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Twin Cities Reader Summer Books Issue - Volume 22 - Issue 1070 - Cover Story - June 6, 2001

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Illustrations by Trevor Collis

Henry Ford's Industrial innovations were many, but automatizing the American novel wasn't one of them. No, the manufacture of quality, affordable American fiction survived the Taylorization of the economy as an activity still performed by a solitary craftsperson in a garrison of authorial inefficiency. Writers, with their fragile constitutions and innate aversion to deadlines, have continued to turn out stories and novels on their own God-given schedules, and according to personal poetics that have yet to be properly standardized.


More from the
Twin Cities Reader
Summer Books Issue:

A Confederacy of Sleaze
From contract killing to mainlining Mormon blood, James Ellroy depicts the most lurid of American nightmares.

Divine Hammer
In his sprawling new novel, John Henry Days, Colson Whitehead chips away at the legends of the 20th Century

Let Them Read Cake
A new brand of travel writer savors foie gras, catnaps, and voluptuous idle living for the rest of us

Local Books Roundup:

Eleni Sikelianos
Earliest Worlds

Leïla Sebbar
An Algerian Childhood: A Collection of Autobiographical Narratives

Louise Erdrich
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

Jessica Treadway
And Give You Peace

Leave it to City Pages to bring local fiction writing into the machine age. Toward the purpose of extruding a better fiction product, we invited six of our favorite Minnesota writers--Bart Schneider, Jarda Cervenka, Wang Ping, Ellen Hart, Alison McGhee, and Gregory Blake Smith--to craft one segment of a serial short story. Starting with a blank page and the freedom to tackle any topic, our first author scripted some 1,000 words, which he sent on to the next contributor, who wrote another 1,000 words--and so on and so forth. The result: 6,860 words of timely prose--forged from six typewriters into one rugged story.

Imagine if the American novel had previously been subject to such a rigorous process. Melville would never have been given the opportunity to ruin his near-great book by sending noble Ahab to such an ignominious grave. Instead, at the end of his shift, Melville would have turned the story over to the next pen on the shop floor, leaving Ahab to live out his days playing backgammon on Nantucket's scenic wharf. And should Faulkner have been put to the same test? As soon as his blood-alcohol content hit .20, an able second-shift writer could have stepped in to repair Quentin and Caddy's family affairs--only Faulkner's perversity kept these two happy lovers apart. And Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow could have been drawn to a tidy close at page 200, on the dot.

The history of American letters is a sad story of squandered plot lines and wasteful individualism. We now put the finished results of our serial story before you, the marketplace, for judgment. We daresay this is how fiction will be written in the 20th Century.

--Michael Tortorello,
Foreman, Minnesota Fiction Industries

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