Lev Grossman breaks it all down in the WSJ: Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard. "The pleasure of reading stories that don't bore." Favorite quotations from the article (so many to choose from): 1) "Plot makes perverts of us all."
2) "Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century."
3) "The true postmodern novel is here, hiding in plain sight."
Lordy.
5 comments:
Now that article was hard to read. Is someone trying to revive the ire of B. R. Myers? Hmmm? To Myers's credit, at least his criticisms are directed at specifics. Grossman's sweeping (and wrong) generalizations are all over the place. Oy.
But it's all just a set up for a rebuttal by another author. Probably one of the ones he name drops! Gaiman, Chabon, Lethem? We can place bets.
Such a coincidence that his theory flatters his own books...
not sure what he's getting at with the 3rd one, but the first two have a ring of truth to them. in fact, the first two perfectly the describe his brother's (austin grossman) novel, soon i will be invincible.
If you do a blog search, you can find virtually every big-time literary blog performing a full-on take-down of the idiocy in this article. It's a shame that the Times lowered themselves to publish it.
It should win some kind of stupidity award for the year.
The most quoted anti-Grossman blog is Matt Cheney's. Here's a quote: "Lev Grossman sez: 'This is the future of fiction.' Do not trust anyone who utters such a sentence. They are likely a charlatan, a mesmerist, or a dolt."
I sez: do not trust any blogger who cannot make his pronoun agree in number with its referent. He is most definitely a dolt, and an affected one at that.
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