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This book surprised me in many ways. Based on reviews I'd read, I thought I would love the book. When I started it, I thought it might not be for me. The voice and style seemed too precious-pretentious, distancing itself from genuine emotion through academic discourse, and basically being too young for me. But then it started to win me over.
The main character's over-educated and hyper-literate, neurotic digressions reminded me a little of Woody Allen. It reads as a modern literary comedy, I think, and there's surprising heart and craft to it.
I loved how the experience of reading the novel feels like we're watching it being written before our eyes, like we're part of the author's thought process. I also loved the echoing motifs ("the same, just a little different") and words ("dissected") that acted like call-backs, tying the strands of the novel together in strange and surreal ways.
There's a lot to love and admire about this novel, and I could have highlighted a ton more. Here are four parts that jumped out at me as I was reading:
—
It was a thrill that only built space produced in me, never the natural world, and only when there was an incommensurability of scale—the human dimension of the windows tiny from such distance combining but not dissolving into the larger architecture of the skyline that was the expression, the material signature, of a collective person who didn’t yet exist, a still-uninhabited second person plural to whom all the arts, even in their most intimate registers, were nevertheless addressed. Only an urban experience of the sublime was available to me because only then was the greatness beyond calculation the intuition of community.
—
The poem, like most of my poems, and like the story I’d promised to expand, conflated fact and fiction, and it occurred to me—not for the first time, but with a new force—that part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn’t obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.
—
Say that it was standing there that I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures.
—
One should not—no rather cannot as a practical matter—expect one poet often to genuinely like the work of another—not a contemporary’s. Even when we think we are writing to one another we are not writing for one another and so incomprehension is probably a necessity. We poets are not, as Oppen would say, coeval with each other, let alone our readers. It’s in this sense the “public” is right to think of poets as anachronisms.
The main character's over-educated and hyper-literate, neurotic digressions reminded me a little of Woody Allen. It reads as a modern literary comedy, I think, and there's surprising heart and craft to it.
I loved how the experience of reading the novel feels like we're watching it being written before our eyes, like we're part of the author's thought process. I also loved the echoing motifs ("the same, just a little different") and words ("dissected") that acted like call-backs, tying the strands of the novel together in strange and surreal ways.
There's a lot to love and admire about this novel, and I could have highlighted a ton more. Here are four parts that jumped out at me as I was reading:
—
It was a thrill that only built space produced in me, never the natural world, and only when there was an incommensurability of scale—the human dimension of the windows tiny from such distance combining but not dissolving into the larger architecture of the skyline that was the expression, the material signature, of a collective person who didn’t yet exist, a still-uninhabited second person plural to whom all the arts, even in their most intimate registers, were nevertheless addressed. Only an urban experience of the sublime was available to me because only then was the greatness beyond calculation the intuition of community.
—
The poem, like most of my poems, and like the story I’d promised to expand, conflated fact and fiction, and it occurred to me—not for the first time, but with a new force—that part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn’t obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.
—
Say that it was standing there that I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures.
—
One should not—no rather cannot as a practical matter—expect one poet often to genuinely like the work of another—not a contemporary’s. Even when we think we are writing to one another we are not writing for one another and so incomprehension is probably a necessity. We poets are not, as Oppen would say, coeval with each other, let alone our readers. It’s in this sense the “public” is right to think of poets as anachronisms.