redirections of sensibility

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

An excerpt from Albert Mobilio's review of the new Stephen Wright novel,
_The Amalgamation Polka_ (http://www.bookforum.com/mobilio.html):

"In previous books, Wright has proven himself a master of intricate
metaphor and the deftly cantilevered sentence. But all in the service of a
very contemporary, often drug-soaked, fictional world populated by porn
magnates, flying saucer charlatans, and, say, a wedding chapel's lesbian
employees who tattoo one another's asses as a prelude to sex. That he has
put his stylistic intelligence to profitable work in an altogether
different medium - the vocabulary, intonation, and phraseology of the
nineteenth-century novel - is impressive enough; that he has done so to
describe canal boat captains, plantation masters, and Union Army grunts
testifies to an even more significant redirection of sensibility - one
very much along the lines of Pynchon's _Mason & Dixon_."


Anyone managed to read the book yet? Stephen Wright did attend an M&D
event in NYC when M&D came out, didn't he?

I really liked _Going Native_, even heard Mr Wright reading passages from
it at the Twentieth Century Literature conference in Louisville back in
1996. (Wish I could be there again with you guys, John!) To top it off,
I went and talked to him at the conference dinner; in that jet-lagged
and boozed-up frenzy, I must have struck him as one of his characters...



Heikki