John Updike's Bech
As I'm trying to make my way through Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (less than 200 pages to go -- not that I'm counting), I've also been reading John Updike's Bech: A Book. The book has some fun with what it means to be a writer in America -- or at least a writer in America in 1965. So, sure, the book is very dated, but still a fun read.
There is a great quote in the book which really captures what I feel is happening to American literature thanks to MFA programs and our hyperfocus on craft and style. In the book, Bech is talking to Petrov, a Rumanian, and Petrov asks Bech his opinion of some newer French novelists.
"It is tricks," Petrov said. "Good tricks, but tricks. It does not have enough to do with life, it is too much verbal nervousness. Is that sense?"
It's total sense to me, Petrov. It seems to me that so many contemporary writers that I read in literary magazines are playing tricks with words. They can style and craft things into a seeming beauty, but it's just tricks. The stuff of life often isn't there. Writers writing for writers. Where does it put writers? Well, it puts them in a weird place where they have little audience.
There is a great quote in the book which really captures what I feel is happening to American literature thanks to MFA programs and our hyperfocus on craft and style. In the book, Bech is talking to Petrov, a Rumanian, and Petrov asks Bech his opinion of some newer French novelists.
"It is tricks," Petrov said. "Good tricks, but tricks. It does not have enough to do with life, it is too much verbal nervousness. Is that sense?"
It's total sense to me, Petrov. It seems to me that so many contemporary writers that I read in literary magazines are playing tricks with words. They can style and craft things into a seeming beauty, but it's just tricks. The stuff of life often isn't there. Writers writing for writers. Where does it put writers? Well, it puts them in a weird place where they have little audience.
posted by Jeff Vande Zande at 9:46 PM
3 Comments:
Seems to me, many of these "tricksters" are young writers. They don't have 20 - 30 years of practical living (in the world) accumulated, so they fall into fancy artifice to try and make up for it. Almost like writing way over your level of experience, and expecting to squeeze by if you do it cleverly, with flair, or from an odd point of narration, presentation, or view. But it does not make up for what is lacking, some bashing of the ego from Time.
I like tricks. I don't like postmodernism, per se, but I do like tricks. :)
Bret
Thanks for your thoughts, guys.
Jeff
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