[REVIEW] MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction, edited by Chad Harbach

312 pages, $16

Review by Jonathan Russell Clark

Junot Diaz’s recent New Yorker essay “MFA vs POC” may have changed the conversation started by MFA vs NYC, an anthology of essays tackling, the subtitle suggests, “The Two Cultures of American Fiction.” Diaz’s response focused the attention on the race problem of MFA programs. As Diaz puts it, “That shit was too white.” His point is undoubtedly salient, but I hope MFA vs NYC survives the fallout, for it offers many fascinating insights into the current writing climate (though a hard look at race is conspicuously absent).

Despite its pugilistic title, MFA vs NYC isn’t actually a contest, inasmuch as no winner is declared. In fact, both “cultures” emerge equally disparaged. Sure, there are defenders in the mix, too. The wondrous (and current critical darling) George Saunders, for example, presents a simple and idealistic version of an MFA program:

“…a bunch of artists, living simply and honestly, cutting out the crap, trying to reconstruct a happy little petri dish, forming intense friendships that center around, but are not limited to, art, and that continue on through the rest of their lives.”

Sounds harmless enough. Actually, it sounds perfect, an effective way of granting yourself the most important elements of the writing life: time and community.

But then we have David Foster Wallace’s contribution (excepted from an essay he wrote in 1988), which worries about, among other things, the style of education MFA programs offer, since there exists a “mutual contempt” between Creative Writing department and those of “Straight Lit.” Creative Writing students, he argues, are not being exposed to the great and necessary forbearers of literature, which:

“…seems to suggest that Homer and Milton, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Maupassant and Gogol––to say nothing of the Testaments––have receded into the mists of Straight Lit; that, for far too much of this generation, Salinger invented the wheel, Updike internal combustion, and Carver, Beattie, and Phillips drive what’s worth chasing.”

In the NYC department, stories abound of the city’s notorious competitiveness and cutthroat, every-man-for-himself atmosphere. Emily Gould recounts how she sold a book-in-progress for $200,000 in 2008, and then went broke, managing only $7,000 in 2011. Keith Gessen, author of the fantastic All the Sad Young Literary Men and co-founder of n+1, explicitly examines how much money a writer needs to live in New York. We hear of borrowed money, odd jobs, close calls, minor successes, even major ones, and yet, still, no writer is safe in New York, no matter how well-regarded, or even how lucrative, your last endeavor was.

Perhaps the most interesting aspects of MFA vs NYC are the essays from the business side of things. Agents, publicists, editors, teachers and academics are also represented here, and it’s these points-of-view that elevate this anthology above writerly haranguing. Literary agent Melissa Flashman, for instance, ponders the cyclical influence of MFA programs on literary fiction, writing:

“Many recent graduates cycle back into MFA and PhD programs, and many of them teach undergraduates who, in turn, become the next generation of readers. It made sense that these novels would sell to editors who, if not graduates of MFA programs or PhD programs themselves, were at least graduates of American universities. And these novels would, in turn, be read and reviewed by other college graduates with similar concerns.”

Her point is made all the more relevant when one considers that an agent like Flashman sees not just the books chosen from the slush and printed with blurbs and glossy jackets, but also the slush itself, which, unfortunately, comprises the majority of work produced by American writers.

To round out the angles, MFA vs NYC also features an interview with Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, a history of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (who knew that CIA funding helped establish America’s seminal MFA program?), two decidedly academic reviews of Mark McGurl’s 2009 book The Program Era, one by Marxist critic Frederic Jameson, age 80, and one by the wonderfully trenchant Elif Batuman, who is, for my money, one of the great up-and-coming critics, if such a thing could be said to exist.

But for all its multiplicity, MFA vs NYC, taken altogether, seems to toll the bells, not for the publishing industry as a whole or even the MFA era, but, from an aspiring writer’s perspective, the chance of any young artist hoping to make any kind of creative dent in this world. The book’s title would probably be more accurate as The World vs Writers. The final essay of the collection, by Eli S. Evans, adequately sums up the collective feeling the book gives us. Describing a time in his life in which he was broke, alone and ever scratching at the surface of literary validation, he concludes:

“Mostly it sucked because…there was this moment when I spied an image of myself as a writer, whole and intact and accomplished, and recognized that image as me––as who I need to be in order to be me.”

Many of us have seen that image and hedged our bets on the writing life because of it. MFA vs NYC seems to lament the small tragedies that befall such hopeful people. But is it always tragic? Maybe the population explosion and the technological revolution have created too many writers and too few readers. Maybe the writing life is really a fool’s errand, a youthful delusion that time and experience will destroy. Maybe none of us should be in this game. But we’re here. We are, like the title of Dani Shapiro’s recent work, still writing. And though I believe that MFA vs NYC is a worth-while project and a revelatory read, I do hope not everyone is taken in by its somewhat cynical (or, I suppose, realistic) outlook. I hope people still continue to write, despite all its Sisyphean obstacles. I know I will.

***

Jonathan Russell Clark’s essays and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming from The Georgia Review, Colorado Review, The Millions, The Rumpus, Chautauqua, Black Heart Magazine, Thrasher, Edge and DigBoston. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and is at work on a novel.