Reasons to Re-Joyce

[Tom Beshear]

Interesting piece. I couldn't get into NW -- Smith's language often obscured rather than clarified things, and I got tired of the slog. I liked Ben Fountain's novel a lot, tho' I'm not sure it'll last -- in 20 years readers will need an annotated version to make sense of it because it's so steeped in the culture of the mid oughts. Chabon's book is on my to-be-read pile. I like his work a lot, but it kind of defines contemporary middle brow lit, doesn't it, with all those ephemeral pop culture references?

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Bekah 
  To: Pynchon Liste 
  Sent: Saturday, December 08, 2012 12:39 PM
  Subject: Reasons to Re-Joyce


  Interesting - I'm not sure I agree but … fwiw: 


  ESSAY
  Reasons to Re-Joyce
  By DARIN STRAUSS
  Published: December 7, 2012


  The information has gone wide, it’s a note pushed under every reader’s door: Literary fiction is in serious trouble. That’s the deal, The Huffington Post told us so. (You know articles that bewail the consensus even as they work to create it? Well, this HuffPo story had the title “The Death of Literary Fiction?” — and that question mark was only a prop from the “You still beat your wife?” store of weighted questions.) There have been other slights. Here’s how The Millions worded theirs: “The good ship Literary Fiction has run aground.” And don’t get me started on David Shields’s 2010 he-man fiction-haters’ manifesto, “Reality Hunger.”


  Illustration by Stephen Doyle

  Now, it would be one thing if the naysayers were talking about a crash dive of sales figures. Sales figures carry the inarguability of math. But these people are talking about something a little more hazy. Remember, we’re living in the year of theAwardus Horribilis, the Pulitzer Debacle. The prize committee checked out every American novel on offer, shrugged and went galumphing offstage. That was, without a doubt, a verdict on quality.

  So things might look pretty bad. But to me, the scurrilousness has the pasty complexion of po-faced error. The worry, the criticism, feels tacky and fatuous. Just this season I happened to read, back to back to back, new and oddly similar masterpieces. And I mean, legitimate masterpieces. I think the naysaying misses not only the fact that this has been a wildly good book year but also the emergence of a new trend. It’s less a school or a movement than a clutch of writers who share a really unlikely pedigree: “Ulysses.”

  More at:   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/books/review/reasons-to-re-joyce.html?_r=0





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