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…)
