The end of the novel?

Completist attitude?

Those bastard books, wanting to tell a complete story. How very dare they?

Art has always been about artificiality, anyway. Music is inauthentic: it doesn't reproduce the randomness of sound in the universe. Cartoons are horrifically inauthentic: talk about a distortion of reality. Poetry imposes restraints of form and rhythm for no more purpose than seeing what wonderful results we can get by doing things differently. Paintings are static, composed, artificial. Sculpture insists on creating form in unnatural media: when was the last time you saw somebody made of stone? Or a bronze spider? Plays condense the universe to a few hundred square feet and an hour or two of time.

The artificiality of the form is exactly the point. By dressing reality in different clothes than she would normally wear, art inspires us to look at reality with new eyes and discover new things. Novels do indeed remove a great deal of the randomness of real life, so that we can concentrate on other things. Screening out static gives the message and/or story a chance to shine. This is not a limitation; it is a strength.

I think Zadie's really just annoyed that no one really wants to read essays.

I think Zadie's annoyed because no-one wants to read her books.

It of course has nothing to do with the fact that Zadie has just released Occasional Essays

I couldn't get through it. All I got from what I did read was an overdose of pompous pretentiousness.

Well, there's always a subset of people that will eschew entertainment. If it isn't Kafka, and confirms the wicked wiles of the world, it is not literature. I think it's a fairly quaint part of culture, tbh.

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And nobody likes those people. They don't even like each other. They don't like much of anything. They'd be miserable if they weren't so smug.

Zadie didn't write an essay, really. She just wrote a lot of words.

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As in "that's not writing, that's typing."

Recorded music was supposed to kill live music. (In the 40's the musicians union banned recording, for fear that once everything was recorded no one would ever hire a live musician again.) Radio was supposed to kill recordings. Movies were supposed to kill radio. TV was supposed to kill movies. But somehow we still have live music, recordings, radio, TV and movies. How is that possible when the experts predicted otherwise?

Ben Yagoda's new book, Memoir: a History, makes the case that the novel is dead and memoirs are the new novels. That's pretty dumb too. Memoirs are popular, sure, but a good memoir requires both a good writer and an interesting life. Those two things don't always go together. Plus very, very few memoirists will be able to sustain long writing careers, as novelists do. Publishers need writers who can write not one or two books, but dozens.

I'm not sure ... because you gotta wade though two and a half gooey plethoras of fancy buzzwords to figure out what point-- if any -- she's getting at.
But I think she does not intend to say that nobody will buy novels any more.

Basic to her view of the world is the assumption that a serious discussion of literature does not touch upon the taste of the masses -- who will continue upon their vulgar and pointless way, seeking mere entertainment.

My guess is she's saying the 423 people in the world who are important, (76 literary critics, 231 professors of English literature, 107 experimental novelists, 8 poets and her,) are going to talk about how cool essays are for a while.
They will not necessarily read essays or learn how to write them well, but they will appreciate their many virtues and discuss them a lot.

kellion92 said:

Ben Yagoda's new book, Memoir: a History, makes the case that the novel is dead and memoirs are the new novels. That's pretty dumb too. Memoirs are popular, sure, but a good memoir requires both a good writer and an interesting life. Those two things don't always go together. Plus very, very few memoirists will be able to sustain long writing careers, as novelists do. Publishers need writers who can write not one or two books, but dozens.

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"Dozens" is overstating the case, but you have a good point.

I guess "dozens" was wishful thinking for my long fiction (fictitious?) career to come.

In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto Shields argues passionately for the superiority of the messy real – of what we might call "truthiness" – over the careful creations of novelists, and other artists, who work with artificial and imagined narratives. For Shields it is exactly what is tentative, unmade and unpolished in the essay form that is important. He finds the crafted novel, with its neat design and completist attitude, to be a dull and generic thing, too artificial to deal effectively with what is already an "unbearably artificial world"

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Pretentious B.S. What an absolutely appalling and arrogant thing to say.

I'm currently writing a dissertation on the serial killer in Scottish Literature. Say I turned it into a book and it's released the same day as Ian Rankin's new novel. Same themes, same thesis. Which one will sell more?

I just wish a few more Undergrads would bring their books to class

Well, I've seen these cliqueish thoughts before. She's not really speaking to anyone but the people she wants to impress. If I can be the old fart for a while with a few years of behind-the-ears-drying then I can say it's a bit sad to find young people leave the popularity contest of childhood, where writers often tend to be at the bottom end of the social hierarchy, and immediately throw themselves into cliques where the popularity contest is continued.

I don't care whether that's the hooligan wing of the local football club, or the intellectual ivory towers of Fleet street. It's the same thing. You end up spouting nonsense like this because your peers expect it of you, and you even start to believe that the nonsense is objective reality.

Being a hopeless idealist ( with a cynical streak ) one would hope that writers that spend so much time thinking about what it is to be human would see it for what it is. But I guess a need for belonging overtrumps intellectual "thruthiness".

Maxinquaye said:

Being a hopeless idealist ( with a cynical streak ) one would hope that writers that spend so much time thinking about what it is to be human would see it for what it is. But I guess a need for belonging overtrumps intellectual "thruthiness".

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Well said.

This may answer a few questions:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co...ainment/books/book_reviews/article6921949.ece

Evidently she seems to be trying to out Kermode, Frank Kermode.

I do hope she emigrates, but I suspect she won't because the US would take her down a peg or two.