White Teeth & Song of Solomon

[alice wellintown]

I decided to read Franzen's essays, _How to Be Alone_, and, of course
that famous one that has two titles, "Why Bother" and "Perchance to
Dream..." and these led me to a reconsideration of Wallace and Smith
and others who have Pynchonian influence...and to  Smith's essays,
"Changing My Mind", and, as I was very impressed with her essays, and
especially the "Letter from Liberia", and I trully loved her essays on
film, and not having read WT, decided to give it go. Because I've
studied Morrison quite a bit, and Song of Solomon and Sula and Beloved
have been in the mix, read several times, and returned to in parts
several times, the suicide scenes, and one involving one of my
favorite characters, Shadrack, an African American WWI vet who invents
National Suicidse Day reminds me of Slothrop and is, like Slothrop, a
tribute to Ellison's Invisible Man...well...I'm rambling here but
maybe I should give Smith's last a read.....

Here isa fine essay from Smith on Liberia:

http://byliner.com/zadie-smith/stories/letter-from-liberia

On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 10:56 PM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> I really enjoyed Song of Solomon - read it eons and eons ago - 1980s?   One of Morrison's best works, imo - also Tar Baby.     I really did NOT enjoy White Teeth but I might oughta look at that one again because I adored  Smith's On Beauty and her latest,  NW.
>
> The Art of Fielding was okay-to-quite-good.  Nice entertainment,  I suppose.   It really might have been a good candidate for the Pulitzer because it fit the rules  and suggested theme better than anything else submitted.  (Swamplandia is stupid and the other two weren't even nearly finished or first published within the US in the given year -  David Foster Wallace just missed the boat by dying early.)
>
> Bekah
>
>
> On Jan 7, 2013, at 3:31 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> These novels open with a man wanting to take his won life, the black
>> humor of suicide as flight. Did enjoy those Smith essays, not got
>> round to the latest fiction, been stuck in the art of fielding, kinda
>> weak style, baseball...and atonement, and chabon, and gawd, more
>> dickens than...well...yeas...to much of a good thing....and I will
>> glad to see a new P novel...who knows what he's been bloody up to his
>> knees in down on the cutting and killing floor?
>