Dear Republic,
Flags are unfurled, starting pistols are fired, and the Writers’ Cup is launched!
In this utterly bizarro event, two contemporary novelists are pitted against each other. This week it’s Percival Everett v. Ocean Vuong. If you think Everett is better, write “Everett” in the comments. If you think Vuong is better, write “Vuong” in the comments. Voting is open until October 12. This post will be pinned to the home page throughout the week. More extensive rules are here.
If you want to, ergherm erhgerm, gamble on the outcome of the Writers’ Cup as a whole, here is the full bracket:
Write to republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com with “Bracket” in the subject line and ROL will send you a bracket to fill out. Anybody can play but only paid subscribers can win from the pot.
Below is a piece arguing for Percival Everett and below that a piece arguing for Ocean Vuong.
Enjoy bracketing and ballot-casting!
-ROL
PERCIVAL EVERETT’S THERAPIST IS BETTER THAN YOURS
by Pete Beatty
I tell people I am a novelist sometimes when I am feeling brave and I have written a grand total of 1.5 novels in 44 years. Percival Everett has written 24 novels and ten short story collections and also a children’s picture book and he is only 24 years older than me. If I want to be as much of a novelist as Percival Everett, I have to start writing a novel every year and also burn off a short-story collection every other year. You do your own version of that math.
But we are not here for counting or comparing, which I am told steals joy. Yes Percival Everett has written many more books than you or me or almost all humans ever. But fortunately for you and me and unfortunately for Ocean Vuong (in this narrow context), Everett’s novels are good, and they seem to be getting better and better, not judged by popularity or sales or golden baubles received, although those things are accruing, but by their actual substance.
Percival Everett writes more than us, and he writes better than us, and worst of all, he seems from his public comments cooler and better-adjusted or at least availed of better therapy than us. In an interview way back in 2005, when he was only the author of seventeen books and not a Pulitzer-having many million-seller, he told an interviewer this:
Every time I finish a book, I know less than when I started. I think I know something when I start writing and, as the problems I approach become more complex and interesting, I realize that everything I thought I knew was wrong. After eighteen books, I know considerably less than most people. I’m well on my way to knowing nothing, which is my goal, I guess.
This was not the only time that I have sat up and hallelujahed when reading interviews with Everett. He also says:
“The writer is the worst person to ask what a work means.”
“My job when I go into the classroom is to disabuse my students of the belief that there is a right way to do it.”
“Deciding to write a book, it never feels like a great idea. It’s always like knowingly entering a bad marriage.”
“I don’t think there is an interesting work in the world that is not a failed path. That is often what’s interesting—fascinating—about literature: when does a story fail?”
All of that is right and good, in my estimation. But where are we going with this? I guess I came here to praise Everett so as to bury Ocean Vuong. But as Everett writes in James: “Belief has nothing to do with truth. Believe what you like. … Either way, no difference.” Rather than build an elaborate and ephemeral glass fortress from which to launch opinions, I will say that I have only read six of Percival Everett’s four thousand novels, and I didn’t even particularly like Erasure, and I plan to read a whole bunch more. Like a lot of hyper-productive writers, Everett is capable of lapsing into shtick and undercooked sections. But it’s a really good shtick, and the mushy parts always have rude jokes to help things along.
I have read six books by him, and he made me laugh out loud about Emmett Till, which if a non-black writer tried to do they would probably need to go to jail for having no manners. He invaded a cosseted relic of literature and turned it into a mordant satire in which the protagonist dreams about the Enlightenment, and then kept turning on his potter’s wheel until it melted into a poignant Rambo bloodbath. His first novel is about a neurotic third baseman for the Mariners that turns into a road novel.
The six Everetts I know are Telephone, Wounded, Dr. No, The Trees, Erasure, and James (and the children’s book, The One That Got Away, which is kind of a sibling book to Dr. No). That’s six more books that I have read by most authors ever. Usually after that degree of exposure to a writer, you’ve clocked their shtick and can effectively imagine what the rest of their books are like.
I have zero confidence about imagining the vast remainder of the Everett oeuvre, In his current and major phase (The Trees and James are what I’m thinking) he is mapping the wound of race in America through genre — the procedural, the zombie movie, the road novel, the kunstlerroman. James is not about an artist, but I think it is the story of a person coming into his powers all the same.
Wounded stands out among my Everetts — it’s not dour, exactly, but it’s cloudier, grimmer than the rest. A black horse trainer in Wyoming grapples with hatred and hurt, and also a little bit of romance. It isn’t entirely out of step with narratives like Yellowstone or Longmire in using the American West as a backdrop for male brooding.
Dr. No is, as the title suggests, in communication with spy novels and Bond films — but it’s also a Mel Brooksian farce on the idea of nothingness. I enjoyed every second of reading it, and haven’t thought about it a whole lot since. Erasure got made into a movie, which I didn’t see, mostly because I didn’t like the book all that much — it feels like a bit of a relic from the cultural warfare of the 1990s, and the humor flopped for me. There’s a sourness in a lot of Everett’s narrators/central characters that can set one’s teeth on edge if you read it in the wrong light, and Erasure fell into that manhole for me. One of the risks Everett gleefully takes in Erasure (and other books) is writing about writers trying to write. In oafish hands that can be truly a living death. I wouldn’t say Erasure is quite that bad, but it was not my cup of decaf. Telephone fell into a similar valley of indifference for me — it’s a campus novel, and I work on a campus, so [theatrical shrug].
James will probably be the book mentioned in Everett’s obituary, and it merits the attention just on sales and silverware. Matt Seybold wrote a a fine and hyper-syllabic piece for the Cleveland Review of Books that gets into the remarkable depth of Everett’s accomplishment. I love James not wisely but too well, but the book where I got Everett-pilled was The Trees.
I’m not spoiling anything when I say that The Trees is about Emmett Till. You don’t set a novel in Money, Mississippi by coincidence. The story is at heart a playful inversion of the real story of Till’s lynching and afterlife. Where the real Till case was a profane denial of justice, Everett turns its recursion (its repeating as farce, if you will) into a police procedural, a cop buddy picture featuring the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, an academic inquisitor, and a kind of mystic freelance accountant. That’s before it shambles into a zombie apocalypse played for laughs, making the end of The Day of the Locust look like a Hallmark Channel movie. All of it is savagely, impolitely funny — I can see a lot of readers being scared off by just the idea of “Emmett Till case + jokes,” and frankly, I appreciate that quick litmus test — I want to hang out with the people willing to laugh through a river of shit and death and evil.
If you want to know why I believe Percival Everett is better than Ocean Vuong, I don’t really care. Believe what you like. As Kierkegaard wrote and Everett epigrammed in Telephone: “My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it—you will regret both.” I don’t know how much more Everett I’ll get to — there are a lot of writers, and a lot of them are good — but I do know that he will surprise me, tip over some sacred cows, and entertain me. I don’t expect to regret any of it.
OCEAN VUONG: ROMANTIC HERO
It takes years for actors to learn how to cry on command, yet for poet and author Ocean Vuong, crying comes as easily as breathing. Vuong cried on NPR, he cried with The New York Times, and when he is not actively crying, he is often near tears — on Oprah, on Colbert, in several other unnoted venues. I’ve seen these tears myself, in person, in real life, at a book festival I stumbled into in Washington, DC in 2019. I don’t remember why Ocean Vuong was crying. All I remember is his quiet, whispery voice, and something about how the typical novel structure—with rising action leading to a climax—is both patriarchal and violent. And then, out of nowhere, came the tears. And let me tell you, the room was captivated: many audience members were crying themselves. I won’t pretend I was moved, but I was extremely baffled, which is almost the same. This was my first exposure to the phenomenon of Ocean Vuong.
Ocean Vuong is a force that bends the fabric of space-time to his will until even our dads are talking about him. People are talking about Ocean Vuong, talking about talking about Ocean Vuong, and talking about talking about talking about Ocean Vuong. Is anyone tired of it? No. If you were tired of it, you would feel nothing when you saw yet another Ocean Vuong thinkpiece, instead of frustrated curiosity, which is what I’m guessing brought you here. Aside from attending the aforementioned reading in DC, have I read a single book by Ocean Vuong? No. Have I read a couple dozen thinkpieces about Ocean Vuong highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of his work? Yes. So here I am. Yet this is not a thinkpiece, because I haven’t done too much thinking about it, but I do have feelings, including a gut-level sense of protection for our Ocean, and for the joy he has brought to the far-flung corners of the internet, both sardonic and self-serious. Ocean Vuong is an artist, in writing and in life, crafting his story one tear at a time. He creates tears and is created by tears, in a constant state of self-renewal. Here is a sample of things he’s written about crying:
I used to cry in a genre no one read.
I wanted to cry but did not yet know how to in English. So I did nothing.
I’m a big fan of crying. (Well, I cry a lot, which must mean I’m a fan of it. For the past two years I have resolved to go a full month without crying, and I lose every time.) Crying is a relief. Crying is an outpouring. A physical break between our inner and outer worlds. There is a limit to how much one can feel on the inside before breaking through that limit, with excess feelings spilling outwards in the form of water, salt, and mucus. There’s a thin barrier between Ocean Vuong and the sublime—the thinginess of our lives, the unexplained forces that move us all—which he steps through often and easily, via tears. All we’re trying to do with writing is to break through the barrier between one person’s head and another’s. It’s a two-part translation process. The writer turns thoughts into words, the reader turns words back into thoughts, and something happens in between. What happens? Something unexplainable. And sometimes, tears. Which are very explainable.
Ocean Vuong is correct to say that tears have many languages and genres. Tears are not a universal language. But they may be the closest thing we have to one. We emit hormones through our tears. Different types of hormones for different types of tears. Crying while laughing relieves our stress. And according to science, tears from sadness make men less aggressive by lowering their testosterone. As noted above, Ocean Vuong hates the patriarchy and he hates violence. Tears are his weapon against weaponry. A physical act of violence against violence. If you have to be in the same room as Ocean Vuong to feel the effects of his tears, so be it. So shall he cry in as many places as humanly possible in front of as many people as can fit. Do not try to run! Submit!
This makes Ocean Vuong far more of a Romantic hero than any of us, swash-bucklingly cavorting from place to place, shedding tear after tear. As for the writing itself, again, I haven’t read much of it, but I have read what others have to say about it, which is that he tries too hard. So what? I want him to try even harder. A Romantic writer lifts words as high as they can go, opens apart metaphors until they make no sense. “What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?” I have no idea! But do I know anything at all? If you stare too hard at anything, nothing makes sense. It’s up to each one of us to create our own sense. Or, we can reject this. We can delight in the absurd. Ocean Vuong does both at the same time.
Besides, like any great hero, all the hatred thrown his way has not impacted Ocean Vuong at all. Ocean Vuong says he loves having imposter syndrome. You are giving him more material and he will transform this, too, in some way, through his tears and Oprah book club appearances. And even if I never read a book by Ocean Vuong, I’ll still be following where it goes.
Revel in the nonsensical, let it flow through you. Eschew logic. Read Ocean Vuong.
Or maybe cry instead.
VOTE BELOW!
Everett
Everett