Inspired by Obama’s win, I checked the index of the Complete New Yorker for items in the “Fiction” category that contained the word “president.” I got 167 hits, and I’ve been happily reading ever since. This is the first of a series of posts I have planned on the results.

The darkness, strangeness, and complexity of the new President have touched everyone. There has been a great deal of fainting lately.

Sound sorta familiar? It’s from the second paragraph of Donald Barthelme’s story, “The President,” which appeared in The New Yorker on September 5, 1964. I can twist Barthelme’s story only so far to apply to Barack Obama, but I was amused by the echoes. The narrator’s girlfriend, for example, says of her new president, “He has some magic charisma which makes people—” and then she runs out of words for a moment. A precursor to “drinking the Obama juice,” perhaps?
Another character says,

“I’m not saying that the problems he faces aren’t tremendous, staggering. The awesome burden of the Presidency. But if anybody—any one man …”

Barthelme was being ironic, but in spite of myself, I really feel this way about Obama. Or try this:

What is going to happen? What is the new President planning? No one knows. But everyone is convinced that he will bring it off. Our exhausted age wishes above everything to plunge into the heart of the problem, to be able to say, “Here is the difficulty.” And the new President, that tiny, strange, and brilliant man, seems cankered and difficult enough to take us there. In the meantime, people are fainting.”

The fainting, of course, is a touch typical of Barthelme; the absurdity is part of why I love him. But since it’s Barthelme, it’s also there for a reason: this is not really a story about the President (who is, in Barthelme’s story, a “strange fellow,” and whose face clouds, on television, “when his name is mentioned,” as if “hearing his name frightens him”). It’s actually a story about the mysterious power of charisma, and the unknowable nature of other people.
Twice during the course of the story, for example, the narrator says, with only minor variations, “I regarded her with my warm kind eyes,” spotlighting the gulf between one’s intentions—how one feels and would like to be perceived—and how one is actually perceived. Then, too, it’s the odd duck who wins Barthelme’s election: the “handsome meliorist” full of “zest and programs” who runs against the strange, “cankered” President is “defeated by a fantastic margin.” Who can account for charisma?
Fifteen years later, in the March 19, 1979 issue of TNY, Mark Strand published “The President’s Resignation“, which initially seems to owe a great deal to Barthelme. For one thing, Strand chooses to focus his story on the President himself, just as Barthelme did—a highly unusual move, if my spot-check of the CNY index is to be believed.
For another, Strand’s president sounds a little like Barthelme’s: “Though his rise to power was meteroic, he was not a popular leader.” And both presidents are a bit goofy, by normal standards: just as Barthelme’s president used his “philosophical grasp of the death theme” to win his election, Strand’s president “made no promises before taking office but speculated endlessly about the kind of weather we would have during his term, sometimes even making a modest prediction.”
Once elected, Strand’s president builds a National Museum of Weather with public funds, “in whose rooms one could experience the climate of any day anywhere in the history of man.” Attending his resignation speech are couples with titles like “the First Minister of Potential Clearness & husband,” and the “Lord Chancellor of Abnormal Silences & father”—also reminiscent of Barthelme.
But once Strand’s president begins his speech, he leaves Barthelme behind:

From the beginning I have preached melancholy and invention, nostalgia and prophecy. The languors of art have been my haven. More than anything I have wished to be the first truly modern President, and to make my term the free extension of impulse and the preservation of chance.

Whoa Nelly! That’s not the sort of oratory one associates with the presidency. Sure, his speech still has its touches of Barthelmic humor, such as his fond memories of the “hours spent reading Chekhov aloud to you, my beloved Cabinet!” But here’s the heart of it:

Who can forget my proposals, petitions uttered on behalf of those who labored in the great cause of weather—measuring wind, predicting rain, giving themselves to whole generations of days—whose attention was ever riveted to the invisible wheel that turns the stars and to the stars themselves? How like poetry, said my enemies. They were right. For it was my wish to make nothing happen. Thank heaven it has been so, for my words would easily have been wasted along with the works they might have engendered. I have always spoken for what does not change, for what resists action, for the stillness at the center of man.

Strand’s president, in other words, is not a statesman, policy wonk, or warrior; he’s not a meliorist, “all zest and programs.” He’s the answer to the question, “What if America were ruled by a poet?” Politics is not what motivates him, but human consciousness, the mystery of being.
He’s impossible of course, even in fiction—hence his resignation—but reading Strand, you feel the idea’s wistful majesty.

I never knew that films had been made of Shirley Jackson’s classic June 26, 1948 story, “The Lottery“. Turns out you can view a classic 1969 short based on the story right now on the blog we saw that…, via the magic of YouTube. (But if you’ve never read the story, do that first!)
The dialogue in the film is a bit wooden (as it is in the story, frankly), and it moves very slowly by today’s standards, but when the climax comes, it’s remarkably shocking even if you know what’s coming. Be sure to unwind with Paul Morris’ Wavy Rule cartoon, in which he gives the story a softer ending.

Last week, I linked to Donald Barthelme’s 81-book syllabus. Now I offer a top-ten list from David Foster Wallace, for those of you who, like Martin and me, are trying to come to grips with his suicide—or trying to learn more about who he was. The list comes courtesy of J. Peder Zane in The New York Observer:

David Foster Wallace’s Top Ten List:
1. The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis
2. The Stand, by Stephen King
3. Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris
4. The Thin Red Line, by James Jones
5. Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong
6. The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris
7. Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein
8. Fuzz, by Ed McBain
9. Alligator, by Shelley Katz
10. The Sum of All Fears, by Tom Clancy

This list, of course, is considerably more problematic than Barthelme’s. (The Screwtape Letters?!) Or rather, I don’t think it’s problematic at all, but it can be hard, apparently, to know what to make of it, because of Wallace’s heavyweight status, erudition, and lack of meanness. Zane, anyhow, agonizes over whether or not Wallace was serious when he offered this list; he even invites a fan of Wallace’s to comment on it, who also cannot make himself believe that Wallace was just being flip, even though the fan refers to a very different sort of reading list—”stars you steer by”—that Wallace reeled off in a 1996 interview in Salon, with Laura Miller:

Historically the stuff that’s sort of rung my cherries: Socrates’ funeral oration, the poetry of John Donne, the poetry of Richard Crashaw, every once in a while Shakespeare, although not all that often, Keats’ shorter stuff, Schopenhauer, Descartes’ “Meditations on First Philosophy” and “Discourse on Method,” Kant’s “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic,” although the translations are all terrible, William James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience,” Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus,” Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Hemingway—particularly the ital stuff in “In Our Time,” where you just go oomph!, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, A.S. Byatt, Cynthia Ozick—the stories, especially one called “Levitations,” about 25 percent of the time Pynchon. Donald Barthelme, especially a story called “The Balloon,” which is the first story I ever read that made me want to be a writer, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver’s best stuff —the really famous stuff. Steinbeck when he’s not beating his drum, 35 percent of Stephen Crane, “Moby-Dick,” “The Great Gatsby.”

There’s a breathtaking gap between those two lists. Personally, I don’t think there’s any question that he was kidding when he submitted his top 10 list to Zane, but it’s always been my impression that part of what Wallace was trying to do in his work was to bridge that gap—to reconcile two incredibly disparate parts of our culture. If you want Socrates’ funeral oration to matter, it can be difficult to accept that The Stand is someone else’s North Star.
I recommend reading Miller’s whole interview with Wallace, in which, among other things, he also talks up his contemporaries. And though I was grateful to Martin for tipping me off to an appreciation of Wallace from New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, I found Miller’s memorial the best and most touching of all those I’ve read.

It’s back-to-school time, so it seemed appropriate to link to an 81-book syllabus Donald Barthelme used to give out to his students. (It appears in the margins of a nice 2003 essay by Keith Moffett in The Believer about his experience of tackling the list.)
If that’s too much for you, then I recommend you read Barthelme’s hilarious and thought-provoking story “The School,” which appeared in the June 17, 1974, issue of The New Yorker. In the story, a grade school class keeps adopting living things that then die. Yet there’s enough uplift in the improbable, left-field ending to carry you through the rest of the school year. (Don’t cheat and read the capsule summary on TNY‘s website—it’s a spoiler.)
The story typifies what I love about Barthelme: his ability to explore serious topics with larky wit and surreal turns. Though I find him sometimes obscure, I vastly prefer his lightheartedness and unpredictability to the emotionally detached and/or humorless narrators who appear in contemporary TNY fiction with such regularity these days.
But evidently, reading TNY‘s fiction section is better for you than reading the nonfiction, at least when it comes to your social reasoning skills. Need proof? I quote from Liam Durcan’s Toronto Globe and Mail article from July, which I found courtesy of Jonathan Shipley’s blog, A Writer’s Desk:

In a recent study conducted by University of Toronto psychologists, subjects who read a short story in The New Yorker had higher scores on social reasoning tests than those who had read an essay from the same magazine. The researchers concluded that there was something in the experience of reading fiction that made the subjects more empathetic (or at least take a test more empathetically). The study provided some proof for what has often been intuitively argued: Fiction is, in some very important ways, good for us.

To read the rest of Durcan’s article, go here, but be prepared to fork over $4.95. If that’s too rich for your blood, there’s more detail here.