Disappoint

I do reading around the classics and at one point, discover I spend more time reading about classics than actually reading them.

There is a large body of criticism to go with the body of work that is considered literature and some of it has to do with the definition of literature. I'm not interested in anything definitive but I do want to share two articles that I keep coming back to, months after I have read them the first time.

An book review by Johnathan Franzen (The Corrections) for Alice Munro's Runaway. (NY Times: Subscription required)

An article by Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club) about author Amy Hempel and the minimalism technique in literature.

Two things struck me from the articles. One is that writers do not try and conceal the fact that they are fundamentally telling the same story over and over again. They overcome this by becoming very good at telling this one story. The other thing was that each sentence contributes to the overall mood of the story. If you remove a sentence, then the mood changes. Inside this story, the mood is purefied. Every sentence is vital. A popular critical phrase to describe this kind of storytelling is, "a loyalty at the level of the sentence".

Andre Dubus, an author in this tradition, wrote Killings on which the movie In the Bedroom is based. Two days ago, watching this film I caught this line, said by Sissy Spacek that is now my
favorite line in movie, "Come fall, you're on a plane. Are you taking them with you?" The movie can be seen as a series of power games between the family members, they want very specific things and never say what they want. The title, In the Bedroom, refers to a part of a lobster trap where the lobster is held intact in the cage, this is why you have to check lobster cages every couple of days because if the bedrooms get too full, the lobsters rip each other to bits. The extension is that a house is a trap and we find this house full of power struggles and games.

It's a poor excuse to talk about the technique of literary minimalism. I haven't read the actual short story but it seems too crafted to have been a filler line. There are implications that flower out of the phrase. The invitation, "come fall" is pointing out foolish behaviour yet being respectful in it's brevity. I love the flatness of the offer, "are you taking them with you?" saying at once, "the choice is yours" and "you have no choice".

The writer suggests detail. Maybe all this second hand reading can produce something valuable. Thinking out loud.