‡James Wood on Don Delillo  #

James Wood, who never particularly likes Don Delillo because of the latter’s disdain for faith and God, reviews Delillo’s Falling Man. His assessment is that while it sometimes achieves an aching beauty, it ultimately fails to reveal much about the sources of that which haunts our lives now, nor does it manage to paint a full picture of those lives. The weird thing is that the passages that he quotes admiringly I thought less impressive than those he quotes disparagingly. I suppose, as always, it comes down to a matter of taste, and mine does not coincide with our most esteemed literary critic.

‡Graydon Carter on editing a magazine  #

This post on the Dubliner website offers this advice from Graydon Carter on what makes a good magazine essay. Magazine articles are built on three pillars: access, disclosure, or narrative. The best have all of them. Access is opening a new experience or world to the reader. Disclosure is a scoop, some new information or insight. Narrative, of course, is a story with characters and an arc.

‡Racing Against Reality  #

Andrew O’Hagan, in this piece in The New York Review of Books, argues that Don Delillo’s new novel, Falling Man fails because it doesn’t hew closely enough to the actual events, the true story, the reality. I find this a rather limited view of what the novel can and should attempt to do. He concludes on this pointless criticism:

DeLillo’s novel was inspired by a photograph of a real person—most agree that he is Jonathan Briley, who seemed at a certain point in his descent from the North Tower to plummet straight, upside down, one leg bent, his shirt flying off in the ferocious breeze, his head scorched, “The Falling Man” whose image became a token of horror and a mass-media legend. And the things pertaining to his image are what interest Don DeLillo. Yet the person inside the legend was a man from Mount Vernon who worked in the North Tower restaurant, Windows on the World. He was flesh and blood, not just an idea. He was born on March 5, 1958. He was six feet five. His father was a preacher. He suffered from asthma and had a wife called Hilary. He died sixty-five minutes twenty seconds after Mohamed Atta, and is currently awaiting a writer sufficiently uncoerced by the politics of art to tell his story.

Michael Wood, on the other hand, finds Falling Man to be a cogent depiction of the events and aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York. The novel has been hit hard by many reviewers, in addition to O’Hagen, for its lack of adherence to reality, to documentary veracity, but for Wood and others, it feels true if not necessarily accurate. How else should fiction be?

‡Essays and Novels  #

This essay discusses four recent collections of essays by novelists — Milan Kundera, J.M. Coetzee, Susan Sontag, and Mario Vargas Llosa — and the relationship between novels and essays, both capacious forms that come close to encompassing the full human experience, which is a political as well as personal one.

‡A second reading of Unbearable Lightness  #

A fascinating comparison between what The Unbearable Lightness of Being meant for Czech people when it first appeared and what it means today. Also a study in how literature changes with time even as the words stay the same. A book of politics, philosophy, love, and story all at the same time.

‡Martin Amis follows Blair's farewell tour  #

Amis follows Tony Blair, whom he obviously admires, on his farewell tour. He writes well, although his description of Blair’s failure of words in Iraq could be a clearer: what does he say and how does it fail. An interesting portrait.

‡The Scorn of Literary Blogs  #

Adam Kirsch attempts to be judicious in seeing both sides of the debate between book critics and (so-called) book bloggers, but even so the comments in response become rather pointed and snide. He seems to define blogs by content and length rather than by format, which is the most standard definition: occasional writing organized by date (often with comments and keyword tagging). He is right that literary discussions will continue to grow online, given the ease of publication and infinite space, but he still manages to be slightly sneering of blogging and what it can be and do. The problem in these debates that no one acknowledges is that there is a literature culture and a publishing culture that are only tangentially related. Blogs and book reviewers both cater to the publishing culture (what is new) much more than to the literature culture (what is lasting).

‡A New York Writer’s Catch-22  #

The difficulties that young writers face are only more difficult in the glare of New York’s many distractions and demands, Peter Carey has learned from watching his students at Hunter College. He also remembers his own days in Australia when there were no good reasons to write but also nothing else to do.

‡Five Writer-Friends Discuss Success  #

Or the lack thereof. Akhil Sharma, Suketu Mehta, Gary Shteyngart, John Wray, and Ray Isle (a food writer I’m unfamiliar with) get together once a month to commiserate about writing and the writing life. Maybe light on substance but an article that can leave one longing for companionship.

‡Sound of Silence  #

Thousands of inexplicable mutations thought by scientists to be silent, having no effect on the individuals phenotype, turn out to open the body up to specific diseases, new findings show. These findings will also requires scientists to rethink how DNA functions and works in controlling who we become.