The Elegant Variation: LIPSYTE v. ISHIGURO

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April 03, 2006

LIPSYTE v. ISHIGURO

Today's Tournament of Books match-up is the one we were invited to judge - Sam Lipsyte's Home Land vs. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Here's how we start:

When I first received word that my match up for this year's Tournament of Books was going to be Sam Lipsyte's Home Land versus Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, my initial reaction was "You bastards." Because here are two novelists I admire – two novelists who could not be more different in voice and style. And although I'd read Home Land and had touted it as a Recommended Title at my blog The Elegant Variation, Never Let Me Go was a Booker shortlist that has garnered some of the best reviews of Ishiguro's career, including a love letter from James Wood in The New Republic. It promised great things. Clearly, I had a Gordian knot ahead of me, and hell if I knew what I was going to do.

We even get all DFW and use footnotes. Well, one footnote. To find out who won, you'll have to wander over here ...

Posted at 12:30 AM in Litlinks | Permalink

Comments

For some spooky internet reason, I wasn't directed to the Lipsyte vs Ishiguro agon, but to the Foer vs Mrs Foer bashing instead (lots of satisfyingly liquid thwacks and thuds), which I enjoyed over-much. The Foer-Krauss household exemplifies my tirelessly exasperated assertion that novelists need seasoning (experience; AGE) to be of real value to any reader older than 17. Verbal facility is not enough. When will publishers stop behaving like record labels with this younger-is-better nonsense? Never, probably.
Meanwhile dying of curiosity as to how you chose to betray either Ishiguro or Lipsyte in praise of the other (laugh)...

Posted by: Steven Augustine | April 03, 2006 at 04:59 AM

I'm particularly pleased to see that the winner is "[not to ruin the surprise] by Mark Sarvas."

Congratulations, Mark, on such a great novel! Or at least on getting to take credit for it until they fix the page.

For what it's worth, I agree with your choice.

Posted by: Mogolov | April 03, 2006 at 06:43 AM

Nice work! I'll take a ham on rye now, please. Scratch that. Screw the ham and pour me some rye.

Posted by: Jim Ruland | April 03, 2006 at 07:27 AM

I like your choice as well. When I finally read the other one [trying to avoid spoiling here, so forgive the goofy term], I couldn't understand all the praise. The story was unsurprising and the voice bored me.

Posted by: Karen | April 03, 2006 at 12:26 PM

Damn, I must have missed it - they had Home Land by Mark Sarvas??? Too funny. And my footnote is gone, inelegantly crammed into the kind of parens I was hoping to avoid ...

Posted by: TEV | April 03, 2006 at 02:12 PM

just finished ishiguro [have not read home land so no comment there] and I have to come to the defence of the well-praised book - not for the reasons it's been praised, but rather the reasons you citicize it, which in fact were, I think, the very things I found striking about the book.

First, the blandness of the main character - indeed all the characters; the writing; the commentary. i thought this bold. maybe formal and maybe cold, but that blandness and the passiveness & emptiness left so much room to contemplate the central problem, which I think extends well beyond the scifi set-up of the novel.

re: Parlour trick: seems to me everythign about the book was purposefully telegraphed, and there wasn't any sleight of hand, clumsy or not. cloning was a non-secret; the naive dreams of the clones were obviously naive; the purpose of the art interesting only in that the kids didn,t wonder much about it. there was nothing very mysterious about any of it, and again, like the blandness, it was in fact the lack of interest in myths & ways out that was most disquieting. the bland acceptance. It seemed off; but very real for being so far off. and very terrifying, very demanding morally - perhaps more than artistically, which may be the problem it has.

but i agree with the problem with cliff-hanging.

Posted by: Hugh | April 03, 2006 at 11:52 PM

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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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Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick

"History," wrote Henry James in a 1910 letter to his amanuensis Theodora Bosanquet, "is strangely written." This casual aside could easily serve as the epigraph of Cynthia Ozick's superb new collection Dictation, which concerns itself with lost worlds evoked by languages -- languages which separate and obscure as readily as they bind. It can be risky to look for connective tissue between stories written years apart and published in magazines ranging from The Conradian to The New Yorker. But themes of deception, posterity, and above all, the glory of language -- at once malleable and intractable -- knit together this quartet, recasting the whole as the harmonious product of Ozick's formidable talent. Read the entire review here
Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee

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The Dead Fish Museum: Stories by Charles D'Ambrosio

The best short story collection we've read since ... well, certainly since we've started this blog. And we might even say "ever" if Dubliners didn't cast such a long shadow. The short story is not our preferred form but D'Ambrosio's eight brilliant stories are almost enough to convert us. Defy the conventional wisdom that short story collections don't sell and treat yourself to this marvel. (We're especially partial, naturally, to "Screenwriter".)
The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier
*Now in Paperback*

What would you do if the woman who’d left you high and dry ten years ago called out of the blue to invite you to a party without any further explanation? If you’re French, you’d probably spend a lot of time pondering the Deeper Significance Of It All, which is exactly what Grégoire Bouillier does for the 120 hilarious pages of The Mystery Guest. This slim, witty memoir follows Bouillier through the party from hell, and is a case study in Gallic self-abasement. Before it’s all done, you’ll set fire to any turtleneck hanging in your closet and think twice before buying an expensive Bordeaux as a gift. But fear not – just when it seems that all is, indeed, random and pointless and there is no Deeper Significance, salvation arrives in the unlikely form of Virginia Woolf, and the tale ends on a note of unforced optimism. Parfait.
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The Sea by John Banville

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Here Is Where We Meet by John Berger

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Home Land by Sam Lipsyte

In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.

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SECOND LOOK

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

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

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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

April 03, 2006

LIPSYTE v. ISHIGURO

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

April 03, 2006

LIPSYTE v. ISHIGURO

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism