What Would Lynne Tillman Do? Read Free

but re-creates her for the reader. Slowly, as her power diminishes, another force in Lily, the force released by her imagination, becomes dominant, as voice in a novel becomes dominant over character, as tone and texture over plot.
    By emphasising questions of space in Wharton, Tillman focuses on confinement. In doing this, she manages to capture the idea that Lily Bart is trapped in a cell of her own making, a cell which is the only place where someone as original as she can feel enclosed and nurtured and engaged and then destroyed.
    In contemplating confinement and space, Tillman considers Wharton’s style:
    But Wharton is economical about elegance, stringent about lushness, display, every embellishment. Rarely extravagant. Maybe it’s because she understood position and space, knew she didn’t really have much room, no room for profligacy. She couldn’t run from reality, even if she wanted to (and I think she did), so she had no room to waste, certainly no words to waste. The inessential might obscure the clarity she sought. She wouldn’t let herself go, let her writing go. She understood the danger, she understood any form of complicity. Her often privileged protagonists fatally conspire with society against themselves, become common prey to its dictates, helpless to disown or resist what they despise in themselves and it in it. Wharton was profoundly aware that, seen by others, she was free to do what she pleased, a privileged woman dangling the world on a rich string. And she wrote, perhaps explained, early on in The House of Mirth, Lily Bart “was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”
    As with any serious piece of critical writing, Tillman’s version of Wharton, while remaining true to the original, also tells us a great deal about Tillman’s own procedures as a novelist, her own scrupulousness, for example, her own refusal to take easy options, her knowledge that her characters are alone and that the style in which they are rendered arises from thought and strategy, from a willed and intelligent examination of the available possibilities, and the full knowledge, as Wharton writes, that “we are hampered at every turn by an artistic tradition of over two thousand years.”
    —Colm Tóibín
    September, 2013

The Last Words Are Andy Warhol
    I’m going to speculate about some of the issues raised and some of the ideas I found compelling and daunting in a: A Novel . a: A Novel is a narrative based on 24 audiotaped hours in the life of Warhol superstar Ondine, an articulate, funny, volatile man. When Pope Ondine acted in Chelsea Girls , his performance exceeded, crossed—even violated—the supposed boundary between life and art, a line Warhol wanted crossed. It’s blurred, if not effaced, in his only novel, a .
    I’ve written this essay as a list, a shopping list in paragraphs. Warhol liked to shop. I don’t, but I like lists.
    1. “A” is for Art, Andy, and Amphetamine—Ondine lived on speed, and the story is speed driven.
    2. Reading a: A Novel , I sometimes felt like one of its participants: “Nine more hours to go,” said the Sugar Plum Fairy. Time was of the essence—actually it’s the essential element in the book. There are just so many tapes to fill, hours to stay awake, and so time’s on everyone’s mind. The tape recorder’s going, a book is being made. The Book is being made. In fact, the last words in the novel, spoken by Billy Name, are: “Out of the garbage, into THE BOOK.”In a way, Warhol through Name is claiming garbage—the minutiae and tedium of daily life, the unedited flow—for literature.
    3. a: A Novel is a project of—and an exercise in—consciousness and self-consciousness. Ondine and most of the others recorded are not unwitting characters or subjects. They’re self-conscious even when they’re nearly unconscious.
    4. Ondine, the protagonist, sometimes