Who will write about the poor?
Moorish Girl wonders what happened to the voices of the disadvantaged in contemporary lit.

Poverty has receded from the list of popular themes of the American novel. No longer do we have a John Steinbeck, a Richard Wright, a Theodore Dreiser, or a Zora Neale Hurston writing about the working poor. Who today would write that "In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage"? It would not be an exaggeration to say that, in the last decade, American fiction has been fixated on the middle and upper classes.

Luckily, that'll change now that the middle class is becoming extinct.

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Inferiority complex

Why are some genres considered inferior to others? Let's face it, it's because ugly people read them.

What is it, when Man Booker juries meet, that makes genres "inferior", asked Baroness James? Why is crime writing, with its "very conscious structure" and ability to raise "big moral issues" outside the box of introversion, such a poor relation of "literary fiction", asked Rankin?

Okay, not ugly people - poor people. Poor and ugly. Too poor to get an education, too ugly to go to the right salons where people are reading the right Oprah books and the occasional Booker winner.


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Marcus vs Franzen

People are confused by Ben Marcus's Harper's attack on J-Franz . Confusion causes delay. I should know. I've been sitting stone still for about twenty minutes wondering where my coffee is on my desk. I really can't find it. I set it down next to some papers and I think the edits from Lane's article drank it and ate the paper cup.


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Using the same muscles

A chat with the fiction editor at the New Yorker.

It really messes with you when you’re trying to do your own writing.

I don’t do my own writing.

You don’t?

No.

Not at all?

No. I don’t think there’s any way—for me, anyway—to do both.

How come?

Because it uses the same muscles. And you spend your day in a hypercritical editorial mode where you’re looking at every sentence to see what’s wrong with it. And then if you try to write one there’s a lot of things wrong with it. And you never get past it. It’s pretty tough to do both. Some people do it. And there are a lot of journalist-editors. Not a whole lot of fiction writers-fiction editors.


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Who reads fiction?I do,and lots of it. Not surprising that more women read novels than men: perhaps it has something to do with "interiority". God, there I said it.I picked that gem up in a piece of criticism, which I almost never read, and you now understand why. Curious fact,though, when one considers that until recently the world's major literary critics were male. Novels by males sweat too much, with the exception of Sebald and one or two others.

Edited by author 11-23-2005 02:07 PM
"Novels by males sweat too much." Sheesh. Now if a man said something like "poems by females lactate too much," there wouldn't be enough left of him to feed to the bluebottles. So what makes this a reasonable generalization, Frayed?

Don't get too worked up over a metaphorical generalization. It makes as much sense as saying "interiority." I won't explain what I mean by it, but rest assured it would never appear in a critical essay, but perhaps "interiority" would.

Edited by author 11-23-2005 05:00 PM
Interiority
Suggests to me
A colonoscopy!

Edited by author 11-24-2005 01:45 PM
NYT 100 notable books

Now here's a list.

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Edited by author 11-24-2005 04:52 PM
Famous last words
What's your favourite ending to a book?

One of the favourite games of literary people is that of best first lines. Everyone enjoys reciting them; the bizarre (Earthly Powers), the haunting (Rebecca), the august (Anna Karenina), the casual (Howards End) or the strangely anonymous (Jane Eyre). First lines are great fun. But they aren't really as important to a novel as the last lines. From a terrible first line, a novel may recover; the last line is what it leaves a reader with.

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Always love Eggers' A.H.W.O.S.G.'s "...finally, finally, finally."

It's just the words that come before that that suck.

Heh, I was waiting for some jab. Guess the Pulitzer commitee, etc, etc, etc are just a bunch of chumps, uh?

They could be. Did all the pretentious dorks from McSweeney's headquarters somehow end up on the Pulitzer jury?

Now now. Let's stay on topic.

My vote for a great last line (and I think Peter will have my back on this one) is that of Grendel by John Gardner. Here's the line:

"Poor Grendel's had an accident," I whisper. "So may you all."

Edited by author 11-26-2005 05:54 PM
I'm with Paul on the last line of Grendel.

Although it's tied for me with the last line of Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber (the first series):

"Good-bye and hello, as always."

Peter