Tag: novels

Olsson from awhile back.

And then there are the heirs of Victor Hugo in Les Miserables, Aristophanes in Lysistrata, Jonathan Swift in A Modest Proposal, Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Charles Dickens in multiple works, Jack London in The Iron Heel, and so on.

Olsson:

Sinclair’s heirs today are writers of literary nonfiction, who derive their drama from facts. It almost seems a shame that Sinclair couldn’t have written that way, for the story of the actual family whose wedding inspired his opening scene would probably have contained more surprises and more nuance than his ideologically driven plot.

But it wouldn’t have been as popular. In the way that Sinclair used fiction to get his facts across to a broad audience, The Jungle‘s closest contemporary counterparts are films like Dead Man Walking or Maria Full of Grace, whose stories illuminate aspects of the death penalty or drug running for audiences much larger than any equivalent book could be expected to have. (And now that Fast Food Nation has been made into a narrative movie, it’s likely to do the same for the meat industry.) Meanwhile, surely The Jungle has endured in large part because it’s a novel. How many high-school English teachers assign Ida Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company or Lincoln Steffens’ The Shame of Our Cities, nonfiction works by Sinclair’s muckraking contemporaries? Judged for its style or insight into character The Jungle may leave something to be desired. But it lays bare a place and a time and an industry, registering injustices which, as Schlosser notes in a foreword to the Penguin Classics edition, we have yet to fully remedy. So, go ahead, read The Jungle for its documentary power—just be warned that, as with Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard, the label is a little misleading.

Julia Stein on Dickens’ Bleak House:

What’s great about Dickens’ he makes judgments: against lawyers corruption, against the corrupt Court of Chancery, against the brutalization of the poor and the homeless. Well, right now the United States is also a Bleak House dominated by corruption: the corruption of the Iraq War totals billions. What is missing in a lot contemporary fiction is Dickens’ moral judgments.

I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a novel which won a recent Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but the well-written novel has a father and son trying to survive in post-apocalypse America. In many ways I thought the Road was metaphorically saying this country is now so bad off all a decent person can do is suffer it–I find that a huge cop out. Give me Dickens any day of the week instead.

Or Lib Lit.

They suspected everyone but themselves. They were the good people, respected by the respectable. They were the responsible class. They were the unwitting and witting minions of the monied class, the status quo. Some doubted themselves, but they believed their actions to be good, and good enough. If they believed anything else they could in no way facilitate the great crimes as very much as they did, these people.

More often than not they were people with more money than others. Some were the many faceless intellectuals who had been well trained and quite thoroughly mentally cleansed. Some were the acolytes of frenzied demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity busy duping and poking out the eyes of part of the populace. These people were often cheery, or dutiful, while others went numb or played dumb or otherwise could not care less.

Continue reading Life Among the Mentally Cleansed

The Amis-Eagleton controversy
The British literary elite and the “war on terror”

By Ann Talbot 

In giving Eagleton a kicking, the British literary elite are sending a message to younger and less well-established academics, to aspiring writers and to students that Marxism is not acceptable and that they had better adopt the same degenerate stance as Amis if they expect to be published, get promoted or be awarded any grade above a gamma minus.

Continue reading Eagleton, Amis, and the Literary

Thinking About New Orleans: Kim Sykes

Q. Tell me about the writing of fiction you have written since Katrina.
A. There is little room for nonsense, beating around the bush, sort to speak. I get straight to the point. My characters say what they mean and mean what they say.

Continue reading Kim Sykes and Artistic Consciousness Post Katrina

Norman Mailer will not R.I.P.

by Saul Landau 

The obituaries on Norman Mailer offer little or no space to his literary contribution that offers unique insight into the Cold War. Harlot’s Ghost explored the U.S.-Soviet clash as no historian or sociologist dared — or had the capacity to probe.

Maxwell Geismar on Norman Mailer (part one)

Maxwell Geismar on Norman Mailer (part two)

On Maxwell Geismar and Norman Mailer:

In the two previous posts of Maxwell Geismar on Norman Mailer, it seems to me that Geismar is primarily critiquing the political or ideological component of Mailer’s work — which is easy to understand coming from a literary critic whose work and livelihood were threatened, then destroyed, for political, ideological reasons during the Cold War. In my view, Geismar correctly and astutely calls Mailer on these shortcomings. 

I think Armies of the Night and Executioner’s Song are highly accomplished non-fiction works, essentially, aesthetically and otherwise. However, Armies does have the political shortcomings that Geismar points out. Continue reading Links to some earlier posts and other comments on Norman Mailer