When I read Millet's novel Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, I commented that it reminded me of DeLillo some. When I read this novel, it reminded me of John Kennedy Toole (Confederacy of Dunces) some. Which is not to say that Millet pilfers her voice from other writers, but rather that I think I can pick out her influences and it's interesting to me that they are two quite different writers, but two male writers that are taken quite seriously by the academy etc etc and not the kind of influence that you most often see in a woman writer (if I may generalize a little)...and I like that.
Everyone's Pretty is full of strange characters behaving badly and is written largely in scene with dialogue that you probably won't hear on the street (it's stylized, it's weird, it's very very crisp and funny) and as a whole it didn't have the breadth and depth of Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, but I certainly enjoyed it. What struck me most though was how willing Millet is to change her style from work to work. Some writers take on different characters from piece to piece but their voice remains quite similar (think Hemingway, Salinger, Austen, Ishiguro, Irving or REM, if you want a musical example, though I must admit I haven't heard them lately) and a seemingly much smaller number of writers embrace totally different styles and voices from book to book (Jane Smiley... um, I'm sure there are others). I tend to fall into the second camp--I like trying on voices--but I wonder if the more I write the less this will be so. I remember Russell Banks telling me once that I should experiment while I was young before I got boxed into what I (and possibly others) thought was my style. At the time, he had just finished The Sweet Hereafter which was starting to move away from his style (Contintental Drift, Affliction) and then he busted out Rule of the Bone and Cloudsplitter, which took his thematic interests but changed the voice and strucutre and scope of his past work really drastically, and I think allowed for some of his best work. So maybe that feeling of being boxed in gets uncomfortable and even limiting after awhile. If you write enough books that is...
Showing posts with label Lydia Millet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lydia Millet. Show all posts
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet
I'm so happy to have found Lydia Millet. Finally, a woman writer who takes on the social, political concerns, the big ideas, that are most often left to male writers. There is definitely some Don DeLillo in this novel (his observations on crowds in Mao II are overtly echoed here), but Millet is totally her own stylist, and I can't wait to read more.
This novel pairs the personal story of Ben and Ann, a gardener and a librarian respectively--gentle folk, obviously--with observations on nuclear war, cult behavior, and religious fanaticism, by dropping three atomic scientists from the 1940s into Ben and Ann's lives. The book is great on character, on language, and on observation, but, to my taste, a little wacky with plot (also a DeLillo trait), but still, it's now one of my favorite books of the past few years.
My undergraduate workshop has been talking about when to show and when to tell, and Millet is really great with telling. She uses lines of intellectual observation to add a deep layer of beauty and thought to what would otherwise be only a clever tale.
A bold example: "As she walked she became all abstract./ The opposition between the small and the big, the idea of the miniscule and the idea of the vast, she thought, is not far removed from the opposition between the mundane and the sublime./ And if the question were asked: What is more real, the mundane or the sublime? most would hesitate before they gave an answer./ On the one side details: say, the aftermath of a breakfast, dirty chipped plates in the sink, their rims encrusted with egg yolk. Against this, the unnameable: small aching heart with boasts, what can you know? Outside the cage of everything we ever heard or saw, beyond, outside, above, there lies the real, hiding as long as we shall live, there stretch and trail the millions of names of God burning across the eons. When all through this our end will come before we even know the names of us./ For many the egg yolk prevails."
For a more subtle example, see my reading in progress entry below.
This novel pairs the personal story of Ben and Ann, a gardener and a librarian respectively--gentle folk, obviously--with observations on nuclear war, cult behavior, and religious fanaticism, by dropping three atomic scientists from the 1940s into Ben and Ann's lives. The book is great on character, on language, and on observation, but, to my taste, a little wacky with plot (also a DeLillo trait), but still, it's now one of my favorite books of the past few years.
My undergraduate workshop has been talking about when to show and when to tell, and Millet is really great with telling. She uses lines of intellectual observation to add a deep layer of beauty and thought to what would otherwise be only a clever tale.
A bold example: "As she walked she became all abstract./ The opposition between the small and the big, the idea of the miniscule and the idea of the vast, she thought, is not far removed from the opposition between the mundane and the sublime./ And if the question were asked: What is more real, the mundane or the sublime? most would hesitate before they gave an answer./ On the one side details: say, the aftermath of a breakfast, dirty chipped plates in the sink, their rims encrusted with egg yolk. Against this, the unnameable: small aching heart with boasts, what can you know? Outside the cage of everything we ever heard or saw, beyond, outside, above, there lies the real, hiding as long as we shall live, there stretch and trail the millions of names of God burning across the eons. When all through this our end will come before we even know the names of us./ For many the egg yolk prevails."
For a more subtle example, see my reading in progress entry below.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)