Novel Writing Fillip
The Counterlife by Philip Roth was a novel that I was hugely impressed by when I first started reading novels. Great title too; a precise description of what the novel is in general as well as in particular. Surprisingly, it has a “Limited Availability” tag on Amazon UK, so I’ve given a US link. While this might be a minor complaint, it does hint that this excellent book, where realism is consciously destablised by the author’s imagination, has been buried beneath his prolific recent output of more “naturalistic” novels. Indeed, he welcomed being called Zolaesque by Jean-Louis Turlin in an interview published in The Independent. That�s Emile Zola by the way, not Gianfranco.
I wonder why this shift is examined less than his personal views on Jewish-American life and US history in general? Unfortunately the interview doesn�t give much of an insight into this. Although his unaccountable defense of Clinton suggests there is a lacuna in his half-hearted modernism correlating with the one at the heart of all liberal thinking. A space filled, eventually, and inevitably, with conservative reactions. Perhaps it’s inevitable too, because if he hadn’t gone down this route he wouldn�t have risen to the top of the list of American authors touted for the Nobel Prize. Beckett, for example, didn�t manage even one 350-page “thumping good read” in old age.
Yet one can’t but admire Roth’s dedication in his Connecticut farmhouse. Maybe he was inspired by the website for National Novel Writing Month, which describes itself as “a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.” Those who sign up “begin writing [on] November 1″ to reach the goal of writing “a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.” They add that the program values “enthusiasm and perseverance over talent and craft”.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Info Dump
- Mil Millington Interview
- Bookworm: clock stopping
- Journalists writing about books about writing
- A postcard
