goodbye invisible

I’m finally done with Invisible, thank goodness. Not a fan. It was simultaneously better and worse than The New York Trilogy, but mostly it was more of the same, just less exciting (not that The New York Trilogy is very exciting). I’ve already talked a lot about it (here and here and here), so I won’t bother to repeat myself. Normally I would have put the book down, but I wanted to get to the end — I knew he was going to throw something in there, some twist that would (in his eyes at least) tie everything up in one way or another. And, it was definitely there, like a bad M. Night Shyamalan movie. Overall the book felt like a collection of scraps that didn’t really work on their own  forced into a semblance of a novel. On the surface everything a reader of serious fiction would want was there — everything except depth.

I’m also very close to finishing the Zadie Smith book, which I recommend. At times her thinking can be a little inchoate and scattered, but not ever to the extent where you doubt her in what she’s saying. The last chapter on David Foster Wallace is extremely engaging.

bellow and roth and auster oh my

Question: Your writing style has changed in the last decade. How would you describe the change?

“Yes, I think it has. I think it’s more condensed. I think it hits harder than it used to. I think I have a much greater desire to strike sharp blows, to find more exact formulations. I greatly dislike books that waste my time. I detest superfluous sentences, unwanted paragraphs, needless pages.” –Saul Bellow, Contemporary Literature Vol. 25, No. 3 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 265-280

Mark Athitakis has a post up on brevity and Bellow, and he situates Roth smack dab in the middle of it. Apparently Saul Bellow was Phillip Roth’s mentor, which I find very interesting. My knowledge on both authors is very limited, restricted to the kind of historical facts one would learn in school, but I can see it. I’ve had Augie March sitting in my to-read pile for several months now as well as American Pastoral, and I’m definitely going to follow up the former with the latter. As someone learning to read as a writer instead of a reader, I’ve found approaching books in such a contextualized way to be  much more rewarding — don’t tell Barthes.

In other news I’m still reading Invisible. I’m refusing to let myself make up my mind about it, but I’m beginning to think that maybe Auster just isn’t for me. Almost everything I said about New York Trilogy applies to this book as well: it’s overly intellectualized, and the prose is boring. There’s no life to anything, no soul. It’s all so sterile. I find myself wanting to skip over whole paragraphs that seem to serve no real purpose except to fill space and get the reader from point B to C, and all this reading about Roth and Bellow and short form fiction makes me want to get out a red pen and go to work on my copy. I’m just barely half way right now, and I’m still hopeful…but things are looking grim.

auster then and then again

I finished The New York Trilogy the other night, and I’ve spent a lot of time since then thinking (and reading) about it — but that’s not necessarily a good thing. The conclusion I’ve come to is this: Auster succeeded in writing the novel he wanted to, but the novel he set out to write wasn’t very ambitious.

I found the trilogy to be lukewarm, and intellectually I  wanted to spit it out. The only real problem I have is his management of expectations and tension, and he plays with the genre in this regard, counting on the reader to make assumptions about the direction his mysteries will take. You think you’re headed somewhere, but ultimately you end up right back where you started. He makes connections through pattern and repetition and blankets the whole thing in the warm blanket of postermodernism, and it comes off as too self aware — and that, right there, is the crux of the issue for me. The book was overly intellectualized, too well thought out and plotted. The prose comes off as limp and uninspired, there only to connect one incident to the next, like covered bridges between cliff-tops. I was bored.

Different books set out to do different things, and here Auster accomplished what he wanted to, and I think he did it very well. I just don’t think his goal was worthwhile enough to warrant the book he wrote. I’m giving him another go, however, and I’m currently a hundred pages or so into Invisible, his most recent release. So far much more engaging, though it hasn’t sucked me in just yet. I’ll report back when I’m finished.

some reviews

I hope Labor Day festivities were as pleasant for everyone as they were for me.  I’ve almost finished Olive Kitteridge, which is a good thing because it’s completely hijacked the rest of my reading. On the plus side, having a little distance between myself and The New York Trilogy has given my mind the freedom to think about it in ways I otherwise wouldn’t have had — and not necessarily in Paul Auster’s favor. Right now color me mildly impressed. I’ve had a friend recommend his latest, Invisible, however, and after reading a few things about it I’m definitely going to give it a go here in the next few months.

Since I’ve been talking about Franzen and book reviews lately, I thought it would be fun to go back and read some reviews he’s read. Here’s a selection from his review of Alice Munro’s Runaway:

“But who is Alice Munro? She is the remote provider of intensely pleasurable private experiences. And since I’m not interested in reviewing her new book’s marketing campaign or in being entertainingly snarky at her expense, and since I’m reluctant to talk about the concrete meaning of her new work, because this is difficult to do without revealing too much plot, I’m probably better off just serving up a nice quote for Alfred A. Knopf to pull — ”Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America. ‘Runaway’ is a marvel” — and suggesting to the Book Review’s editors that they run the biggest possible photograph of Munro in the most prominent of places, plus a few smaller photos of mildly prurient interest (her kitchen? her children?) and maybe a quote from one of her rare interviews — ”Because there is this kind of exhaustion and bewilderment when you look at your work. . . . All you really have left is the thing you’re working on now. And so you’re much more thinly clothed. You’re like somebody out in a little shirt or something, which is just the work you’re doing now and the strange identification with everything you’ve done before. And this probably is why I don’t take any public role as a writer. Because I can’t see myself doing that except as a gigantic fraud” — and just leave it at that.”

The whole review is very interesting and overall Franzen does a great job contextualizing his opinion of Runaway in who he is and what he likes and why he likes it. Plus, he doesn’t give anything away. I’ve tried reading reviews of Freedom as they continue to come out, but I find myself either skipping over paragraphs at a time in an attempt to avoid plot details, or wading through pretentious paragraph after pretentious paragraph of head-in-ass snobbery. Ah, yes. Now I remember why I don’t read book reviews. Still, here and here and here are a couple of the more engaging ones I’ve stumbled upon.