Word: novels
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David Foster Wallace was young enough when he published his first novel, The Broom of the System, in 1987, that critics who read his witty marathon sentences and then flipped to the author photo of a young man willing himself to look older - like every fake I.D. picture ever taken - were powerless: they had to dub him the next literary voice of his generation. It's exactly the kind of over-enthusiastic cliché Wallace was so good at examining and twisting and footnoting into an ironic tangent, and it was that distrust for pat declarations and easy praise that...
...asked me when I was 18 what I'd like to do with my life, I'd have said I'd like to write a novel at some point. But then I sort of fell into journalism. I guess sometime after Killing Yourself to Live, I kinda wanted to write long form fiction, and I had an idea for a story and I decided to try. This is retrospective: I've been asked this question many times, and I keep coming up with interesting ways to make up answers...
...never takes it in. Two-thirds of the way through, you're desperate for Jack and Glory to fall into bed together, even if they are brother and sister, just as a gesture of Christian charity toward a reader starved for incident. It's a strange thing for a novel to be full of so much wisdom and craft and still be so unsatisfying. It's as if Robinson somehow understands everything about people--their astounding strength, their pathetic weakness--but has forgotten something essential about readers...
That changed last year with No Country for Old Men, their faithful adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel about one man who steals $2 million in drug money and another man, or monster, who chases him. Both characters were resourceful in the tradition of Hollywood heroes and villains; neither one blithered. The plot carefully built its tensions right up to a climax that confused a lot of viewers--but that too showed fidelity of the film to its source novel. The Coens' entente with genre conventions earned Oscars for Best Picture, Screenplay and Supporting Actor (for Javier Bardem...
Anathem By Neal Stephenson; out now What ever happened to the great novel of ideas? It has morphed into science fiction, and Stephenson is its foremost practitioner. Here he imagines a postapocalyptic world where cloistered monks keep the secrets of mathematics safe from the fallen civilization around them...