Despite some fifty years now of “experimental fiction,” the majority of current novels I’ve read still aim for the Roman arch structure—but fail miserably. I’m mostly thinking of books in the “blockbuster midlist” category, like Jonathan Franzen’s works. Like the painstaking ratchet of roller coaster cars up the incline, these novels develop complex action and character so meticulously that they are forced to cut loose in the final third, the cars careening downhill in the kin...| Slant Books
I picked Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 mostly because, at the time, the sonnet’s edgy tone about the drive to tamp down the earthly passions–—something I was personally dealing with at the time!-—cohered to my own struggles. I scrawled the poem in cursive on notebook paper over and over, trying to memorize it, and in memorizing it, it became a part of me—a part of my body, really| Slant Books
2024 marks the fortieth anniversary since the publication of the novel Bright Lights, Big City. It was the first book by Jay McInerney, and probably to his chagrin, the one for which he is still known the most. If you know anything about it at all, you probably remember the novel’s signature reference to cocaine as “Bolivian Marching Powder,” in which the twenty-something male protagonist, in the middle of an emotional breakdown, indulges on a parade of mirrors and in nightclub bathrooms.| Slant Books
The most amazing thing happened to me in the past few weeks. It was the kind of thing that I thought might never happen to me in exactly the same way, ever again: I fell in love with a book. The book was a novel, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, by Christopher Beha, originally published in 2020.| Slant Books
More and more, I think, it’s this tyranny of concepts—the predetermination, pre-editing, and pre-thinking—that seem to plague our literature. Instead of opening the trap door to endless perspectives, endless transfiguration, this book, along with so many, seemed to end where it started.| Slant Books
