Genre Wars Redefined

After reading this, is it terribly perverse of me to hope that Otto Penzler could have his say about the other National Book Award nominees?

Comments

[Laura Benedict]

A subject close to my heart. Well-said, Mr. Penzler!

[Graham]

"Successfully fighting both crime and boredom" - could any mystery writer hope for a better epitaph?

Although I recently read one of the repring volumes and.... well, let's just say I prefer Doc Savage.

[Steven Torres]

A million words a year? That's impressive. That's like 3,000 words a day.

[Charles Finch]

I have to respectfully disagree about Tree of Smoke -- it was astonishing in every way. And nobody could read Jesus' Son and accuse Denis Johnson of being incoherent. If he's occasionally obfuscatory I think both books prove it's towards a greater end.

[ChrisR]

And let's face it, it's probably the same amount of people who read literary novels as does The Shadow maybe even more. And probably when those of the age of Otto die off there will be even less. However, there will still be an awful lot of Stephen King readers, etc. Probably a better example then the Shadow. I think they all have their place.

[Dan]

"Tree of Smoke" is beautiful on every page, and the way Johnson captures the dialog of soldiers, spys and various deluded vision questers is dead-on. But I do share Penzler's sense that critics have given Johnson a pass on his flaws in a way that they're almost never wiling to do for less ambitious and more coherent fiction. The book has a major storyline that really has nothing to do with that of the protagonist or the novel's overall dramatic development, and ends up drifting off to nowhere; the character Jimmy Storm evolves into an irritating Dennis Hopper caricature (as in "Apocalypse Now"); the main character Skip is a pretty torpid vessel, and seems to spend much of the book in suspended animation; and the supposedly mystical and charismatic Colonel struck me as a blowhard cliche who only the easily-duped would follow. The critics do seem a bit blinded by Johnson's technicolor dreamscape, and as a result they've pulled their punches. It's a dazzling read, scene by scene, but I agree with Penzler that it could have used much stronger editing.