Are you a novelist? Hoping to be one? Or do you just want to argue over whatever the hell a novel might be in 2025? Well here’s your chance to ditch all those nattering URLs for an IRL meetup with the staff, subscribers, and admirers of The Metropolitan Review, the audacious, new — relatively — lit mag that looks at all facets of the Word.
Have you read any of William T. Vollmann’s epic, labyrinthine tomes? If not, for an introduction to the novelist’s mind-grappling tales, check out the 11k-plus-word interview/profile by Alexander Sorondo that TMR published this past March, which illuminates the vicissitudes even an established author encounters when seeking to publish a 3,400-page novel. Sorondo’s feature, like one of Vollmann’s tales, finds its pleasures not just in narrative and events but in details that accrete and — over unfurling paragraphs — coalesce into revealing portraits.
I was able to speak with Vollmann after someone gave me the phone number to a bunker-like structure that used to be a Mexican restaurant …
There’s a landline in a closet that he doesn’t really answer.…
If he’s interested, he’ll call back a few days later; the screen on your phone will spell JOHN Q. PUBLIC, all caps, and when you answer he’ll say, “Hi,” real chipper, “this is Bill Vollmann.”
I hear it a few times as we phonetag toward an interview.
Finally on a Saturday night we catch each other and he says he’d like to give me his home number for tomorrow’s interview.
Then with gravity he adds, “Now promise me first that you will nevvver share this number with anyone.” The delivery’s a little tongue-in-cheek, the way Wonka would say it knowing you’ve been approached already by Slugworth, but he’s serious. Vollmann’s work has garnered threats over the years and even though the FBI has finally and categorically decided he is not the Unabomber, after investigating him for several years, he’ll still occasionally go for his mail and find the envelopes aren’t sealed but re-sealed. In an unbroken package of books, he’ll find the spines all slashed and searched.
The byline for that piece reads “Alexander Sorondo and The Metropolitan Review,” a reminder, in our age of bloviating sole-proprietor blogs, that editors are crucial to making the published word actually worth reading. Also, as TMR’s “About” blurb proclaims, “Our pages are home to serious, entertaining criticism that doesn’t pull any punches. In a tech-addled, philistine-friendly world, we seek to reinvigorate high culture, and we believe we will.”
Indeed, in an age when fan clicks are the main metrics by which merit is measured, throwing hard critical punches — backed up by actual bylines rather than pseudonyms under purile avatars — feels, as the comedy troupe Firesign Theater once put it half a century ago, like marching “Forward Into the Past.” Perhaps we do have to rummage about in the past to find a path through the Internet’s gibbering digital miasma back to tangible debates about quality and standards — along with calling out philistines.
We all know how passionate writers can be — and hella snarky, too. So come to Reichenbach Hall Wednesday evening and maybe you’ll meet your own Gordon Lish and have your short stories blue-penciled down to their glimmering bones, as the relentless editor did for Raymond Carver. Or perhaps you want to mix it up with whoever has the wits to be tomorrow’s Dorothy Parker or Alexander Woollcott. An old-school German beer hall on West 37th might not be the Algonquin Hotel, but no doubt you and some new literary friends will still be able to find a table — round or otherwise — to trade barbs over. ❖
TMR Hangout
Reichenbach Hall
5 West 37th Street
Wednesday, September 10