Patrick Oxtoby, the narrator of This Is How, M. J. Hyland’s third novel, does not appear to have a hopeful future. Although his life started out well—he fulfilled his mother’s ambition by being the first in the family to attend college—he reveals himself within the first few pages to be unfit for society.
Yes, it’s true. Padgett Powell’s new “novel” is a highly allusive prose work composed entirely of questions. Many reviewers of this book, I suspect, will attempt to admonish the questioner with further questions, wondering at the gumption of the thing. But it might be useful instead to answer some of the questions posed. In this regard I have chosen questions at random, at intervals of about twenty pages, in the hopes of giving the flavor of the whole, while, at the same time, attempting some context for this offhanded, witty, original, and altogether unique book.
An international student is pleased that her professor doesn’t consider himself religious. “Good,” the young woman responds. “I’m nothing, either. I’m a Maghreb Algerian Kabyle Catholic Atheist French Canadian on a student visa.”
The intergenre artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha made her reputation with the experimental novel Dictée, published in 1982, a few days after she was murdered by a stranger in New York. A speculative history of Korea as it intersects with the life of Cha’s mother, Dictée intercuts oneiric prose with family photographs and political documents. English, French, and Korean shape the book’s voices.
A Lebanese pharmacist concocts a mysterious green potion that makes him sexually irresistible to his female customers. An architect dreams all day of emigration while playing a computer game simulating the demolition of downtown Beirut. A son rescues his father’s favorite prostitute, a woman who ruined his childhood but also made him a man, from a brothel that is about to be bombed. He looks after her for the rest of her life. An eccentric old man in the port city of Tripoli claims to be the last living descendant of the Frankish invaders who led the Crusades. He applies
For some time I’ve wondered how Michel Houellebecq’s Submission would play when it arrived here in the States, nearly a year removed from its tumultuous publication in France. In that country, of course, it appeared the same morning that terrorists slaughtered much of the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, including one of Houellebecq’s closest friends. The book had already enjoyed—if that is the right word, and with Houellebecq it probably is—a prepublication patina of infamy. The novel dominated the evening-TV pundit fests, sparking debates about multiculturalism, Islamophobia, and the politics of provocation and responsibility. Fleur Pellerin, the embattled minister of
“The feuilleton,” Joseph Roth once declared to his editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung, “is just as important to the paper as its politics. . . . I don’t write ‘witty glosses.’ I paint the portrait of the age. That ought to be the job of the great newspaper.” Michael Hofmann, who has, over the past two decades, translated most of Roth’s major fiction, including his great novel The Radetzky March (1932), concurs with this boast. “Roth’s masterpieces,” he writes, “were not his novels but his feuilletons.”
The plot of Clancy Martin’s new novel, Bad Sex, is rickety; it makes the narrative sway. Brett, a writer, is married to Paul, a hotelier with kids. The couple live in Mexico City. When a storm hits Cancún, Brett goes to check on a property there. By chance, her husband’s banker, Eduard, is also in town; by luck, he looks like Benicio Del Toro, if only because Benicio Del Toro is the one hot and famous Latino of whom Martin—or Martin’s reader—has heard. Some months later, Paul discovers her and Eduard’s affair by way of, what else, her phone bills,
No novel has taken the task of defining a generation more literally than Generation X, Douglas Coupland’s first-person narrative of post-Reagan, post-college drift, with its long lexicon of neologisms for the 1990s: Cryptotechnophobia, Conspicuous Minimalism, Lessness, McJob, Mid-Twenties Breakdown. Published without hype in the spring of 1991, Generation X was a word-of-mouth best seller by fall. “I don’t want to be a ‘spokesperson,’” Coupland told a newspaper that winter. “I just want to show society what people born after 1960 think about things. We’re sick of stupid labels, we’re sick of being marginalized in lousy jobs, and we’re tired of
Along with its consumers, American popular culture in the 1950s became both besotted with the abundant possibilities set loose by the Second World War and discomfited by the looming prospect that this bounty, along with all of humanity, could at any moment become devastated by nuclear oblivion. The postwar mood swings of “Oh, wow!” and “Uh-oh!” were absorbed, often with cheeky abandon and heedless ingenuity, by movies, television series, and paperbacks using otherworldly scenarios to probe for malignancies beneath the chrome-plated dreams of Better Tomorrows. The state of dreaming—mostly while sleeping, but also the wide-awake kind—preoccupied one of the era’s
Madness is often said to feed creativity, but the reverse might also be true—that creativity is the fuel that brings madness to fruition. The emotional intensity of that reciprocal relationship is the subject of Adam Haslett’s latest novel, Imagine Me Gone. The ghostly title is given its context a few dozen pages in, when the book’s patriarch, John, takes the two youngest of his three children, Celia and Alec, out on a boat near their family’s borrowed cabin on the coast of Maine. It is Celia who narrates this episode; we will later meet Celia and her brothers as adults,
Sarah Schulman was already working on her third novel when, in the late 1980s, customers at Leroy’s coffee shop in Tribeca, where she was waitressing, told her she needed to get an MFA. She joined Grace Paley’s CCNY class and, as she later wrote, read “a scene from my novel-in-progress After Delores, in which the lesbian narrator meets a little go-go dancer named Punkette, who takes her back to her tenement apartment and tells her about the woman she loves.” The other students didn’t get it: They assumed that the narrator was a man. Paley gave Schulman a sharp look
The game of what is now called “real tennis” was arguably the first modern sport to be played on a standardized court rather than in the messy topography of the real world. It was the first sport to require special shoes, and its baroque rules, written down in the sixteenth century, were codified alongside those of empire. It is still played on a court that mimics the architectural idiosyncrasies of some now-lost courtly ur-space, with sloping roofs and a formal gallery. In interviews, Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue has described the establishment of the rules of tennis as a kind of
Mark Leyner is exhausting. Although often mentioned in the same breath as David Foster Wallace, with whom he appeared, along with Jonathan Franzen, on a classic 1996 episode of Charlie Rose, it is impossible to envision a Leynerian corollary to Infinite Jest that would be anything short of psychosis-inducing. Leyner’s books—recursive, often maddening, laden with an encyclopedic range of references, from the art-historical to the biochemical—are slim things, intended to accomplish niche seek-and-destroy missions before abruptly retiring.
The speakers at the Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists, held in Paris in September 1956, included Richard Wright, Alioune Diop, Léopold Senghor, and Aimé Césaire. James Baldwin was also there, albeit as a journalist. He was taking notes for a report that would be published in Encounter magazine. In this essay, Baldwin noted that the conference, in gathering African and African American writers together, raised a question: “Is it possible to describe as a culture what may simply be, after all, a history of oppression?” Close at the heels of this query came another: “What, beyond the fact that
Lydia Millet’s new novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven, begins with an unwanted pregnancy. Its heroine, Anna, is a virtuous, long-suffering suburban wife. Her sole mistake in life was in her choice of husband; despite herself, she fell in love with a charismatic but predatory businessman who was less attracted to her than to her small family inheritance. Nevertheless, when she gets pregnant by mistake, Anna wants to keep the baby. (“It had been an accident, technically more his fault than mine, but who’s haggling? And once it happened I felt I needed to accept it—I wanted to.”) Her husband, Ned,
Rebecca Schiff’s debut story collection, The Bed Moved, is a shorter-than-average book of shorter-than-average fictions about misanthropes who are (or may as well be) near-miss versions of each other, all of whom find the same pained comedy in sex, death, Brooklyn, Judaism, and summer camp. The title story, two pages long and the first piece in the book, opens with an unnamed narrator reporting that “There were film majors in my bed—they talked about film. There were poets, coxswains, guys trying to grow beards.” Two or three other stories open with similar lists, and one called “Third Person” features a
Nicotine is further proof that Nell Zink has one of the finer imaginations in fiction today. Also a tin ear: “He steps out into the angled light of early fall, which is creating colorful geometric patterns on the fawn-colored carpet via prismatic glass in the Glasgow-style transoms of the French doors facing west.” I don’t read Zink for these stilted autodidactic flourishes—for that I prefer John Kennedy Toole, with whom she shares a trademark comical pathos.
It is unlikely that Aaliya Saleh, the narrator of Rabih Alameddine’s 2014 novel, An Unnecessary Woman, and Jacob, the protagonist of his latest, The Angel of History, would pass each other in the street, but if they did they would probably not speak. Aaliya is a misanthropic seventy-two-year-old recluse who, despite the violence raging outside her Beirut apartment during the decades, has devoted herself to the useless task of translating notable novels into Arabic. What makes her work useless (or “unnecessary”) is that these are secondary translations, based on prior renditions. Her version of Crime and Punishment, for example, is
In terms of posterity, the late British novelist Iris Murdoch, who died in 1999, would seem to have all the equipment a distinguished literary figure might want. She left the planet as Dame Iris, having been awarded an OBE for her achievements in fiction and philosophy. A mere two years after her death she was the subject of Peter J. Conradi’s authorized and highly intelligent biography Iris. This year saw the publication of the skillfully edited Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch, 1934–1995, which among other things put her complicated, busy, extramarital and bisexual erotic and affective life on
