"When you feel lost in the world, there is some joy to be gleaned from exact imitations of familiar things."
— Zadie Smith, “Hanwell in Hell”
"The girl had a manner that was all itinerary, charmless and focused, and Pam, a Midwesterner by birth, had the shameful idea that she might go far, this Martha Penk, here on the East Coast."
— Zadie Smith, “Martha Martha”
Thrilled to receive this in the mail today. Had to order it from the UK because it’s not for sale here (odd, since both of the stories were published in American magazines*). Now she just needs to hurry up and write another novel.
*My mistake: Granta is actually a British publication. One of the stories, however, was published in the New Yorker.
books I read in october
Spring and All - William Carlos Williams
Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
The Messiah of Stockholm - Cynthia Ozick
The Ghost Writer - Philip Roth
The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides
Exit Ghost - Philip Roth
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
Playing in the Dark - Toni Morrison
The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
White Noise - Don DeLillo
***
Some good reading this month, some bad. I had only read Portnoy’s Complaint—and that was a long time ago—but now I finally understand why people like Roth. If you are baffled like I was, you should read Ghost Writer. But Graham Greene wins the month. If I didn’t have to read shitty stuff for school (Jong, Stephenson), I would sit down with a stack of Greene novels and plow through them.
Surprisingly, I found White Noise almost unbearably tedious on rereading it. I loved it when I last read it, but that was six or seven years ago, and I guess it seems less novel to me now than it did then. Can’t deny that, on a sentence level, the writing is mostly sharp—I don’t think anyone’s ever accused DeLillo of being a bad prose writer—but does everything have to be so portentous? Can’t we have some real characters, Don? Do we have to scoff at everything? (Maybe that’s why I enjoyed the book so much as a teenager…)
“Why did you name Heinrich Heinrich?…”
“I thought it was a forceful name, a strong name. It has a kind of authority… I thought it was forceful and impressive and I still do… There’s something about German names, the German language, German things.”
—Don DeLillo, White Noise
"The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted."
— Don DeLillo, White Noise
"I have never been able to describe even my fictitious characters except by their actions. It has always seemed to me that in a novel the reader should be allowed to imagine a character in any way he chooses: I do not want to supply him with ready-made illustrations."
— Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
"If one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it."
— Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
"But isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. for some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most."
— Philip Roth, Exit Ghost
