Ur-story: The Muddle's the Thing

[continued from previous post]

Much has been made of the use by Vladimir Nabokov ['VN'] (the dead writer, married to Vera, father of Dmitri, teacher of Thomas Pynchon at Cornell) of mirror subjects, or doppelgangers. In Pnin, he employs one Vladimir Vladimirovich ['VV'] who, it must be remarked (because it has so often been), bears considerable affinity with VN, to narrate the rather simple, sentimental story of Pnin. VV is a fictional character who is something like VN—but not to be identified with him. The details of VN's life and their similarity with those of VV are not at all relevant here. Nor is the question of who was the real-life model for Pnin—though much ink has been spilled doing precisely this. We are more concerned about how Pnin works.

VV, the narrator, presents Pnin as a compelling, sympathetic character whose story, though slightly comic, is relatively simple and uncomplicated: Pnin, 57 year old untenured professor of Russian at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, takes wrong trains because he uses out-of-date schedules. The idioms and nuances of English, his second or third language, confound him. He is absent-minded and myopic. He has heart seizures that send him into reveries about his past. He moves from rooming house to rooming house practically each semester. He lectures to his classes from printed texts, rarely looking up to acknowledge his students. He puts calls on library books he has already checked out (and which nobody else on the campus could possibly want). He has all his teeth pulled and enjoys the improvement. He is genial. He makes a near-heroic effort to adjust his old world manners to new world customs. He is an old school scholar (running down endless strings of obscure footnotes) in a pragmatic, career-oriented education system. He misses his ex-wife, the feckless Liza (with whom, we are led to believe, VV had an affair), and wants desperately to connect with her teenaged son, Victor—an incipient artist. Pnin is a former social acquaintance of VV. He, like many in his rootless, emigre community, is nostalgic about pre-civil war, Czarist Russia. He enjoys brief, cooling swims in summer. He is a gracious, generous host. He loses his job at Waindell College when his benefactor, Hagen, takes a better position at another college.

"[Y]ou'll be glad to know that the English Department is inviting one of your most brilliant compatriots, a really fascinating lecturer—I have heard him once; I think he's an old friend of yours."

Pnin cleared his throat and asked.

"It signifies that they are firing me?"

"Now, don't take it too hard, Timofey. I'm sure your old friend—"

"Who is old friend?" queried Pnin, slitting his eyes.

Hagen named the fascinating lecturer.

Leaning forward, his elbows propped on his knees, clasping and unclasping his hands, Pnin said:

"Yes, I know him thirty years or more. We are friends, but there is one thing perfectly certain. I will never work under him." (169-70)

We also learn along the way that Pnin was separated from his former youthful crush, one Mira Belochkin, by the Russian civil war and revolution. She, a Jew, was slaughtered at Buchenwald.

What do we know about VV, then? For all intents and purposes, Pnin disappears at the end of Chapter 6, and VV steps forward and takes over Chapter 7 to justify his narrative: "My first recollection of Timofey Pnin is connected with a speck of coal dust that entered my left eye on a spring Sunday in 1911." (174) He claims to have met Pnin socially a couple of times in and around old St. Petersburgh, though Pnin refutes this. As ex-pats, they met again in Paris. There, VV also met Liza, an incipient poet. She sends VV her poems. He tells her they are bad and she should stop composing. Later, VV reviews them in her room—"the cheapest room of a decadent little hotel"—and, apparently, they have a brief, torrid affair: "In the result of emotions and in the course of events, the narration of which would be of no public interest whatsoever, Liza swallowed a handful of sleeping pills." (181-82). A few weeks after that incident, Liza importunes VV for his advice on a rather pedantic marriage proposal by Pnin. She tells him: "I shall wait till midnight. If I don't hear from you, I shall accept it." (182) He shuns her seemingly desperate plea, and she marries Pnin. VV, it seems, is a bit of a cad. Later, Liza "told Timofey everything," and he pardoned her. (184) VV meets Pnin some years later, and Pnin insults him: "Now, don't believe a word he says... . He makes up everything. ... He is a dreadful inventor." (185) In the forties, VV and Pnin (now divorced from Liza) meet in New York, and all seems to have been forgotten. Later, VV accepts the English Department position at Waindell and, indeed, offers Pnin a job:

"When I decided to accept a professorship at Waindell, I stipulated that I could invite whomever I wanted for teaching in the special Russian Division I planned to inaugurate. With this confirmed, I wrote to Timofey Pnin offering him in the most cordial terms I could muster to assist me in any way and to any extent he desired. His answer surprised me and hurt me. Curtly he wrote that he was through with teaching and would not even bother to wait till the end of the spring term." (186)

When VV arrives at Waindell, after an evening of lampooning Pnin with another colleague, he crank calls Pnin and, the next morning, stalks him as he's leaving town. That is the last we see of Pnin and his dog, and that is the end of the book.

The two men have a long and complicated history. Both remember fondly their pre-war days in Czarist Russia. VV seems to have adapted to the American ways and language, while Pnin still retains his Old World manners. VV seems to have been more successful ("brilliant", "fascinating lecturer") as well. And then there's the matter of the woman. Yet, this does not explain why VN needed to interject VV into the narrative to tell the story of Pnin.

Or, to frame the question another way: Why does VN need to use this so-called post-modern technique? What purpose does it serve? Stylistic devices, it seems to me, need to have some rationale. It's like the twenty-minute drum solo in Iron Butterfly's "In-a-gadda-da-vida": sure, it's long and technically show-offy, but how does it contribute to the song? Is VN merely being self-indulgent, here? Showing off? Let's look:

We know VV is not entirely reliable. As I pointed out in the last post, he relates things he cannot possibly know. Even Pnin knows this ("He makes everything up.") And to drive the point home, we are told in the last paragraph of the book that VV is being told "the story of Pnin rising to address the Cremona Women's Club and discovering he had brought the wrong lecture." (191) Of course, we recall that the first chapter is about Pnin taking the wrong train to Cremona where, as he is about to rise to deliver his lecture, he has a vision about the past (including his parents, an aunt, a friend killed by "the Reds", and "shyly smiling, sleek dark head inclined, gentle brown gaze shining up at Pnin from under velvet eyebrows, sat a dead sweetheart of his, fanning herself with a Program. Murdered, forgotten, unrevenged, incorrupt, immortal..." (p.27) Of course, this is Mira.).

Pnin is, at first face, a comical character, often the butt of jokes and lampoonings on campus. This is the way the world—especially the American world—sees him. VV invents stories about Pnin's inner life that show Pnin's endearing side. He shows Pnin's pain (as, e.g., about Mira); his pride (as, e.g., his proposal and dignified commitment to faithless Liza); his poignancy (as, e.g., when he connects with Victor, tosses out the soccer ball he'd bought for him when he realizes it would be inappropriate, and receives as a trophy a beautiful punch bowl which he nearly breaks in one of the few really suspenseful moments in the book); his passion (as, e.g., for the arcana of Russian culture). This takes an act of the imagination, and however unreliable it might be, is, perhaps, the only way one human can come to empathize with another. And, VN seems to be showing us, it is the lack of precisely this sort of sympathetic imagination that resulted in the unfathomable horrors that defaced the 20th Century:

"In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself, during the last ten years, never to remember Mira Belochkin—not because, in itself, the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind (alas, recollections of his marriage to Liza were imperious enough to crowd out any former romance), but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consicousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible." (134-35)

Art and literature—i.e., The Imagination—are the best we have for overcoming our aloneness and our alienation, for transcending our own egos and entering into the experience of another.

According to James Wood, in How Fiction Works, "the history of the novel can be told as the development of free indirect style." In this regard, he cites Pnin and shows how Nabokov sort of backs into a kind of FIS almost by accident in Wood's close reading of the book's description of a nutcracker as "the leggy thing." ("Nabokov is here using a kind of free indirect style, probably without even thinking about it." Section 20). Wood, here, misses the impact of VN's having VV mediate the narrative of Pnin's interiority. It doesn't matter whether VN gets out of the way and gets Pnin's words right. The unreliability of the narrator is key here—it means something—because VV is attempting something quite impossible: sympathetically imagining and portraying another person's thoughts and memories, entering the experience of another. He's going to get it wrong. [I'm planning a subsequent post comparing the free indirect style and the writer's notion of 'voice'.]

Pnin is mediated by VV's narrative, and VV is imagining another being, another mind. It doesn't matter if VN gets the language of Pnin right because we know VV doesn't (and can't) get it right. Here, in a very real way, VN's style is precisely the substance. VN is more of a master of the free indirect style than Wood can see. That is to say, Wood is just plain wrong here: VN employs the free indirect style to bring us the character of VV vainly trying to imagine the inner world of Pnin! [One thinks of such cliches as nesting Russian dolls, and 'riddle[s] wrapped in [m]ysteries inside enigmas'.] Wood is right only to the extent that VV's (not VN's) use of 'thing' represents a success at imagining the inner life of Pnin. VN is entirely successful at representing the language and thought of VV (which Wood utterly fails to see).

VV is necessary thus. It is his effort—the supreme spiritual effort, if you will, of attempting to imagine and understand and empathize with another person's interiority—that matters. And, for the record, it has nothing to do with faith or dogmatism.

The muddle's the thing.

Ur-story: A Portrait of the Scholar as an Old Pnin

The first major issue confronting the novel writer is how to frame the story he wants to tell. How, if at all, does the writer naturalize the text? How, if at all, does she disguise the fictional artifice? What is the justification for this book's being here? Why, in other words, is this novel being written? Let me explain.

Legion are the ways in which writers seek to justify the existence of their fictional works. Some are organic to the text, others not so much. Thus: this is a collection of letters (epistolary novels like Pamela and Shamela) or diary entries (think: Adrian Mole, Bridget Jones, Tintin); this is a confession (The Book of Evidence, Lolita) or a memoir I've hacked out for posterity or simply to pass the time (Malone Dies); this is a story told to me by someone I trust (or don't); this is an account of something that happened to me or somebody else; I pieced this story together from a variety of sources and this is what I discovered; despite what you may have read in the papers or the legal casebooks, this is what really happened; here's what I saw (Sherlocke Holmes); here's what the butler saw; etc., etc. These are, by and large, attempts to disguise the artifice of the fiction: to make it seem true (even though we secretly know it isn't).

Then there's another set of works that make no attempt to justify themselves; the writer does not trouble over the whole notion of a frame story. You are 'in' the story once you start reading. They might begin in media res, or, e.g., 'Once upon a time' or 'It was a dark and stormy night' or [insert your favorite filmic establishing shot here] or 'Stately, plump Buck Mulligan...' or 'As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect,' or however. Naked stories, if you will, which, by their very being, imply they are works of fictional art and are to be taken as such: "This is unashamedly an artifice," they seem to say. "It participates in the artificial category: fiction." It may even say so and be titled something like: Netherland: a novel, just so there's no mistaking it.

Some works, however, try a third approach by having the story purportedly told, narrated, dictated by purportedly dead people: The Third Policeman, where it works to marvelous and compelling comedic effect; Transparent Things, where it works to brilliant, technical effect (about which more later); and The Lovely Bones where it doesn't work at all—or rather, to be generous, works to cheap, sentimental effect. One also thinks of the Torah a/k/a the Pentateuch, purportedly written by Moses whose account of his own death and burial at the age of 120 on Mt. Nebo is particularly compelling.

This is by no means systematic, but you get the drift.

Some few works problematize the whole issue by inserting the author (or purported author or implied author) into the story as a character: one thinks here of Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star, e.g. In my most recent Ur-story post, I showed how William Gillespie used a Nabokovian Pale Fire pastiche-type strategy to achieve an original effect, challenging the reader to piece together the justificatory framework and with it infer the meaning herself.

Nabokov is notorious for playing around with frameworks. Case in point: Pnin. The story is ostensibly about a bumbling, old world, scholar at a small, upstate New York liberal arts college. For the first few pages, we read what appears to be a fairly standard, straightforward, third-person close narrative about Professor Timofey Pnin, a Russian emigre who fled both Stalin and Hitler. We pick up tidbits about his history; we enter his private thoughts; we learn things he is unaware of; we see him in defining, anecdotal moments: in other words, we encounter him in his aloneness.

Along the way, however, we get a few hints that things are not all they seem: "Now a secret must be imparted," we read on p.8 [the second page of text] of Vintage Books edition; "How should we diagnose his sad case?" (p.13). We gloss over these casual references, perhaps thinking them to be rhetorical devices or flourishes of the master stylist we know VN to be. But then, on p.16, our sensibilities are shocked when we hit this sentence:"

On the third hand (these mental states sprout additional forelimbs all the time), he carried in the inside pocket of his present coat a precious wallet with two ten-dollar bills, the newspaper clipping of a letter he had written, with my help, to the New York Times in 1945 anent the Yalta conference, and his certificate of naturalization..."

"Whoa, whoa whoa!" we think (after appreciating how VN is able to work the word 'anent' so naturally into the sentence), "with 'MY' help? Who the heck is this person interjecting himself into the narrative, referring to himself and how he 'helped' Pnin? How can he possibly claim to know these facts about Pnin's private, interior life we've been reading? This must be a mistake, a typo or something. A slip of the tongue if you will. Or else it's just Nabokov being Nabokov. What an ego, eh?" And we let it pass again, but a little more skeptically this time.

Further on, on p.19, we read: "What was our poor friend to do?" Again. Is this 'I' making us complicit in the narrative, or is this merely the rhetoric of the royal 'we'? Our Spider-sense is aroused. Then, on the very next page, we are completely confounded by this passage:

"My friend wondered, and I wonder too. I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego. The sensation poor Pnin experienced was something very like that divestment, that communion. He felt porous and pregnable. He was sweating. He was terrified. A stone bench among the laurels saved him from collapsing on the sidewalk. Was his seizure a heart attack? I doubt it. For the nonce I am his physician, and let me repeat, I doubt it. My patient was one of those singular and unfortunate people ..."

This has been no mistake, we realize. The narrator has now established himself as a full-fledged character in this narrative. But this is problematic. Who is he? He knows too much; he is telling us things he cannot possibly know about Pnin's inner states. He must be imagining things, or projecting. What gives? How can he be trusted?

So we step back, reflect, and think to ourselves, 'Well, maybe this is some sort of philosophical disquisition on the problem of 'other minds' or something?'

We read on to see. More clues, like breadcrumbs, are scattered about throughout the text:

"Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically. Had I been reading about this mild old man, instead of writing about him ['AHA!' we shout], I would have preferred him to discover, upon his arrival to Cremona, that his lecture was not this Friday but the next." (p.26)

And that is Chapter One. Here, the implied author drops another veil (to mix the metaphors): He is ethical, he implies, adhering to the 'truth' of the situation and not his more sadistic predilections.

Oh, Vladimir Nabokov (vlah-DEE-mur nuh-BOH-cough), you're such a scamp, playing around with our perceptions, interjecting complexities and confusions into an otherwise simple story-line. What are we to think?

[continued next post up]

True History of the Kelly Gang

I've been reading True History of the Kelly Gang, the Booker prize-winning novel by the Aussie Peter Carey. I enjoyed it much more than his Jack Maggs. History is told in the delightful Ozzie brogue of the famed outlaw. It falls into that category of fictional account of a historical personage (see Coover, The Public Burning; DeLillo, Libra). Of course we know it's fiction and not history, but we suspend our disbelief, immerse ourselves, and imagine we are seeing events through the spongeworthy eyes of a barely literate, biased observer/flaneur.

I am put in mind of a group of contemporary novels in the tradition of Crime and Punishment: Vladimir Nabokov's classic and controversial Lolita (1955), John Fowles's The Collector (1963), Evan S. Connell's The Diary of a Rapist (1966), John Banville's Booker-nominated The Book of Evidence (1989), and James Lasdun's The Horned Man (2002). All are told in first person—though The Collector has a middle section told from a POV other than the protagonist. If you need a cubby to put them in, you could call them "psychological realism X" (for X-treme), but I don't read books because they fit into some convenient category. I read them because they're well-written. And this group is superb.

Everyone knows Humbert Humbert's melancholy confessional of the stalking, gaining, and eventual losing of Lolita. The Collector, Fowles's first novel, is the story of a methodical, lottery-winning butterfly collector who connives to upgrade his quarry to include a beautiful young art student and possibly others. Diary follows an obscure civil servant's descent into the depths of resentment, self-loathing, misanthropy, and ultimately criminality. The Book of Evidence is written as a mocking confessional by the murderous and notoriously unreliable art thief Freddy Montgomery. The Horned Man, in my opinion the best of a superior lot, drops us behind enemy lines and right smack in the mind of a paranoid, radically alienated professor of gender studies.

None of the protagonists in these five books is likable; you wouldn't want to have a beer with any of these murderers, kidnappers, rapists, thieves, or madmen. You can't identify with them—unless you are prepared to delve into your own dark places (and that, after all, is the point, the challenge of such books). They are complex characters with strange motivations and bizarre rationalizations; none is quite forgettable. The books are profound. Each in its own way is concerned—and here is where we escape the pigeon holes and easy labels—with beauty and the possibility of transformation. Excerpts:

Nabokov:

"You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power." (19)

Fowles:

"Seeing her always made me feel like I was catching a rarity, going up to it very careful, heart-in-mouth as they say. A Pale Clouded Yellow, for instance. I always thought of her like that, I mean words like elusive and sporadic, and very refined—not like the other ones, even the pretty ones. More for the real connoisseur." (3)

Connell (if you don't know him, you should):

"To the mirror once again. Why can't I break this habit? I look for my face so often, think that my significance ought to be reflected but there's not much change. I note only that secrecy goes well with my appearance. Rigid pose. I can't say that I'm graceful, but my eyes are black & full of interesting lights. Also I do think that as I've matured my features have acquired—umm, what? Am I more impressive? I've noticed that others stop talking when I approach. And yet few learn from a face what's happening in the deeps of the soul. My perception must be singular, not much escapes me. However as I think about that it's not surprising—no, not at all. Why, compared to me most men are as simple as cattle. All that troubles me, in fact, is that I'm not able to feel certain emotions, ordinary states that others enjoy. Familiar feelings I used to know. Happiness & sorrow. I've lost the power to absorb them.

... "So ends the month & leaves a taste of copper on my tongue." (239-40)

Banville:

"What did I feel? Remorse, grief, a terrible—no no no, I won't lie. I can't remember feeling anything, except that sense of strangeness, of being in a place I knew but did not recognise. When I got out of the car I was giddy, and had to lean on the door for a moment with my eyes shut tight. My jacket was bloodstained, I wriggled out of it and flung it into the stunted bushes—they never found it, I can't think why. I remembered the pullover in the boot, and put it on. It smelled of fish and sweat an axle-grease. I picked up the hangman's hank of rope and threw that away too. Then I lifted out the picture and walked with it to where there was a sagging barbed-wire fence and a ditch with a trickle of water at the bottom, and there I dumped it. What was I thinking of, I don't know. Perhaps it was a gesture of renunciation or something. Renunciation! How do I dare use such words. The woman with the gloves [the subject of the stolen portrait] gave me a last, dismissive stare. She had expected no better of me. I went back to the car, trying not to look at it, the smeared windows. Something was falling on me: a delicate, silent fall of rain. I looked upwards in the glistening sunlight and saw a cloud directly overhead, the merest smear of grey against the summer blue. I thought: I am not human. Then I turned and walked away." (119)

Lasdun (seriously, get this book; treasure it):

"I was unaware of any nocturnal visitation, human or otherwise, but when I emerged at dawn, bleary and unclean, I realized even before I caught sight of myself in one of Trumilcik's strategically placed mirrors that something truly catastrophic had come to pass.

"Forcing myself to stand still and confront my reflected head, I had the sensation of fainting rapidly through successive layers of consciousness, but without the luxury of passing out.

"A thick, white, hornlike protrusion had grown out of my forehead.

"I knew, of course, that this could not be so; that I was either still asleep and dreaming it, or that the mounting pressure of these past few days had made me suggeistible to the point of hallucination. But this knowledge didn't remotely lessen the terror I felt as I stared at my image in the mirror. Gingerly, I raised my hand to the protrusion, praying that the sense of touch—less given to hysteria, perhaps, than that of sight—would prove the monstrosity an apparition and make it vanish. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect. The thing felt appallingly real: hard, rock-smooth, and icy cold.

"Though I was no longer in pain, I felt as though I had become extremely ill. Something had shifted in my relationship to my surroundings. Physically, materially, they were unchanged, but in some essential way they seemed to be receding from me, or I from them. It was as though I had switched sides in a train, and what once rushed to meet me had started slipping away. I looked at the furnishings with an odd feeling that I recognized after a moment as yearning. I wasn't so much seeing these ordinary things—the black-stained chairs, the sunflower clock, the pottery mugs, the five- to seven-cup Hot Pot coffeemaker—as yearning for them. I was filled with nostalgia for them as if my world and theirs had already parted company." (182-83)

True History of the Kelly Gang has no such pretensions. It is a well-told, fairly straightforward tale. The protagonist is made sympathetic, unlike those above, by his honest motives (his love of his mother, his wife, and his daughter) and his lack of guile. Though he is a criminal, his side of why he did the notorious things he did has some plausibility given the authenticity and sincerity of his voice—this, of course, is a tribute to Carey's skill. Ned Kelly is not portrayed as mad, but is driven by circumstances further and further into exile from an unjust and corrupt colonial society. True History has none of the psychological complexity nor transformational beauty—and, indeed, horror—of the other novels. It is, by all mean, a great romp. A ripping good yarn. Epic even. Fully-realized, as they say. A good read; I can highly recommend it. But I will not go back to it again and again. The style is wonderful: there are quite good turns of phrase and the voice is winning. The protagonist is charming and the action is riveting—it keeps you reading. Never fails to entertain. Yet, despite all its skillfully-executed, writerly craft, it is not art.

[For context on this point I refer you to the ongoing discussion raised by our post re: Jill Lepore's comparison of history to fiction in last week's New Yorker here and over at Dan Green's outstanding blog The Reading Experience.]

No, Not that James Woods

Disambiguation. A good word I learned, frankly, from Wikipedia.

The other James Wood (no 's') gives a close analysis of the free indirect style in a passage from Henry James's What Maisie Knew. He focuses on one word in one passage that shows James's true mastery; that is to say, he shows us how James steps back and allows us to see the scene through the eyes of Maisie through the use of one perfectly-modulated word: embarrassingly. [Of course, you can hear the chorus of MFA students bellowing in the background about the use of -ly adverbs.] Wood then traces the use of this technique back, interestingly, to the mock-heroic poetry of Alexander Pope. All he is really saying is: the writer needs to stand back and let the language reflect the character's own POV. The writer's style interferes with our being able to see the world through the eyes of the characters. With any given word or phrase or literary device, as a writer, ask yourself: "Is this my character speaking or am I intruding?" Call it "method writing"—after so-called method acting. The greater artistry, Wood is telling us, comes in getting the characters just right.

Now, what's fun about Wood's first chapter, called "Narrating", is his delicious take on other writers. He takes Updike to task for grievous authorial interference (or, offsides in soccer jargon) in Terrorist. He takes a first run at Nabokov, in Pnin saying: " Nabokov is here using a kind of free indirect style, probably without even thinking about it." I guess VN got lucky, huh? Wood notes how Faulkner's, Joyce's, and Shakespeare's characters all manage to sound like Faulkner, Joyce, and Shakespeare respectively.

But then, then my friends, he breaks out the stiletto: "David Foster Wallace is very good at becoming the whole of boredom." Pow! Do you get the feeling he doesn't particularly care for DFW? Wood praises Chekhov's use of what he calls the unidentified free indirect style, or the "village chorus." Then, he shows how Wallace takes that style to extremes in imitating the jargon and mangled lingo of Madison Avenue. Wallace's predecessors, he notes, include Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Pynchon, and DeLillo who let the "debased" language of the contemporary American idiom debase their own language. His point is a good one. There really is a balancing act, let's call it 'artistry', involved. But, then, Wood really drives the point through the heart of DFW. And twists.

In concluding this section, Wood gets it just right, I think:

So the novelist is always working with at least three languages. There is the author's own language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; there is the character's presumed language, style, perceptual equipment, and so on; and there is what we could call the language of the world—the language which fiction inherits before it gets to turn it into novelistic style, the language of daily speech, of newspapers, of offices, of advertising, of the blogosphere and text messaging.

In essence, the novelist is a bit of a juggler. The balancing act is to keep these three balls (if you will) of language in the air simultaneously. Writers often talk about getting the words just right. Wood provides the matrix, or context, in which we can locate this rightness.