low-fi reviews of new and old literary novels
(Comments originally posted on FB October 18, 2017)
Finished “Crash” by JGB last night. Jesus. Disturbing fantastic shit.
8-10-18 update: This is the second-best novel I've read. Part of me thinks that I rank it behind Gatsby partially for sentimental reasons. I've not read another novel like Crash, and it is such an outstanding story. Read it immediately.
(Comments originally posted on FB October 7, 2017)
I snapped up this book after I saw two very smart people (don’t remember who) rave about it, separately. It also won the Man Booker, and a co-worker who reads fiction constantly told me that she thinks Man Booker nominees are better overall than their National Book Award counterparts, after I told her I quit reading fiction after reading several award winning novels that were dogs.
I enjoyed the book (and finished it!) but was disappointed. The characterization is ... non-existent. The characters aside from the protagonist are not much more than stick figures. The plot is also lack-luster. The writing itself rarely rises above OK. There were periodic run-on sentences that were clunky and didn’t work.
Where the book succeeds is in painting a rich portrait of life as a black man in South Central LA. Beatty has a keen eye for social observation and detail. It’s billed as a comedic novel and I did get some LOLs out of it. Lastly while the plot was not even close to fully realized, The Sellout is an original story. The protagonist is a bookish farmer in South Central who also is into surfing; the story revolves around his efforts to re-segregate his neighborhood.
So, that’s that. I enjoyed it, glad I read it, but not sure I’d recommend it.
(Comments originally posted on FB September 5, 2017)
Just finished re-reading "White Noise" for the first time in 20 years. The ending was a bit disappointing, but it was a fun read. I wanted the cloud to figure more prominently into the plot.
8-10-17 UPDATE: After further contemplation I decided that it wasn't just the ending of the novel that was problematic, it was the last 1/3 of the book. The first 2/3's however were very good
(Originally posted on FB April 8, 2017)
I've been saying for as long as I can remember that The Sun Also Rises is tied for first place on my list of favorite novels (with Moby Dick). Partially because I wanted to enjoy it again, and to a lesser extent to verify that it doesn't suck, since I hadn't read it since I was in my early 20s, I have picked it up again. I'm 30 pages in, and, aside from some flat dialog between Jake and Ashley, it is as good as I remembered it being. I feel like that fucker opened up some kind of hole in the fabric of space-time with that book. Even more of a shock that he wrote it in his mid 20s.
(Originally posted April 19, 2017)
I know, you're *dying* to hear my thoughts on The Sun Also Rises. I think the last time I'd read it I was in my early 20s, loved it, considered it tied for first with Moby Dick for best novel in the English language. I was wondering if it would hold up 20 years later.
I'm about half way into it, and I don't think I'd rank it first or even second or twentieth in the English language. I remember the Spain part of it being the best, and I'm not there yet so maybe it will knock me on my can over the next few days. But, after a very strong start, the second quarter of the book drags a little. There's a lot of dialog that feels inconsequential. There are scenes that feel like asides.
I'm still really digging it, and I'll probably read it periodically for the rest of my life, but it's not the flawless gem that I half-remembered.
(Originally posted April 25, 2017)
Finished The Sun Also Rises last night. It still does pack quite a wallop. The whole time I was reading it I was curious about how it came to be, and what it came to mean in America, so I'm going to have to snap up Everyone Behaves Badly by Lesley M. M. Blume today after work, and read the shit out of that book. This New Yorker piece was a nice snack; I did not know that Fitzgerald had a hand in the revisions, it sounds like his advice made it a better book.
(Comments originally posted on FB April 5, 2017)
AGAINST BAD NOVELS
One of my goals for 2017 was to try to start reading novels again. My efforts toward that goal, unfortunately, have reinforced my prior aversion to the form. It's not an aversion to the form; it's an aversion to worthless novels, and way too many of them are worthless.
What could be worse than wasting 2 hours in a worthless movie? Wasting 30 hours on a worthless novel!
The latest offender: Shadowbahn, by Steve Erickson. Great premise, first 20 pages were promising, and then it devolves into complete garbage.
I thought I learned after getting burned by Nabokov's "invitation to a beheading," and an Ali Smith effort the title of which eludes me: with Shadowbahn I read the first 5 pages before buying, and liked them. Compelling premise. I think I also opened up to the back third and read and liked a few pages there. Of course it got great reviews, or at least a great review, in the Washington Post.
But the inescapable problem is that you can't tell if a novel is a dog until it's way way way way way too late. It's like buying an album before they had listening stations or iTunes. You're buying blind. But it's worse! You can tell an albums sucks in as few as 20 minutes!
A co-worker suggested that Man Booker novel nominees are better than their National Book Award and Pulitzer peers, so maybe that will be guide in the future.
Another thing I'll look for when dipping in to scan a few pages in the middle of a novel is evidence of writing where interesting stuff actually happens (a plot!) or interesting observations are made about the people in the story (characters!) as opposed to vague pointless rambling.
For my next 2 novels I'm going with known winners. I'm going to re-read "The Sun Also Rises," which is either my favorite or tied-for-favorite novel of all time, and then "White Noise". It's been years since I've read either of them, curious to see what senior citizen Steve thinks of them vs 20-something Steve.
Thank you!
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