Last year, I read four Philip Roth novels – the first of his Zuckerman series, anthologised by The Library of America as Zuckerman Bound. This year I read the next Library of America volume, which collects the four books Roth wrote between 1986 and 1991.
Two are works of fiction that Roth dares us to view as autobiographical and two are non-fiction but Roth teases us with the possibility that he is not telling the truth. I’m going to look at the first two in this post.
I read this back in May and in the time it’s taken me to write about it the football season has rolled around again. Wilson’s book is a thorough guide to the history of tactics in football, from the days when the majority of players were attackers, through to the modern game, in which teams frequently play without a recognised striker.
Though Wilson, as an English writer, spends a lot of time on the game at home, he also finds time for extensive examinations of how the game developed across Europe and South America.
This is the fifth and final book of my short run of experimental and post-modern fiction. This one is perhaps the most radical of the five but, though it’s an interesting experiment, it’s not really one that engages.
The book is a stream-of-consciousness narration by a woman who is, or believes she is, the last living person in the world. She doesn’t explain how this situation arose but she does detail her travels across the world in search of another survivor.
This was Nabokov’s first novel in English. It can be read as the story of one man’s search for his brother, a novel about literature or a post-modern intellectual puzzle. However you choose to approach it, it functions brilliantly as all three and it’s a worthy addition to my mini-exploration of post-modern and experimental fiction.
The book’s narrator, known only as V, is writing a biography of his half brother, the noted author Sebastian Knight. V feels that Knight, a Russian who made his name writing in English, has been unfairly treated in a recent biography and plans to set the record straight.
Lost in the Funhouse marked the beginning of a small exploration of experimental and post-modern fiction. I followed it with The Lime Twig, the sixth novel by John Hawkes, which seems not to be very well known, from what I can tell. It’s obscurity is undeserved.
Hawkes’ was clear about his approach to fiction: “I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.”
“Once upon a time there was a story that began…” begins the first story in this landmark collection of postmodern fiction. Barth’s instruction is to cut out the phrase and loop it around on itself so that it repeats endlessly.
Barth had written four novels by the time he turned his attention to the short story. Inspired by Borges, he sought to marry form and content in a collection of stories that explored the nature of storytelling itself.
“It was around nine-thirty, there was a chill in the air, the wind was gentle now, and he was moving inside it like the light of love, ringing without sound, giving himself up to every vibration, totally alive inside of a crime.”
Angels, Denis Johnson’s first novel, is a dark and affecting story, populated with characters that are easy to dislike but difficult to avoid empathising with.
This was Wallace’s first collection of essays. It’s not quite as good as the follow-up, Consider the Lobster, but it does contain some brilliant pieces, particularly the title essay.
There are seven essays here, all published between 1992 and 1996 and covering literature, television, film, tennis and, of course, Wallace’s now well-known social observation.
Though the ‘Golden Age’ of crime fiction is generally considered to have ended with the Second World War, this novel, published in 1948, is very much in the golden age tradition. It’s a mystery that centres on a country house, features a host of upper and upper-middle class characters and, despite some devious criminality, order is restored at the end.
I find golden age crime novels comforting in a funny sort of way. They are more like puzzles than novels and, as with any genre fiction, the adherence to a template offers a reassuring familiarity. The Franchise Affair is considered one of the classics of its kind so everything should have been in place for an enjoyable read.
The Pale King was to have been David Foster Wallace’s third novel. He spent about 10 years working on the book, having begun researching it in the late 90s, after finishing Infinite Jest. He was still working on it at the time of his suicide in 2008.
What would have become of it had he lived is something we can only guess at. He had been struggling with the book for some time, according to those who knew him. Perhaps he would have abandoned it or re-worked it into something else entirely. Either way, what we have here is an assemblage of fragments and not an unfinished novel like, for example, those of Kafka.
