By: annieem

annieem — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 20:14:46 +0000

Thanks for the Myers’ link: I’m excited to read it!

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:03:13 +0000

It’s nice to see Grossman so enthusiastic about the future of “the novel,” but when he says “the novel” I think he means “the self-consciously artistic novel.” Those Modernist classics he mentions, and the many imitators he doesn’t have room to mention, comprise only a subset of fiction written during the past hundred years. Grossman says “The novel is getting entertaining again” because of authors who “are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction,” but outside of literary fiction, the novel never really stopped being entertaining, and for decades plenty of genre authors, from science fiction to crime fiction, have been doing exactly what he’s praising as revolutionary. His claim that the various “literary spheres” have been “hermetically sealed off from one another for a century” isn’t accurate; until recently, the interest in literary fiction by genre writers simply wasn’t reciprocated.

Comments on: Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard

By: annieem

By: Jeff