No dialogue on the page is realistic (by which I mean, real
realistic), at least if it's good dialogue. When I called
Bill James's dialogue realistic I meant that I found it
convincing, whatever that means. The realism operates within
the fictive space. And furious green nouns dance the
dirty-boogie with refried critical jargonisms.
So, who are the great *critics* of crime fiction? Our genre,
which is by now quite old, deserves at least one critic as
good as Edmund Wilson, H.L. Mencken, Gore Vidal, or Mary
McCarthy. I know that Boucher reviewed a lot of books, but I
never found much critical depth in his articles. Maybe the
genre should collectively hire James Sallis as its permanent
record-keeper. He has the irony, the stealth, the wisdom and
the words -- and the love for the genre, which is essential.
Didn't Edmund Wilson write some basic instructions for people
who want to be critics and reviewers?
One of this days I'll tell the Man from Rara-Avis story,
which happened to me in a town in Kentucky.
Best, and I really got behind in my Gold Medal plans. I
haven't even finished the Aarons novel.
MrT
__________________________________________________ Do You
Yahoo!? HotJobs - Search Thousands of New Jobs http://www.hotjobs.com
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 12 Aug 2002 EDT