Picks of the Week

  • Benjamin Black: The Lemur: A Novel

    Benjamin Black: The Lemur: A Novel
    Anyone who thinks John Banville lacks a sense of humor clearly did not read his serial for the New York Times magazine, available in novella-ish format in July. The story has all the basic crime ingredients - blackmail, adultery, murder, betrayal, that sort of thing - but it is so, so clear how much fun Banville had writing this pseudonymous exercise, loading up sentences filled with bizarre but well-placed metaphors and gently (or not so gently!) lampooning his characters as he moves them around his narrative chess board.

  • Cassandra Clare: City of Bones

    Cassandra Clare: City of Bones
    I read this on the flight home from the LA Times Festival of Books and it really is about the perfect airport read: fantastic storytelling, characters whose adventures and melodramas wrap you in their spells and really ass-kicking action scenes involving demons and all manner of underworld types. Sure, Clare clearly owes a huge debt to Buffy and Harry Potter, but dammit, I want to find out what will happen next to Clary, Jace, Simon & co. - and that's exactly the button that's supposed to be pushed.

  • Ibi Kaslik: ANGEL RIOTS

    Ibi Kaslik: ANGEL RIOTS
    Reading this novel was like being transported back to the mid-1990s Montreal I knew during my college years. But it also affords an inside look at the ups and downs, the politics and the dramas, the hookups and breakups endemic to a rising rock band. It's clear, whether told from the vantage point of the young violin prodigy with a boy's name or her bandmate looking to redefine himself outside the orbit of his best friend (and leader) that Kaslik knows this world cold, and we're privileged to share in this knowledge.

  • Irene Nemirovsky: David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair (Everyman's Library (Cloth))

    Irene Nemirovsky: David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
    I'd recommend this simply based off of the utter gobsmacking brilliance that is LE BAL, one of the most crystalline and shocking novellas I've ever read, but the other three works simply confirm Nemirovsky's literary brilliance. THE COURILOF AFFAIR is a wonderful surprise for mystery readers because it's her version of a spy novel, tackling the moral quandaries of terrorism for a so-called greater good by personalizing the narrator's deeds and misdeeds. In other words, Nemirovsky's entire backlist can't be translated fast enough for me.

  • Sarah Hall: Daughters of the North

    Sarah Hall: Daughters of the North
    Goddamn, Hall can write, and her chosen dystopian subject matter gives her the chance not only to show off her sentence-by-sentence chops but to demonstrate how few steps removed our current culture is from the apocalyptic fervor of her world, where the reproductive rights of women are trampled on so definitively it takes an army of women to try, however futile the exercise might be, to take some independence back. I can't think of enough good things to say about this except that it should be read, now and years to come.

Archived Picks

...And Cabana Girls, Too

Stats


« Calm before the fast | Main | Sean Rowe navigates the publishing world »

October 14, 2005

Defenders of the genre

It's the day after the fast. I'm trying to stay out of the big litblog skirmish (except to say that shame, shame, SHAME on Salon for publishing an article about one Jew having a beef with another Jew on Yom Kippur. Like that's gonna help matters...) and what do I see? the whole literary/genre argument getting revived thanks to PD James and Ian Rankin:

TWO of Britain’s best loved authors have hit out at literary snobbery, saying that crime writing is long overdue the recognition of a mainstream literature award.

Baroness James of Holland Park, better known as P.D. James, and Ian Rankin said at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival that genre writing at its best was the equal of so-called “prestigious literature”.

Despite the popularity of crime writing with the public, they said, the literary world looked down on it and on other genres as “inferior”.

James, the creator of the detective Adam Dalgliesh, told The Times: “I would say genre writing tends to be less well regarded. I don’t think that’s fair.

“Genre writing at its best can stand with any good, straight novel. It can tell you more about life today than more ‘prestigious’ novels.

“What’s interesting about the crime novel is it can explore all sorts of problems that worry people today and often does it more realistically. It often tells you more about the age in which it’s written . . . the crime novel can tell you more about the social mores and problems and complexities of the age.”

Rankin, who made similar comments at the Cheltenham Festival, also sends a shoutout David Peace's way, which I certainly won't argue with. The man's a phenomenal writer who should get way more recognition than he does (hmm, if Martyn Waites can get published here, thanks to Pegasus Press, why not Peace?

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/26559/3365900

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Defenders of the genre:

Comments

Sara I am not going to try to figure out your thinking or motivation in mentioning Steve Almond’s crotch-grabbing, dick -pulling press release at Salon and opting out of any comment other than to trivialize the matter as a squabble between two landsmen.

Admittedly I literally have a dog in this hunt as Stevie thought it was funny to drag my precious, and, dare I say innocent, Rosie into his latest impersonation of a real writer. Not to mention comparing me to Regis Philbin. Ouch. To quote Omar (of the Wire), "he gotz to be got."

Seriously though, mentioning this scrum and not commenting suggests that there is an equivalence here between Mark Sarvas' stance and Almond's posturing. Which there isn't. And that doesn't even deal with his transparent pandering to an anti web-log backlash. I leave it others to comment on Almond’s talents as a writer but his ambitious striving and attacks on other writers are self serving and,well, pure crap.

Oh, for crying out loud. There's no moral obligation to take sides on Almond v. Sarvas. You want Sarah's opinion? She said it was a lousy thing for Salon to do. Gee, I wonder what that might possibly imply about whether she admired the piece?

This reminds me of how literary feuds are so much like academic feuds...and as Santayana said about them, the reason they're so nasty is because the stakes are so low.

That being said, the Salon piece struck me as being more tongue-in-cheek than anything else.

Post a comment

If you have a TypeKey or TypePad account, please Sign In