The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from March 1996

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from March 1996

Second thoughts. (the state of contemporary fiction)(The Future of Fiction: A Forum)
March 22, 1996... A few years ago I wrote a series of essays in which I proclaimed that the enterprise of fiction was in a state of serious crisis - a state that had a number of causes but that was most obviously connected to our sudden submergence under the...

Crackpot realism: fiction for the forthcoming millenium.(The Future of Fiction: A Forum)
March 22, 1996... A man must be a little mad if he does not want to be even more stupid. - Montaigne There are two kinds of literature that endure: that which utterly transcends its era, and that which perfectly reflects it. Most writers of contemporary...

Impressions of a paranoid optimist. (The Future of Fiction: A Forum)
March 22, 1996... As to fiction's future (for which I have no crystal ball), I can only say that I have no fear for it; it looks very bright indeed, although the brightness I see is not a technologically produced illumination, such as that which emanates from this...

Literature as lyrical politics.
March 22, 1996... I think we should never write out anything which we do not intend to commit to memory. - Quintilian "We are in one of those moments," a publishing colleague said to me recently, "when nobody knows what is happening." We were talking, as...

I'll be doing more of the same.(The Future of Fiction: A Forum)
March 22, 1996... The academy as nursing home for terminally ill arts: better that the novel die with honor in the gutter than enter those gates, where candy-striped theorists will offer it the illusion of warmth as they lead it in slow dances, play bingo with it...

Bad times. (censorship and the marketplace)(The Future of Fiction: A Forum)
March 22, 1996... There is a place called the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow, a gallery space, theater and performance cafe sort of affair where the newest of new artistic work is not only permissible but expected. It is a welcoming...

Slouching towards Grubnet: the author in the Age of Publicity.(The Future of Fiction: A Forum)
March 22, 1996... "To write - was that not the joy and the privilege of one who had an urgent message for the world?" - Marian Yule in New Grub Street "There's no question of the divine afflatus; that belongs to another sphere of life. We talk of literature...

Rupture, verge, and precipice: precipice, verge, and hurt not.(The Future of Fiction: A Forum)
March 22, 1996... Be not afraid. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. - William Shakespeare You are afraid. You are afraid, as usual, that the novel is dying. You think you know what a novel is: it's the kind you...

'Rivages roses' for Niels Bohr.(The Future of Fiction: A Forum)
March 22, 1996... We convened, late summer, between the wars. My friends and I traveled by ferry and train, slept sitting chins on chests, to join the others at Como in the lake district. We came from all over the continent, from Munich and Brussels, from...

31 questions and statements about the future of literary publishing, bookstores, writers, readers and other matters.(The Future of Fiction: A Forum)
March 22, 1996... 1. This is now almost old hat, at least in some circles. The future bookstore will consist of as many as 200,000 sample books (all strategically chained to a rack so that no one walks off with them), not representing every book ever published...

Specially marked packages. (packaging literature for consumption)(The Future of Fiction: A Forum)
March 22, 1996... The intensity with which those who ache to brand literature obsolete have seized upon newer electronic media as its usurpers is deeply suspect, mostly because the story's old news that was wrong when it was fresh. The impulse to mourn one form's...

Three axioms for projecting a line (or why it will continue to be hard to write a title sans slashes or parentheses).(The Future of Fiction: A Forum)
March 22, 1996... My father was a machinist. Most of the fathers (and none of the mothers) who lived on our block were workers in heavy steel - a thing, as Plato would describe it, with no fuzzy lapses into that shadowland of symbols. Today, however, makers of...

SYSOUT = A. (the myth of the rise and fall of the hard copy)(The Future of Fiction: A Forum)
March 22, 1996... "They," by whom I guess I mean Heidegger's das Man, say that the role of hard copy is declining. In MVS operating system Job Control Language, which I was once somewhat familiar with, the programmer can specify SYSIN, what goes into the system,...

Writing the life postmodern.(The Future of Fiction: A Forum)
March 22, 1996... I once imagined that I could attend a conference of the Associated Writing Programs without putting my writerly soul in jeopardy. I learned otherwise one brilliant Easter weekend in San Francisco, April of 1988. Heart's blood! Didn't I witness a...

A conversation with Fernando del Paso.(The Future of Fiction: A Forum)(Interview)
March 22, 1996... Q: SINCE IN Palinuro of Mexico you function not only as the novel's author but also as a cultural commentator, I wonder if you could take a step back for a moment and assess for me its merit and achievement. Almost two decades after its original...

On returning from Chiapas: a revery in many voices.(The Future of Fiction: A Forum)
March 22, 1996... 1. The One Pearl In this country everyone dreams. Now the time has come to awaken . . . - Subcomandante Marcos, "Two Winds: A Storm and a Prophecy" (VF 33) Iranian Gnosticism offers an exemplary text called The Hymn of the Pearl. It...

Infinite Jest.
March 22, 1996... While reading William Gass's The Tunnel last year at this time, I feared I was witnessing the last of a dying breed, the encyclopedic American novel that began with Gaddis's Recognitions in 1955, hit its stride in the sixties and seventies (Giles...

Galatea 2.2.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... What distinguishes Richard Powers's new novel from other recent cyber-fictive responses to postmodern-deconstructive-life-as-text/world-as-web is the absence within it of science speculation, of theory, and of ideology. Galatea 2.2 is a deeply...

Skinned Alive.
March 22, 1996... At the very end of "Watermarked," the last story in Skinned Alive, the narrator, reflecting on his time in the theater some thirty years before, says, "What we learned from the theater, improbably enough, was how to be gay." The eight stories in...

The Tent of Orange Mist.
March 22, 1996... With the publication of The Tent of Orange Mist Paul West takes his place as the premier practitioner of historical fiction in America. In each of his novels since The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, West has consistently explored the...

Mrs. Ted Bliss.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Stanley EIkin's last book is about last things. Mrs. Ted Bliss, a Russian-born Jewish woman who had married a Chicago butcher and lived a relatively unreflective life bounded by cleaning and cooking, clipping coupons, and playing kaluki, finds...

Extinction.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Exile is important in the novels of Thomas Bernhard, but the emotional focus is always firmly rooted in Austria, the homeland that he so richly despised (and where, by the terms of his will, publication of his books is forbidden until 2059)....

Donkey's Years: Memories of a Life as Story Told.
March 22, 1996... It seems that for most of his writing career, Aidan Higgins has been preparing for Donkey's Years. That is to say, after disguising or fictionalizing his childhood memories in short stories and novels, there would come a time when the masks would...

The Age of Wire and String.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... No. 1. Material not categorized: "Ben Marcus, The." In 1938 George P. Murdock, et al., published the first edition of the Outline of Cultural Materials. This massive classificatory scheme, developed at Yale as a tool for anthropologists and other...

Annotations.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Keene's Annotations is a dense and often rich book about growing up in St. Louis. Part novel, part autobiography, part history and social science textbook, Annotations offers a boy's life mixed with historical commentary and parsed into chapters...

Ghost of Chance.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... This slim novella, which carries illustrations by the author, returns to the landscape evoked in Burroughs's earlier work Cities of the Red Night, namely the jungles of Madagascar. Once again we encounter the early eighteenth-century pirate...

Strange Traffic.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... The odd title of this brilliant collection of stories captures their form and content. There are movements between Berlin and New York, the past and the present, Christianity and Judaism. Names change; puns abound; stories move within stories....

The Acid House.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... In the stories that make up this fine collection, Irvine Welsh's bleak portrait of Scotland's underclass, overwrought youth often assumes Joycean resonances through the uncommon richness of his writing. Wordplay, marvelously pungent vernacular,...

The End of the Story.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Lydia Davis is a translator of many of Blanchot's texts; I am not surprised that her text is concerned with the "meaning" of loss (broken love, time, identity). It is a kind of "death sentence" (pun intended). There is no plot, no chronology. The...

Candy Story.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Candy Story bears the unmistakable stamp of a Redonnet novel - her poetic minimalist style. The story told by the narrator, Mia, blends elements from the detective novel with the fairy-tale atmosphere characteristic of Redonnet's work. The...

There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Every Carla Harryman work presents a new set of visionary silverware. Harryman is particularly agile at opening new space onto what constitutes narrative, poetic, and theatrical identity. There Never Was a Rose without a Thorn is a collected...

The Ring of the Brightest Angels Around Heaven.
March 22, 1996... The celebrated author of the innovative novel The Ice Storm surprises us again with a totally unconventional collection of stories that explore the idea of form. The title story, a novella actually, contemplates the Lower East Side with its...

The Final Dream and Other Fictions.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... In his introduction to these dozen fully realized speculative fictions, George Zebrowski berates publishers for overlooking such alternative fantasy and SF writers as Philip K. Dick, Ward Moore, and Daniel Pearlman. Their continual omission from...

Five Days of Bleeding.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... My initial approach to Five Days of Bleeding was cautious, since I was unable to finish Cruz's first book, winner of the Nilon Award for Excellence in Minority Fiction, Straight Outta Compton, and was somewhat baffled by its billing as "the first...

Corruption.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Readers of Tahar Ben Jelloun's earlier novels, especially Child of Sand (L'enfant de sable) and With Downcast Eyes (Yeux baisses), will already be acquainted with the magical, lyric style of this Moroccan writer. No Arab male writer presents...

Aviary Slag.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... One of the current mandates of "serious" art is to hide itself from its viewer - to work against the resistance of the mind in the same way Michelangelo worked against the resistance of the marble, changing what is cold and hard into the...

The Eleventh Jaguarundi and Other Mysterious Persons.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... You can't help liking someone who announces in her author's note - shortly after the fact that she lives in Seattle and that John Ruskin finds her "entirely foolish, entirely wise" - that she's "an anchoritic vegetarian who has been known to tie...

At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... An important gap in Barnes's published work is now filled with this splendid collection of her early plays. These sixteen one-acts were written between 1916 and 1923, when Barnes was in her late twenties and active with the Provincetown Players...

The House of Others.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Numbed by a vision of reality with no future or purpose, the protagonists of these five remarkable stories contemplate life in its most naked form. "What do people do, here in Montelice?... They live. There you have it. They live and that's all...

Horseman.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Nicol does not want to write a novel that must be read in a postmodern way. He resists the very notion of interpretation of consciousness, of planes of meaning. He wants, instead, to suggest that we are all "horsemen" (animal and men) who cannot...

The Mad Man.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Samuel R. Delany has long been consigned to two literary ghettos - science fiction and, more recently, gay erotica (three, if you count his status as a black writer) - but his literary achievements in both fiction and criticism are such that he...

Defoe.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... In her subversive and prismatic texts, Leslie Scalapino explodes the authority of narrative and writes fictions that cross all of the boundaries of conventional literature - between past and present, dreaming and waking, poetry and prose,...

Stories Out of Omarie.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... In her Stories Out of Omarie, Wendy Walker has given us English versions of eight medieval tales based on lays of Marie de France and her school. Marie, the supreme author of some of the best short romantic poems of her time, and who spent much...

Beyond Rust.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... "How come I'm telling all this?" asks a character in Larry Smith's opening novella "Beyond Rust": "I'll tell you. 14,000 men and women once worked in these Lorain mills. And now it takes just 2,000 workers breaking their backs and hearts to keep...

The House on the Lagoon.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... The House on the Lagoon is an attempt at a Puerto Rican House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende's 1982 novel. Indeed, the narrator's name is Isabel. Set in Ponce and San Jose, the novel follows six generations of two families from the business...

Unbearables.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... What remains to be said about an anthology that proudly declares itself outmoded? That presents itself as a collection of work by an unknown quasi-movement of "unbearables," "beer mystics," people who were too late to be beatniks and too early to...

The Lost Boat: Avant-Garde Fiction from China.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... The past decade has seen an explosion of innovative fiction in mainland China distinctly different from the largely pedestrian writing that preceded it. A number of recent anthologies offer samplings of this new writing - especially noteworthy is...

Hawaiian Cowboys.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... These two recent books from Black Sparrow seem initially to offer visions of the world that are intriguing and unique, but don't quite live up to the expectations they create. With John Yau, this is minor: most of his stories are energetic and...

The Giraffe.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... I highlighted a great deal of this novel as I read, looking for that passage or passages that would give me the definitive clue to its meaning. I never found it. What I found instead was the kaleidoscope structure of corresponding images,...

Coin Locker Babies.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Ryu Murakami is the much-esteemed author of more than thirty books, including the two novels that preceded Coin Locker Babies into English, Almost Transparent Blue (1977) and 69 (1993). Sometimes seen as a chronicler of Japan's disaffected young...

Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Its dust jacket describes Homo Poeticus as "erudite and impassioned," and although one hesitates to defer to flap scholarship, that is as briefly accurate a phrase as one is likely to find to characterize this posthumous collection of essays and...

The Ravenous Muse: A Table of Dark and Comic Contents, A Bacchanal of Books.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Karen Gordon's inimitable, irresistible books are difficult to describe or categorize. She is best known for her two flamboyant grammar books, The Well-Tempered Sentence and The Transitive Vampire, which use outrageous but scrupulously correct...

Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Mark Polizzotti, translator of the wonderfully perplexing Compact and Harry Mathews's editor, has written an astonishing biography. He has dared to write about an icon of modernism. His subject is no less than the "Pope of Surrealism," the father...

The Old Man and the Wolves.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Best known for her essays in psychoanalytic theory, Julia Kristeva crafts her most recent novel as a critical allegory that illustrates a wolf never changes its nature, nor, apparently, does humankind. Classical ideologies, such as those...

Firebrand: The Life of Horace Liveright.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Firebrand should be required reading for all those planning one day to walk the hallowed halls of publishing, or those who are now walking them but finding them not too hallowed. In Tom Dardis's customary lucid, engaging style, the life and times...

Neoism, Plagiarism, and Praxis.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... If you want to make smart cultural remarks in about ten years, buy this book now and memorize Horne's aphorisms. Of course if you quote them now, you'll be too many light years ahead. This collection of short essays is a follow-up to his The...

An ABC of Contemporary Reading.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... The incredibly prolific Richard Kostelanetz takes Ezra Pound's seminal 1934 thesis, ABC of Reading, as a springboard for this book-length essay, An ABC of Contemporary Reading. Comprehensive and effectively simplistic in its delivery,...

Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Motte has written books on Perec, Jabes, and the Oulipo group. These are risky, brilliant works with an underlying theme of play. Now he takes this theme and moves it to the heart of his criticism; he traces "play" in several texts which seem to...

Big Sky Mind: Buddhism and the Beat Generation.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... This is not a study of the Buddhist element in Beat literature, as the title might suggest, but an anthology of works from the Beats themselves that illustrate their engagement with Buddhism. Friends and foes alike have not always known what to...

A Sacred Quest: The Life and Times of Mary Butts.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... All writers should be so lucky as to have a publisher like McPherson: after discovering the work of this interesting British writer (1890-1937), they began restoring her work to print with re-edited, definitive editions, with prefaces or...

Clementina Suarez: Her Life and Poetry.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... We are taken to Honduras, New York, Mexico, Cuba, and El Salvador in the first biography about Clementina Suarez, the matriarch of Honduran letters. The title of the book could be "Pintame pintor" (Paint me, painter) because Clementina the art...

Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk.
March 22, 1996... Fall 1995: The rough postmodern technological beast, forever at hand, has gone over the top. With Nike's appropriation of Gil Scott-Heron to sell shoes, there's no doubt that "the [other] revolution will not be televised." Nor should I be...