Pondering the Current State of American Fiction

On my trip to Cancun, I of course took along a couple of novels to catch up on some reading. I brought Snow Falling on Cedars, a bestseller, and The Sea, a novel by one of my favorite writers, John Banville. I started the American novel first, and for the second time (the first being The Time Traveler's Wife) I am underwhelmed and a little miffed. Snow was a best-seller; I remember a time when this book was all over the Barnes and Noble crowd's lips, and no one could get enough of it. I suppose several people were somewhat clueless about the Japanese concentration camps of WWII -- the camps that were in America, and this book served to tell a kind of story about the camps, although they weren't the focus of the story, and really didn't illuminate the experience.

It is not that I didn't like the book. Well, maybe I didn't like it. I can't think of anything I particularly liked about it, unless you count thinking of Ethan Hawke as the character Ishmael counts, because I did remember him playing a character in the film adaptation, and thinking of Ethan Hawke is enjoyable, for reasons I can't really relate. He's not my favorite actor, but I did rather enjoy the Sunrise/Sunset movies, and I liked Gattaca and Great Expectations, although I think it is that I relate to him, more than admire him. But back to the book. The romantic lead was named Ishmael, and he was missing a limb, an arm. A homosexual relationship was flirted with, but not state explicitly, and I would venture that such was not good writing or suggestive writing, as other sexuality was stated with matter of fact openness. All of the women in the novel were mysterious, and difficult to fathom. Fishing was the main source of income, and death occurs on boat. Moby-Dick was brought up in the book outrageously, trying to force irony on to a blatently derivative plot and character layout. Other classical works of literature were referenced, either directly or indirectly, and the last words of the book were in effect a direct rip off of the qoute that has been on Blythe's myspace forever, "The heart of another is dark forest always," or something like that; the end of Snow saying something like,"the heart of the ones we love are as mysterious as dark forests..." I hate reading something and then wanting to repossess all the time spent reading.

So I'm back to David Foster Wallace; I'm' going to read Infinite Jest again, ro reclaim my sanity and see what I can get out of it after not reading it for about ten years.

Then, we'll talk about reclaiming American Fiction.