My Review Of The New Mark Twain Bio Got Me Into LitHub

SPOILER ALERT-- THIS EXPERIENCE DID NOT HUMBLE ME

I write book reviews for Washington Independent Review of Books, and I reviewed Ron Chernow’s new Mark Twain biography.

Usually I’m writing about books that you find at a bit of a remove from popular subjects, famous writers, and the bestseller list. This isn’t a rule; it’s just the way it shakes out. Most of the books that grab me are immediately successful at grabbing me specifically, but their attempts to find purchase on the jackets, epaulettes, and tender parts of the common reader are only sporadically crowned with success. But fear not— my tastes are often esoteric, but I’m not completely stuck in the snobbery zone.

Here are some examples to show how my snobbery profile lines up with respect to science fiction:

🧜‍♀️if a book comes out about Star Wars, I would prefer not to know about it. (Although a book about American Graffiti would pique my interest.)

🧜‍♀️if a book comes out about Frank Herbert, I probably wouldn’t read it, but I would be interested to know what people were saying about it. I always hold out hope that I may learn something about him that will help me. I’m not convinced that Herbert is a great writer, but I also realize that the two Herbert pages I’ve read are not sufficient for me to consider my opinion anything more than a lazy prejudice. These two pages had the virtue of being “in a row,” but that doesn’t help my case much.

🧜‍♀️ if a book comes out about Theodore Sturgeon, I’d be very interested to read it, and I might write about it. I’m a Sturgeon fan, and I suspect Sturgeon’s reputation could be in a state of flux in this moment, after the canonical treatment they gave his collected works a few years back. I’m interested to know if Ted is finding new readers these days; he certainly deserves them, with his seductive combination of tight pulp-magazine storytelling and humanism.

🧜‍♀️if a book comes out about Ray Bradbury, I would jump at it, unless I heard that it was awful. I’m a big Bradbury fan, so his giant popularity doesn’t scare me away. Also, I think my perception and evaluation of Bradbury are a little left of center, so I’d be very interested to see whether the book overlaps at all with what’s in my head. For the record, I’ve always liked Ray’s science fiction work, but I really love his idiosyncratic supernatural stories, and it seems wrong to me that people mostly remember him for the science fiction material. Not that his science fiction isn’t wonderful! But I can’t get enough of his weird fiction, which is also wonderful.

Bradbury got noticed early on through his horror/weird tales writing, but he appears to have been conflicted about this, preferring to be lumped in with science fiction writers rather than with the weird tales crowd. He took some steps to push public perception in that direction, and while it’s not clear to me how much his effort was responsible for this, he has often been typecast as a science fiction writer. Bradbury’s work can be quite effectively horrifying, but as with Sturgeon, there’s an underground current of humanism flowing beneath the genre surface.

🧜‍♀️if a book comes out about Leigh Brackett, I want to read it because I know nothing about Brackett except that director Howard Hawks liked her, and that’s good enough for me. Hawks was pretty perceptive about writers. There is in fact a book about women science fiction writers that’s being written as we speak, and I got the impression it will include some Brackett dope. Crossing my fingers!

MY TWAIN REVIEW

Mark Twain is one of the hugely famous artists that I got hooked on early, before I descended into esoterica, and my high regard for him has only grown over the years. I ditched some of my favorite sacred cows as I got older, but never Twain.

Twain’s approach to comic writing influenced me as much as anything I’ve ever read, and I still follow his main injunction: never put in anything that indicates for even one second that you’re trying to be funny. (I imagine the people who pulled over to read my work, scrunched up their faces, and then got back in their cars and drove away would say I certainly met THAT goal.)

I figured the time was right for a new definitive Twain bio, and Ron Chernow’s book, which weighs almost as much as I weighed at birth, did not disappoint. It’s over 1100 pages, but let me reassure you— a lot of that is supplemental, and the bio itself is only about 989 pages, give or take.

I was very pleased to find out from my editor that Lit Hub had included my review in a roundup that led off with the great Michael Dirda. After writing about this Twain book, I was Twained out. I don’t have the energy to read the other reviews, but if any of you are malevolent enough to try to rile me up by saying, “hey! someone from the Guardian totally disagreed with you,” go ahead and do it. It might be fun for you to see me get triggered.

I understand there are some people who deem Twain unnecessary, out in the heady corridors of learning where people are expected to deem things. To me, Twain dismissal is a fatuous position, but as I mentioned in my essay, Chernow’s book tells the truth, and he can’t have left out very much. For those inclined to shoot Twain out of the canon, Chernow’s book provides plenty of self-righteous gunpowder.

Hint: much of it has to do with racism. I know— just like you, I am scratching my head at the idea of a 19th century white American being racist— but Chernow really did what we call a “deep dive.”

That’s enough from me on Twain for now; you can find plenty more of my thinking about him in my 800 word review. Imagine me editing my remarks on any topic down to 800 words! This is an ordeal for me, but they have a rule that you’re supposed to be in the 700-800 range, so I usually write exactly 800.

Here’s the Lit Hub link; I recommend lingering on the other names just long enough to let out a respectful whistle, at the rarefied company that I now intermittently travel in. No, let’s make it “in which I now intermittently travel.” Now that I’ve been folded in with the swells, I need to start using that elite grammatical claptrap. If you squint while riding a galloping horse past these other writers from magazines like the Atlantic, the Pacific, and so forth, you’ll get the impression that I’ve arrived. You can’t hear it, but I’m pronouncing the word “a-rive-ed.” (Okay, I stole that joke from Ben Elton, but I suspect he won’t even notice it’s gone.)

Lit Hub Mark Twain bio reviews