Garth Risk Hallberg

Good news for fans of A Field Guide to the North American Family.

It was even more evidence that the long novel is experiencing a resurgence, as a dozen publishers competed for the rights to release the book, set in New York City in the 1970s. “City on Fire” was written by Garth Risk Hallberg, a 34-year-old who has contributed to The New York Times Book Review and The Millions. Publishers who had a copy of the manuscript — and said they could concentrate on little else until they had finished reading it — rapturously compared it to work by Michael Chabon and Thomas Pynchon.

Atwood on The Circle

Margaret Atwood has kind things to say about Dave Eggers' novel, The Circle. It's notable that his effort to satirize Google, et al, utilizes a 19th century model upon material that's dangerously up to date. One might wish despite Snowden and Assange that he would have taken a little more time with the last 15% of the pages, as the blend of satire and late-arriving tragedy dilutes the takeaway. Stylistically, though, it's masterful and reads faster than greased Dickens.

Zibaldone

Not a novel, but why not? 4265 pages reviewed at The Quarterly Conversation.

Charles Newman's In Partial Disgrace

Scott Esposito interviews the editor of In Partial Disgrace:


 A notoriously hard-living man and extremely fastidious writer, Newman hewed out an idiosyncratic oeuvre of four novels, two book-length essays, and a number of critical studies (as editor) across three decades. He did not publish a book between 1985 and his death by heart attack in 2006, though he did leave behind an apartment’s-worth of boxes full of manuscripts for a massive, uncompleted project that was to comprise a nine-volume cycle taking place in a fictitious Eastern European nation. Its theme, Newman once wrote, was to be “the great un-American novel.”

Because You Want to Believe--No Regrets, Coyote

Excerpt: No Regrets, Coyote--John Dufresne

My friend Bay Lettique, a sleight-of-hand man, does close-up magic. You can shuffle a deck of playing cards, spread them facedown on the table, and he'll pick them up in order, ace to king, by suit or by rank, your choice. He once asked me to think of a card — not to mention it, just to picture it — and he not only identified the card, he did it by asking me to open my wallet and pull out the five—dollar bill that had the rank and suit of the card written on Lincoln's shirt collar in red ink. Nine of diamonds. He can make a parakeet fly from his iPhone to your iPhone and from your iPhone to his shoulder. I've seen him slice a banana in half with a card he threw from ten feet away. At least I think I saw it. Bay says close-up works this way: I tell you I'm going to lie to you, and then I lie to you, and you believe it. Because you want to believe.

WWNorton

VALIS

I thought to myself, this shouldn't work. But it does. My confession: I waited later in life to read Philip K. Dick, having bought into the reputation of prose clunkiness. But here, that applies little, and matters not anyway.

The famous quote: It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

It kept me awake at night, a couple of times. When did that last happen?

But don't take my word for it.


Ted Gioia on VALIS :

. . . . . .  For a writer 

who devoted his career to the sci-fi field, Dick seemed almost perversely unconcerned with explaining the disjunctions that send his characters reeling in confusion into an alternative universe.  As a result, his tales often come across more like applied metaphysics than science fiction.  And this explains much of the appeal of Dick's storytelling:  where other sci-fi authors would blame everything on aliens or weapons, Mr. Dick describes similar plot twists in terms of transcendent events and personal crises.  As a result, he has more in common with existential novelists such as Walker Percy or Albert Camus than with space opera authors like Arthur
C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein.  

Bleeding Edge is upon us

(from the p-list!)

It's  dawn, and Maxine and companions are in a boat on the Arthur Kill near
Isle of Meadows, a huge NYC landfill site:

 "and for maybe a minute and a half she feels free-at least at the edge of
possibilities, like whatever the Europeans who first sailed up the Passaic
River must have felt, before the long parable of corporate sins and
corruption that overtook it, before the dioxins and the highway debris and
unmourned acts of waste."

Language Creates Its Own Reality

Joseph’s a clipper: he cuts newspaper articles about the world’s atrocities and posts them on the walls of his attic, a collection he refers to as the “Inhumanity Museum,” a museum that will “remind its visitors of the vileness of mankind — not its nobility and triumphs.” He undertakes this task as if it were his life’s work. Professor Skizzen resembles more the thoughtful, melancholy professor-protagonists that inhabit Saul Bellow’s work than he does the rambling Professor Kohler of The Tunnel. While much of the book takes place inside the world of Skizzen’s mind, a dark, roving mind preoccupied with the future of humanity, the sections that depict his childhood (as Joey) are so precisely told with vivid details that they read less like reminiscence, and more like scenes unfolding before our eyes. Gass, who was briefly a student of Wittgenstein’s at Cornell, is a playful writer. And Wittgenstein’s theory that language creates its own reality is very much apparent in Middle C, not just in its absurd, enigmatic beginning, or its many language games — several words at the end of sentences intentionally rhyme — but with its questioning of identity and reality, notions that Gass constantly upends. For who cares if Skizzen (German for “Sketches”) fibs about his age, lies about his family’s past, and even concocts an imaginary career for himself as a music professor? He is, after all, an invention.

Christopher Urban's thoughts on Middle C at The Millions.

The Infatuations

“Once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten,” María, the narrator of The Infatuations, thinks. “What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.” With that philosophy in mind, Marías takes slightly trashy, eye-catching plots, then winds long, philosophical digressions around them like so many knotty, twisty pieces of string. These digressions consist of what Marías calls pensamiento literario, “literary thinking,” which is different from philosophical thinking because it “allows you to contradict yourself. A character within a book can say two totally contradictory things, yet both can be true.”

David Haglund in Slate, on the last translation of Marias to hit these shores.

Upstream Color

For a while (Shane Carruth) worked nights and weekends on a novel, only to find that his writing style didn’t lend itself to prose. “I wouldn’t do internal monologs,” he says. “I wouldn’t write what was going on emotionally. And at some point I realized that if all you’re writing is description of what’s happening, you’re actually writing screenplays.”

from Wired

So, we guess, the novel's loss is the movies' gain.

See Upstream Color