I’ve been reading Scott McClanahan’s work for a long time — long enough to know that Fights!, his new novel, is not his first book with an exclamation mark in the title. (That would be Stories V!.) But there’s also something about Fights! that made reading it substantially different from the experience of reading McClanahan’s other work. And maybe that’s why I’m writing this, which is less of a review and more a case of me figuring things out using language.
On the surface, Fights! is not very different from the books that came before it. This is a book about a man named Scott McClanahan, a writer based in West Virginia whose life seems very similar to the life of its author. The prose is frank and the events described here reveal the narrator to be fallible, someone searching for the transcendent even as they get in their own way more than they’d like to admit.
Much of the book centers around fights with two people the narrator loves: his wife, fellow writer Juliet Escoria, and his editor and publisher, Giancarlo DiTrapano. If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware that DiTrapano died in 2021, and you may well have an idea of where this book is going. I feel comfortable saying that this is the most “literary” of McClanahan’s books, in the sense that it is the book of his that engages the most with the literary world and the publishing industry. That makes sense, but it also means that, of McClanahan’s books, this was the one where I felt like I had the greatest awareness of the real-life events that informed it.
Full disclosure here: I’ve known McClanahan and Escoria for a while. (Also, all three of us are on the masthead of Zona Motel.) And there are certain events in here, including a point when DiTrapano took to Twitter to reveal that he no longer wanted to publish writers who had agents, that I can remember watching play out as they took place. That’s a first for me while reading McClanahan. It isn’t meant as a critique and it did not affect my enjoyment of Fights! one bit. But it did shift how I perceived the book: reading McClanahan’s other work, I had no idea what was real and what was fiction, nor did I care all that much. McClanahan is a writer who knows how to tap into that tension, and I’m largely content to be along for the ride.
When I saw McClanahan read at P & T Knitwear last month, he brought up a book I wasn’t expecting: Javier Marías’s Dark Back of Time. That book follows a narrator with numerous similarities to Marías as he returns to England after the publication of his novel All Souls, a book somewhat inspired by his time living there. Much of that book is about distance: the gap between Marías the author and Marías the character, and then between each of them and the protagonist of All Souls.
The other book that this reminded me of is Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty. (Am I the first person to compare McClanahan and Patchett? Perhaps.) Both books are about their author’s friendship with a fellow artist; both are tragedies where we’re aware of the tragedy going in. And both are books that are illuminating about the ups and downs of making art alongside people you love. There’s a section in Fights! in which DiTrapano’s choice of carrier for a McClanahan manuscript prompts panic.
This book can easily be read as a roman a clef about a certain section of the literary world in the 2010s and 2020s; maybe it will be by some readers. At this point, having read McClanahan for years upon years, I’m unsure what Fights! would read like to someone encountering his work for the first time. If it’s the hot goss that theoretical reader is after, however, it’s notable that McClanahan does perhaps his most significant metaliterary gesture to date, throwing one very clear reminder that what we are reading is a book with an author, not simply an account of certain events from a neutral perspective.
Here’s the thing: this is really hard to do well, and McClanahan — to my mind, anyway — nailed the landing. It’s a bold gesture; think Steve Erickson introducing a “Steve Erickson” character in his novel Arc d’X and then killing him off, or the “Silencio” sequence in Mulholland Drive. McClanahan’s work has a quality that oscillates between conversation and ritual. It’s a kind of magic act, the kind of spontaneity on the page that takes a lot of craft to evoke. It isn’t the only one found in these pages.
***
Fights!
by Scott McClanahan
Rose Books; 276 p.