The Reading Experience

From my review of Angela Woodward's Natural Wonders, now available at Full Stop:

It would seem that many of the more adventurous younger women writers right now are tending toward a kind of undisguised fabulism as their chosen form of departure from conventional practice. Writers like Joanna Ruocco, Danielle Dutton, and Helen Oyeyemi create fanciful, dreamlike worlds that suggest fables and fairy tales as their apparent inspiration, although it is the ambience and mannerisms of allegorical fantasy that this fiction seeks to incorporate, not the underlying symbolic structure that allows an allegorical narrative to abstract a higher level of meaning (“the moral of the story”). In this sort of experimental fabulism, the main object of subversion is “realism” conceived as fidelity to reality in its familiar aspect, subject to the known laws of causation, and in the fiction of the neofabulists this reality is freely transformed through the unfettered exercise of imagination.

My review of John Keene's Counternarratives has been posted at the Kenyon Review Online:

John Keene’s Counternarratives is neither a collection of short stories, nor the sort of linked novel-by-proxy series that has become increasingly common in the past decade or so. This extraordinary book is instead unified by the conceit invoked in its title: its stories all counter, challenge, or subvert established narratives about race and slavery in the history of the Americas. Together their effect is to disrupt and disorient our settled notions about the agency of the enslaved and exploited, and about the intelligibility of history itself.

My review of Derek Attridge's The Work of Literature, at New Rambler Review:

But for the critic’s attempt to be either just or unjust, the “literary work itself” must have palpable qualities that are not simply functions of the reader’s perception. There must be the possibility that some critics might do greater justice to the work than others, even the possibility that some critics might simply get it wrong. “Getting it wrong” is not something that applies to the act of reading taken purely as a psychological state; the retort, “That’s the way I read it” is impossible to counter with an admonition to read better, not unless it is acknowledged that the “text” exists as more than a rumored presence enabling the act-event of literature, that the singularity of literature begins in the writing, the very material medium through which all literary art is irreducibly given its form.

My review of DeLillo's Zero K is available in the new issue or Open Letters Monthly:

Zero K doesn’t exactly seem like self-parody, however; it is more like DeLillo has come to this DeLillo-like premise and cast of characters belatedly, after a dominant impression of “typical” DeLillo themes and motifs had been established among many readers and critics and before DeLillo himself could treat the premise with any kind of fresh inspiration or create characters that don’t already seem like stereotypes. . . .