The 3 AM guy is tired of Christianity and Gilead Sciences and the contemporary American novel, he has been reading Shelley - Percy Bysshe Shelley, PBS! - and Shelly was a bad guy, he flirted with everyone and got them pregnant and left them to die, but he wrote some swell poems, many of which are packed with jejune and adolescent political rage, but: so what? He was mad at his dad. Who isnt? Queen Mab - which he wrote in like 1812, he was twenty years old! - is part Wordsworth, part William Godwin, and its about Shelley learning how to scan a line of iambic pentameter, and its about his anti-semitism, maybe, alas, and its about his figuring out how to put the real world in which actual people suffer and die into a long poem which is partly a lyric effusion, partly an eclogue, partly a political screed. And heres the thing: the orthodoxy of novel writing craft these days is that youre not supposed to be egregiously political - polemical is the code word, Dont put polemics in your prose! - but Id rather read a messy book with a political conscience than an achingly well-crafted novel about nothing. And I dont mean nothing with a capital N! I mean just nothing that ever really mattered to anyone except the 3 sad main characters who feel bad that their pleasant childhood is over.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 18:31:08 +0000
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