If influence is wave--like....

[Mark Kohut]

“IF I were a character in a novel” says Elsie, the protagonist of Hannah
Tennant-Moore’s debut novel, *Wreck and Order*, “I would be the
quintessential twenty-first-century narrator: characterized by the aimless
bustle of the sharp mind, revealed through thoughts about my inner torment
rather than events that explain the torment.” Elsie’s postmodern brand of
literary self-consciousness doesn’t stop there:

There was a blog post about this on some literary site one time. I read it
in my pajamas after Brian left for work, drinking coffee, eating instant
oatmeal. My mental activity both sustains and paralyzes me! Exactly! […]
The obvious paradox was that there was nothing I could do with the
realization. I was not some dynamic character out of, say, Dickens or
George Eliot or, um …

Add in sex and Sri Lanka, and you’ll find the central subjects of this
novel, with its intense focus on the linked — but often conflicting — lives
of the prosaic, slacker body and the literary, self-searching mind. Elsie’s
voice is keenly self-aware and naïve, mundane and literary, and grave and
ironical all at once, or in rapid alternation.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160327/278a5218/attachment.html>