I read a lot of quality fiction this year from the likes of Garbhan Downey, Ken Bruen, Colum McCann, Hilary Mantel, AS Byatt, John McFetridge, Cormac McCarthy, Orhan Pamuk, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Colin Bateman, Zadie Smith, Alan Glynn, Dec Burke, Gita Hariharan, Stu Neville et. al. but for me the novel I enjoyed most was Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. At a party in July I had a bit of a friendly row about Inherent Vice with the crime reviewer of The Times; he felt that the book was disjointed and overly silly and not a proper crime novel but those were three of the reasons that I liked it. It is silly and its more of a riff on detective fiction than an attempt to fully engage the genre. Mainly though I liked the book because of its Big Lebowski vibe and the fact that its very funny. Chronologically it lies between The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland and it sort of inhabits the same paranoid, druggy, conspiratorial, trippy, ascerbic universe. Here's a paragraph explaining why there are no blacks in Gordita Beach: "When a black family had actually tried to move into town [after the War] the citizens, with helpful advice from the Ku Klux Klan had burned their place to the ground and then as if some ancient curse had come into effect refused to allow another house ever to be built on the site. The lot stood empty until the town finally confiscated it and turned it into a park, where the youth of Gordita Beach by the laws of karmic adjustment were soon gathering at night to drink, dope, and f**k, depressing their parents though not property values particularly."...
I've already posted about Inherent Vice twice, here and here so that's probably enough for now.
26 comments:
I must say your reading list is very impressive. But did you read an older, that is to say, younger Zadie Smith or did you read her new collection of essays?
I'm really not sure that I'm all that impressed with my year of reading literary fiction, but my crime fiction reading has been pretty stellar.
What I meant to say is that the books have been stellar, not my reading of them.
Seana
This was the year I finally read White Teeth so I'm not exactly au courant. I was the year I read Kavalier and Clay finally too but I really felt that was overrated. The final third dragged like a post 1992 James Cameron movie.
new twist on the James Cameron story
I'm hardly ever au courant with novels which is kind of bad in my line of work. I'm interested to read Smith's essays, but what I'd really like is a new novel from her.
The Cameron story is looking pretty bad for him, but then LAX could do that to anybody.
Speaking of hardly au courant novels, you and Marco will be pleased to know that I did in fact manage to finagle the book group into discussing Cloud Atlas, next time, which means I'll be reading it sometime in January.
Nice paragraph. I was sort of under the unfair impression, for whatever reason, that Pynchon was a little inaccessible, esoteric, and all the other negative literary buzzwords you can think of...but reading that passage makes me think otherwise. So yes, yet another thing to add to the To Read List.
Hope you and the fam had a great holiday! So, the next question is: what's on the literary horizon for A-Mack in 2010?
Re: Cameron. A lot of people are saying he turned the guy down at the airport b/c the guy wasn't a fan, he was trying to get the autograph on a poster so he could turn around and sell it on ebay...though I'm not sure how Cameron would have known that just by looking at him.
Well Adrian, your choice of books is excellent. But remember your progenitor, John D. MacDonald and his avator Travis McGee. The chivalrous but tragic knight errant. Read "The Pale Blue Sky" and tell me that doesn't embody the angst,loneliness and promise of modern America.
Seana
Thats excellent news about Cloud Atlas. Actually its probably THE perfect book for a book group and will excite lots of passions, positive and negative.
Brian
What makes Pynchon so interesting is the variety of his prose style: both Against The Day and Mason and Dixon are written in completely different rather more difficult styles. This however is very accessible: all you need is a working knowledge of 70's TV and music.
Bright
I really like MacDonald. Good audio books too.
Yes. Although I really get my reading group to read things so that I will finally settle down to read them. Sometimes, great discussions--sometimes not so much--or at least not so literary.
The concurrence on Cloud Atlas seems to be very solid--I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that they couldn't stand it or anything close.
My mom read a lot of John D. MacDonald for awhile, but I've only read Ross.
Seana
I thought Girish's comments were quite astute and from an interesting perspective too.
Yes, I've seen enough Bollywood to at least follow his comparisons there. I added him to my blog roll, though I expect that a lot of the time I won't know his references.
I'm a McDonald fan myself. I particularly liked The Green Ripper, but I read it when I was thirteen, so I wonder how it holds up.
Adrian -
That's very interesting about Pynchon, his employing of a variety of styles when writing. That has to be difficult.
Seana
Although my comments were particularly brilliant of course.
Brian
You should read Ulysses some time. A different style and vocabulary and voice with every chapter.
Adrian -
Ulysses has bested me every time I've tried to read it. Though I'm sure I will try again at some point.
But you didn't answer my question: what's on the literary horizon for A-Mack in 2010? (I hope the catchy new nickname I created for you, which will doubtless make you famous, didn't throw you for a loop)
v-word is "corsp." A dyslexic corpse? Too easy and probably too offensive.
Brian
I was avoiding the question. I dont know whats in store exactly. I finished the YA novel and it should be out in November but I've been batting around two quite different ideas for an adult book. One crime, one not. Sometime in January I suppose I will settle on one of them and try and to finish it. If I finish it by say April or May and can find a publisher I suppose it would be a spring 2011 book.
Adrian,
Ah, sorry for prodding there. Congrats on finishing the YA novel!
My Tuscan Idyll
I drowned in the floods. Well not really, but houses bordering the river had to be evacuated. Nothing particularly scary, but the water reached some first floors.
Nice to know you choose Pynchon as best of the year. I'll probably buy that sooner than ATD.
Congrats for the YA Noir. Hope you gave the kid a better musical taste than yours ;)
Bri
No worries. Hopefully the YA novel will be good. Its an odd mix and a bit of a gamble but we'll see.
Marco
That looks bad. Still come spring I'm sure you wont be able to move with tourists, second home buyers and film companies making movies about Victorian English ladies losing their heads in the liberated South.
Have you seen Il Divo - a critic I like, Xan Brooks of the Guardian, picks it as one of his films of the year.
Adrian, your brilliance had not been recorded over on Garish's blog at the time I read it, so had to go back. Question now is, what are some joyful movies from our hemisphere? Though I guess it's not actually your hemisphere right now. I don't think even Hollywood musicals quite match Bollywood's exuberence.
Yikes, Marco. Under the Tuscan Sun this is not. (Not sure why I can see slide shows but not You Tube, but it's good to know.) Reminds me, though of a nice little novel by Robert Hellenga called The Sixteen Pleasures, where a young American girl takes off for Florence to help save some valuable books damaged in a flooding of the Arno.
Brian, take Ulysses along when you visit Dublin. It worked for me.
film companies making movies about Victorian English ladies
Those are scheduled for April. For them it is an enchanted time of the year, for us it's a cruel month.
A-Mc would be a cool nickname. A white rapper.
Yes. It is a great film. Go see it if you have the chance.
Adrian, Seana, Brian Peter, etc.
Happy New Year!
adrian--just started fifty grand which is great so far. I have to say it is my first crime novel where I have seen the word epididymis used. Well done and very accurate! John Kane, MD
John
Thanks for that. Dont know if you'll be quite so happy about the fact that I mention mercury sulphate being used as a cure for syphilis later in the book.
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