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Susan Shepherd's avatar

A Frolic of HIs Own, William Gaddis. The best dialogue.

And sex scenes in fiction? Yeah, write them if you want. Sometimes they're great, sometimes they're not. Like any writing. That's really annoying advice, Ms. Libes. Sometimes one's characters want to have sex. Let them.

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Scott Spires's avatar

Dialogic and (implicitly) philosophical novels? To my mind, it's a Central European/Slavic specialty.

First I'd mention Witkacy's "Insatiability," a book I reviewed last year on my site. It's dialogic in the most literal sense, with entire pages devoted to philosophical and religious arguments. Witkacy was primarily a playwright, and his plays are similar in this respect.

Otherwise, Musil, Čapek, Gombrowicz and similar writers are worth checking out. Why is this such a Central European thing? Partly I think because of the centrality of philosophy in the educational systems and political movements in these countries. I believe that Saul Bellow was probably picking up on this. He was also an admirer of Wyndham Lewis, whom TS Eliot called “the only English writer who can be compared to Dostoevsky.”

Perhaps also because of what Czeslaw Milosz said in "The Captive Mind": "It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy."

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