Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Prize-winning fiction authors get theirs

I keep meaning to link up this wonderful article, which I read in paper & ink. It's by B.R. Myers, called A Reader's Manifesto. Myers does a weblog-level dissection of many of the most critically-acclaimed bestsellers. Like this look at Annie Proulx' "evocative prose":

In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns.

Like so much modern prose, this demands to be read quickly, with just enough attention to register the bold use of words. Slow down, and things fall apart. Proulx seems to have intended a unified conceit, but unfurling, or spreading out, as of a flag or an umbrella, clashes disastrously with the images of thread that follow. (Maybe "unraveling" didn't sound fancy enough.) A life is unfurled, a hustler is wound tight, a year is spooled out, and still the metaphors continue, with kicked down—which might work in less crowded surroundings, though I doubt it—and hinge, which is cute if you've never seen a hinge or a map of the Big Horns.And this is just the first sentence!

On White Noise:

DeLillo also adds rhetorical questions or other disclaimers to throw his meaning out of focus. Here, to return to White Noise, is another of Jack's musings.

"We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot."

Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?

The first and third of those questions are easily answered; after all, we edge nearer death every time we do anything. So why, indeed, does Jack say this? Because DeLillo knew it would seem profoundly original to most of his readers. Then he added those questions to keep the critical minority from charging him with banality.

Myer's also takes his scalpel to David Guterson, author of Snow Falling on Cedars. After destroying the most un-sexy sex scene in Western literature, he points out that the world may not be fooled, although the critics are:

Almost every fourth amateur reviewer on Amazon.com complains about the repetitiveness of Snow Falling on Cedars. Kirkus Reviews, on the other hand, called the 345-page novel "as compact as haiku," and Susan Kenney, in The New York Times, praised it as "finely wrought and flawlessly written." The novel is required reading in some college English classes, and even history students are being urged to read it, as a source of information about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. So much, I suppose, for Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston's Farewell to Manzanar (1973), another good book displaced from the school canon by a bad one.

Even if you are not into fiction (I, for one, spend too much time shopping and was thus unable to finish Snow Falling on Cedars), you will love reading this article. Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at December 5, 2001 06:03 AM | Technorati inbound links