Recommendations

  • Anything West of Chicago Is Not Necessary March 17, 2010
    Andrew Seal argues that “Chicago and New York are to U.S. fiction what Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are to the Russians. Sorry, Boston. Sorry, L.A. Sorry, D.C. Sorry, San Fran. Sorry, the South. You have your claims, no doubt, but they are as the claims of Pushkin, Lermontov, Chekhov, or Gogol.” Discuss. […]
    Scott Esposito
  • Who’s Bad? March 17, 2010
    Phelan goes on to say, "There will, I’m sure, be no consensus about what constitutes badness or whether it belongs to the book, the reader, the situation of reading, all of the above, or none of the above," though he's almost wrong there. The list is pretty varied, from the morally-bankrupt to the so-bad-it's-good varieties, though gene […]
    John Lingan
  • Vollmann Interview March 17, 2010
    Wherein we learn that Imperial hasn’t gotten nearly the attention it deserves and “Vollmann was exceptionally gracious as both host and interview subject, quite generous with his whiskey and his time.” […]
    Scott Esposito
  • Margaret Atwood + hockey movie musical = Heaven March 17, 2010
    In some of the best news ever, Margaret Atwood is going to have a cameo in a movie musical about hockey. Seriously. I am — what is the word? – giddy. Don’t believe me? Atwood discusses it on her blog. Can this news get better? Hell, yes. The movie also stars Olivia Newton-John. […]
    Matt Jakubowski
  • New NYRB March 17, 2010
    New issue of the New York Review of Books is out, with Colm Tóibín on exile lit. […]
    Scott Esposito
  • More from the NBCC Awards March 17, 2010
    With jokes from Joyce Carol Oates and "wild imaginings" from 92-year-old winner Diana Athill -- not to mention talk of a sequel from "Wolf Hall" author Hilary Mantel -- this year's NBCC Awards were noteworthy for their celebration of literature by women. […]
    Matt Jakubowski
  • Broom of the System Gets Cover Makeover, Plus One Cover I Love and One I Hate March 17, 2010
    DFW's latest cover makeover, plus a great-looking cover and a really not-so-great-looking cover. […]
    Scott Esposito
  • Rereading Wallace Stevens March 17, 2010
    Since buying The Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens at City Lights, I’ve been rereading many Stevens poems and trying to understand it from a more mature perspective.  Last time I read a vast amount of Stevens was when I was 22 for a class on Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, and Marianne Moore.  With fifteen years [...] […]
    Soo Jin Oh
  • Best Translated Book Award 2010 March 17, 2010
    The 2010 Best Translated Book Awards were announced last night at Idlewild Books, Manhattan. The Confessions of Noa Weber by Gail Hareven, translated by Dalya Bilu won the fiction award, and the poetry award went to Elena Fanailova for The Russian Version, translated from the Russian by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler. Check out the [...] […]
    Jeff Waxman
  • NBCCA March 17, 2010
    The National Book Critics Circle Award is announcing their winners tonight.  The diversity of their nominations, from the better known (such as Hilary Mantel and Mary Karr) to the less mainstream (such as Rachel Zucker and Eula Biss), makes the blog entries on the nominees an interesting read.  I added Stephen Burt’s Close Calls with [...] […]
    Soo Jin Oh

Invisible Conforms to the Auster Model?

Invisible Conforms to the Auster Model?

Last week I was thinking that Paul Auster’s new novel, Invisible, was breaking out of his rut, but James Wood argues no:

Paul Auster’s latest book, “Invisible” (Holt; $25), though it has charm and vitality in places, conforms to the Auster model.

He also gets into the role of cliche in postmodern fiction (failing, I note, to name-check Gilbert Sorrentino, one of the greatest abusers of cliche in the American postmodern canon):

Clichés, borrowed language, bourgeois bêtises are intricately bound up with modern and postmodern literature. For Flaubert, the cliché and the received idea are beasts to be toyed with and then slain. “Madame Bovary” actually italicizes examples of foolish or sentimental phrasing. Charles Bovary’s conversation is likened to a pavement, over which many people have walked; twentieth-century literature, violently conscious of mass culture, extends this idea of the self as a kind of borrowed tissue, full of other people’s germs. Among modern and postmodern writers, Beckett, Nabokov, Richard Yates, Thomas Bernhard, Muriel Spark, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace have all employed and impaled cliché in their work. Paul Auster is probably America’s best-known postmodern novelist; his “New York Trilogy” must have been read by thousands who do not usually read avant-garde fiction. Auster clearly shares this engagement with mediation and borrowedness—hence, his cinematic plots and rather bogus dialogue—and yet he does nothing with cliché except use it.

This is bewildering, on its face, but then Auster is a peculiar kind of postmodernist. Or is he a postmodernist at all? . . .

Pass it on:
  • Print
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Blogplay
  • StumbleUpon
  • Twitter

2 comments to Invisible Conforms to the Auster Model?

  • Tim

    Wallace impaled cliche? What? More like insisted on their utmost importance, their wisdom beyond intellect, unavailable to the ironic eye.

  • Tom

    Tim:
    Not sure what you mean about Wallace. Do you remember “Mister Squishy” and “The Suffering Channel” from Oblivion? Or how about nearly all of the “hideous interviews?” Or vast stretches of Infinite Jest?
    Wallace impaled the cliche in the sense that he turned the tables on it. He seized the cliches permeating pop culture – whether in the media or in our everyday dialogues – and exploited them (ruthlessly, brilliantly) to dramatize how people fail to connect…how we insulate ourselves in catchphrases, corporate jargon, doublespeak, etc. that now mean anything and nothing.
    And he was often ironic about it to boot.

Leave a Reply

 

 

 

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>