This novel is presented to us in the opening section and author’s introduction from its publication as a “history in novel form” which may or may not have truth to it. (I am dubious about it myself). And there’s a strange middle section that lasts about ten pages where a main character in the novel (there’s mostly two, but kind of a third) writes a series of letter to “Miss Oates” (ie Joyce Carol) as if she were a former student reflecting back on college […]
Hello!
I am more or less live-blogging this one a little bit, so my feelings on it might change as I go. I do not dislike this novel, and in fact, in some ways I think it’s perfectly good. The story is about a research neuro-physiologist named Margot Sharp who spends her lengthy career working with an amnesiac named Elihu Hoopes. It is repeatedly insisted throughout the novel that she is a doctor, in the sense of a scientist, but not a doctor, in the sense […]
“Is growin’ up always miserable?” Sonny asked. “Nobody seems to enjoy it much.” “Oh, it ain’t necessarily misearble,” Sam replied. “About eighty percent of the time, I guess.”
The Last Picture Show – 4/5 Stars In this novel, Sonny and Duane (along with their various and interchanging townsfolk) are in their small Texas town during their senior year of high school trying to figure out what their present is, and maybe what their future is. There’s no past to speak of. So the boys are stuck, playing sports, drinking and driving, whoring, trying to get married, and not doing their schoolwork (napping or otherwise in class). There’s nothing but questions in this book, […]
He leans over his notebook, feeling the ghosts of words in his fingers, but instead of words he draws a human torso.
Thomas Williams is not a particularly well-known writer. In his day, he wrote eight novels, won the National Book Award, but is more known for tying for that award (which has happened a few years), with Robert Stone, a much more well-known writer. His most famous work, The Hair of Harold Roux, is a strange book I have read about half of (I am going to return to it), about a writer working on a novel while teaching future writers. And this kind of subject matter, […]
What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?
Sometimes when I talk to my students about their writing, I use the metaphor of diving and gymnastics routines, and how they are often (or used to be) graded on a curve of difficulty. So a very hard routine that falls short still get high marks over all. So the student who tried to use the “Mandela Effect” as proof of a multiverse gets a lot of credit trying something audacious, even when it comes up decidedly short. And the student who writes an uninspired […]
My insides were ulcerous from coffee and terror
This is a novel that feels like it owes a lot to Don Delillo and J.G. Ballard, and is a kind of more sardonic George Saunders. And it also feels like a novel that I would have loved or at least loved the idea of in my early 20s. I still liked it, but over the course of the novel, the conceit and the execution drifted farther and farther apart for me and by the end I was very much ready for it to be […]
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