Where are the Oddysseys, the Ulysseses, the Tristram Shandies, the a la recherche du temps perdus of today? I lamented, both mentally and to my girlfriend.
Nevertheless, I set out to the Nottingham branch of Waterstones with the intention of educating myself on writers whose blood still runs warm. Among other things, I came upon the July 12th edition of the New York Review of Books. Bearing the below garish yellow cover, with its 'I-may-be-ugly-but-at-least-I'm-smart' graphic design.
While the article on the reassuringly familiar subject of James Joyce's final novel enticed, the 'new story' by a living writer, along with reviews of current books were the real clinchers. So I took my purchase up to the counter, along with this year's Man Booker Prize winner, last year's Man Booker runner-up, and an as-yet-unread copy of the London Review of the Books, clocked the copy of 'Fifty Shades of Earl Grey' proudly displayed there, and paid.
One thing The New York Review of Books is is dense. The review of Slavoj Zizek's latest philosophical work was pretty much the most difficult thing I've read since I grappled with ontological layers in post-modern fiction for my BA dissertation. With lines like
"The Hegel that emerges in Zizek's writings thus bears little resemblance to the idealist philosopher who features in standard histories of thought. Hegel is commonly associated with the idea that history has an inherent logic in which ideas are embodied in practice and then left behind in a dialectical process in which they are transcended by their opposites."
And yet it is immensely satisfying to read, simply because of how well written it is, and how it avoids both pandering to the reader while also remaining a lot less dry than books of critical theory tend to be. I've found myself reading articles in it on subjects which would otherwise be of no interest to me, such as on American politics.
My girlfriend asked me how I can read reviews of books I have not read, and yet I'm finding them immensely useful. It feels like the sort of thing, as someone who is serious about writing, that I should be reading. Aside from the satisfaction I'm getting from slowly working my way through it (and I have been going slowly: after two-and-a-half weeks, I'm only just past the halfway point) I'm picking up some ideas I feel may be useful.
Here are three of the passages I've underlined so far, which may be useful for future reference:
From Christopher Benfey's review of Toni Morrison's 'Home': "Rhythmic urgency drives individual sentences in Home as well. As Frank makes his escape from the hospital, "maniac moonlight doing the work of absent stars matched his desperate frenzy." At some subliminal level we recognize that "maniac" goes more rightly with Frank Money, the "bare-foot escapee from the nuthouse," than with the moonlight, but the displaced pairing feels like syncopation, words struck slightly off the beat. A similar effect occurs a few pages later when Frank falls asleep and dreams "a dream dappled with body parts" before awaking "in militant sunlight." Again "militant" seems to belong with the body parts while the sunlight should be doing the dappling."
(Syncopation: Music . a shifting of the normal accent, usually by stressing the normally unaccented beats. - dictionary.com)
This use of this poetry-like technique in a prose novel, as flagged by Benfey, is something worth remembering.
From Michael Dirda's review of Richard Ford's 'Canada': "The two main actions of Canada are announced in its opening lines: "First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later." Such sensational words, even presented with matter-of-fact understatement, will grab anyone's attention. But on the surface, they would also seem to be revealing too much, arguably wrecking the novel's plot. Yet Ford is nothing if not sensitive to his sentences, emphasizing in many interviews the great care he takes over the subtleties of sound and sense. Nobody, he says, looks longer at his words than he does or calculates more precisely their effects.
"So readers should also look again. Note the pronoun "our" instead of "my" - this is, in some way, going to be a story about siblings. Notice, too, that Ford's narrator dances over whether the robbery is successful or not. Finally, he carefully avoids saying who is murdered and by whom. Ford's real interest doesn't lie in the robbery or the murders per so so much as in the events leading up to the crimes and to their aftereffects on those siblings. We know that the robbery and the murders will take place. But when? And how? And what will happen subsequently? So we attend, we observe, we prepare for the inevitable. Readers may recall that Gabriel Garcia Marquez strikingly employed just this technique in his novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold."
These opening lines recall for me the opening of To Kill a Mockingbird: "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow," only Ford appears to be showing far more with fewer words. A striking gambit for the opening lines, as Dirda points out.
Finally, from Charles Simic's review of Steven Millhauser's 'We Others: New and Selected Stories': "[Short stories'] most admirable quality is associated with what Steven Millhauser calls "artful exclusions." Like poems, good stories never overexplain. They only hint that a second, slower and more careful reading will deepen our understanding."
This is a point I think I would do well to remember, as I think my short stories often tend to be a bit on the long side, and would probably benefit from harsher editing, which I may reattempt on my latest short story as I'm still not happy with it.
If I see any more choice passages in the NYRB or the London Review of Books I shall post them here.
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