August 28, 2004
A step in the right direction, a step aside
I tried to ease my way further into the realm of fiction by reading The Book Against God, the debut novel by literary critic James Wood. I am in awe of the analytical power and bristling prose of his essays, so I should be equally enamored of his novel, right? Almost. Its protagonist is a depiction of what I fear myself becoming, and as he is mired deeper and deeper in his problems during the course of the book, I was more and more intolerant of the book itself. I should know better than to make one-to-one connections between character and book—I'm certainly able to make a similar distinction when looking at art—but I'm not yet that adept a fiction reader. So I underlined triusms and fabulous turns of phrase ("...we can't schedule the consequences of our lies"; about the narrator's parents: "And though they drank tea every night, from the same art deco cups and saucers, the event seemed to give them the same pleasure every night; there was no death by repetition in their marriage, quite the opposite, it was as if only by repetition they knew the exact weight of everything"; "...I looked at Terry's hands, broad with earthy seams"; describing a church organ: "the organ sounded—beautiful, that silver dapple of complicated breath through a thousand mouths") and am now back to the realm of non-fiction, with Jeffrey Steingarten's It Must've Been Something I Ate.