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  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."
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November 19, 2006

THE END OF MR. Y

Not too long ago, I complained about PopMatters' review of Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr. Y, and promised my own official take.  It runs today in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  Here's an excerpt:

That hoary workhorse, "the novel of ideas," gets an invigorating kick in the pants in Scarlett Thomas' imaginative new novel The End of Mr. Y. Among the ideas on offer for our reading pleasure, one can choose from the works of Samuel Butler, Schrödinger's Cat, Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia, relativity vs. quantum mechanics, the power of prayer, Jacques Derrida, homeopathy, the search for LUCA (the Last Universal Common Ancestor), Victorian science (luminiferous ether, anyone?), Heidegger's Being and Time, and the genetics of laboratory mice. And that's a partial listing.

But The End of Mr. Y is considerably more than a precocious recitation of seemingly disparate ideas. It is, above all, an exhilarating, breakneck narrative that leaves the reader dizzily impressed with Thomas' brio and talent as she takes each new preposterous plot development (an 8-foot-tall mouse god? a secret government plan for mind control?) and makes it utterly convincing.

You can read the rest here.  The book is garnering deserved positive attention among litblogs.

UPDATE:  Harcourt has set up a website for The End of Mr. Y that's worth checking if you'd like to know more about this fascinating title.

A bit of housekeeping.  In honor of this week's release of Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, TEV will be running three days of devoted posts courtesy of our very own resident Pynchon Scholar Jim Ruland.  There will be no posts on Thursday and Friday and I'll be back in the saddle on Monday.  (Of course, as ever, I reserve the right to randomly pop in from time to time.)  Please do make you sure you check out Jim's work - he's got some awfully cool stuff planned, not your typical bag of Pynchoniana.  And you can use the new email feature (top right corner) if you'd like your posts mailed to you.

Happy holidays one and all.  See you back here in a week.  (Oh, and to all those who've asked, Casino Royale was absolutely terrific.  This Bond fan is pleased, indeed.)

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