--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, Jack Bludis <buildsnburns@...> wrote:
<<First, most best selling fiction, until the movie comes out, is
primarily
"literary." Boys talking to dogs, flying kites in Afghanistan, take
offs on
Hamlet, Lear, or what have you. Slice of life that it is interesting
to many on
some intellectual strata that I can't reach or comprehend. And much of
it by
insiders in a given profession or social strata.>>
I think you are correct, though you forgot novels about
"relationships", women's trouble with their sisters and mothers, and,
last but not least: NOVELS IN ACADEMIC SETTINGS.
Now, once in a while a book makes it to the best-seller list that is
so unlikely that it restores one's faith in, as you say, the ether up
there. Jonathan Franzen's book _The Corrections_ is one of them.
Totally unlikely, a bizarre book, not catering to anyone specifically,
or rather, trashing everybody the author encounters. But the whole is
great, and it sold (and won big prizes, even more bizarre). And Cormac
McCarthy is another unlikely who did it. Even Pynchon has been on the
bestseller list!
But mostly, as in really mostly, there are formula books attempting a
certain genteelity of telling (faking literariness) or a certain
feeling of fellowship with everyman and everywoman. Lear, Hamlet,
Oedipus, what have you. Some make me wish for the application of the
author's talent to something else. The case of the late lamented John
Updike, a gentle soul and a magnificent technician. My secret wish was
that Updike would one day let it rip and go Quixotic.
End of rambling, I lost the thread, folks... I blame Bludis's medication.
Best,
mrt
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