| The old guards of post-World War II American literature – basically Saul Bellow and his exemplars – are almost all dead and gone. The gap in American letters has been filled with either their offspring (Richard Ford) or the midwestern response to post-Beckett prose (Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy).
Culturally, that period of sex, whimsy, guilt and memory has disappeared. Now, stories of dislocation and strange attacks from the ether of urban sprawl occupy the literary landscape, and those authors who are trying to straddle the divide (bearing in mind there aren’t many of them) are failing, exposed for the elderly writers they are, continuing to tarnish careers once held at greater heights.
OK, I’m really just talking about John Updike, who has dragged his predilection for writing drawling, yuppie tales of insecurity into the 20th century, with dismal results. But there’s one author who continues to write relevant fiction even as both he and his characters age, the only living American author who deserves the Nobel Prize – Philip Roth.
Prolific in the best sense of the word, he’s traversed the fumbling sexuality of youth (Portnoy’s Complaint) to surrealism (The Breast) and politically speculative fiction (Operation Shylock, The Plot Against America). Both playfully pornographic and philosophically profound, he’s chased the same few themes throughout a body of work that ranks among the best in contemporary fiction (evidenced by the fact that The Library of America has already started to compile his work).
Roth’s new novel, Everyman, is as distilled as anything he’s written before. The rich, hilarious and gluttonous prose of Sabbath’s Theatre is replaced with a sombre structure that mirrors its scattered plot, which consists of the unnamed narrator’s thoughts leading up to his death, intertwined with the procedural events of his funeral. All of Roth’s classic themes are here – Judaism, sex, relationships – but written as a coda, a final summation of what his characters have struggled with, along with the author himself.
The less said the better – for fans, the fictionalized eulogy of Zuckerman, Kapesh and the others is best discovered as a slow surprise.
The new issue of dANDelion is being launched Friday, May 12 at 7 p.m. at the Art Gallery of Calgary, with readings from William Neil Scott (the forthcoming Wonderful) and Donato Mancini (Ligatures).
Miriam Edelson presents her new book Battle Cries: Justice for Kids with Special Needs, discussing the challenges and services available to parents, on Saturday, May 13 at 2 p.m. at Self Connection Books.
McNally Robinson has a few great events this week, the first with Julie Van Rosendaal and her new cookbook for kitchen virgins, Starting Out, on Friday, May 12 at noon. Later that evening at 8 p.m., Linda Holeman (The Linnet Bird) reads from her new novel, The Moonlit Cage, set in Afghanistan. On Saturday, May 13 at 2 p.m., the ImaginAsian Writers Showcase presents another set of readings in support of Asian Heritage Month, with authors Lydia Kwa, Shree Ghatage, Sandy Lam and Crystal Mimura. On Monday, May 15 at 7 p.m., poet Phil Hall (recently nominated for the Griffin Prize) reads from his new collection, An Oak Hunch. And on Thursday, May 18 at 7 p.m., English author Clare Allen reads from her debut novel, Poppy Shakespeare, set inside a psychiatric hospital.
Tickets are on sale for the Alberta Book Awards Gala, taking place Saturday, May 13 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, co-hosted by the Writers Guild of Alberta and the Publishers Association of Alberta. Awards will be given in 13 categories of fiction and non-fiction. Tickets are available through the WGA main office, 1-800-665-5354.
And Dan Brown’s bible for armchair historians, The Da Vinci Code, has been knocked from its place in the Amazon.com bestselling list by Bad Twin, a tie-in novel by "Gary Troup" (who only exists in television land as far as I know) for the show Lost. At least it’s a new approach to marketing – a fictionalized "novel" written by a fictional character that, presumably, has nothing intrinsically to do with the show. And the survivors have something to read after being chased by dinosaurs, cavemen and sharks, which I assume are probably the main nemeses they face. Once again, America proves that its taste is solely in its mouth. |
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