Nothing annoys me like historical fiction. The presumption that detailed social and historical analysis can be sloppily grafted onto a love story. The mortifying dialogue where characters explain things to each other a toddler would have known. The subtle editorializing from the author, who is slyly judging a fake story about past events recorded by whoever had the loudest voice. The petticoats!
This is another chamber of the science fiction problem — how do we endeavor to make the familiar strange and the strange intimate? Say you’ve come up with a vivid anthropological framework to set your alien culture in, how do you make portions of it incomprehensible and unknowable enough to disorient the reader and make them cling even harder to familiar elements of the story?
I’m finishing “Ragtime” by E. L. Doctorow and it doesn’t annoy me. I love how Doctorow enumerates things, he doesn’t just give you three or four examples, he really digs in with a carefully curated list that rolls across the page like a parade. Yes, he has written Emma Goldman and Harry Houdini into the novel as characters; neither of them are caricatures of their most memorable features. It reminds me of “The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay,” the way it takes time to dawdle in a fascinating bit of obscure history which turns out to be a curlicue in the filigree of the main story.
Speaking of L’Histoire, I finished “The Wordy Shipmates” and it was pretty good. It was like a puritan tell-all, not as long or as formidable as a comprehensive history but following the the intellectual curiosities of the author. I read half of Hollinghurst’s “The Spell” and after checking it out twice I let it be. I think he’s crackerjack but his characters need to get in therapy and stop all the numb, thoughtless sex.
I listened to Murakami’s “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” and he found a way to encapsulate a state of mind that is perishable and hard to capture. I’ve never wanted to run a marathon but I’m thinking about it now.
W♥YCG 