Reasons to Re-Joyce

[David Morris]

"po-faced?"

On Saturday, December 8, 2012, Bekah wrote:

> 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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