summer of American Lit
August 2, 2011
I’m working my way through the Orange Prize longlist. I’d read Kathleen Winter’s wonderful first novel, Annabel, long ago, and last week I finished Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife. There’s a scene near the end between the doctor and “the deathless man” that is absolutely astonishing. And now I’m almost through Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which is incredibly different from the Obreht novel but just as powerful. Egan managed to do something that I’ve always been curious about, that is writing each section from the perspective of a different character and never repeating (unless she repeats in the last sections…I’ve yet to reach them). Each section explores some brief moment in the life of a character who is somehow connected to a character who has come before, but it’s never the same event. It’s not like twelve perspectives on a car crash. Each section wanders off into a completely different time and space, and it’s a wonder she can pull it off at all. Next up, I’m thinking, will be Nicole Krauss. It’s the summer of contemporary American Lit.
