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January 20, 2006

BIRNBAUM v. BEE

Our pal Robert Birnbaum chats with one of our least favorite novelists, Bret Easton Ellis, but Brother Robert always puts on a good show, and the two chat about "Italian concrete, Jay McInerney, Rat and Brat Packs, Gary Fisketjon, Joe McGinniss, the joys of writing, reviews—writing and receiving them, Roger Rosenblatt, "American Psycho", the time of "Less than Zero", Los Angeles, writers in the movies, his mid life crisis, Mark Spragg’s "An Unfinished Life", his picks for the greatest books of his generation, "Gilead", James Wolcott and James Wood and James Atlas, Phillip Roth, Jayne Dennis, his next book and his Yankee cap. And other stuff."

RB: James Woods [sic] published a novel that received warm notices, but I don’t think his reputation was adversely affected.

BEE: I felt the same thing about James—I also felt he was a very boring critic. And I found that novel equally boring. So that didn’t bother me. James Wolcott seemed to be a very vital, exciting critic, and I suppose if you hadn’t read his book, he still might be. He just wrote an interesting review of the Jim Atlas book [My Life in the Middle Ages], and it was very cruel, very funny, and very intense review, but I kept thinking of The Catsitters the whole time. And I kept saying, “How dare you have the right to go out and criticize these people when you have written a terrible novel?” On the other hand, you don’t have to be a chef to know when a meal tastes bad or not.

Which only serves to reinforce our opinion of BEE ...

Posted at 12:12 AM in Litlinks |

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TEV DEFINED


  • 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."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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