Word: fictions
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Contemporary English fiction is becoming incestuous. The intricate, clever construction of Black Dogs calls to mind works like Martin Amis' Time's Arrow, which is written backwards. The form of the novel clearly betrays the influence of Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot, in which a literary scholar hides from the failure of his marriage in his obsession with Flaubert. Amis, Barnes and McEwan are close friends. The three friends inspire and rival one another. The form of Black Dogs echoes the smart, complex, but often self-conscious tone of McEwan's literary circle...
...McNally's latest book, Until Your Heart Stops, is his first full length novel. But it won't be his first success: in 1990, McNally won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction for his collection of short stories, Low Flying Aircraft. Critics greeted his short stories with open arms. They all loved his "voice." A reviewer for San Francisco Chronicle described his "original language;" in The New York Times a critic gushed about his "stark, imaginistic prose...
...style of Until Your Heart Stops clearly springs from his short fiction. He establishes his tone within the first few pages--one of the primary challenges in writing short stories. But a novel must be more than a short story writ large. McNally's voice, for all its clarity, cannot single handedly support a novel...
...narrator, then, is real -- whatever that might mean in a work of fiction -- but is the other Philip Roth some sort of con man or scam artist or lunatic exploiting a reputation not his own? Or might it be the other way around? Even to frame such a question is to play and plunge helplessly into Roth's game...
...their pleas, the cavernous Piranesian spaces of the anteroom to the Palace of Justice known as the Salle des Pas-Perdus, or Room of Wasted Steps, the frightened clients, the stone-faced ushers, the bewildered accused in the dock. It took another 19th century genius, Dickens, to convey in fiction what Daumier gives in line and wash: the sense of the law, not as a means toward fairness or justice but as an enormous and self-feeding machine, abstract and inhuman, operating far beyond the lives it is supposed to regulate, masticating its diet of human hope...