A roundup of the literary criticism I published in the past year:
Reviews:
"Not Somewhere or Anywhere" (On Ottessa Moshfegh's Homesick for Another World )
The publication of Ottessa Moshfegh’s story collection, Homesick for Another World, does not so much allow us to measure the progress of this writer’s talent following on her first two published books, the novella McGlue and the novel Eileen, the latter of which in particular generated considerable enthusiasm among readers and critics and seemed to establish Moshfegh as a writer whose developing career warranted attention. Instead, this new book mostly gathers the short fiction she wrote before the two longer works brought her more widespread acclaim, although these short stories, many published in such premiere venues as the Paris Review and the New Yorker, certainly also tagged her as a young writer of promise. . . .
Continue at 3:AM Magazine
"Living in a Story" (On Robert Coover's Huck Out West)
Robert Coover has been a presence on the American literary scene for over 50 years now. In many ways, the critical response to each new book he publishes continues to register the perception that he remains an adventurous writer who repeatedly offers challenges to convention, a perception in which Coover himself must take considerable satisfaction, as he is indeed one of the most consistently audacious and inventive of the first generation postmodernists his work partly represents. Coover’s novels and stories subvert both the abiding myths and shibboleths—sometimes outright lies—that animate American history, and the formal assumptions of literary storytelling, often by adopting the ostensible conventions of such storytelling but subjecting them to a kind of straight-faced parody. . . .
Continue at Numero Cinq:
"The Long and the Short of It" (On Edie Meidav's Kingdom of the Young)
Whatever judgment might be made about the merits of particular stories in Edie Meidav’s collection Kingdom of the Young, a judgment about the book as a whole has to begin in the observation that it does not serve very well as an introduction to Meidav’s work as represented by her preceding three novels, The Far Field (2001), Crawl Space (2005), and Lola, California (2011). Those novels are intricately constructed, expansive works that immerse the reader in their episodic details and unhurried, sauntering prose. Kingdom of the Young is not only a much slimmer volume, which of course is not unusual for story collections that assemble a writer’s ongoing work, but in effect the stories seem conceptually thinner as well, more concerned with tone and atmospheric effect — although this simply may represent a novelist’s attempt to adjust to the differing demands of the short story. . . .
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"Contents of Consciousness" (On Baret Magarian's The Fabrications)
Baret Magarian’s The Fabrications" is a rarity among 21st century novels — at least those that could be categorized as “literary fiction” — in that the point of view maintained throughout the novel (a novel of over 400 pages) is consistently from the third-person “omniscient" perspective—a seemingly old-fashioned strategy more characteristic of the 19th century novel and its greater emphasis on sheer storytelling than the novel as it developed in the 20th century and beyond, which became more conscious of its “art,” an important consideration of which includes narrative voice and the potential effects of point of view. . . .
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"How It Came to Me to Say": Gordon Lish
If, as Jonathan Sturgeon has suggested, we have entered an era dominated by “autofiction,” in which “the life of the author is now the novel’s organizing principle” (“2014: The Death of the Postmodern Novel and the Rise of Autofiction”), then in the search for progenitors of this literary phenomenon we might consider the fiction of Gordon Lish. Indeed, a common reaction to Lish’s books, at least since Peru (which may be his last work of fiction to predominantly feature a main character who can, to some degree at least, be separated from “Gordon Lish”) is to question whether Lish is writing fiction at all rather than some sort of free-form (some would say self-indulgent) autobiography. However, the wary reader would be just as mistaken to trust Lish’s writing to provide reliable accounts of the author’s actual experiences as to expect his “stories” to bear much resemblance to the traditional well-made short story. . . .
Continue at The Quarterly Conversation
"Contexts of Reception" (On Joseph North's Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History)
Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History is a book with a provocative premise addressing an important subject that ultimately does justice to neither. North contends that academic literary study has settled into a stagnant and unavailing practice that aligns it entirely with ‘scholarship’ at the expense of ‘criticism’. Further, the putative goal of this scholarship in a by now thoroughly politicised discipline – to act as a counterforce against the dominant neoliberal ideologies – is one that scholarship in its current form is actually unable to meet. Indeed, North maintains that the historicist/cultural studies approach that now dominates academic literary scholarship (to the virtual exclusion of nearly everything else) arises from and reinforces the neoliberal status quo and that only a return to criticism, with its greater attention to the aesthetic nature of literature, can in fact reorient academic literary study in such a way that it might have the capacity to ‘intervene’ and effect real political and cultural change.
Unfortunately, North’s argument, as conveyed through his attenuated institutional history (the title of the book is misleading, since it offers a history of the shifting fashions in academic literary study, not a history – political or otherwise – of literary criticism per se) does little to clarify the stakes involved in distinguishing between criticism and scholarship, to explain exactly what North has in mind in his use of the term ‘aesthetic’ to identify the literary value currently absent in the dominant mode of literary scholarship, or what its presence would add. . . .Continue at Review 31
“The Possibility of Musical Thought” (On Joanna Demers’s Anatomy of Thought-Fiction)
Upon the publication of her previous book, Drone and Apocalypse (2015), Joanna Demers told her institution’s newsletter (at USC’s Thornton School of Music), that the book “has a fictional premise, but it’s not a novel. It’s not a fictional story.” Yet on her author website we are told that in addition to her scholarly work as a musicologist, Demers “has also written two novels,” one of them Drone and Apocalypse, the other her new book, Anatomy of Thought-Fiction: CHS Report 2214. On the new book’s back cover, its publisher, Zero Books, identifies it as a “philosophical novella.” The title of the book itself self-announces the split personality it seems to embody: “Anatomy of Though-Fiction” implies a philosophical analysis, a kind of metacommentary on an analytical strategy; that such an anatomy is apparently carried out in the “CHS Report, 2214” of course appears to suggest we should expect some version of a science fiction narrative or setting. . . .
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“Formally Restless: Joanna Walsh"
In her 2015 New York Times review of Joanna Walsh's Vertigo, Heidi Julavits complained that the stories in the book “do not cut downward or inward, instead they move laterally until the energy simply dissipates.” On the one hand, this seems to signal an impatience with the stories’ resistance to the perceived need of psychological depth (“downward and inward”), reinforced by Julavits’s further charge that Walsh’s prose is “like a series of rocks expertly skipped across a body of water that maintains its surface tension,” but it also reinforces what is clearly a broader intolerance on the reviewer’s part of Walsh’s more unorthodox and adventurous narrative practices: “When does the reader feel vaguely ashamed for wanting more guidance” from the author?” Julavits asks near the beginning of her review, which pairs Vertigo with Walsh’s previous nonfiction book, Hotel. “Walsh’s formally restless approach,” Julavits avers, eventually “begins to seem less an inventive way to convey her story (and her mind) and more a fashionable evasion tactic — one that is intimidating and disorienting, so that common desires for sense, order, or the accrual of meaning are deemed moot, even foolish.”. . . .
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"Making Believe" (On Rikki Ducornet's Brightfellow)
Rikki Ducornet’s last three novels, Gazelle (2003), Netsuke (2011), and now Brightfellow, have discernibly evolved away from the more purely fabular kind of fiction—often veering into the surreal or fantastic—that characterized her previous work, toward more naturalistic settings and more recognizably “lifelike” characters. Although these later novels are by no means conventionally crafted “literary fiction,” they draw less noticeably on the structures and iconography of fairy tales and fables than the novels for which Ducornet initially became known, especially the “elements” tetralogy, The Stain (1984), Entering Fire (1986), The Fountains of Neptune (1989), and The Jade Cabinet (1993). The recognizable motifs introduced in the earlier books recur in these later ones, but they are now not tied directly to the more imaginatively colorful contexts in which they first appeared. . . .
At American Book Review
"Content Without Form: Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper"
In her review of Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper, Lionel Shriver judges that the novel exists in a kind of narrative void so that "when all is said and done, you’re pretty much left with a strong voice and snappy one-liners. There’s an arbitrary quality. . .a sense that one thing could happen or something else altogether and it wouldn’t matter." Despite Zink's stylistic skills, the narrative lacks "a story that really rolls.". . . .
"Language Always Prevails: Pamela Ryder's Paradise Field"
The "novel in stories" has become an increasingly common form in current American fiction, so while Pamela Ryder's Paradise Field is recognizable enough in its use of the developing conventions of the form, it expands the possibilities of this hybrid genre just enough to warrant publication by a press (FC2) that is one of the longest-lived publishers of "experimental" fiction, and illustrates that the "story novel" still might hold some potential for surprising us. . . .
Critical Essays:
"The Landscape of Bitterness and Recrimination" (On the fiction of Jonathan Baumbach)
Readers mostly unfamiliar with the work of Jonathan Baumbach (perhaps aware that he is vaguely identified as an "experimental" writer and that his son is a film director whose most famous film portrays a character loosely based on him) would find his latest selection of stories, The Pavilion of Former Wives, to be on the whole usefully representative of Baumbach's work in its prevailing subject, but not so revealing of the more adventurous formal strategies Baumbach has employed in his best fiction. As with most of Baumbach's work in the second half of his career—a career that overall has now spanned more than 50 years—the stories in The Pavilion of Former Wives track the erratic course of love and marriage (the latter often interfering with the former), usually from the perspective of a relationship-battered male protagonist. . . .
"Sad and Bad and Mad: The Fiction of Rosalyn Drexler"
Perhaps it is because her most lasting accomplishment may turn out to be her paintings that Rosalyn Drexler is now so very little known as a writer of fiction. Although she did attract attention with her novels in the 1970s, and her plays gained notice for their association with the "theater of the ridiculous," a kind of variation on theater of the absurd, it seems safe to say that for most current readers and critics Rosalyn Drexler has almost no name recognition. Perhaps the novels to an extent seem dated, their cultural references and lingo too stuck in the 60s and 70s (although ultimately they are not at all trying to "capture" their era in any direct way). Or perhaps Drexler has simply been overshadowed by the already established experimental writers of her time, most of whom are male, even at a time when efforts are regularly made, by academics and publishers, to maintain attention on neglected women writers. . . .
"Events, of a Sort: The Fiction of Rudolph Wurlitzer"
While the first three novels of Rudolph Wurlitzer certainly express the sensibility of the 1960s--specifically the late 60s, when the more insouciant rebelliousness characterizing much of the initial cultural ferment of the period began to curdle, congealing into less equivocal forms of disaffection and alienation--it is not as clear that his fiction should be identified as "postmodern," along with the first wave of postmodernists that include Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and Robert Coover. Surely Nog, Flats, and Quake are "experimental" by anyone's definition of the term as it applies to adventurous fiction, but where there is a kind of exuberance, and obvious delight in the sheer possibilities of the imagination in the work of these writers, in Wurlitzer's books energy has been dissipated, the abundance and vitality of language we find in the earlier writers reduced to a kind of exhaustion even Barth, in his influential essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion, could not have anticipated, one that doesn't merely acknowledge the "used-upness" of fictional form but seems to question the capability of language itself to adequately communicate human experience. . . .
From Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction (Projected)
Ch. 1, "Sorrentino the Poet"
There is no question that Gilbert Sorrentino considered himself first of all to be a poet. He began his writing career not just writing but also reviewing and publishing poetry, most prominently in the little magazines he edited, Neon and Kulchur. While it now seems almost certain that Sorrentino will be remembered primarily as a writer of fiction, certainly that fiction is sufficiently unconditional in its rejection of the traditional core elements of fiction—plot, character, setting, theme—and so unmistakably focused instead on creating alternative formal arrangements of language that it is considerably more than a fancy to say that essentially Sorrentino remained a poet throughout his whole body of work, whose key aesthetic assumptions are recognizably embodied in the poetry as well as the fiction. . . .
Ch. 2, "Sorrentino the Realist"
The publication of Sorrentino's first novel after he had established himself as a poet—at least in those quarters of the poetry world whose notice would have meant the most to him—perhaps conveys the impression that writing fiction was a kind of literary second thought. Even while Sorrentino continued to write lyric poetry for the remainder of his life, the succession of novels that followed the publication of The Sky Changes in 1966 certainly did soon enough foster the perception that he had altered his career course to become primarily a novelist. But a proper appreciation of Sorrentino's whole body of work can be gained only be recognizing that the poetry and the fiction are not divergent practices, that the fiction represents Sorrentino's effort to engage with language for the purpose that also motivates the poet: sounding out the artistic possibilities that can be realized through the imaginative arrangement of words. . . .
Ebook Volumes:
Between Silliness and Satire: On Black Humor Fiction
During the 1960s, one of the strains of American fiction prompting many readers and critics to believe that novelists were beginning to shed themselves of the lingering constraints of realism still influencing many postwar writers was referred to as "black humor." At first mostly used interchangeably with other terms to describe this new mode of "absolute" comedy, such as "absurdist" or "grotesque," or sometimes regarded as a more radical form of satire, "black humor" was clarified and established as the term of choice to identify this particular literary phenomenon in a 1966 anthology, edited by Bruce Jay Friedman, himself one of the prominent practitioners of the form, entitled, simply, Black Humor.
Innovative Women Writers
I present this selection of essays on current women writers whose work either could be called innovative, or raises important issues relative to the notion of experiment or innovation in fiction, without a lengthy preface because I believe that the connections among these writers emerge clearly enough when the essays are read in sequence, especially through the brief signals provided by the section headings. Ideally the reader would indeed read these essays in sequence (they have been arranged here with a purpose, and to some extent were initially written with the idea they might appear in a collection like this), but readers are certainly free to consider them individually as well. Whatever insights I may have to offer about a particular writer ought to be able to stand alone, or of course my effort has failed.
American Postmodern Fiction
Although these are essays that have appeared variously over the past decade or so, usually on the publication of a new work by the writer at hand. . .they were almost all written as part of an effort on my part to “cover” as many classic postmodern writers as I could while also in individual reviews and essays examining the formal features and stylistic tendencies, as well as discernible commonalities of insight and perspective, associated with American postmodern fiction in general. Ideally, then the reader would find in the following selections both close readings of an individual author’s work and accumulating commentary on the nature, assumptions, and identifiable practices of postmodern fiction. . . .
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