VKN said: “You disappeared off your blog for awhile.”
Okay! Here’s an email I was writing (but didn’t finish or send [but which I’m finishing now to you, dear blog reader]) to my friend Kevin yesterday about American novels:
I.
Have you read anything good from the US lately? I’m despairing. Yesterday I read the first two pages of the new Dennis Cooper—whom I’ve never read before (but have heard much about from the HTMLGiant camp)—which of course Blake Butler and Ken Baumann went gaga for, and which the product page for it has a Justin Taylor blurb (“a mindbending masterpiece”). But I found the beginning to be filled with inane bantering:
”Chateau Étage, as a corroded iron plaque leads the unsuspecting to believe, lies a multi-hour car ride from my loft in the Marais and near a small town whose hyphenated name I keep forgetting.
“The wooded property is vast enough to hold a hill of slight historical value and the makings of a river where the older son of the chateau’s prior owner appears to have slipped, bashed his inebriated head against a rock, and drowned.
“It was seeing this boy’s picture and obituary in Le Monde that led me to case the home originally, and, according to a subtext, an alleged sighting of his ghost that caused his superstitious parents to put it on the market.” (The Marbled Swan, first page)
A lot here reminds me of shit I was writing at Florida [“hill of slight historical value“—so clever!] and other bits are borderline nonsense [“according to a subtext”? What does that mean?] Also what does the corroded iron plaque say? The name? That it’s multi-hour? (And why multi-hour? It’s not like the trip length would vary. Why not 2 hour? 3 hour?) Why are the readers of the plaque unsuspecting? It’s all language that’s supposed to sound neat but doesn’t mean anything…
II.
I also picked up a book called Luminarium, which has good blurbs (“dizzyingly smart and provocative” –Dave Eggers!) that made it sound like the kind of philosophical novel I tend to enjoy (see: Tinkers) about a man dealing with his twin brother being in a coma. (Blurb: “”A strikingly metaphysical novel that never dematerializes into misty cliches” –Washington Post) But as soon as I got it I knew it probably wasn’t good since it’s a billion pages long, which might be okay, but the writing is like this:
“Visiting hours ended at ten, after which, not ready to go back to Brooklyn, Fred retraced what may or may not have been George’s route that night, zigzagging south and west, spending a noticeable percentage of his net worth on a vegetable-covered pizza slice on Second Avenue, trying not to think about the hydrogenated oils and preservatives and pesticides working their way into him. He passed by the Zeckendorf, of course, alert for short, vivacious blondes, and made the embarrassing mistake of nodding hello to the familiar-looking heft man in the blue security jacket, who was just then clocking out for the day.”
Who thinks about hydrogenated oils preservatives and pesticides working into them? When is “nodding hello” ever an embarrassing mistake? Is this book really about humans, I wonder? Both of these also seem overly gossipy to me—enraptured with details that don’t really matter (That damn hill of modest historical worth. That silly “noticeable percentage of his net worth”).
III.
Compare these with the beginning of the French novel The Truth About Marie:
“Later on, thinking back on the last few hours of that sweltering night, I realized we had made love at the same time, Marie and I, but not with each other. At a certain moment in the night—during a sudden heat wave in Paris, for three straight days the temperature reached thirty-eight centigrade and fell no lower than thirty—Marie and I were making love in Paris in two apartments a mere half mile apart, as the crow flies. We couldn’t have imagined at the night’s start, or later, or at any time for that matter, it was simply inconceivable, that we’d see each other that night, that before sunrise we’d be together, even for a brief moment in each other’s arms in the dark, staggering hallway of our apartment.”
There’s no games or tricks here. The apartments are half a mile apart, not “a multi-minute walk” apart. Toussaint says what he means instead of forcing the reader to figure it out (no “according to a subtext” here). There’s no details given for the sake of stuffing in details (“in her apartment in which Jean Genet once wrote one of his plays and cost a considerable amount of her net income each month”) or sentences trying to be fancy or clever.
Well, that’s two random American novels. Surely there’s something good by an American out there. My friend Ana suggested that I read Jonathan Franzen (whose fiction I’ve been avoiding). I kind of want to read Tezuka comics and Aldous Huxley books forever though. I’m welcome to any recommendations, either at monkfishjowls@gmail.com or via web here.
