I’ve always found the “drub a novel through overattention to its prose” approach to criticism silly. Ian Watt pointed out, rightly, that the novels can and do survive their sloppy writing, and I’d suggest that a novelist bruising their imperfect, never-going-to-be-wholly-adequate language against (imagined) reality is what gives most “classic” novels an immediate sensual appeal. (Neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky were very nice about their prose, to Nabokov’s infamous displeasure; but who were the greater writers there?)
In the end, I’d rather read a prose that “risks it all” than the “wan, thin husks” of language that for so much of the “literary” establishment conveys artistic respectability. The “nice” style in literary writing seems to me like the moribund, mannered reflex of a once-great actor sleepwalking through a needless supporting role in some middlebrow prestige picture that no one will remember past next Oscars season.
This is weird. I don't recall having any complaints about the prose, except for a large number of typos, which I assume have been fixed. As for "backstory," has Stivers never heard of the concept of non-linear narrative?
Nothing says "predisposed to dislike before reading" like spending most of a review on the first sentence...One is tempted to suggest that a more scrupulous magazine editor would advise the reviewer to rethink the balance of the review.
As someone who was lightly critical of the hype around the substack novels (just a little! a healthy skepticism, let's say), I also have to acknowledge that the excerpts from the Compact piece show it to be in bad faith. The reviewer says she "could red-pencil many other paragraphs..." but this is a novel, not a five paragraph essay! What would she do with Joyce!? There's no right way for a novel to work. It either works or it doesn't, but there's no formula. The fact that the reader "has to read the sentence again"--well, yeah, sometimes the author wants you to read the sentence again! This isn't a frictionless email edited by grammarly. I haven't read the book yet, but I guess there's no bad press, because this bad review actually gives me more motivation to do so. Do I detect a reference to Travis Bickle with the army jacket as well?
Hype always deserves criticism; if I weren't me, I'd find myself irritating! Re: Travis Bickle, that wasn't a conscious influence—he belongs in Ross's book, with its opening in '70s crime-ridden New York—but I *was* trying to imagine a narrative of masculine spectacular violence that would be sort of the opposite of the incel stereotype, or a return to its Romantic root, less killing for hate but dying for love. So in that sense maybe an inverted Travis Bickle—though if I recall (it's been a while, since about my teen years) the movie is halfway between these archetypes. Mainly I wanted to evoke the long, slow alteration of manhood from the WWII image roughly contemporaneous with the superhero's cultural emergence into wherever we are now with gender. In other words, if I even have to say this, it's not an extraneous detail.
Not to belabour the point, but, given Jacob Morrow's youth, my mind, after Bickle, went to Linda Cardellini's army jacket in Freaks and Geeks when I first read the passage. Just how I pictured the jacket hanging on Morrow's frail body, it certainly, to your point, hangs rather oddly on her. It swallows and protects Cardellini as one might say Ash del Greco, who picks out the jacket, comes to envelop Morrow. Not to mention the gender implications of associating the two figures. Anyways, I hope this little thought proves that the description certainly does not "puff something out of nothing."
Thanks! I've never actually watched Freaks and Geeks, though I'm familiar with the visual. I think there's something in the collective unconscious, linked to the concept of the "avant-garde," about teen bohemia as sublimated or spiritual warfare.
Given that I've been partial to her other work, I'll posit patiently that Stivers was attempting something akin to what Sam Kriss did to the cohort of alt-lit writers in The Point this past February. That essay included mixed admiration of Honor Levy but keen dissection of Conroe and others, all by their proclaimed goal of writing something actually new. I couldn't get past the Compact paywall but wonder: is this just another, less-successful turn of the same cultural gyre? Acclaim, assessment, rejection, re-evaulation, assimilation, etc. (This wondering mostly makes me despair of literary criticism but cling more fully to novels.)
Yes, you're right it's the same cycle, just a different moment of it, in that the alt-lit 2.0 phenomenon was/is the mainstream coopting and selling back an indie movement, whereas this is an indie movement still trying to emerge into the mainstream, and the mainstream trying to figure out how to react. I think VS doesn't like the way the "scene" is going for various reasons, but pragmatically she couldn't write a big survey piece like Kriss's—it makes me laugh to think how much he'd hate Major Arcana, by the way!—because some of her other implied targets (the badly-written "hyped galleys" she mentions) are literally her colleagues, thus I became the scapegoat for all involved. This is mostly, but not entirely, an inference—though I do believe she genuinely disliked the book, leaving aside the micropolitics involved. It's all so stupid; truly, get rid of social relations!
I have a hard time articulating exactly why but I actually think Kriss would like it. Forgive my sycophancy but it's in the service of a point; there's a reason both of you are on a very short list of contemporary writers I will drop everything else to read. The superficial differences might be stark but I think MA's attitude towards questions of category -- what we call gender, what we call magic, etc -- is not so different from some of his work. Perhaps one of us will be proven wrong!
Thank you! I guess it's possible; I just imagine he would judge it sentimental, petit-bourgeois, all-around "American," if not a naive attempt to revive a deservedly moribund form. (See? I can write my own bad reviews!)
Did she not mean 184 pages before the story goes back to the present? (Although that can’t be right either because the story really only returns to post-incident, in the last section).
Anyway, while I had a couple of thematics issues with Major Arcana (certainly not the prose), I thought the book was great. My Locus review will be out in June. It was enjoyable engaging with the book intellectually and putting my thoughts to (virtual) paper. I could have said more, but I felt I said enough. I hope you sell a gazillion copies.
If we're maintaining the arbitrary stricture against "backstory"—it's all story, not sure what back and front has to do with it—then most of Part Three is still backstory. But thank you, and I look forward to your review!
Thinking some more about that paragraph V. Stivers dissected. It makes me wonder if she ever tried to write anything creative. If so she would know that sometimes you describe things in such a way as to create an impression in the reader's mind, rather than to record events in their physical exactitude. But I bet she'd be great at writing product specifications and the like.
I’ve always found the “drub a novel through overattention to its prose” approach to criticism silly. Ian Watt pointed out, rightly, that the novels can and do survive their sloppy writing, and I’d suggest that a novelist bruising their imperfect, never-going-to-be-wholly-adequate language against (imagined) reality is what gives most “classic” novels an immediate sensual appeal. (Neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky were very nice about their prose, to Nabokov’s infamous displeasure; but who were the greater writers there?)
In the end, I’d rather read a prose that “risks it all” than the “wan, thin husks” of language that for so much of the “literary” establishment conveys artistic respectability. The “nice” style in literary writing seems to me like the moribund, mannered reflex of a once-great actor sleepwalking through a needless supporting role in some middlebrow prestige picture that no one will remember past next Oscars season.
This is weird. I don't recall having any complaints about the prose, except for a large number of typos, which I assume have been fixed. As for "backstory," has Stivers never heard of the concept of non-linear narrative?
Nothing says "predisposed to dislike before reading" like spending most of a review on the first sentence...One is tempted to suggest that a more scrupulous magazine editor would advise the reviewer to rethink the balance of the review.
Editor of Compact would be an interesting role for you, Anne...
oh no I'm fine over here doing "gonzo publishing" (fyi I have always-- always!-- hated HST)
As someone who was lightly critical of the hype around the substack novels (just a little! a healthy skepticism, let's say), I also have to acknowledge that the excerpts from the Compact piece show it to be in bad faith. The reviewer says she "could red-pencil many other paragraphs..." but this is a novel, not a five paragraph essay! What would she do with Joyce!? There's no right way for a novel to work. It either works or it doesn't, but there's no formula. The fact that the reader "has to read the sentence again"--well, yeah, sometimes the author wants you to read the sentence again! This isn't a frictionless email edited by grammarly. I haven't read the book yet, but I guess there's no bad press, because this bad review actually gives me more motivation to do so. Do I detect a reference to Travis Bickle with the army jacket as well?
Hype always deserves criticism; if I weren't me, I'd find myself irritating! Re: Travis Bickle, that wasn't a conscious influence—he belongs in Ross's book, with its opening in '70s crime-ridden New York—but I *was* trying to imagine a narrative of masculine spectacular violence that would be sort of the opposite of the incel stereotype, or a return to its Romantic root, less killing for hate but dying for love. So in that sense maybe an inverted Travis Bickle—though if I recall (it's been a while, since about my teen years) the movie is halfway between these archetypes. Mainly I wanted to evoke the long, slow alteration of manhood from the WWII image roughly contemporaneous with the superhero's cultural emergence into wherever we are now with gender. In other words, if I even have to say this, it's not an extraneous detail.
Not to belabour the point, but, given Jacob Morrow's youth, my mind, after Bickle, went to Linda Cardellini's army jacket in Freaks and Geeks when I first read the passage. Just how I pictured the jacket hanging on Morrow's frail body, it certainly, to your point, hangs rather oddly on her. It swallows and protects Cardellini as one might say Ash del Greco, who picks out the jacket, comes to envelop Morrow. Not to mention the gender implications of associating the two figures. Anyways, I hope this little thought proves that the description certainly does not "puff something out of nothing."
Thanks! I've never actually watched Freaks and Geeks, though I'm familiar with the visual. I think there's something in the collective unconscious, linked to the concept of the "avant-garde," about teen bohemia as sublimated or spiritual warfare.
And to quote a mutual friend: "The true war is a spiritual war."
And on and on it goes, right?
Given that I've been partial to her other work, I'll posit patiently that Stivers was attempting something akin to what Sam Kriss did to the cohort of alt-lit writers in The Point this past February. That essay included mixed admiration of Honor Levy but keen dissection of Conroe and others, all by their proclaimed goal of writing something actually new. I couldn't get past the Compact paywall but wonder: is this just another, less-successful turn of the same cultural gyre? Acclaim, assessment, rejection, re-evaulation, assimilation, etc. (This wondering mostly makes me despair of literary criticism but cling more fully to novels.)
Yes, you're right it's the same cycle, just a different moment of it, in that the alt-lit 2.0 phenomenon was/is the mainstream coopting and selling back an indie movement, whereas this is an indie movement still trying to emerge into the mainstream, and the mainstream trying to figure out how to react. I think VS doesn't like the way the "scene" is going for various reasons, but pragmatically she couldn't write a big survey piece like Kriss's—it makes me laugh to think how much he'd hate Major Arcana, by the way!—because some of her other implied targets (the badly-written "hyped galleys" she mentions) are literally her colleagues, thus I became the scapegoat for all involved. This is mostly, but not entirely, an inference—though I do believe she genuinely disliked the book, leaving aside the micropolitics involved. It's all so stupid; truly, get rid of social relations!
I have a hard time articulating exactly why but I actually think Kriss would like it. Forgive my sycophancy but it's in the service of a point; there's a reason both of you are on a very short list of contemporary writers I will drop everything else to read. The superficial differences might be stark but I think MA's attitude towards questions of category -- what we call gender, what we call magic, etc -- is not so different from some of his work. Perhaps one of us will be proven wrong!
Thank you! I guess it's possible; I just imagine he would judge it sentimental, petit-bourgeois, all-around "American," if not a naive attempt to revive a deservedly moribund form. (See? I can write my own bad reviews!)
Did she not mean 184 pages before the story goes back to the present? (Although that can’t be right either because the story really only returns to post-incident, in the last section).
Anyway, while I had a couple of thematics issues with Major Arcana (certainly not the prose), I thought the book was great. My Locus review will be out in June. It was enjoyable engaging with the book intellectually and putting my thoughts to (virtual) paper. I could have said more, but I felt I said enough. I hope you sell a gazillion copies.
If we're maintaining the arbitrary stricture against "backstory"—it's all story, not sure what back and front has to do with it—then most of Part Three is still backstory. But thank you, and I look forward to your review!
Wouldn’t worry too much about the opinion of someone whose professional life has largely depended on the opposition. Her column sucks btw.
Thinking some more about that paragraph V. Stivers dissected. It makes me wonder if she ever tried to write anything creative. If so she would know that sometimes you describe things in such a way as to create an impression in the reader's mind, rather than to record events in their physical exactitude. But I bet she'd be great at writing product specifications and the like.
I was a bit puzzled by her objection to my describing the army jacket; there's not just one type.