The Books We Talk About

There's an interesting post on the New York Review of Books blog concerning the books we talk about.  The post is written by Tim Parks, and it explores past novels from Laurence Stern's Tristam Shandy and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles to such contemporary works as E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey.

Parks refers to the "social function of a novel" as "[a] shared subject of discussion. Something complex for minds to meet around. . . .  Novels are ideal subjects for testing the ground between us."

He notes that with the proliferation of novels today, it is sometimes difficult to find common ground unless we settle on a blockbuster or media-hyped work. He also notes the role of "chance" in making a novel one that is likely to generate discussion.

For my part, I can't help thinking that the amount of publicity given to a novel, its marketability as a film or television spin-off, and the fact that it is written by an author whose name is instantly recognizable are all major factors in making a novel--for better or worse--the subject of conversation.

For the full text of the blog post, please click here.

And Nothing but the Truth. . .

There is an interesting post on The New York Review of Books blog by Tim Parks entitled "Writers into Saints". It talks about the apparent need for literary biographers to glorify the lives of writers and to gloss over or justify their behavior as if they "were afraid that the work might be diminished by a life that was less than noble or not essentially directed toward a lofty cause." Among the examples he cites are biographies of Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce. 

 

Parks sees this tendency most pronounced in the biographies of Charles Dickens. He states:

Quite apart from the writer’s [Dickens'] dramatic rejection of his wife after she had given him ten children, there is simply an enormous resistance to admitting what a tyrant the man was, seeking to control the lives of those around him to an extraordinary degree, deeply disappointed and punitive when they didn’t live up to his expectations, which was almost always, yet at the same time fearful of any sign of competition.

Parks' comments are telling: shouldn't we be able to accept a writer--warts and all--and still be able to critically appraise his/her work?

For the full text, please see http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/feb/11/writers-saints/?insrc=hpbl.