So, last week I picked up a contemporary, strongly-hyped realist novel that I wasn’t planning to actually read, but was deeply pulled in by the opening. It did what fiction does; it tells something true and makes something up at the same time, and doesn’t care whether you’re hip to the artifice or not. It just is. I became excited about the book, and put down other things to read it. Then, about halfway through, my mood started to change. There were several occasions where I thought of throwing or at least slamming it on something, but still I read on, and still the feeling at the end was of supreme disappointment. The book had been written well enough, and with enough interesting ideas to keep my attention, but the reliance on novelistic conventions and dishonesty toward the characters gradually snuffed out any glimmer of originality promised by the beginning, and the ending offered nothing more than a mild gimmick.
At other times this fall, I picked up two other new books in the old-time realist genre. They were boring in ways that made them unreadable. To these big shot writers, I have only this to say:
I’m curious…what novels were they? Would you give a hint? Were they Americans (I decided this fall, Bolan-yo, Aria, are, American, better American authors than anybody basically from ‘America’ America)?
They were American, though I just read W. Kennedy’s latest and loved it for the most part, full as it was with conventions. His brand of barrel-chested, Hemingway-loving newspaper prose, expanded with Joycean meditations, is strong enough to save any clunky plot. Agreed of course on Bolaño and Aira , though all I’ve read so far is How I Became A Nun. This reminds me to read more.
Hints…let’s see… new wave and what comes before apple pie.