On Abandoning Novels
Posted on June 18, 2007
Filed Under Reading |
As a reader, I mean. I haven’t every attempted to write one, a poem of three or four pages being about as long as I have been able to extend a literary structure. But after years of not reading novels very often, I have been on something of a roll lately. I had looked forward this spring to two in particular, Richard Powers’ Operation Wandering Soul & Phillip Roth’s The Great American Novel. I gave up on each for similar reasons: they’re full of set piece comedy & love-me-I’m-an-asshole characters. To put it in something closer to critical terms, neither novel was able to establish a bond of sympathy for either its characters or its situation. Powers lost me with the misanthropy of his central character (no doubt to be redeemed in the last hundred pages) & his overly clever writing. Roth lost me with the whorehouse scene where guys go to be bathed, dressed in diapers & treated like an infant. It was probably funny, or at least “daring,” in the sixties, but it just seemed dumb. I pushed on a bit, to a scene where a last-place major league baseball team — it’s a baseball novel — plays an exhibition against the inmates of an insane asylum. Both narratives traffic in emotional clichés & literary exhibitionism.
Comments
3 Responses to “On Abandoning Novels”
I don’t read novels or long books, although I did read Sidney Blumenthal’s 900 page book on the Clinton years, the Clinton Wars. However, to your point, I read 92 percent of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and quit. The phantasmagoric world Rushdie dwelt in eventually war me out.
thelrd in TEXAS
[...] Duemer offers a few thoughts on why he abandons novels. The last novel I abandoned featured a plotline in which a bald [...]
Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer is probably my favorite work of fiction. I’ve easily read it 15 times and can reliably return to it annually. His earlier work was a lot more frisky but in later years he has grown deadly serious.
I read Satanic Verses out of a sense of obligation to liberty and the freedom to read, and I read several of his other novels, but I also find his universe to be hard to join.
In recent years I’ve enjoyed reading the novels of Iris Murdoch. Much of it I don’t get, but I love reading about a world that has so much more texture than most novelist bother to explore.