Monday, March 17, 2008

BASS: Fiction Anemic's Review of My Brother Eli

"Hey Louie, you don't happen to know Jacob Foxx Greer, do you?"

So, after a nice break with young characters, we're thrown right back into Elderlyland with Joseph Epstein's "My Brother Eli", the story of a man looking back on the life of his self-centered writer brother.

Almost from the get-go, I kept looking at this story and Ann Beattie's "Solid Wood". In that story, the narrator was literally left picking up the life tab of his self-centerd famous author mentor.

While Beattie's narrator is just figuring out that his mentor was a destructive prick, Louie, Eli's brother, knows it from the start. Eli borrows money, writes about Louie and his mechanic business in a bad light, marries woman after woman only to abandon them and his children in the end, etc. Few people realize this, however, and Eli develops a literary following.

In the Contributor's Notes, Epstein says he was playing with the idea that artists are entitled to special rights and priviledges (i.e. if Mozart hadn't fooled around on his wife, we might not have Marriage of Figaro). Do lesser artists get the same pass? Epstein's goal is to say no. Staggering work of genius or not, artists are just as accountable as everyday people.

It's a nice sentiment, but Eli is so thoroughly unlikeable that I don't know if I see it. It would be nice to maybe see some of Eli's prose perhaps to make it more udnerstandable why the literary types are drinking the Kool-Aid.

I'll leave the more thorough analysis to Synedochick, but I will ask the question, why are audiences (or writers) so fascinated with the flamboyant author? This is (at least) the second story in this anthology like this. Is it because so many of these writers (Mailer, Vonnegut, etc.) were around for so long, entertaining us in their larger than life style, and are now going or gone?

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