…..Mockerybird is interesting:
Speaking of not being able to find the words, Martin Amis writes about the novel in the post-September 11 world:
An unusual number of novelists chose to write some journalism about September 11 – as many journalists more or less tolerantly noted. I can tell you what those novelists were doing: they were playing for time. The so-called work in progress had been reduced, overnight, to a blue streak of pitiable babble.
Link via Marginalia. Bill must be on a literary bender, because he’s also got a link to an interview with programmer-turned-journalist-and-novelist, Ellen Ullman.
Recently read:
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. Pulitzer Prize winning story of two young Jewish comic book entrepeneurs in the Golden Age of comics … which, of course, happens to coincide with the Holocaust. One of the best books I’ve read in the last year or so. Absolutely worth your time: complex, entertaining, challenging, and a damn fine history of comic books to boot.
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. About an unravelling family at the endof the 90’s economic boom. National Book Award winner, I think. Yeah, the one that caused all the flap. Franzen apparently pulled a literary Babe Ruth, pointing to the academic outfield and claiming he was going to knock a Great American Novel out of the park. Corrections is his at bat.
My take: Get over yerself, Franzen. It falls into that category (which, actually, I greatly admire) of a novel that successfully combines “literary pretensions” (code for “complexity”) with a character-driven narrative and straightforward writing (other example purveyors: the aforementioned Chabon novel, anything by John Irving, the occasional Updike novel and the even more occasional Stephen King novella). It stands counter to the idea-driven narratives of authors like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon or the stylistic tics/flourishes of authors like Toni Morrison or Don DeLillo. (Also some of my favorite authors, for the record.) The Corrections is good, but it’s not revolutionary, nor is it a home run. A strong double, that could have been a triple if the author was a gutsier runner. However, it is probably the first novel that I’ve read that really captured the tail end of the 90’s, and it’s dead-on in its rendition of fin-de-siecle suburban angst.
Naked by David Sedaris. Collection of personal essays that are supposed to be humourous. People have been urging me to read Sedaris for a while now, so before I went to the UK for a month I picked up two Sedaris books. The first one I read, Naked, was a disappointment, especially compared to Kavalier and Clay which I read — no, devoured — right after Sedaris’ book. If you want to read humorous essays, pick up David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again which is the only book to actually make me fall out of a chair laughing (in public, no less).
Currently reading or recently purchased:
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. The other Sedaris collection I bought. As uninspiring as the first so far.
Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje. For a book club. I’m not an Ondaatje-head.
The Best American Short Stories 2001. Haven’t started yet.
War Fever by J.G. Ballard. Short stories. Haven’t started yet.
The Trouble With Principles by Stanley Fish. Fish is a legal scholar/literary theorist/philosopher who I find to be one of the most interesting and lucid thinkers writing today.