The Reading Experience

John Barth, Metafictionist

My essay-review of John Barth's Collected Stories at The Quarterly Conversation:

While numerous works prior to Lost in the Funhouse clearly enough now seem classifiable as postmodern (including Barth’s own previous two novels), it also now seems clear that this book is most responsible for clarifying (and raising) the stakes involved in what by the time it appeared was obviously among younger, more adventurous writers a rejection of the reigning practices of the immediate postwar years in favor of a more formally audacious kind of fiction. Barth, along with such generational colleagues as Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and William Gass, no longer took for granted a definition of fiction that ties it to traditional conceptions of narrative and its fixed elements (“character development,” “point of view,” etc.). . . .

Book Reviews, 2015

Full Stop

Satin Island, Tom McCarthy (link)

I, Bartleby, Meredith Quartermain (link)

Book of Numbers, Joshua Cohen (link)

Silence and Song, Melanie Rae Thon (link)

 

Kenyon Review Online

Once Human, Steve Tomasula (link)

Induced Coma, Harold Jaffe (link)

 

Open Letters Monthly

The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography, Scott Donaldson (link)

 

The Quarterly Conversation

Collected Stories, John Barth (forthcoming)

 

On this blog:

Binary Star, Sarah Gerard (link)

Infinite Fictions, David Winters (link)

Fancy, Jeremy Davis (link)

Lincoln's Billy, Tom LeClair (link)

No Moon, Julie Reverb (link)

Bats of the Republic, Zachary Thomas Dodson (link)

 

Unprofessionals

Sam Sacks on the "insider" ethos in contemporary fiction:

What is only rarely found is fiction that starts on the outside and, by virtue of formal innovation and the manipulation of language, stays outside. These are books that deconstruct the very act of reading. . .[T]he truth is that American fiction has very little dedicated avant-garde. The few who doggedly (and brilliantly) pursue it—Percival Everett, Lance Olsen, Stephen Dixon, among others who don’t find a place in these anthologies—are our real unprofessionals, since very few are reading them.

Alienated in Various Ways

Lisa Ruddick on the antihumanist consensus:

The poststructuralist critique of the self, though associated with progressive politics, has an unobserved, conservative effect on the lived world of the profession. It protects the institutional status quo by promoting the evacuation of selves into the group. In the story behind the story, the decentered subject is the practitioner who internalizes the distaste for the inner life and loses touch with the subjective reserves that could offset his or her merger with the profession. What is correspondingly strengthened is the cohesion of the collective. For our profession, alienated in various ways from the American mainstream, needs members who will band together. One way to get members to commit to the group and its ideology is to make them feel ashamed of the varied, private intuitions and desires that might diversify their interests.

Failing Vision

I generally agree with Mark de Silva's critique of contemporary fiction's loss of "visionary" power:

In fiction, it seems we’ve grown increasingly accustomed to expecting, even from those we consider our most ambitious literary artists— a previous generation’s list would have included challenging writers like Nabokov, Robbe-Grillet, Pynchon, and Gass—to deliver many of the rewards of contemporary narrative journalism: immediacy, a conversational tone, swift absorption, topicality. At the same time, our expectation of, and even our appetite for, profoundly transformative vision in fiction seems to have waned.

I would add, however, that I'm not sure that "we" have ever had much of an appetite for "profoundly transformative vision in fiction." All of the writers named here were frequently attacked for too strenuously "challenging" established expectations of "swift absorption" in works of fiction.

I have not read Karl Ove Knausgaard, so I cannot say if de Silva's prominent inclusion of his work among those lacking in vision is fair or not. The essay as a whole, nevertheless, is well worth reading.

Book of the Year

The best book I read in 2015 was John Keene's Counternarratives. Since I will have a review of the  book upcoming in Kenyon Review Online, I will not delineate its virtues here, except to say it's the kind of challenging, formally innovative work that is also simply enjoyable to read. In the meantime, an interview with Keene from On the Media: https://www.wnyc.org/radio/#/ondemand/533522

Readers Were Seduced

I have to say I think Gordon Lish is correct. From what I've seen of Carver's work both pre- and post-Lish, if Carver had not been edited by Lish he would have been just another regressive realist.

I was there before there was a record to suffer muddling, confusion, sides taken. I can’t believe that what I had in my hands from Ray would have made its way into the hearts of those who have apparently been so undone by the work. Which work had been deformed, reformed, tampered with in every respect by, yeah, me. Contaminated, uncontaminated, that’s a discrete consideration. But readers were seduced, and, I’m sorry, but it was my intervention that seduced them