We got to talking over dinner last night. And by we, I need to set the stage here and let you know up front that I was likely the LEAST QUALIFIED PERSON EVER to be participating in this conversation...but here I was, seated amongst Robert Olen Butler, Rick Moody and Mark Winegardner at dinner (yes, Iowans, we get real writers here too). And we got to discussing the American book critic's reticence to read and comment favorably on longer books.
One of the shockers of the evening was Mr. Moody's admission that he had been asked to review Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon by one of the big magazines precisely because no other reviewer would touch it, given its 1000-page length.
In order to achieve maximum brevity and pith, I'll put it out this way: even though its Tuesday, I'm talking about books, bitches. So tell me--the hardest book you've ever read, and ideally, what you learned from it. I'll start with two...Women and Men by Joseph McElroy, and The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. I felt I had to read them both, though I'd like the 3 months I spent with Musil (reading about 100 pages a day--it's a 2 volume door stop, and no, I didn't finish) back.
No votes for Infinite Jest are allowed, because I know you did not read all of the ancillary material, or all of the footnotes.
11.22.2005
In Praise of Difficult Novels
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9 comments:
Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian is a doorstop. in fact, at the moment it shares responsibility of holding down the lid on my snake's tank along with a few cd boxsets...
anywhooo.... it's a post modern masterpiece nobel winning piece of work based loosely on the author's fascinating life... but, to this westerner, it wasnt unlike putting my brain in a vice and slowly tightening. unfortunately, i learned that sometimes life is complicated and reading should not be. not to mention the fact that i think perhaps when post modernism turns the corner so that it blurs the lines of narrator, author, creation and consistancy of pronouns, maybe it's evil genius and maybe it's just gone too far.
or maybe he needs a better translator.
I like skinny books.
Unless they're skinny books made fat only because they contain lots of pictures, preferably of the pop-up variety.
Although, I did really enjoy The Corrections. Is that fat enough to count?
When I was much, much younger, I read the unabridged version of Stephen King's The Stand. Man, that sure was long.
I'm with you on the unabridged the stand . i spent a summer reading that in high school and i dont think i remember anything else from those three months. it's still on my favorites list.
How about Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves"? Big, odd, footnoted, interesting.
Pete, I am with you on the posthumous publication rant...though I am fascinated by Hemingway's Garden of Eden. Somehow, House of Leaves didn't do it for me, though I tried. For three weeks, alone in the Ontario wilderness with nothing but provisions (gin and tonic) and one fine companion (my Airedale terrier Clyde)...we tackled House of Leaves until I thought Clyde began to speak, and then we stopped.
Interesting that no one so far has ponied up with a big book that they thought was good...both of mine I thought I learned from, but I would be hard pressed to recommend.
I'm finding the Nicole Ritchie novel to be extremely difficult. Not so long, but man, that is one fucking difficult book.
For instance:
"Chloe had been going to the hottest clubs in Hollywood since she was this many, wearing L.A. Gear sneakers everywhere she went. Like me, Chloe has always been tiny, which meant we could both sneak into The Viper Room under the noses of the bouncers when we were thirteen. She was a kid partying with adults who treated her like a peer. Every important marker of her life had to do with clubbing. She wore her first bra to a club. She went out without a bra for the first time to a club. Her first kiss, her first crush on a gay guy, the first time she saw Jimmy Choo sandals, the first time someone passed her a joint -- all happened in a club."
See what I mean?
Come on, Juneteenth or Soul Mountain seem like a stoned trip to the 7-11 compared to this Ritchie novel shit.
i praise dave if he finishes ritchie's novel, as i had to take a nap after expelling the energy it took to get through that paragraph!
I don't mind long ones. Many of my favorites are extra thick. The Corrections, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay--the former is over 500 pages and the later tops out at well over 600, but I was still disappointed when I got to the end of both. I wanted more.
However, even though I nearly made it through a short book, The Sound and Fury--I had about forty pages to go when I left it in DC over thanksgiving--it occurred to me upon returning that I don't give a fuck how things play out. I think I read K and C, roughly three times the length, in a little under a week; I'd been plugging away at Billy Faulkner's magnum opus for nearly a month and I felt every word of it, like wide potholes on a windy road in a car with shitty shocks.
How about "Sometimes A Great Notion" by Ken Kesey?
Long beautiful and somewhat dearranged...
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