The problem with reading something like Junot Díaz's Drown after reading something like John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor or Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds or while reading something like Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is that it winds up feeling not nearly as good as it might actually be.
And it's not even that I'm disappointed. I've read three stories so far. And I've liked them each well enough. But I find myself wanting more. Which is why I say it's probably bad timing; I'm clearly in a mood for maximal literature. Words and more words. Moral pronouncements. Self-infatuated narratorial voice. And more words. And, well, Díaz just ain't Tolstoy.
(Side note: I think I'm in love with the moment Vronsky and Anna pass each other for the first time. It's such a balls-to-the-wall bit of writing. I'd like to write an entire book on that paragraph and the paragraph describing the second murder in Crime and Punishment. Oh, oh.)
Díaz's prose doesn't come off so much as refreshing, as one might expect it to, as it does, well, modern, and typically so. The presence of situational brutality and the deft deployment of important- and poetic-sounding lines, lines like the stressed syllables of iambs, aren't quite enough for me. Not right now, at least.
Not that I don't plan on finishing the book. I do like it. And I do enjoy a short story with my lunch. But (to slip into a William Gassian-style language-as-food figure) it does feel like a kernel of corn caught between the tines of the fork that's busy bringing a heaping helping of meat and potatoes to my mouth: nice, tasty, but neither chewy nor filling.
(And, yes: I'll note I've seen the infatuation pluck up my own fiction writing and carry it along on down entire shorelines worth of descriptive and figurative language in the story I'm working on now, this coming off the last story I finished, a couple months ago, which was by far the most minimalistic thing I've ever written, not counting certain pencil-based experiments from childhood, which were only ever minimal in comparison with the ambitious desires that gave rise to them.)
1 comment:
Anna Karenina is my favorite example of why telling is sometimes better than showing. Or, more accurately, how telling can make all of the showing really pay off.
I loved that book.
Except for the wheat harvesting bit. Wheat harvesting chunk I should say. That part was boring.
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