A Reader's Manifesto: Classic or Dud?

We have done that here, in fact. 17 responses to a thread asking people to post their favourite sentence. We must all have been faking it.

He disparages DeLillo's dialoge but "White Noise" at times captures speech in a highly realistic way and also in ways i have only read in this book. Scenes where the family is at the dinner table talking; overlapping speech; talking in non sequiteurs (sp?); speaking unfinished thoughts; speaking without listening to the conversation itself - all these scenes remain extremely vivid in my mind.

"But why should we bother with Consumerland fiction at all, if the effect of reading it is the same queasy fatigue we can get from an evening of channel-surfing?"

Why not when its done so beatifully and revealingly by DeLillo?

He did make me rethink Auster to an extent though.

The "literary" writer need not be an intellectual one. Jeering at status-conscious consumers, bandying about words like "ontological" and "nominalism," chanting Red River hokum as if it were from a lost book of the Old Testament: this is what passes for profundity in novels these days. = OK, it's too obscure.

But then...But what we are getting today is a remarkably crude form of affectation: a prose so repetitive, so elementary in its syntax, and so numbing in its overuse of wordplay that it often demands less concentration than the average "genre" novel. Even today's obscurity is easy—the sort of gibberish that stops all thought dead in its tracks. = OK, it's too simplistic.

Or passages like this: In 1999 Proulx wrapped up the acknowledgments in a short-story anthology titled Close Range by thanking her children, in characteristic prose, "for putting up with my strangled, work-driven ways." That's right: "strangled, work-driven ways." Work-driven is fine, of course, except for its note of self-approval, but strangled ways makes no sense on any level. Huh? I can imagine lots of different contexts where "strangled ways" would make sense, including the one Proulx uses it in. Is he being disingenuous, or does he actually not understand the written language?

And so forth. He complains about there not being enough "action" in these books, but his targets include Cormac McCarthy, who's got as much action, death, destruction and mayhem in his books as anyone I know. I mean, some of his individual complaints about individual authors make sense; he might be an entertaining reviewer (he can fillet David Guterson all he wants as far as I'm concerned). But he's reaching for some overarching theme that just isn't there. He's lumping together a bunch of writers who don't have much in common thematically or stylistically (all they really have in common is winning awards and generally being accorded a certain high-brow status), in the name of some vaguely defined anti-elistism. I'm all in favor of anti-elistism, but I think it helps if you can actually figure out which elites you're opposing and why.

dead right. but i would feel more strongly about the controversy if i really liked any of the authors he was poking at. cormac mccarthy is a fine writer but his politics are all fucked up. don delillo i've tried to defend in the past but "cosmopolis" was so so so bad that i don't even feel like trying. i know a lot of people i respect like paul auster though i haven't read him myself.

but "appointment in samarra"? c'mon, man. is he suggesting we go straight back to social realism? (i have a feeling this guy is a closet steinbeck fan and that bugs me)

that's EXACTLY why i hated it! so over-the-top it hurts. which wouldn't be a problem for me with an author like chester himes or william burroughs. but delillo's always appealed to me on the qualities you were mentioning upthread. here it just seemed like he was running wild with his old ideas. it totally reminds me of that letter that people sometimes post on ILX where this semi-illiterate guy writes to a college newspaper to ask something like "in what way does any of this writing resemble anything that has ever gone through the head of a person who was real and living?"

but at least "the body artist" is short. and the very first vignette, the main character having breakfast in the kitchen with the husband, is totally stunning (the rest sags, you right).

Actually i wasn't that keen on Cosmopolis but i was glad it wasn't The Body Artist. Did you read that dreadful story he wrote a couple of years ago about Richter's Baader Meinhof paintings? ugh.

And I believe he's right about limited syntax. Contemporary literary writers can be unnecessarily plain, in my opinion, and in that plainness overlook the necesity of grammatical balance and logical parallelism. For me, it's a shame that so few sentence shapes are used nowadays. Thank goodness for the likes of Tobias Wolff who, without being difficult, varies his sentence structures sweetly, imparting a spring to his prose.

"Like the mucoid nubbin that spins a shell called 'oyster,' we Binewskis
wove a midway shelter called 'carnival.'" OK, the source is obvious, but I hated this novel: Geek Love. To me this sentence summed up how hard it it's always trying, so I recorded it.

Here's an example from a story I read not long ago:
"Carla got a glimpse of a tanned arm bare to the shoulder, hair bleached a lighter color than it had been before, more white now than silver-blond, and an expression that was both exasperated and amused at her own exasperation--just the way Mrs. Jamieson would look negotiating this road." (Italics mine) Carla is looking at a car driving by at a fair distance--and she can see all this? And can anyone actually imagine this 'expression'? This isn't that bright a character--why are her thoughts so sophisticated (like a writer's) anyway? This is, by the way, Alice Munro' "Runaway."

Or how about this line from another story:
"Everywhere I went, he went, creeping along a few sedate paces back in soft-soled shoes, a shadow that gave off a disturbing susurrus like the maddening sibilance settling dust must make to the ears of ants." !! This is from a recent clunker of a story in the NYer by Charles D'Ambrosio who's written some amazing stories! (Of course, you could argue that the narrator, a writer, is supposed to come off this way--but if that's the case, it should have been more consistently done so it reflected on the narrator and not the writer.)

You know what book has refreshingly clean, simple prose (and it completely fits the character)? The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. I love that book.

i enjoy the punk-crit approach myself from time to time. it can be refreshing if it isn't just tiresome. check out the thread on ILM about that endless rant on chuck klosterman in the new york press to see how awful it can be.(or check out the rant itself. it's probably on their web-site. or don't. it's really pretty terrible)
for a great example though, check out Mark Twain's essay-length destruction of James Fenimore Cooper!! It's friggin' brilliant and will have you rolling in the aisles whether you have read old leatherstocking or not.

"Then he switches from the horses' perspective to the narrator's, though just what something imperfect and malformed refers to is unclear. The last half sentence only deepens the confusion. Is the thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace the same thing that is lodged in the heart of being? And what is a gorgon doing in a pool? Or is it peering into it? And why an autumn pool? I doubt if McCarthy can explain any of this; he probably just likes the way it sounds."

Alright, so Cormac's perhaps getting a little too deeply into the puke thing here, but am I alone in thinking that Myer's is spectacularly missing the point? Isn't "Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being" a reference to man's essential nobility, and vomit's essential lack thereof? Doesn't "Autumn pool" connote images of beauty, stillness, tranquility, which a gorgon would tend to bugger up?

The problem with Myers is that he has a nasty habit of bobbing around on the surface: He seems to be far more interested in style than in substance. He has a point: after all, he is merely fighting on the battleground selected by the critics, and "Accordion Crimes" _is_ overwritten twaddle. But his attack on the Border Trilogy is unwarranted, and suggests one of three things. A) Myers is a snob, and is simply adopting a scattershot approach to all "literary" writing because he doesn't like some of it, or because he doesn't like the people who _do_, B) Cormac McCarthy once cut him up in traffic, or; C) Myers simply doesn't "get" McCarthy's work, and wants to punish those who are, perhaps, smarter than he. Whatever the reason, Myers is indulging in the journalistic equivalent of bullying the smart kid in class. It ain't big, it ain't grown up, and it ain't clever. That last line, "I'll be reading the kinds of books that Cormac McCarthy doesn't understand", says it all, really. Of course McCarthy is going to understand John Grisham, Mr. Myers, because - and this may come as a shock to you - he's more intelligent than you are. So may I simply say, as someone who agrees with 80% of your thesis: Go to bed, will you please?

"All reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living." - Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder"

"I may not be Orson Wilde, but I know well constructed sentences when I see one." - Humphrey Littleton

An irritating anti-Meyers argument, however (or anti- a lot of stuff) is a "lack of intelligence". If somebody doesn't like a book, or movie, or piece of music, it's because they're not "smart" enough to get it. And the person accused of not being "smart" enough has to go on and say "Well I read 'Godel, Escher, Bach' with no problems!"

It has nothing to do with intelligence. In fact, I would go so far as to say that anyone with enough balls to get up against the various "sacred cows" (an overused and annoying term, but it serves its purpose here) of modern literature, and to express himself so lucidly (even though some of what he expresses is pure twaddle), is smarter than most of us.

Ditto for people who complain about the obscurity and impenetrability of people like Pynchon, Foster Wallace, Joyce, etc. There's a synapse in their brain somewhere which tells them "This is unadulterated nonsense" and the currents spread outwards from there. It's not that they don't "get it". It's not that they ain't "clever enough". It's not even that they're not "well read" enough. It's just that, to them, it's trash, and unless somebody can successfully implement a universal law and a lesson-based process for the digestation and comprehension of a particular piece of literature (eg. your first step is to read the following source material to understand the period, and then branch out into these texts by these authors authors, with this particular edition of this particular dictionary by your side, then forget everything else you've ever read, and *then* you'll get 'Finnegan's Wake' etc.) then this is going to be a problem (if you can even call it that) until the end of time.

Varieties of taste, background, preferred reading materials all contribute to a person's perceived understanding of a piece. There have been approximately eleventy-nine billion books published over the course of human history, and one could have read and digested eleventy-eight billion of them, but they could still feasibly be considered "not intelligent or well-read enough to understand the piece of shit that is 'Infinite Jest'" because they haven't read the EXACT books and comprehended them in the EXACT way necessary to formulate an appreciation for the text. And that's just stupid, don't you think?

So yeah, I agree with what Myers has to say about high-brow literature in general, and I'm glad someone decided to speak out against it, even if he's maybe a little extreme in his views. I mean I don't think we ought to go back to old stuff like Balzac and Henry James, necessarily. There's digestable contemporary lit out there. It just doesn't always make the New Yorker.

I doubt that any reviewer in our more literate past would have expected people to have favorite sentences from a work of prose fiction. A favorite character or scene, sure; a favorite line of dialogue, maybe; but not a favorite sentence.

I get Electric Literature's facebook updates and they recently posted a request for people's favorite sentences. I increasingly agree with this part of the manifesto, it just feels kind of counter to how literature works for me to focus so heavily on individual sentences, although there are certainly many wonderful sentences in literature. I mean you don't ask instrumental music fans to point to their favorite musical phrase.

Also to the extent I ever find myself honing in on an individual sentence it's usually more for pith and sharp description than for "beauty." Strings of overly beautiful sentences tend to become heavy and distracting for me as a reader.

'sentences' a very friendster-profile thing to like

your favourite hook, your favourite chorus, your favourite solo, your favourite riff

i mean, i think the problem with the favourite-sentence game is that it reduces all of lit to the "merely voluptuous" or whatever, to the status of pleasure-giving

i think it's a nice corrective to high school literature though