Scott McClanahan: The Last Great American Author
“RECENTLY—at least comparatively—authors have been putting on airs. They are, in their own eyes, not spinners of yarns but critics of the social scene. They are prophets, counselors, correctives, political physicians and economic surgeons, evangelists, preachers, missionaries, soothsayers, witch doctors, clairvoyants, harbingers of the new order, interpreters of change; they are, in fact, anything but story tellers.”
In a literary landscape riddled with careerist writers thirsting for yet another fellowship or publication in an obscure literary magazine to pad their ever-expanding CVs exists West Virginian author Scott McClanahan. A man who, in this era of perpetual academic striving and rampant literary back scratching, says fuck it, and does what all great writers do: write.
How stupid this McClanahan must be—he is from West Virginia, after all—to only concern himself with writing beautiful and absurd books while his award-winning contemporaries in Brooklyn continue their playacting as woke coastal writers. Don’t you want awards too, Scott? Don’t you want a nice little sticker on your book signaling to all the literary elites that you’re a good boy? Don’t you want out of Appalachia and into a brownstone, one of the finely coiffed Jonathans your neighbor and strolling partner? Don’t you want to be a serious man?
The first book I read by McClanahan was The Collected Works Vol. 1, a collection of his previously self-published short stories, and I was immediately struck by the fact that I’d finally encountered an actual writer, and not some tepid pseudo-scribbler of the palatable. I was surprised that while reading McClanahan’s tales of West Virginia woe, I was actually feeling something, which is a rarity when I read contemporary fiction these days. So much of the time, after I’m done reading the latest award-winning literary confection, I think: well, I guess I just read a book. I might spend a few more minutes thinking about some authorial choices before putting the book away, immediately forgetting about it, as is usually the case when one encounters sterile intellectual exercises.
The problem is that so many writers want to make you think, which is to say that they want to impress you with their intellect. Look at me and my degrees! Did you know that I studied under so-and-so and he gave me a stamp of approval? Readers of McClanahan, on the other hand, seek out his books, because when you read him, you not only feel, but you feel deeply. This happens not only because of McClanahan’s style and subject matter, but because like all great outsider artists, he cultivates a community of likeminded souls instead of an audience. His guiding principal, it seems, revolves around his desire to bring down the usual barriers that separate writer from reader, which explains the wild readings of his early career.
The first time I remember seeing McClanahan was in a YouTube video of one of these readings, in which he shook violently and belted out a story from memory. It was a scary, thrilling sight, and dare I say, borderline spiritual. Here was a writer without a podium or even a book, a man looking to release himself from the constricting affectations of the staid literary world.
This is why a Scott McClanahan book will make you cringe and it will make you laugh, and sometimes, as is the case with his auto-fictional The Sarah Book, a short novel detailing the disintegration of his marriage, you’ll be cold-cocked by a deep, purifying sadness. The Sarah Book, McClanahan’s masterpiece, opens with this emotional uppercut:
I was the best drunk driver in the world. I’d been doing it for years. One morning Sarah came home from work and went back to bed. I tucked her in tight and kissed her forehead and told her not to worry about a thing. I told her to drift off to dreamland and not worry about her night shift and everything would be better when she woke up. Then I shut the door behind me and snuck down the stairs. I dodged the piles of basement junk and walked to a tiny room where we kept the out of tune piano from Sarah’s childhood. This is where I kept the big bottle. I took out my empty water bottle from my back pocket and then I opened up the piano top. The wood creaked eek and popped open like a monster’s mouth. “I’m worried about you,” Sarah told me a few weeks before. I thought about that now as I reached inside the open upright piano and pulled out the bottle. The piano keys tickled out a tune as I twisted off the bottle top and held the empty water bottle up to it and filled the water bottle full. I listened to its love song. I screwed both lids back on tight and then I put the big bottle back and shut the piano top shut.
It was time for my favorite part. It was time to drive. I drove down the street and through red lights and stop signs shouting stop. I zipped alongside cars at seventy miles an hour and thought, ‘We’re all just a few feet from one another. We’re all just a few feet from finding out the physics of death.’
Many have written of McClanahan’s cult success and have attributed it to his West Virginia setting or his let’s-sit-around-the-campfire style, but it’s this reckless, pull-no-punches induction of feeling, as seen in the opening of The Sarah Book, that brings people to his work—that brought me to him.
Fresh out of an MFA program, where timidity so often rules the day on account of the flattening effect of the workshop model, I was searching for something wild and wicked. Somehow, his stories become vessels for your own feelings, as if Scott is saying, “Yeah, it’s fucked up. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful and fucked up, and this is it. Cry. Laugh. Throw a chicken wing over a fence and then hop the fence and eat the chicken wing.” It’s a revolutionary act whenever a writer exposes his emotional wounds and brings you to those places of messy feeling and emotional disturbance that literature can lead you.
So how does McClanahan do it? Why do readers laugh and cry and kick chairs and kiss their crushes after reading one of his books? McClanahan, like many great writers before him, understands that a writer must not be constrained by the intellect in his quest to evoke feeling. Intelligence, or the writer’s desire to look and sound intelligent, can be the enemy of artful and moving fiction, which is what McClanahan aptly stated in an interview with The Creative Independent: “Essentially you’re dealing with your own enemy, which is your brain.”
The McClanahanian sensibility is what I’ve termed “the courtship of the clown,” a negation of the seriousness the bureaucratic literary world imposes on its writers. McClanahan understands that literature is far too important to be turned into serious business, so he leads with anything but the brain, which explains his questionable fashion—he’s been photographed wearing a pink onesie—and the strangely affecting short films and songs he’s released through Holler Presents, his independent publishing outfit with partner-in-crime Chris Oxley.
In courting the clown, the writer can finally begin to destroy his desire to be a Respectable Intellectual. If the writer is lucky enough, he might one day completely disable the more debilitating aspects of the brain and become the clown, which is what McClanahan’s project sometimes looks like, a project that sets him apart from his very serious contemporaries in the increasingly dour world of American letters.
The writer is no longer the social agitator or the spitter of acidic truths, but the acceptable marionette of the well-heeled upper classes. The writer, then, who wants to be successful—i.e., sell more than a dozen books or win an award or two—must pander to this elite class of mediocrities, which explains why so many of today’s notable writers are indistinguishable, in spirit and sensibility, from doctors and lawyers and accountants. Writers are now expected to propagate and uphold the social niceties of the day, or else risk excommunication from the very world of constant self-policing that defanged their work in the first place.
The “intelligent” writer is no longer a writer at all, but a calibrator, perpetually adjusting and keeping abreast of the correct ideologies of the day. To calibrate is to search for the correct idea or phrase or message in hopes of achieving congruence with the tastemakers and gatekeeper activists of the day. In short, to be a calibrator is to be that most cretinous of creatures: a politician.
Scott McClanahan does not calibrate; he is not a man searching for literary legitimacy. He wants to be illegitimate, because only the illegitimate are willing to traffic in foolishness and sentimentality, and even stupidity, in search of the transcendent magic of the everyday, which is what McClanahan perfectly captures in one of my favorite stories in The Collected Stories Vol.1, “The Prettiest Girl in Texas.”
The narrator—presumably a McClanahan alter ego—is woken up in the middle of the night by his uncle, who wants to “show him something.” The boy comes to, gets dressed, and just like that, we’re off into the Texas night in search of the prettiest girl in Texas, who, of course, works at the local strip club. The young narrator has never been to a strip club before and has only seen a single naked woman—his buddy’s mother—so there’s no doubt about what the uncle wants to show the kid; we’re just not sure why.
A pair of drugged-out strippers shake and shimmy as the narrator waits for the appearance of the prettiest girl in Texas. It goes dark. A country song plays. A spotlight illuminates the stage. She appears:
The prettiest girl in Texas is older and skinny and she’s wearing an imitation Dallas Cowboys cheerleader outfit. She’s a regular old stripper, until she isn’t. The narrator realizes that she’s missing an arm, except for a nub above the elbow. She’s wearing a sock on the nub, and the narrator understands, as does the reader, that this is the whole act. We’re watching, as implicated as the audience in what is about to go down, as the uncle tells the story of the motorcycle accident that caused the stripper to lose her arm. Then it happens:
After he told me this, he leaned back in the chair and watched her some more. I watched her too. I watched her keep reaching over and pulling at the end of the sock. By this time it was like the music wasn’t playing anymore. There was just the woman pulling on the sock. Then she stopped. She just pulled on the sock some more, but real slow and drawn out. Then she did it one more time, and it came off, and she was just standing in front of us all, holding the sock in her hand and letting her nub hang free.
My uncle leaned over and whispered, “This is what I wanted to show you. This.”
Only a writer courting the clown, unafraid of foolishness and sentimentality, can write a truly beautiful and absurd story such as “The Prettiest Girl in Texas” and not resort to the usual protectionist literary devices of irony and affectation. Yes, McClanahan says, there can be a prettiest girl in Texas, and she is this one, the one with the nub.
McClanahan, like his literary compatriots Elizabeth Ellen and Sam Pink—two brilliant writers in their own right—works outside the academy and literary institutions, because the academy and the institutions want to strap you in the uniform of the modern mediocre squire, which is to say, an MFA and pocketful of credentials. In short, they want to make you boring as fuck, which is why McClanahan affiliates himself with literary fire starters—New York Tyrant’s Giancarlo DiTrapano immediately comes to mind—and acts out whenever he feels the seriousness encroaching, such as the time he tried to pull Hill William from the LA Times Tournament of Books with the following Facebook status: “I am resigning Hill William from the tourney of Books. I am sorry to say so. But fuck me. Soccer moms are still idiots. I have resigned from the judging. Contact Anna Stein.”
McClanahan’s dismissal of the preposterous “tourney of books” is one of the great literary clown moves of our time, a necessary counterbalance to today’s brand of writerly striving. This recklessness in service of the search for everyday transcendence is best encapsulated in Hill William, when the narrator drops his pants and fucks the side of a mountain. He’s spent the better part of the novel taking punishment, continually running into the absurdity of existence, and now he’s going to fuck the earth and blow his load deep into the mud and give a little back, which, in McClanahan’s world, is all one can really do anyway.
Give a little back. Be the clown. Embarrass yourself. Be an amateur. And for fucks sake, if you’re going to write, put the brain away.
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