The Reading Experience

Mainly Negentropic

In an essay at electronic book review on "ecocriticism," Andrew McMurry writes:

. . .The resources of poetry and literature and art are not particularly suited for stopping or even slowing the headlong rush into destruction (and this is where I differ from some in ecocriticism. . .who imagine that poetry and art and film can help us tread more lightly on the earth) because the roots of the problem go far deeper than culture can penetrate. Still, a study of culture helps us to understand what sort of creatures we are that we can effectively choose to immolate ourselves and the planet. Literature, as we all know, is the human pageant distilled; but it's equally the transhistorical record of a sad and furious primate, a mirror held up to our species' ugliness. Passed through the interpretative lens of ecocritical theory, literature reveals instance after instance of our inability to project, limit, and control the mainly negentropic quality of all our activities in our environments. In simple terms, the price we have paid for the complexity of our things is the decomplexity of earth's things. As a species, we have the power to modify our surroundings to suit our needs but not the wisdom to suit our needs to our surroundings.

This seems to me an admirably succinct account of what might be called the unromantic school of ecocriticism (disencumbered of the notion that literature can and ought to be deployed as a weapon in the battle to stave off our "headlong rush into destruction," that it might "help us tread more lightly on the earth"). It recognizes that the "resources" of art and literature are wasted when expended on agitprop and ill-disguised moral instruction, and it doesn't insist that writers exchange art for "relevance." McMurry clearly enough believes that literature does have relevance of a sort, but it isn't the kind that must be channeled into particular programmatic or ideological forms.

But he is stuck with a conception of literature that equates it with "content," that reduces it to its role in facilitating our understanding of "what sort of creatures we are," its status as "transhistorical record." Literature, through providing "a mirror held up to our species' ugliness," offers us information about ourselves, in this case disturbing information further clarified "through the interpretative lens of ecocritical theory." Literature's mirror and criticism's lens reflect back to us in a handily focused and duly intensified image "instance after instance of our inability to project, limit, and control the mainly negentropic quality of all our activities in our environments."

That works of literature do frequently reveal "the mainly negentropic quality of all our activities" is undeniable, although this is so mainly because serious writers do not shy from portraying human activity in all of its manifestations (many of which are ugly indeed), not because ecological degradation in particular seems especially pertinent. One might just as easily say that, viewed in the right way, literature reveals "the highly erotic quality of all our activities" or the necessarily "economic" character of those activities. An "interpretive lens" of any sort that directs its attention to what a literary work "reflects" is necessarily going to distort the work, in most cases extracting from it what it hoped to find in the first place, but approaches as determined to "see" only content as ecocriticism puts into high relief this tendency to appropriate the incidental characteristics of the work for external and purely utilitarian purposes, leaving the "merely literary" properties of novels and poems and stories to those who, in this case, seem blithely unaware of the overriding need to save the planet.

(Which is not to say that ecocritical insights never contribute to our understanding of particular works. To add such an insight to others that might be gathered in considering a given text is a perfectly sound strategy, but of course in most cases the ecocritic would likely not appreciate ecocriticism being subsumed to the broader goal of literary understanding in this way. It only makes the ecocritical agenda seem secondary to the protocols of reading literature efficaciously.)

Thus while McMurry is able to resist concentrating the interpretive lens of ecocriticism even more narrowly on the therapeutic possibilities of literature (convincing us "to tread more lightly on the earth"), he remains content with the metaphors of literature as mirror and criticism as lens. There's no doubt that all works of literature refer us to and illuminate human reality, if not always so directly and so simply as the mirror metaphor implies. But Stendhal's notion of the "mirror in the roadway," when taken too literally, too quickly sanctions the assumption that literature is important for its content and that its most immediate use is to enlighten us about this or that "issue," to serve as the "subject" of some such mode of analysis as ecocriticism. By deflecting attention away from the work itself and onto the "reality" it supposedly reflects, the mirror metaphor encourages us to ignore those elements of literature without which literary texts would be no different than any other species of writing: form and style.

In fact, Andrew McMurry might go some way toward easing his own dyspepsia caused by the depravity of human nature if he were to pay some attention to the aesthetics of literature. By putting aside the mirror and considering the way fiction and poetry transmute human experience into complex and challenging verbal forms, he might come to appreciate one kind of human activity devoted to creating rather than destroying. He might learn that art is one way by which the human imagination is able to realize its more beneficent possibilities. It's all right there in front of us, but sometimes we seem too busy staring at our own reflections in the mirror to see it.

Stephen King

In a response to a recent post of mine which included some disparaging comments about two of Stephen King's novels, Jahsonic suggests that my criticism is "for a large measure based on content related rather than style related criteria."

Nothing could be farther from the truth. As Jahsonic concedes, I would hardly be enthusiastic about the film versions of Carrie and The Dead Zone if I objected to their "content"--by which I assume Jahsonic means their horror/fantasy narratives, the supernatural occurences the novels are "about." My dislike of these two novels, as well as much of the rest of King's work (although not all--The Shining is a passably good horror novel, and I like the screenplay he wrote for George Romero's Creepshow), is based almost entirely on "style related criteria." I think Stephen King is a bad writer. More precisely, whereas Brian De Palma and David Cronenberg (as well as John Carpenter in his adaptation of Christine) treat the "content" of the source novels with exemplary style, are nothing if not great cinematic stylists, as a writer of prose fiction Stephen King has no style.

Jahsonic quotes Susan Sontag on invidious distinctions between style and content: "It would be hard to find any reputable literary critic today who would care to be caught defending as an idea the old antithesis of style versus content. On this issue a pious consensus prevails. … In the practice of criticism, though, the old antithesis lives on, virtually unassailed. Most of the same critics who disclaim, in passing, the notion that style is an accessory to content maintain the duality whenever they apply themselves to particular works of literature." Presumably I was guilty in my original post of inappropriately cordoning off style from content in King's fiction, in order to assail the latter. But it's precisely because I cannot so easily separate style and content that I find his fiction hard to take seriously. In fact, it seems to me that it is Stephen King himself who is guilty of detaching style from content, of not understanding that the two ought to work in concord and not at cross purposes, which in my opinion they too often do in his books.

At best, King's prose is blandly functional, a "plain" style occasionally gussied up with pseudo-colorful idioms. Here's a passage from The Dead Zone, describing the accident that sends Johnny Smith into a coma:

There was the sound of smashing glass. A huge gout of flame stroked its way up into the night. Johnny's head collided with the cab's windshield and knocked it out. Reality began to go down a hole. Pain, faint and far away, in his shoulders and arms as the rest of him followed his head through the jagged windshield. He was flying. Flying into the October night.

Dim flashing thought: Am I dying? Is this going to kill me?

Interior voice answering: Yes, this is probably it.

Flying. October stars flung across the night. Racketing boom of exploding gasoline. An orange glow. Then darkness.

His trip through the void ended with a hard thump and a splash. Cold wetness as he went into Carson's Bog, twenty-five feet from where the Charger and the cab, welded together, pushed a pyre of flame into the night.

Darkness.

Fading.

Until all that was left seemd to be a giant red-and-black wheel revolving in such emptiness as there may between the stars, try your luck, first time fluky, second time lucky, hey-hey-hey. The wheel revolved up and down, red and black, the marker ticking past the pins, and he strained to see if it was going to come up double zero, house number, house spin, everybody loses but the house. He strained to see but the wheel was gone. There was only blackness and that universal emptiness, negatory, good buddy, el zilcho. Cold limbo.

Johnny Smith stayed there a long, long time.

Does anyone want to defend this as good writing? When it's not straining after poetic phrasing that just lies limply on the page--"A huge gout of flame stroked its way," "His trip through the void ended with a hard thump," "revolving in such emptiness as there may between the stars"--it presents us with awkward repetitions--"up into the night," "into the October night," "pushed a pyre of flame into the night"--and just purely embarassing expressions--"Reality began to go down a hole," "only blackness and that universal emptiness, negatory, good buddy, el zilcho." King is trying to describe an extraordinary event as vividly as he can, but his relentlessly routine language simply isn't up to the task.

Here's another passage depicting Johnny's post-crash psychic abilities:

Johnny stopped suddenly and stiffened like a dog on point: "here," he muttered. "He did it right here."

Images and textures and sensations flooded in. The copper taste of excitement, the possibility of being seen adding to it. The girl was squirming, trying to scream. He had covered her mouth with one gloved hand. Awful excitement. Never catch me, I'm the Invisible Man, is it dirty enough for you now, momma?

Johnny began to moan, shaking his head back and forth.

Johnny's power of "second sight" is this novel's primary "supernatural" device (as are similar powers in other of King's books), but it's really hard to accept it with a straight face, much less experience it viscerally as a gateway to "horror," when the writing is as flat and listless as it is in a passage such as this. King renders the most extraordinary (and inherently incredible) occurences in the most ordinary kind of language, although it's hard to know whether he employs such language deliberately--in which case it's a very poor choice for bringing scenes like this to life--or whether this is just King's conception of what the language of fiction should be like, in effect the best he can do given the assumption that "content" is everything, style much less than even an afterthought. Ultimately, Stephen King is a realist despite himself, and despite his genre, as the burden of his prose style seems to be to present his characters and their predicaments in as transparently "lifelike" way as possible, adhering to conventional methods of plot, setting, and characterization even when the plot features outbreaks of "unreal" events and the characters find themselves in the most outlandish of situations. Paradoxically, however, his pedestrian prose fails to make his creations seem "real" in the manner demanded of works that violate the suppositions of ordinary reality: by making the depicted world a vivid, aesthetically transformed alternative to that reality so beguiling it makes those suppositions irrelevant.

Thus I just can't agree with Jahsonic that Stephen King's novels qualify as "transgressive fiction," fiction that "transcends everyday life" and "makes you curious of what life can and can’t be about." King's novels don't transcend everyday life so much as they make the strange events they portray seem almost as prosaic in the way they unfold as anything else in the routine of human affairs. And, in my opinion, they certainly don't make us "curious of what life can and can't be about." Their "content" is so perfunctorily related, so lacking in texture, that they only make us more aware that life will never be like that.

Nor can I agree that in the long run King will rank with other ostensibly "popular" writers such as Charles Dickens. Dickens's books still reveal to us a writer of prose that is vibrant, surprising, and transformative, that makes the long-vanished world of Victorian England as alive as it could have seemed to those who belonged to it--probably more so. King's fictional worlds are already dead (except when they are revived and reinvented by more talented filmmakers), done in by a prose style that withers on the page.

Erosion

According to an article in indieWire:

. . .technology's greatest gift to film culture may be the blogosphere, which has seemingly ignited a passionate audience for auteur cinema around the country. Film historian David Bordwell, whose film textbooks are used in college classrooms around the world, has recently taken to blogging, which he calls an "overturning of the critical establishment," he says. "In the 1950s and 1960s, when film culture really got going, it was a small space, mostly in New York City. Now that monopoly is eroding very fast and there is a tremendous amount of people out there. They don't buy newspapers. They're not my students, and they're not the general public, either," he continues. "And their cinephilia is much greater."

I don't know that American literary culture was ever literally a "small space," but it is surely the case that it has long been centered in New York City, whose writers, critics, and publishers have consituted whatever "critical establishment" exists in this country. (Some people might regard the academy as the intellectual arm of our critical establishment, but academic criticism has all but lost interest in monitoring current writers and their work except insofar as these writers can be made to align with the critic's own external political objectives.) It has exerted a "monopoly" on what ultimately can be regarded as acceptable practive both of fiction-writing and of literary criticism in the same way New York film culture monopolized the critical discourse about film. All other practices are marginalized, even if in the long run they turn out to be more influential or more durable than those sanctioned by the establishment. (One thinks of Gilbert Sorrentino, a native New Yorker whose work--in criticism as well as in poetry and fiction--was essentially invisible to this establishment, and who could barely get an infuriatingly perfunctory obituary from the New York Times on his death.)

(And I don't mean this to be a slam against New York City per se. A critical establishment has to be located somewhere, and in our case New York is it.)

To this extent, I wonder if the blogosphere (the cybersphere more generally) is having/will have the same kind of effect on literary culture Bordwell believes it is having on film culture. It would seem that the litblogosphere has indeed demonstrated there are large numbers of people "out there" who take a passionate interest in books and writing, people who have not much been taken into account by the "mainstream" outlets of opinion (they're not just members of the "general public") but who clearly know literature just as extensively as those reviewers and critics sanctioned by the establishment and have intelligent things to say about it. I think a journey down the blogrolls on the right will demonstrate this to be the case, both through the blog posts themselves and through the comment threads many of them attract.

The establishment response to litblogs has lately been pretty uniformly and intensely negative. Bloggers are accused of being "pooters" who should leave the real thinking to those reviewers who get paid to do it. They sell themselves out "for a couple of review copies and a link on a blogroll." Even when blogs are ostensibly being praised, establishment types prescribe that they "are supposed to be fun and freewheeling, filled with quick snippets written in a breezy, conversational voice," as if this will safely distinguish them from the more serious work being done in the newspapers (!). Perhaps this is all justifiable criticism, but perhaps it is also the collective voice of panic being expressed by those whose authority "is eroding very fast."

Close to Heresy

On the heels of the previous post examining the absurd idea that formalism--close reading, paying primary attention to the formal and stylistic properties of works of art and literature--is a "mechanical" approach that turns art into "something less than human" comes this equally silly commentary by Emily Wilson at Slate:

Historicism, in various new and not-so-new guises, dominates most contemporary academic literature departments. It has become something close to heresy to suggest that any literary work could be studied without close reference to the specific place, time, and culture in which it was produced. Literature does not express timeless truths about human nature—or, at least, you would sound like a simpleton if you said so at an academic conference. Rather, literature articulates the ideas and values of its own time, according to older, Hegelian forms of historicism. Or literature "negotiates" the "power dynamics" of its own time, according to the newer, post-Foucaultian versions. These positions each have something to be said for them: Both respond, in different ways, to the obvious fact that literature is not produced independently of its author and his or her society—as radical forms of literary formalism might suggest. . . .

So formalists believe that a work of literature is produced "independently of its author"? Literally by a machine? By some magic process whereby an author discovers his/her new book fully-formed beneath a moss-covered rock?

Similarly, just how would a writer work "indepentently. . .of his or her society"? All writers are literally expatriates? They float above the world on a billowy cloud of inspiration, gazing heedlessly on their fellow humans down below, who don't seem to realize they might also be "independent" of their time and place?

What radical formalist ever believed such patent nonsense? Of course, names are never given in these sophomoric caricatures of formalism because no literary critic has ever held the position that "literature. . .is produced independently of its author and his or her society." Only someone intent on marginalizing formalism--aesthetic appreciation more generally--could even read such a statement without noting how ludicrous it is. Those of us who prefer to focus on the aesthetics of literature (without which there is no literature) are not so stupid as to think poets and fiction writers free themselves of the assumptions of time and place and produce "timeless truths"; we do think that they produce art, and that art bears scrutiny as art at least as much as (in my opinion more than) it does as a specimen of "the ideas and values of its own time."

Wilson goes on to maintain that "the triumph of historicism is a pity, not least because the dominance of any orthodoxy tends to deaden the critical faculties," but she has clearly accepted the underlying demonization of formalism (it's "inhuman," to accept it "heresy") that has made the domination of historicism in academic criticism possible. To deviate it from it might cede the scholarly territory to those radical formalists and pleasure-seeking aesthetes who still lurk outside the campus walls. Such "simpletons" wouldn't understand "power dynamics" if it was right there in front of them.

A Certain Image Regime

At The New Criterion, Michael J. Lewis quotes from The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, by art historian T. J. Clark:

My art history has always been reactive. Its enemies have been the various ways in which visual imagining of the world has been robbed of its true humanity, and conceived of as something less than human, non-human, brilliantly (or dully) mechanical. In the beginning that meant that the argument was with certain modes of formalism, and the main effort in my writing went into making the painting fully part of a world of transactions, interests, disputes, beliefs, “politics.” But who now thinks it is not? The enemy now is not the old picture of visual imaging as pursued in a state of trance-like removal from human concerns, but the parody notion we have come to live with of its belonging to the world, its incorporation into it, its being “fully part” of a certain image regime. “Being fully part” means, it turns out in practice, being at any tawdry ideology’s service.

"But who now thinks it is not?" A better question: Who ever thought it was not? What formalist ever believed a work of art or literature was literally "brilliantly (or dully) mechanical," or, at least, that a proper response to art was one that regarded it as "something less than human, non-human"? Has anyone ever really confronted a work of art "in a state of trance-like removal from human concerns"? The very fact the a human being experiences a work created by another human being, both of whom presumably draw on very human attributes--creativity, attentiveness, for that matter even the ability to self-induce a "trance-like" state--would seem to make the transformation of the puerile metaphor of the "mechanical" response to art into something real, something to be contrasted with "human," manifestly preposterous. Yet this association of formalist criticism of all kinds with merely "mechanical" aesthetic appreciation and "engaged" political criticism with the fully "human" world of "transactions, interests, disputes, beliefs" has been an operational assumption of academic criticism for almost three decades now, producing such an endless stream of ideologically sodden "scholarship" that apparently even Clark has had enough.

It's good that T. J. Clark wants now to challenge the pseudo-analyses of "belonging to the world" and "image regimes," but maybe he should have realized that his own interpretation of formalism was itself a "parody notion," that he was exchanging one "mechanical" approach for what was inevitably to become its equally distorted mirror image. It now seems a fixed law of academic criticism that one generation will dismiss the previous generation's preferred critical method based on its least representative, most exaggerated characteristics, while going on to practice a new method that seems designed to provoke a similar reaction from the next (or in this case, from one of its own.)

I am loath to quote The New Criterion approvingly, but I agree with Lewis (although I'd change his "immeasurably" to "somewhat"):

. . .The tendency of Clark’s career, then, has been to dislodge the aesthetic object from its pedestal to set it back into the social, cultural, and political currents that brought it forth. Such an approach, wielded judiciously, can immeasurably enrich the understanding of an object. But, used indiscriminately, it can also impoverish that understanding, rendering the object into a mere historical document—like a bill of lading or a deed of transfer. And a mediocre work of art always speaks far more eloquently about the society that made it than a great one. In the end, an insight that aspired to widen the scope and relevance of art history demoted it to a subspecies of social history. And Clark, whatever one may think of his politics, is too good an art historian not to realize that this is a loss for everyone.

Relevant to Our Complicated Moment

Noting that this year's "100 Notable Books" list is balanced evenly between fiction and nonfiction, New York Times Book Review editors (i.e., Sam Tanenhaus) aver that

This indicates, most obviously, that the past 12 months have been an especially strong period for fiction. But it also suggests, perhaps, that novelists and short-story writers have begun to rediscover the uses of narrative and to find new ways of making their imagined creations more relevant to our complicated moment.

Since I haven't noticed that 2006 was "an especially strong period for fiction" (nor a particularly weak one, either), I have to conclude that this is Tanenhaus's way of encouraging novelists to "rediscover the uses of narrative" (old-fashioned storytelling = a better chance of getting a NYTBR review).

Frankly, I find this critical tic of Tanenhaus's--American fiction has abandoned narrative--rather baffling. I defy him to look at the literary fiction shelves (even allowing him to walk past the genre aisles) at Borders and Barnes and Noble and point out what books do not in fact dispense narrative in fairly heavy doses. Perhaps the powers that be in these stores occasionally set out an experimental novel or two that engage in wacky distortions of time or narrative structure, but could Tanenhaus really seriously contend that most of the displayed items do not harbor storytelling of a fairly recognizable kind behind their gaudy jackets? For most writers and readers, "story" and "novel" remain more or less synonymous terms. Perhaps Tanenhaus believes these stories are too "literary"? Too heavily concealed behind daubs of prose and a facade of "psychological realism"?

Although Tanenhaus ultimately does reveal his storytelling preference in affirming those writers who have managed the feat of "making their imagined creations more relevant to our complicated moment." This has been Tanenhaus's mantra ever since he took over the Book Review. We live in "complicated times," and only those books that contribute to the "national discussion" of our various complications are deemed worthy of inclusion in the country's ostensibly premier book review section. Never mind that this reduces the value of books--even works of fiction--to their potential role in continuing onto the book review pages the same kind of blather to be found in the rest of the New York Times, and in most of the larger American newspapers as well. (Although perhaps I shouldn't trivialize it quite so much by calling it "blather"; it's precisely this NYT-style blather that helped get us in the current "complicated" mess in Iraq.) Let's invite the same fools and charlatans who dominate the news and opinion sections over to the Book Review and make it into the same kind of intellectual sinkhole.

Thus, "imaginated creations" aren't enough. (Although there's more than enough condescension in the way that phrase is used here.) If fiction writers aren't going to stick to the facts, damn it, then they ought at least stick to the manly art of storytelling in ways we journalists can commend! Once they've turned their attention to the "relevant" subjects, and told us a nicely constructed story, we can in turn make fiction irrelevant and twist their tales into our own conventional, prefab shapes.

Diving In

At her blog, The Palace at 2:00 a.m., Marly Youmans provides an excellent brief account of the benefits of rereading:

. . .it is in rereading that a story or poem reveals itself—and tells us the extent of its merit. Most reviewers know only the first cursory passage through a work when they pen a review; a reader can know more. Though life is short and art long, we ought to reread often, because it is there that we “dive,” as Melville would say.

Actually, I would say that Marly is describing not merely the difference between reading to review and truly reading--diving in, without concern for reporting on it afterward--but between the goals of reviewing in particular as opposed to the goals of literary criticism more generally.

The reviewer is charged with the task of immediately assessing a given work for its value to a "general audience" at least as interested in keeping up with the newest and the latest as in plunging deeply into any particular book (dawdling over the current book only prevents us from moving on to the next hot release). Good reviewers certainly do help us decide what books may reward a more careful and concentrated kind of reading, but the very nature of periodical book reviewing makes it necessary for the reviewer to assume the role of cultural quality inspector. It's the stage of literary life in which books are most conspicuously presented as commodities, another kind of "choice" to be made by the intelligent consumer.

But after this initial flurry in the literary marketplace and after most of the products offered by the "book business" have been consumed, ignored, or discarded, some books remain to be read and reread in the way Marly has described. They're books (or poems or stories) that call on us to immerse ourselves in the experience of reading them for reasons that go beyond the timely and the trendy. And I like to think that there is a kind of literary criticism that corresponds to this order of reading, that both reminds us what works these are and helps us to enhance the reading experience. Such criticism also attempts to "dive" in the Melvillean manner, providing "information" of a sort through patient description of the text's manifest (if not always immediately apparent) features (as experienced by the critic him/herself), but also drawing attention to the implications of the text's formal and stylistic qualities or putting the work in a relevant context, especially the context of literary history. "Interpretation" might be involved, but it is not the kind of interpretation that encloses the work in critical amber, telling us what it "means." It is interpretation meant to be supplemented, if not replaced, by additional informed interpretation.

At one time this sort of criticism was relatively abundant, in literary magazines and journals, although it was frequently labeled "academic." Unfortunately, academic criticism as now practiced bears little or no relation to the literary criticism I have described, criticism concerned first and foremost with the literary qualities of literature, with making the reading of works of literature a more satisfying experience for those who might be interested. In revolt against the mere "appreciation" of literature, academic critics now enage in its interrogation. Literature exists not as the effort to create compelling works of verbal art but as a category of artifacts to examined among others for its relevance to "cultural critique." "Reading" is the process of forcing the text to conform to one's pre-established critical paradigm, not the act of exploring its verbal complexities. Since no "diving" into works of literature is possible when they've been drained of all their vitality, what now passes for literary criticism in the learned journals does less than nothing to encourage active reading, much less rereading. It wades around in the shallow waters of ideology and second-hand social analysis, leaving serious readers of literature to swim for themselves.

Aeons Old

I decided to read Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone partly because he is a writer from my home state of Missouri with whom I was previously unfamiliar, and partly because this book received such unanimous praise upon its recent publication (including from two prominent litbloggers who drew attention to it in multiple posts). This review in the otherwise fairly sober-minded Guardian review pages was not atypical:

. . .a characteristically short novel of tremendous and, at times, ferocious power. Words such as 'bleak' and 'beautiful' and 'heartbreaking' spring to mind. . . .

Everything about [the protagonist's] quest is utterly compelling; everything evoked about the landscape and its people convinces completely. . . .

Woodrell's language fascinates and intrigues; he manages to make this sort of American-English seem aeons old, ancient. . . He conveys the clipped and functional utterances of the characters as strongly as the bleak beauty of the Ozarks themselves. . . .

Winter's Bone pulses between innocence's triumph and annihilation. . .reading it will make you feel that you walk on very, very thin ice, and know that chaos is very, very close. Such knowledge has many consequences; one of them is exhilaration.

Harper Barnes of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch asserted that

Daniel Woodrell is a classic storyteller, a writer who is able to mold from the raw material of his culture forceful vernacular narrative that is structurally lean, yet embedded with metaphor, symbol and myth.

As to this latest novel in particular, Barnes informed us that "I just didn't want Winter's Bone to end."

According to Carolyn See

In the hands of a conventionally educated urban author, [the] characterizations would seem intolerably condescending and elitist, but Daniel Woodrell was born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks and still makes his home in the Ozarks near the Arkansas line. He's not taking cheap shots; he's reporting life as he sees it.

Any reservations about the authenticity of these characters and their actions would be "carping," since "Woodrell simply shows us a world, the raw meat of it. If we can't stomach his reality, it's our problem, not his."

Suffice it to say I did not find the world depicted in Woodrell's novel so overpoweringly "raw" I didn't want to "stomach his reality," nor did I find Ree, the novel's protagonist, to be like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, "a knight in a world full of craven churls." Neither can I echo some of the over-the-top terms--"tremendous," "ferocious," "utterly compelling"--used by so many reviewers in describing this book, as illustrated in these excerpts. I can't say I found it a bad book (I managed to finish it, and a few of its scenes are well done enough), but I'm finally just puzzled about what such reviewers are seeing in it that warrant these kinds of hosannas.

Speaking as someone raised in southeastern Missouri, on the other side of the Ozarks, I found the characters in Winter's Bone mostly unconvincing, verging on Daisy Mae-type stereotyping of "rural America." The men are all bumptious ne'er-do-wells whose assumed authority and propensity to violence and law-breaking are faintly cartoonish. The women are strong but trapped in the backwardness of their crcumstances, capable both of killing in order to guard family honor and of enduring great hardship to keep those families functioning in their disfunction. Indeed, these characters might have been more compelling (at least to me) if the author had deliberately exaggerated their cartoonish qualities, played them for laughs rather than as defining characteristics we're meant to take seriously.

However, I suspect it's precisely the depiction of the characters as modern-day hillbillies that made Winter's Bone immediately appealing to some readers. So unlike the people such reviewers interact with in their own lives, they are safely "other," and a novel portraying them and their environment brings an acceptable dash of "local color." And it's so much easier to consider characters like these as "embedded with metaphor, symbol and myth." Who's going to regard a harried urban professional contemplating infidelity as an embodiment of "myth"?

The appeal of Winter's Bone certainly cannot be based on its narrative power. In an interview with the author, John Freeman informs us that after reading Raymond Chandler, "Mr. Woodrell realized he might be in an in-between place, a literary writer who believes in the imperative of story above all else." I don't think Chandler would be enthralled with the narrative twists in Winter's Bone. Mostly Ree, who lives with her younger brothers and her mentally-evacuated mother and who must locate her ramblin' man of a father or lose her home, travels around from place to place, talking to various members of her widely-extended family to see if they know where he is. Eventually she confirms that he's dead. That's about it, but from such meager drama we're to regard Ree as an epic heroine, her "quest" an elemental saga. One of the blurbs on the book's jacket would have us believe that "Winter's Bone is as timeless as Homer."

Then there's Woodrell's style, the language that seems "aeons old, ancient," the "forceful vernacular narrative." On the one hand, the novel is filled with relatively pleasant passages of "poetic" description. especially descriptions of nature, with which the characters are portrayed as being in intimate co-existence:

As the frosty bits dwindled the wind slowed and big snowflakes began falling as serenely as anything could fall the distance from the sky. Ree listened to lapping waves of far shores while snowflakes gathered on her. She sat unmoving and let snow etch her outline in deepening clean whiteness. The valley seemed in twilight though it was not yet noon. The three houses across the creek put on white shawls and burning lights squinted golden from the windows. Meat still hung from limbs in the side yard, and the snow began clinging to the limbs and meat. Ocean waves kept sighing to shore while snow builit everywhere she could see.

Some of this edges toward cliche ("lapping waves of far shores"), but the first sentence is nice, and the image of the snow-encrusted meat is both acridly humorous and an apt symbol of the existence being led by the inhabitants of the "valley."

On the other hand, a passage like this strikes me as overly cute in its attempt at demotic lyricism:

A field, a line of trees, a small path with a few paw prints wending deeper into the woods. A plump waxing moon and silvered landscape. Merab followed the beam and led them on a slow wamble across a rankled field, then a slight curving path rose to a balled mound with a knuckled ridge and down again into a vale. It was a coggly path to an iced pond, with a hedge of blowdown barring the way. The logs and branches caused slipping and barked shins, oaths and mutters, but were soon put behind, and the women gathered into a puffing rank, staring down at the stiffened pond.

The wambling and the coggly paths just don't do much for me. It's part of a "vernacular" that is simply a rustic version of the same old routine psychological realism (we're receiving these details as they are filtered through Ree's perception of them) employed so reflexively in most contemporary literary fiction.

I also have to say I found the deus ex machina-inspired happy ending of Winter's Bone (Ree is saved from indigence by a providential stash of cash) pretty treacly. I'm suprised the reviewers I've cited weren't more bothered by it themselves. But perhaps they found it only what was due the Odysseus-like protagonist after her wanderings through the winter-blasted Ozarks, her tilting between "innocence's triumph and annihilation." It would be of a piece with the general critical exhaltation of what is finally a rather thin slice of workshop realism.