In general, Morrison does not spend much time on characterization--her women especially run together. Nor does she provide much in the way of historical detail or sociological analysis. In creating the character of the Native American Lina, Morrison recalled in an interview, she briefly worried, "Oh God, now I’ve got to know all about these tribes," but then decided that the death of Lina's people by plague would save her the effort of research.

Morrison's few descriptions of Lina's traditions are either vague ("she cobbled together neglected rites, merged Europe medicine with native, scripture with lore, and recalled or invented the hidden meaning of things") or seem to be taken straight from the Dances With Wolves school of American Indian neo-hippie mysticism ("she wears bright blue beads and dances in secret at first light when the moon is small").

Such sloppiness is apparent throughout the novel. One knows A Mercy is set in the 17th century only because the characters helpfully announce the year every now
and then. ("1682 and Virginia was still a mess," frets Jacob, and later Lina points out, "Florens, . . . it’s 1690").

Labels: lit crit, shameless self-promotion

PLATO, AS EVERYONE KNOWS, once defined man as a "featherless biped." His student Aristotle insisted instead that man is by nature a political animal, a being whose capacity for speech compels him to live with others.

So who's right, ironic Plato or solid Aristotle? I can think of only one living writer who might reconcile the two--and that's Donald E. Westlake, the author of the best crime-caper stories ever written. Indeed, properly read, Westlake has already reconciled Plato and Aristotle in his stories, by showing us man as the animal who can laugh at himself, use speech to explode human pretensions, and thus reach toward civilization. Donald Westlake is not only our finest living comic mystery writer, but perhaps one of our finest living philosophers.

Labels: alas, lit crit

Labels: food blogging, lit crit

In the days when American Jewish fiction was at the high-water mark of literary prestige, Bernard Malamud was universally acknowledged as one of its three leading figures (the other two being Saul Bellow and Philip Roth). From the mid-1950's through the late 60's, he was considered a master of the American short story, and taken with the utmost seriousness as a novelist. He received every major literary award in the United States, and achieved significant commercial success with his 1966 Pulitzer-prize-winning bestseller, The Fixer. Four decades later, however, Malamud's name is "fading, his readership and literary standing in danger of decline." These are the words of Philip Davis, whose Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life is the first full-scale biography of, in Davis's estimation, a "major writer of the 20th century." Davis is a sensitive and intelligent researcher, and his book is a valiant effort at reclamation; but he does not answer the central issue he raises: why would the work of a major writer be at such risk of disappearing?

Labels: lit crit, shameless self-promotion

• Christopher Buckley lists his five favorite books about Washington, D.C. Last but not least is "any White House memoir": "They all have two themes: 1.) It wasn't my fault! and 2.) It would have been so much worse if I hadn't been there. Now that really tells you something about this town."
  

• In the WSJ, Alexandra Fuller names the five books that best evoke the modern American West.
  

Labels: lit crit

Labels: alas, lit crit

• Just got back from Denver and I must say: Men! I take back all the bad things I've said about you recently. You are all so pleasant and nice, putting my heavy carry-on in the overhead bin. I promise to give you the benefit of the doubt from now on (yes, even FLG, though he doesn't read this blog anymore).
  

• This is my new favorite blog. For those who question my love of shoes, I direct you here. I also have much love for her post on dinner at Per Se: "Once all this was through we transitioned to dessert via the cheese course -- Brillat Savarin (a soft cows-milk cheese vaguely reminiscent of brie, named after the late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century gastronome whose biography I started to tell at the table and then I checked myself because honestly, Helen, shut up."

• I am finally reading Middlemarch, formerly the book I was most ashamed to have never read. I can't say why it has taken me so long to get to it. For one thing, it has just the kind of heroine I like: insufferable and priggish. (Oh, how I love you, Mansfield Park!) Secondly (and most important), I love Edith Wharton; Edith Wharton loves George Eliot; hence, I will love George Eliot. The only obstacle was Adam Bede, which I read in college and detested. So far Middlemarch is much better, but I'm only a hundred pages in. There are 800 more pages for it to go downhill.

• Lastly, I am making this pasta for a girl's night in this evening. After, we will watch Breakfast at Tiffany's and eat cookies. What a wonderful world.
  

Labels: I heart EW, lit crit, the arts, travels

Labels: lit crit

I was groping gingerly for his intellectual keystone, but not gingerly enough. There are certain quagmires to be avoided with people. You can find yourself liking someone who appears intellectually normal and then have him let drop that his favorite book of all time is The Prophet. That wasn't the particular danger with Denoon, but there were others. A guy who tells you the best novel ever written in Clarissa, which also happens to be the first or second novel ever written, is also not unlikely to tell you that the only music he likes to listen to is motets and that art has never really advanced over the cave paintings at Lascaux. I suppose I was on the qui vive for some variant if this reflex because Denoon has said his favorite novel was War and Peace, so I was thinking, Oh no, it's going to be Beethoven for music and Shakespeare for plays. It isn't that these positions are not defensible, but taking them may mean someone is not very individual. One thing you distinctly never want to hear a man you're interested in say softly is that his favorite book in the whole world is The Golden Notebook. Here you are dealing with a liar from the black lagoon and it's time to start feeling in your purse for carfare.

Labels: gender wars, I want to marry Norman Rush, lit crit

My hunch is that the sentence is one of those things that no one will admit to being confused by, like the movies of Godard or the tenor-sax solos of John Coltrane, lest your peers think you're a loser or a moron. Certainly Obama fans won't admit how obscure the sentence is--though several have claimed that it's lifted from a prophecy of the Tribal Elders of the Hopi Indians. Hopi prophecies are famously obscure.

[snip]

When Obama's supporters say "We are the ones we've been waiting for," what they mean is that in the long roll call of history, from Aristotle and Heraclitus down through Augustine and Maimonides and Immanuel Kant and the fellows who wrote the Federalist Papers, we're number one! We're the smartest yet! Everybody--Mom, Dad, Gramps and Grandma, Great Grandpa and Great Grandma, maybe even the Tribal Elders--they've all been waiting for people as clued-in as us!

Labels: lit crit

Insistence upon the rank of the tragic hero, or the so-called nobility of his character, is really but a clinging to the outward forms of tragedy. [...] Tragedy enlightens--and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies. In no way is the common man debarred from such thoughts or such actions.

Seen in this light, our lack of tragedy may be partially accounted for by the turn which modern literature has taken toward the purely psychiatric view of life, or the purely sociological. If all our miseries, our indignities, are born and bred within our minds, then all action, let alone the heroic action, is obviously impossible.

And if society alone is responsible for the cramping of our lives, then the protagonist must needs be so pure and faultless as to force us to deny his validity as a character. From neither of these views can tragedy derive, simply because neither represents a balanced concept of life. Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.

Labels: I heart EW, lit crit