Category: Prose Fiction

Wyatt Mason reviews John Updike’s collection of book reviews and other essays, Due Considerations, for the December, 2007 number of Harper’s (I’m not sure how long this article will live outside the paywall):

Without coyness, Updike renders a stern judgment [a review of J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey] based on telling quotation. He builds toward his findings in plain sight, earning him an authority that is based on his presentation of a plausible case. Rather than caring about books per se, which Heidi Julavits described as the central requirement for a book reviewer, Updike may be seen here caring about doing his job. The job in this case demanded that he point out flaws in the work of a fellow fiction writer and corroborate those points with evidence.

Although some readers are uneasy, a priori, with negativity, Salinger’s reputation has weathered Updike’s high-profile critique for a very simple reason: a text is not exhausted by a work of criticism, only informed by it. We leave Updike’s review thinking not about negativity, nor about Updike, but thinking, as good criticism makes us, about a writer’s choices. That we ultimately do or do not agree with Updike’s assessment is of no importance. That the assessment is clear and well-founded allows us to engage a point of view with which we can also, if we are so disposed, argue privately.

Charles Ardai of Hard Case Crime sorts out the difference between “noir” and “hardboiled” for Matthew Baldwin.

A noir story can be grim and suspenseful or grim and melancholy or grim and paranoid or grim and fatalistic—but it’s pretty much always grim. Its antecedents in literature include Oedipus, King Lear, and the work of Thomas Hardy; ‘noir’ posits a world in which either there is no god and men are left to make their way in a universe that’s indifferent to justice and to their suffering or else a universe that is actively malign…

Rebecca Stott praises the great 19th-century pre-post-modernist novel Moby-Dick:

It is a creature quite unto itself: a great library of learning contained within the belly of a whale, a key to all mythologies, a joke, a quest, a witch-hunt, a parable, a water eclogue and a warning against the dangers of monomania and what we might call fundamentalism.

Stott compares Melville’s book to an earlier gallimaufry of a novel, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

Cool: I spotted a couple of little things worth adding to the wiki for Against the Day.

Eighteen years after its hardcover publication date, and the year that it arrived on my doorstep from the Book of the Month Club (probably the last thing that I ever bought from them), and fiteen years after a false start, I have finished reading my copy of The Twenty-Seventh City, Jonathan Franzen’s first novel. I. Have. Finished. The Twenty-Seventh City. I feel that more of a burden has been lifted from me than when I finished In Search of Lost Time.

I never meant for it to go this long. In 1991, I read about fifty pages of this political thriller/social satire set in St. Louis in the middle of the Reagan-Thatcher years. And I was interested, but I put the book aside for some reason. And one month became two and became twelve, and then it was a case of starting over because I’d forgotten who S. Jammu and Martin Probst were. And if you’re starting over, then there are so many other enticements on the “read me” shelf, fresher choices. I let Franzen’s second novel go by, and then I read and enjoyed his third, The Corrections, five years ago. And still the bridesmaid, The Twenty-Seventh City remained on the shelf.

Then, finally, I dug back into it the day before Thanksgiving. It was worth the wait. I think it’s a stronger book than the other, certainly more ambitious, with themes of gentrification and coming of age and cultural assimilation, and what it means to have built something without designing it (Probst is the fictional general contractor who has built the Gateway Arch). And Probst’s antagonists are among the most chillingly manipulative that I’ve met in print. There are good lyrical passages, a little history of urban planning and development, and compelling plot. Oh! and a map!

I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself. The next most-senior book on the shelf is Angela Carter’s final novel, Wise Children, which went with me on vacation to the Outer Banks in the early 1990s and was never finished.

I’ve just finished rereading The Erasers, by Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated from Les Gommes by Richard Howard. Robbe-Grillet is one of the champions of the nouveau roman, and The Erasers (1953) is his first published novel. Ostensibly a detective story, it unfolds as a police procedural gone down completely twisted, finally unravelling as a retelling of the Oedipus myth. In a small coastal city crisscrossed by canals, terrorists have infiltrated the police force that is investigating a political murder, but no body can be found. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Dreams, imagined reconstructions of the crime, and outright fantasies push themselves into the story without warning. The book is actually one of Robbe-Grillet’s most accessible, and unlike his later books there’s hardly any sexy bits in it. The course of Wallas, the investigator, through the labyrinth of the nameless town suggests Leopold Bloom’s traversal of Dublin, as well as every other traveller’s tale that has come before.

I’m using a mass-market paperback with a cracked binding that I bought new sometime around 1975. The front matter says that this Evergreen Black Cat edition of 1968 was in its third printing, but I didn’t know about Robbe-Grillet until I picked up a copy of Snapshots in a bookstore in Evanston. In my first reading(s), I marked words and phrases with two colors of ink in an attempt to keep my narrative bearings. I don’t use pen any more on my books: I like the opportunity to efface the evidence of some fatuous inference of mine from the past. Some of the passages that I marked, I have no idea why I found them to be significant. Anyway, as an exercise in reflexive found poetry, here are all the phrases that I underlined or circled from that trip through the book 20-plus years ago, in the order that they appear in the text. I omit sidebars for longer passages and my own inane annotations.