Palish

I think that the novel is an inflexible medium. As much as writers seem to yearn to find new ways to show language on a page, to create multiple perspectives, to fuck with punctuation and syntax, I hold that the novel wants to tell a story, to move from beginning to end. Otherwise, reading begins to feel something like watching a pooly cut film.*

Krauss is married to Jonathan Safran Foer, and wealthy young New York writing couples are obnoxious. Now, after reading her novel, I'm closer to bored with the whole thing. The concept is solid: man writes a novel about his true love. War separates him from both the art and the girl. The book resurfaces, published. How? Why? The problem lies in Krauss's decision to create multiple eccentric narrators, scene hogs who tell their stories in very different ways. I started to dread the shift between perspectives, feeling a little like John Cusack in Being John Malcovich ending up on the freeway. Other stylistic irritations include a series of pages containing only a single paragraph or sentence. I understand that space signifies distance, Nicole, but it's such a tired trick.

One last thing: "But" is not a sentence. Stop doing that.

One more last thing: I understand that this report smacks a little of Victorianism. That's funny considering I am plenty bored by many of the long, classic examples of the genre (except Dickens. I love Dickens. And French novels are the best. Madame Bovary and The Red and Black deserve to be read.) Anyway, what I've come to sneeringly refer to as "concept novels" take all the joy out of language becuase they try too hard. See any novel by Jeanette Winterson.

* Exceptions exist, of course, and I could roll out all the big dogs of high modernism. Joyce and Woolf make it work, and I love them for it.

So, it's a clone novel.

I write this sentence as if "clone novel" represents a genre of note, the mere mention of which sets a classroom of graduate students to nodding. I have nothing against clones, Philip K. Dick, or conspiracy theorists and moral compasses the world over. I do, however, get irritated by anything I consider to be a cheap literary conceit. In this case, Ishiguro doesn't reveal that the narrator working through her adolescence is a clone. The word doesn't appear until two-thirds of the book has been read. You could imagine, I think, that you were reading Prep or something like it until vaguaries like "student," "donor" and "programme, " once explained, take on a new, horrible meaning. After that point, reading this novel harks back to how I felt when I watched episodes of V. as a child.

It's a good, well-written read, but I wish the gloves had come off earlier in the game. After all, this brave new word business is where the money is, right?

Inspired by the essay in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review which coincided with the end of the semester (free! I'm free!), I've spent some time the past few days poking around at new (for me) blogs. Yes, I'm woefully behind, I know, but I hope that someone, somewhere, knows less than me.

My new favorite is Maud Newton, who besides having a fantastic name, plays smart with the literary gossip. I've also been spending some QT with Dooce, a recovering mormon who lives in Utah, which is funnier than it sounds.

Now go out and waste some time.

If you could be any writer, who would you be? I, my friends, would be Joan Didion.

In any other circumstance, I would be hard pressed to finish a memoir about grief. Here, however, Didion's combination of rock-star writing (the syntax!), research (she cites medical textbooks and poetry), and self deprecation resulted in both elation (such books exist) and depression (I will never write one).

So what if she's bony and privleged and Californian. I have vague memories of loving Play It As It Lays in college and plan to send some time with Didion over the holiday break. You should too.

Isn't it fitting that an author by the name of Curtis Sittenfield would write a novel about a prep school, a novel in which the narrator's crush has the name Cross Sugarman? Sittenfield, a woman by gender, (I checked) reads like a hybrid of Donna Tartt and Helen Fielding. The narrator's experience will darken your perspective of the self-selecting world of New England boarding schools (where the class prefect always goes to Harvard), but you'll still want her to kiss the boy, despite the hard-set lines of class and popularity. In the end Prep falls well within the fish out of water/coming of age genre. But after all, who needs to go to an excluisve school to feel alienated?

The New York Times named this novel one of the ten best of the year, and I'm not sure I agree. Lee, the narrator, moved through her traumas episodically, and the plot has no real climax or conclusion. It's like watching a BBC TV program.