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.

negatoro

B.R. Myers has reviewed Franzen’s latest for The Atlantic, and it’s a doozy. My favorite part:

Franzen does not take his story very seriously, but the irony is indiscriminate and directionless; he hints at no frame of reference from which we are to judge his prose critically. Nor are we to imagine that a fool or semiliterate is addressing us. The same narrator who gives us “sucked” and “very into” also deploys compound adjectives, bursts of journalese, and long if syntactically crude sentences. An idiosyncratic mix? Far from it. We find the same insecure style on The Daily Show and in the blogosphere; we overhear it on the subway. It is the style of all who think highly enough of their own brains to worry about being thought “elitist,” not one of the gang. The reassuring vulgarity follows the flight of pseudo-eloquence as the night the day. Like the rest of these people, Franzen should relax. We don’t need to find a naughty word on every page to know that he is one very regular Joe.

But if Freedom is middlebrow, it is so in the sacrosanct Don DeLillo tradition, which our critical establishment considers central to literature today. The apparent logic is that the novel can lure Americans away from their media and entertainment buffet only by becoming more “social,” broader in scope, more up-to-date in focus. This may be the reason we get such boring characters. Instead of portraying an interesting individual or two, and trusting in realism to embed their story naturally in contemporary life, the Social Writer thinks of all the relevant issues he has to stuff in, then conceives a family “typical” enough to hold everything together. The more aspects of our society he can fit between the book’s covers, the more ambitious he is considered to be.

I’m a fan of Myers and I respect him as a critic, and (from what I know about Franzen’s idea of “fiction” and the “novel”) I think he’s written a very good review here. I’ll be picking up my copy of Freedom on Friday.

If you’re interested in reading more by Myers, I recommend his “Manifesto” against contemporary literary fiction. It’s been about a year since I read it last, and I’m very curious to revisit it– especially the section on Auster, now that I’m reading him myself. (If I recall Myers was/is not a fan.) My progress through New York Trilogy has slowed greatly, unfortunately, and I can’t seem to motivate myself to start the second part. I was in the end underwhelmed by City of Glass, and felt the whole thing was rather contrived. There are a few excellent passages (really good, actually), but they do little to buoy the rest of his sagging narrative. I’m hoping the second and third parts can change my mind, but I think my reluctance to begin them evidences my lack of hope that they will succeed.