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July 16, 2009

Comments

Tom

Great stuff - certainly worth the wait!

Marlon

Mark, I'm not sure how I feel about your comment about young writers not being inclined towards the beautiful sentence. Simply because the uber-ironic you speak of is selling well does not mean there aren't young writers slaving over scraps of notebook paper trying to write and then rewrite the most lyrical and brilliant sentences ever written.

Damion

Thanks again -- great interview!

If you write an interesting sentence people will want to read it if not then not, that is the truth.

Grayson Ellis

A man whose socks match and loves cricket. It's moments like this that make me realise that there is hope in the world.

A beautiful interview.

Niall

I'm puzzled by the belief that our younger writers are ironic. I see very little irony in their work. It's more like "irony" than true irony. Saturday Night Live style irony, as opposed to the real thing. I don't thing younger writers have had the experience of life necessary to trade in real irony. For them, it's more of a pose, an attitude than something substantive.

So I'm not sure the dichotomy between the "ueber-ironic" and the "lyrical" makes much sense in the American context, since we produce so little of either.

Niall Anderson

A really nice interview, Mark. It comes across like a genuine exchange of ideas, and not as a question and answer session.

But I do think you're getting hung up on Zadie Smith and her essay comparing Remainder and Netherland. First of all, I don't see, as you seem to, that she's demanding that we (as readers) should make a choice between the two: the tone of the piece is much more questioning than that.

Second of all, James Wood is prone to making the specious argument you would have Smith make: "Imagine a world in which the only possible novel available was, say, Pynchon's Vineland and books like it. It would be a hysterical and falsifying monotony. By contrast, a world in which the only available novel was, say, A House for Mr. Biswas would be a fearfully honest, comic, tragic, compassionate, and above all deeply human place."

Whatever about Smith, Wood would definitely have us choose.

Niall

Niall -

First let me get over the surprise at responding to someone with my name. I hope this won't cause confusion, or lead people to believe I am arguing with myself...

In re Zadie Smith's essay: She's not "demanding" anything. She's making a series of observations, using two novels as touchstones and examples of opposite tendencies. We have to separate out her opinion of the worthiness of both novels, and her opinion of the relative worthiness of the literary philosophies each represents.

Smith sees Netherland as an example of lyrical realism trying to overcome its fundamental inauthenticity by making that inauthenticity one of the subtexts of the novel. She accuses O'Neill of doing this only in order to reaffirm the authenticity of lyrical realism, but on an equally meaningless basis.

She uses Remainder as an example of how to confront the inauthenticity of realism in a more honest and aesthetically satisfying manner.

So she's not demanding we like one book over another. She's just saying that Netherland represents the end game of lyrical realism, it's descent into wink-wink, nudge-nudge self doubt, without fundamentally addressing any of the problems it is so "anxious" (Smith's term) about. She definitely sees the literary strategy of Remainder as superior and more integrated.

I don't think her essay is really targeted at readers at all. She probably couldn't care less which books get read or not. Her essay is, I think, really targeted at writers, and is attempting to convince them of how to write. I don't think she's offering Netherland as the preferred exemplar.

This is just my take on her essay. I'm not necessarily taking her side in any of this.

-Niall

Nigel Beale

Nialls,

Although close, I'm kind of wishing my name was Niall right about now...

What I find odd is that Smith says Netherland is about anxiety, and crisis in the modern middle class, while at the same time saying it provides a perfect image of what realism is supposed to look like… if it raises anxieties about form, isn’t it doing what many po-mo novels do? How can it be both at the same time?

If Smith condemns O’Neill’s ‘realism’ as the bedside story that comforts us the most, and if she eschews the importance of form, the truth of language and the continuity of self, what on earth is she suggesting gets us closer to our condition? That everyone write like Beckett? And how, if she has an idea, does she plan to hold reader interest without use of plot, metaphor and style?

- Nigel

Niall

Well, Nigel, I'm not Zadie Smith, so I can't answer any of those questions. But it does seem to me that condemning lyrical realism for being a comforting bedtime story designed to make us feel good is something quite different, and logically unconnected from denying "the truth of language and the continuity of self".

I think, rather Smith could easily say that the problem with lyrical realism is that it abuses those qualities in the service of propaganda, whereas the aesthetic of Remainder deploys those same resources to achieve a more honest image of how we think and live.

It's also important to remind ourselves that Smith in her essay doesn't see lyrical realism as a genre that is dead. Only that it is so out of synch with the world we live in that even lyrical realists like O'Neill feel the need to try to evolve it. This means, in turn, that Smith would probably be quite happy with a more fully evolved form of lyrical realism.

But that's just me.

Neil Appleton

Two Nialls and a Nigel responding to an O'Neill interview! It's the kind of unlikely sleight of hand that Wood would call hysterically realist.

Niall (not Anderson), I agree with you that irony is rare in new fiction. It's a subtle state of mind, and something about this culture doesn't permit it to flourish. Much, much easier to find it in 18th c. French literature, for instance, though much of the humor in Amis and Barnes is also ironic.

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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.
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    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."