Monthly Archives: February 2008

Edit Me

Posted on by
Reply

John Gardner, in an interview, said an editor once told him about his novel The Sunlight Dialogues, that it needed to be cut by a third. He retorted, he said, Which third?

When it was finally published, it went on to be a bestseller. I remember reading in in paperback when Gardner was recommended to me by a teacher, the novelist and short story writer Richard Bausch. It’s been a long time since I read it, but one of the things I remember about it was “the Sunlight Man” delivering long, hectoring lectures to the main character, Fred Clumly. And I remember feeling a little hectored myself, and skipping a lot of that. Continue reading →

Are we in a narrative if we don't know we're in a narrative?

Posted on by
Reply


As is often the case with the web, I stumbled across this clip while looking for someone else (or nothing at all, really; just surfing–but surfing implies some sort of deliberation or volition, and there was none here. There should be another word for this: lolling in the waves. Which is of course not a word.). In this clip, Jonathan Franzen talks about the general irrelevance of the novelist to American culture at large. My first thought was not to agree with him. And while in a certain sense, I don’t agree with him, I have to agree that, sure, “no one, outside of a very small circle in New York, could care less about what Philip Roth thinks about the Iraq war.” Continue reading →