Monday, January 22, 2007

Brick of a novel

Over at The Valve, which I must endorse again, an Ideas piece, the essay by Sven Birkerts about the task of reviewing Vikram Chandra's hyped 900-page new novel, comes into play. While ribbing Birkerts for not having quite read the book, the Valve writer, Amardeep Singh, author of "Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction," has praise for Birkerts. He is annoyed, however, by a review in/on MSNBC/Newsweek by Malcolm Jones, in which the critic in essence admits he's "lazy" and would rather be watching TV if a novel isn't holding him.

This bit of the essay, quoted by Singh, resembles Jonathan Franzen's point, made several places, that fiction has to compete with a lot of artistic entertainments, so why make it hard-going? Boy, did that notion draw the ire of experimental novelist Ben Marcus, in Harper's. (The piece isn't available online but is discussed here.)

Nevertheless, Singh gives a little credence to Jones' point that reading such a brick of a novel because it's your job has the effect of skewing a reviewer's reaction one way or the other. You either resent it or you have invested so much time that you feel bound to praise it: "Can’t just say, oh, it was OK." I'm not sure he's right about that. I once wrote 4,500 words about a 500-plus page novel I found important but, um, OK. (That might have been a mistake.) In any case, I give Jones even more credit for the humor value, and for acknowledging his lack of virtue as a critic.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 06:49 PM

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