In The Fun Stuff, James Wood once again shows us that his criticism always grows from the same seed: his remarkable ability to tell us exactly what makes a writer’s style idiosyncratic.
Even in a culture that frequently dwells on acts of navel-gazing and fictional worlds with multiple levels of reality, Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas stands out. Where other novelists stumble around their intricate plots and too-clever sleights of hand, Vila-Matas approaches his eccentrically structured novels with nimbleness and sharp irony. Bartleby & Co., his first novel to be translated into English, takes the form of a series of footnotes to a book never written, drafted by a failed writer who follows Melville’s Bartleby in preferring not to. Never Any End to Paris, which made Vila-Matas’s name in Spanish and appeared in
In 2012, four years after David Foster Wallace’s suicide, books by and about the late author are being published at a remarkable pace. In addition to the paperback edition of The Pale King and the nonfiction collection Both Flesh and Not (due out in November), this has been the year of D.T. Max’s biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story and a collection of interviews titled Conversations with David Foster Wallace. A powerful contribution to the discussion of Wallace’s work is The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (University of Iowa Press), edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou.
Ben Jeffery’s Anti-Matter is the kind of intelligent, sophisticated response to provocative work that affirms criticism’s value as art in itself. The book is ostensibly a long essay about the work of Michel Houellebecq, the controversial French novelist who recently took his country’s highest literary award for his latest novel The Map and the Territory, but really, Anti-Matter uses Houellebecq’s fiction as a platform for a series of reflections on the hazards of seeking meaning in art. A more rigorous, less stylized version of the kind of long critical essay usually associated with writers like Geoff Dyer and Pierre Bayard,
Argentine writer Juan Jose Saer has never caught on in English translation, although he certainly should have by now. Since 1994, five of his twelve novels have been translated, with his lauded The Witness coming to us via Margaret Jull Costa, the world-class translator of Jose Saramago and Javier Marias. Saer’s novels partake of European and American literary traditions—he lived in France from 1968 until his death in 2005, and allusions to Conrad, Faulkner, and the French New Novelists are common—even as they radiate a South American experimentalism that made Saer among the heirs to Borges.
By now, dystopian fiction has been served up just about every way possible. To my knowledge, one of the few ways it hasn’t been attempted — or, at least, well executed — is in the realm of minimalism. That brings us to The Curfew, the third novel by Jesse Ball, a writer who in the past few years has carved out a quite visible and enviable place for himself as an experimental fiction writer, and as a poet and artist. The Curfew’s shortcomings perhaps demonstrate why the minimalist dystopian novel has yet to find a successful practitioner, and for me
