You know all those shitty novels about "memory" and "loss" and "the holocaust"? The sepia-toned tomes cluttering the front of every Borders&Noble in the land since the mid-90s--you know the ones.
Avoid them. Don't even think about them, lest you become cruel-mouthed and jaded like me about their ilk.
And while you're avoiding them, read this*. It's one of the great novels that inspired the reams of crinoline prose we've been drowning in since before Oprah was pushing Tolstoy. As Hemingway is to, er... later Hemingway, Fugitive Pieces is to Wally Lamb.
I'm probably making too much of the book. If you've read the right things you'll see its roots pretty clearly. It might jjust be Michael Ondaatje wearing a jarmulke. It has a definite pattern of bowling poetically; setting up the pins just so and then grimly tumbling them. But every now and again there's a passage that makes this kind of cute criticism seem as fatuous as a complaint about the predictability of sounds in a sonnet. I'm not going to quote anything for you here. It's a novel because that's what it's supposed to be. It demands immersion.
I continue to be amazed that at some level I can regard the reading of backlist fiction as professional development.
*For all the fucking frou frou this website added** you'd think that you'd be able to post a link in your journal.
**If you personally worked on either frou please do not be offended. I'm just cranky that this bug I found a month ago has persisted.
The book is actually Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels. That wasn't perfectly clear up there, and asterisks have a way of muddling whatever they land in.
Avoid them. Don't even think about them, lest you become cruel-mouthed and jaded like me about their ilk.
And while you're avoiding them, read this*. It's one of the great novels that inspired the reams of crinoline prose we've been drowning in since before Oprah was pushing Tolstoy. As Hemingway is to, er... later Hemingway, Fugitive Pieces is to Wally Lamb.
I'm probably making too much of the book. If you've read the right things you'll see its roots pretty clearly. It might jjust be Michael Ondaatje wearing a jarmulke. It has a definite pattern of bowling poetically; setting up the pins just so and then grimly tumbling them. But every now and again there's a passage that makes this kind of cute criticism seem as fatuous as a complaint about the predictability of sounds in a sonnet. I'm not going to quote anything for you here. It's a novel because that's what it's supposed to be. It demands immersion.
I continue to be amazed that at some level I can regard the reading of backlist fiction as professional development.
*For all the fucking frou frou this website added** you'd think that you'd be able to post a link in your journal.
**If you personally worked on either frou please do not be offended. I'm just cranky that this bug I found a month ago has persisted.
The book is actually Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels. That wasn't perfectly clear up there, and asterisks have a way of muddling whatever they land in.
VIEW 7 of 7 COMMENTS
I continue to be amazed that at some level I can regard the reading of backlist fiction as professional development.
And probably tax deductible!