegence
and hard work young writers can once again
move along more quickly, finding a viable
place for themselves. Literature is actually
now being shaped and molded by certain
trends which are encouraged in the creative
writing programs in America’s colleges
and universities throughout the country.
Another aspect in reaching out to the large
audience has involved making use of young
talent to do research, turning the writing of
the big novel into an industry. In this way,
the research allows the writer to create books
in which the reader feels he can learn something
about say, Hawaii. This type of novel is
something unique to our time. In the late
fifties and early sixties, certain writers like
Phillip Roth, and before him Saul Bellow,
ethnic writers, who might have been on the
margins began to take center stage. To the
American Jewish writers, have also been
added the black writers, the Irish writers,
the chinese, japanese and Korean-American
writers as well as other significant minoriies,
the American Indian writer, for example.
All these groups have added to the pool of
writers readers turn to. Such constituencies
out of which these writers come bring boyancy
to the market, providing new readers. Novels
are only a part of the offerings. Top trade
list books include non-fiction by leading
scientists, in which the general reader can
become educated about the major
developments in, say, biology, the
hottest field in science in recent years.
I have become interested in a writer called
Kizuo Ishiguro who wrote Remains of the
Day and A Pale View of the Hills and another
writer whom I mentioned earlier, Bernhard Schlink,
a German, who wrote The Reader and
Flights of Love a new collection of stories
which are out. These writers are fine writers.
It is fortunate that they become best sellers
here and in England. I am more attracted to writers
who receive the Booker Prize in England or Irish
writers than I am in general to American writers,
probably because they carry on the tradition of the
novel, not simply as traditionalist, but as literary
beings who have been shaped and molded by their own
reading. These people I feel more of a bond with, and
so I read them. One of the unusual and beautiful
features of a writer like Kazuo Ishiguro is his
gift for structure, in his ability to generate
a narrative. In his early work his writing was
more closely linked to what he observed in
the world out of which he came, but, as he advanced,
he became more of a presence in England. He
was able to make the bridge between his own Japanese
roots and the English world of which he had become a
part. And so now, his work has about it a classic
aspect, and I believe that the general reader in every
culture would be moved and interested by
his work. He writes like an angel. And he has a
tremendous talent for structure. I would
suppose that a writer like Schlink in The Reader,
is a writer that’s here to stay, because he’s
writing something which is important about the
generation after the war in Germany, the generation
that looked at the world of their grown-ups and
thought about what they were doing then, when Hitler
was in power . And we are all caught up in
these types of issues as we experience ourselves
being compromised by our governments. It
seems to me that, what he has achieved in The
Reader is something that will be permanently
interesting. As for Ishiguro, I would suppose that he
will be popular, because movies can easily be made
from his work such as "The Remains of the Day" and
other immensely popular stories. I think that
September 11th has had a great deal to do
with an increase in people following blogs written by
journalists who work for among others the
New York Review of Books. I myself spend far
more time reading about the War than I do reading
literary work. In this respect, I take after my mother,
Pat Goodheart, novelist, author of a little known
radical feminist work, called THE TRANSLATOR,
published by Holt in 1979, and translator of
THE WORDS TO SAY IT, by Marie Cardinal,
published by Van Vactor & Goodheart, Publishers,
who, with my father, David Van Vactor are soon
going to introduce their new imprint, FIRELIGHT.
With my father David Van Vactor, Pat Goodheart
established CANTO, a literary magazine, a showcase
for new writing, in a context of established writers.
Later, after the grant cutbacks introduced by Ronald
Reagaon they reluctantly put CANTO on the shelf,
and developed their own small publishing company,
introducing in paperback such writers as WM
Spackman, author of ARM FULL OF WARM GIRL,
Tom Savage's THE POWER OF THE DOG and Francelia
Butler's THE LUCKY PIECE. It is growing up in such
a household where literature was part of life that I
developed my own interest in writing. This is how it
was I have been provided with a literary background,
a context in which to make judgments and develop
my own voice as a critic and future novelist.

Thank you mad painter.

My exgirlfriend told me about sand squirrels: They live near the beach on the dunes in the grass and collect sea shells. Alas they only exist in my immagination and possibly still in her's. I believed her story for almost the whole time we were together, which was five years. Strange, I sometimes think of those sand squirrels when I see real ones, like the other day in Finsbury Park, London.