Men and Apparitions: A Novel
Brand: Soft Skull Press
Color: Multicolor
Categories: Books, Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction



Dimensions: 3.6 x 0.6 x 6.4 inches
ISBN-13: 978-1593766795
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1593766793
Publisher: Soft Skull
Print length: 416 pages
Publication date: March 13, 2018
subtitle: Paperback – March 13, 2018
author: Visit Amazon's Lynne Tillman Page search results Lynne Tillman
review: Editorial Reviews Review Praise for Men and Apparitions by Lynne Tillman Selected as "1 of 60 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2018" by Huffington Post Selected as "1 of 101 Books to get excited about in 2018" by BookRiot Named to "Most Anticipated Fiction of 2018" by Chicago Review of Books Named "One of the Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2018" by Big Other One of Dennis Cooper's Favorite Books of the Year "Zeke is an American consumer, though what he consumes is not material goods but media, endlessly cataloging and referencing the contents of his own mind, often in lieu of visceral experience. . . . Tillman’s novel is a patient, insistent exploration of what it means to live inside such a mind. . . . There are elements of it that brought to mind writers as diverse as Ali Smith and Saul Bellow, Joy Williams and A. R. Ammons, but the cumulative effective is sui generis." ― The New York Times Book Review "[A] ruminative and amusing novel . . . At times aphoristic . . . the book succeeds as a gentle satire of generational self-absorption and emotional disengagement." ― The New Yorker , Briefly Noted "A beautiful meditation on photography." ―Colm Toibin, The Guardian "Lynne Tillman’s new novel, Men and Apparitions , makes a better case for women writing men . . . Tillman isn’t a writer you look to for plot-forward work, and Men and Apparitions is no exception, but neither does it coast on the clumsy charm of its narrator, though it could. Instead, it’s interested in something much more cerebral, and much more difficult to distill into a 600-word review. As I read it, I realized it was doing something I haven’t seen convincingly accomplished in any recent literature: It captures the feeling of life in a society that’s focused more on the quick consumption of a massive amount of text and images than it is on experience . . . This is a scourge of modern life, a high-res lens through which we see our fractured world, and one captured with melancholic clarity in Men and Apparitions . . . Men and Apparitions begins as a book about men, and becomes one about everyone." ― The Portland Mercury “Cult-favorite Lynn Tillman's latest novel, Men and Apparitions , takes readers for a rollicking, frolicking, outstandingly original ride that explores the roots of feminism, the death of masculinity, and the cultural identities we've gleaned along the way, all while making us question everything we've ever known and taken for granted.” ― PopSugar , 1 of 20 Best Books to Read This March "In a novel that overflows with obsessive, encyclopedic energy, her characters luxuriate in self-conscious play, double meaning, and provocative inquiry. The result is a work that enlarges our understanding of what the novel can be―and the sense of self we take for granted . . . Tillman writes pictures the way Jeanette Winterson writes the body: with great and counterintuitive attention to detail, theorizing and revising as she goes . . . If Men and Apparitions is an image, it’s a Polaroid―maybe a haunted one―that someone hands you as it’s still developing. Tillman insists that there are formal and social conventions yet to be upended and rethought. Even if she doesn’t achieve it herself, the magic is that you can see them materializing in your hand . . . These layers are part of her brilliance in conveying the self-in-progress." ― The New Republic “Lynne Tillman lends her remarkable talents to answer questions about today's obsession with images. Through the eyes of cultural anthropologist Ezekiel Hooper Stark, she asks: What is behind the human drive to create, remake, and keep images?” ― Bustle , 1 of 15 Best Fiction Books of March 2018 to Kick Off Your Spring Reading " Men and Apparitions is a work of fiction as ventriloquy by a winking puppet. If it is criticism, too, it knowingly undermines its own arguments . . . Tillman is 71, but she delves deeply into the psychology of a man half her age. In many ways, Men and Apparitions is a portrait of Generation X: caught between the analog and the digital, economic prosperity and recession, the sexually objectifying gender stereotypes of the Bush-Clinton years and the Obama-era gender revolution, Gen-X men are cleaved by history, left raw and ready for the malaise of middle age." ― Los Angeles Review of Books “Lynne Tillman’s much anticipated new novel after 12 years revolves around a cultural anthropologist who turns his anthropological lens on masculinity, art and memory. A profoundly wise and remarkably supple novel from an outstanding writer.” ― Chicago Review of Books , "Most Anticipated Fiction of 2018" "A grab bag of a book, mixing text and image, fiction and nonfiction, material about the character (his history and relations) and essayistic takes on art and photography and masculinity . . . The idea, for her, is to explore family, identity even, as something that we want to preserve, to hold onto, even as time insists we can’t." ― Barnes & Noble Review "In Men and Apparitions , photography is both machine and magic. . . . Zeke’s mind is agile, funny, stylish, but follows its own interior logic, moving quickly through complex knots of ideas and references that start where he is interested, and stop when he is no longer. . . . Reading Men and Apparitions . . . I thought of J. D. Salinger and his Glass family, all of whom narrate their stories with the same offhanded, articulate intelligence as Zeke. . . . I thought of the photographer Philip Steinmetz and his work about family photo albums, a six-volume sociological ‘portrait’ of himself and his relatives, in which he and his family members both are and are not themselves." ― The White Review “With callouts to a mind-revving roster of photographers, writers, filmmakers, intellectuals, and media magnets, erudite, discerning, and everdaring Tillman has forged a mischievous conflation of criticism and fiction. Incantatory, maddening, brilliant, zestful, compassionate, and timely, Tillman’s portrait of a floundering academic trying to make sense of a digitized world of churning, contradictory messages reveals the perpetual interplay between past and present, the personal and the cultural, image and life.” ― Booklist (starred review) " Men and Apparitions tells a fully human story while miraculously feeding one’s mind with the complex narrator’s observations about childhood, family, photography and representation, self and self-understanding, culture, and the art and fallibility of seeing." ––Lydia Davis, Literary Hub "Tillman, it seems to me, is not a writer who invents characters and moves them through the machinery of plot. Rather, she seems to inhabit other minds―or she lets them move through her, like a medium. . . . The book is a study of visual culture, like Susan Sontag’s On Photography or John Berger’s Ways of Seeing . Or the book acts as a seismograph, registering shifting patterns of gender identity and its relationship to power." ― The Rumpus “Will appeal to readers with a particular interest in cultural criticism . . . Tillman is a risk-taker with a wide-ranging mind who likes to experiment with the novel form. This extremely cerebral exercise is studded with fascinating observations and commentary. Literary collections will want to acquire it.” ― Library Journal “A timely . . . exploration of modern masculinity . . . There is much to admire . . . Charming.” ― Publishers Weekly "A smart and sleightful novel . . . Over the four hundred pages of Men and Apparitions , Zeke is by turns analytic, emotional, distanced from his own tale, and immersed in others' histories . . . In some respects, there is an orthodox novel of late-twentieth-century American family life lurking inside Men and Apparitions , but the novel is more essay collection than cross-generational saga . . . Most of [Tillman's] constellating of culture is sharp and sharply expressed . . . Among its many other wise and witty lines of thought, Men and Apparitions is a vexing inquiry into the recent sexual-political past." ― Bookforum p>“As a steadfast Lynne Tillman fan, I am grateful for her authentically weird and often indescribable books. She gives me permission to continue to try to write such work myself.” ―Sarah Manguso, author of 300 Arguments and The Guardians About the Author Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her novels are Haunted Houses ; Motion Sickness ; Cast in Doubt ; No Lease on Life , a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; American Genius, A Comedy ; and Men and Apparitions . Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–1967 , with photographs by Stephen Shore; Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co. ; and What Would Lynne Tillman Do? , a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her most recent short story collections are Someday This Will Be Funny and The Complete Madame Realism . She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writing Fellowship. Tillman is Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at The University of Albany and teaches at the School of Visual Arts’ Art Criticism and Writing MFA Program in New York. She lives in Manhattan with bass player David Hofstra. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Men and Apparitions By Lynne Tillman Soft Skull Press Copyright © 2018 Lynne Tillman All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-59376-679-5 PROLOGUE The end doesn't depend on the beginning, it upends beginnings, also provokes new ones. If the end comes, it's to one person, and could spark beginnings in others. The beginning starts in history, not as a single event, though every birth is singular, and every death, also, but death and birth repeat themselves, the way history does, until no one remembers. — Ezekiel H. Stark SELF-NARRATION, OR WILDNESS OF ORIGIN MYTHS The universe heaves with laughter, and I'm all about my lopsided, selfdefining tale. How I came to be me, not you, how I'm shaping me for you, the way my posse and other native informants do for me, how I'm shape-shifting. I'm telling you that I'm telling you; my self is my field, and habitually I observe, and write field notes. Ethnographer, study yourself. Ethnographer, heal yourself. There was a no-time, with time outs — a long time ago, Way Before Now. Space and time, on a continuum, bend in relationship, and I imagine that soon I will, in some sense, return to the past. Whenever I want. Routine settles, creeps in: I've performed the same acts for thirty-eight years, like eating breakfast. You were eating breakfast, you have been eating breakfast, you are conjugating breakfast ever since your mother set food before you, and now you're feeding yourself only if you shop for it, or maybe you went back to the land to raise it, but not everything, you don't and can't raise everything. I was damn fortunate: meals appeared regularly, I'm no ingrate. That was part of "my home." You were spoon-fed, and it landed plop on the floor, or you the baby threw it. Bad boy. Throw a tantrum, make a mess, soon you have to clean it up — break it, buddy, it's yours, in pieces, because you are responsible; and, true, things go to pieces when not actually broken. Abstractions get broken. Ideas get broken. I have seen the best minds of my gen ... Me talking 'bout the flawed life, totally. Going to sleep, that gets tired, ha, the regularity, and boredom might cause my chronic insomnia, so it's cool when you don't know you're falling asleep, then you wake up and the TV is on. You open your eyes, weird. To dream becomes the best reason to sleep, especially if you do (I do) conscious dreaming, and get to choose: a dream becomes a podcast or movie. Otherwise, nightmares pit REM sleep with terror. I listened to a podcast of an old TV news program and heard a Soviet and Russian historian, Stephen Cohen, argue with a total jerk. Completely exasperated by the fool, Cohen finally said, "With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about." I swallowed the moment like a hallucinogen. That's so fucking rare ... it tears up Max Weber's cage. That's my goal, to tear it up. Me, especially. I don't get high anymore, antidepressants keep me sort of level, and don't combine well with recreational drugs. Living drug-free is a sort of high, except clarity can get ugly. My analyst suggests that I elongated my kid-hood by delaying leaving home. No big deal, really typical. I suffer from abulia, which my analyst says is an abnormal lack of ability to act or make decisions. I like the word. So, I say to my analyst, "Abulia ... I'm another Hamlet. Look what happened to him." I dither, weigh both sides, make lists, advantages, disadvantages. My mother was a permissive parent, finishing college in the midsixties, and didn't want to parent like her uptight parents who let her know she was on her own. Mother had a small trust fund from her maternal grandmother, and did an M.A. in English, then met a man who became her husband, my father, and started a family, as they put it. Father didn't drink then, I mean, excessively. They had us, spacing Bro Hart and me, then an accident — Little Sister — she had to have been. Father, I don't know what his wishes were, but I don't think he fulfilled something in himself. Anyway, he became a functional drunk; Mother kept loving him, maybe. Takes all kinds. He was absent for me, hooked up to his necessaries, like to a breathing machine. I'd come home after school or tennis lessons, walk over to the couch, and his watery eyes were just pools. Staring at photographs of him when he was young, when I was young, comforted and bothered me. Here was evidence of a bright-eyed guy beside the dull living person I knew, and it was discrepant, though I wouldn't have said it like that then, couldn't put the two together, it didn't compute that the boy had turned into this man, my father. In childhood, desires and passions are seeded. In adult- hood, they flower into interests and manias. PICTURE: ME IN A FRAME (FRAMED) My frame of reference is cultural anthropology. Clifford Geertz says that "doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of 'construct a reading of') a manuscript ..."; that "culture is public because meaning is." I do ethnography by working with photographs; also with the human absorption in images, and with the many forms and senses of image, creating an image, loving an image, etc. My specialty — family photographs. Images don't mean as words mean, though people (and I) apply words to them. Photographs can create images, but they are not images per se, they are things, a physical object. An image doesn't have to be based on a photograph. It is a mind-picture, or an image is a picture in the mind. A photograph may inspire or foment an image or images. An image is a concoction, often manufactured, meant to create a way to be seen, viewed, understood. It can be aerie faerie, a phantom, phantasm. Can an image built out of self-consciousness lie? I wear a brimless hat, because it's cool. Does it tell a lie about me? I take a photograph, I don't take an image. (Unless I'm a vampire. Haha. Vampires don't look like the ones on TV, the living dead are regular people, who suck you dry.) A mind is not a brain. Or, a brain is to a mind what a photograph is to an image. And they can be conflated, brains and minds, images and photographs, and sometimes I do it too. Virginia Woolf — Mother's fave — says that words also can't be pinned down: "[Words] do not live in dictionaries ... they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change ... It is because the truth they try to catch is many- sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person." But a photograph doesn't own even a wayward dictionary, though semioticians work it, finding ways to read one. Even vertiginously, words have definitions, to name and rename objects in a cascade of tautologies. A synonym loops, loop de loops. The antique game of telephone: the last to hear, in a string of listeners, will have (hear) an entirely different story from the first. Looking can be benign or malevolent; looking entails everything human, and our instinct to look keeps us close to our evolutionary partners and antecedents in crime and development. If a deer spies a human, it will determine its level of threat. A deer runs if an unknown creature gets closer than what it perceives as safe. And deer are stupid, nice to look at but dumb as doors. Now, people are stealthier in their observations, but the same principle applies: the need to clock others. A stranger enters a room, a group of familiars note her or him, no one moves, a second, thirty seconds pass until one brave familiar strides across the floor, to the door. The stranger introduces himself, and the familiar brings the stranger into the room, and soon others come closer and sort of sniff him. If no one moves toward the door: stasis, unless the stranger boldly enters and quickly identifies himself — I'm Michael, Donald's friend. Imagine if the person entered but didn't identify himself. Discomfort would be fierce. Who is a perfect stranger? Is there a "complete stranger"? Humans assess others shoddily, errors in judgment they're called. People can be poor at sniffing out an enemy, lack discernment, even common sense, and fail at comprehending dangers, signs. Supposedly our big brains allow for more choice, for being sensible, and are capable of complex thinking, etc. Other theorists work diligently on this problem; for one, economists, who analyze rational and irrational consumption patterns. Just saying, as a person who studies groups: people fall in love with the wrong people, make the wrong friends, trust the wrong bank manager, and associate with hurtful, vengeful people. Wolf families have a scapegoat; no wolf picks on any other wolf except an outsider (exogamous) male who tries to pick off the pack's females or eat its cubs. A fight happens then, often to the death. Otherwise, it's the scapegoat who's pushed around. He or she eats last, even when he's the brother, say, of the alpha who eats first. No mercy for a scapegoat. In human groups, scapegoats exist to keep the tribe united. Call human scapegoats "victims." Generally, people drop imprecise clues. Unlike other animals that mark territory with piss or rub scent on trees, human displays or signs can mystify, at least be ambiguous. The worst, the most troubled and damaged, might be the best at keeping their worst signs on the down low. Yet an extremely foul-smelling human on a train clears the car. Imagine if untrustworthy lovers gave off a specific odor. A traditional sign, the wedding ring, signifies as few contemporary interpersonal and social signs do. But it also has scant weight in some Western circles and might even encourage a "free-ranging" male or female to pounce onto someone's spouse. No consequences. Haha. When I was fifteen, I met a philosopher, ninety years old, and, halfkidding, asked him, "You're a philosopher, so, what do you think about?" He was kind to a smart-ass high school boy, answered seriously, I thought, with a twinkle in his eye, because I don't know what else to call it — a glint? The philosopher repeated my question, seemingly asking himself: "What do I think about? Love. I think about love, I always think about love." Love — platonic, romantic, sexual — appears in human– animal stories, and mine. A common trope, the love dope. Kidding. The grand passion, l'amour fou, mine is long running and deep, if mad love can run the distance. No kidding. People repeat themselves, usually don't know it, and I hate repeating myself (but if I didn't, who would? Kidding), but no one is considered herself, himself, without doing it. Consistency = repetitive behavior. A groove grinds itself into the brain, a beat or melody runs the neural pathways. On repeat, repeat, repeat. The most popular songs, the most repetitious: "All about that bass, 'bout that bass." Can't stop singing it. The mind fuck.___ Does the way you fall in love /___ go the same way /___ love on repeat or replay? Similarly, family attitudes, though they aren't obvious like rhythms and lyrics, get beat into us. Neurosis and Love are grooves, and they get deeper. (Continues...) Excerpted from Men and Apparitions by Lynne Tillman . Copyright © 2018 Lynne Tillman. Excerpted by permission of Soft Skull Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. 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