I've observed that there is a crop of recent awards-nominated literary books that draw heavily from commercial fiction, but are seen, by critics, as elevating or transcending the commercial elements they supposedly embody.
Two thirds of the way through this book, I asked myself why Kushner wrote it and why I continued to read it. And so I stopped. Thank you for writing this essay.
i find genre fiction so compelling because there tends to be a lot of attention put on structure (not necessarily plot, but i like good plotting too, and that is obviously a kind of structure). to engage with a genre and then reject the tools that the genre has developed to create not just readability, but depth seems like a doomed enterprise for me. i am currently going through a john le carre phase and his best books are incredibly nuanced BECAUSE of their intricate plotting! i think it's a mistake to assume that character or ideas driven novels have to foreground these things at the expense of plot -- to my mind, characters and ideas are best expressed through a narrative structure!
Agree completely. I think many times authors have ideas that they feel conflict with the structure of the genre novel, but instead of reworking that structure, they just subvert it to no effect and dissipate all the energy of their critique.
I have an MFA and have attended juried writing conferences blah blah blah blah, but have not once been given instruction/guidance on plot. I'm trying to learn it now by reading commercial fiction. Like, Emily Henry!
I mean an MFA--it's all basically just short stories. Really nothing to teach you about structure. Definitely a shame that there is so much writing instruction and virtually none of it focuses on writing novels--the main thing people want to do.
This is why I've enjoyed crime fiction so much lately--it generally gives me quality prose, depending on the author, along with an actual plot. Like, Tana French is a stronger author than 2/3rds of literary fiction. Also why I'm throwing in my lot with genre--I lack the credentials to work those literary angles!
This is so insanely thought-provoking!! I am a television writer old enough that when I started there was no such thing as “prestige TV. “ If you wrote TV, by default you had no prestige. What they gave you instead was money. We were craftspeople who worked on deadline, constantly outlining, writing, and producing — and that’s what the money was for. When this whole concept of “prestige” came for us, everyone started making less money. Heartbreaking. Although I guess we got some good TV out of it.
“You might ask, what is the point of being a success if it really has so little do with literary quality? Well...I don't know, I would imagine that many successful writers don't have a strong sense of what's important or what they'd really like to say.”
It seems like the single most important metric for writers these days is output. All the advice is about sitting in that chair and typing. Acronyms like “BIC” for butt in chair are treated like the deepest wisdom.
When I was in a writing workshop in the ‘90s, an author spoke to us and said, “The writer’s goal is to be prolific.”
Daily word counts are celebrated as achievements in themselves. NaNoWriMo is a marathon that’s also a sprint to get words on the page.
A LITTLE bit of that advice makes sense. But only after what I think is much more important and never gets discussed: why do you want to be a writer? What do you have to say? How will your writing matter? What are you using this form to accomplish? Do you want to serve an audience or do you want your audience to serve you?
I very seldom read or hear anything about purpose in literary workshops, but the sci fi writing workshops I took later had a strong point of view on those matters. They talked a lot about the craft and work of writing for readers. It was revelatory.
Thank you! Yes, my early workshop experiences were at Clarion--a workshop for sci-fi writers--and in various online workshops for sci-fi stories. And in those forums, there was a very strong sense of what exactly we were doing: trying to write stories that could sell to Asimov's, Analog, F&SF and other sci-fi journals. And I think this made it a a lot simpler to provide feedback, because everyone's purposes were just so much clearer, and we all understood what kinds of stories worked and which didn't, etc.
Later on, coming into the literary fiction world, everyone just seemed so adrift. Nobody seemed to know what was important and what wasn't.
Clarion! That's the Harvard of SF workshops! I went to Viable Paradise years ago. It was incredibly helpful. I remember looking back on feedback from literary workshops and hearing things like, "I'm curious about the emotional landscape of this story."
What?
Years later, I also went to Breadloaf twice and I had a great time there.
I am pretty willing to give an author whose other works have provided art + enjoyment the benefit of my attention through the whole book, even if I am not enjoying it the same way. I agree with you on most of this as it pertains to Creation Lake specifically— I definitely would not have put up with this from a writer I was unfamiliar with or had not previously enjoyed. And I do think she wrote this for her writer friends rather than readers, and maybe even to test: will they still nominate me (and not pick me) even if I do THIS?? But I think writing a review of a book you thought was totally pointless, and should have instead been Zola, without offering anything else of much substance to your reader is a bit rich. Here you connect your opinion to some insight about literary fiction and prize criteria in general, which I respect. Good one!
I don't have anything smart to say about this very enjoyable essay or Creation Lake, but I will be forever tickled by the description that some books are "aggressively hostile to the reader’s enjoyment" because there have been many a book where I wonder if it was mostly written as an exercise to see how far it could go to provoke displeasure in the reader.
there’s an interesting term i picked up through my interest in perfume called “masstige”—in perfume terms it is stuff that is priced like a luxury good without having the qualities of a luxury good. (I learned about it here: https://takeonethingoff.com/blog/2018/06/29/the-business-of-perfume-artisan-as-the-new-niche/) Anyway when I read this it was one of those moments when I felt something click into place, mentally, about book publishing.
also, I haven't read ALL, though I probably will eventually—I hated, hated, HATED The People in the Trees so much I just couldn't get myself to try. but when it's described it reminds me a lot of fanfic, especially hurt / comfort fanfic… both because of the dynamic of over the top brutality and sensual luxury but also in that there seem to be no women in it? (or if there are, they don't seem to rate a mention from anybody)
so it's not surprising to me that a book like that could really take off, though it probably would be surprising to a publishing executive. even without fanfic, these are the kind of grand guignol stories i was putting my dolls through (minus the sexual abuse but with some cannibalism).
It is A LOT like fanfic. I have trans friends who swear that Hanya must really be a trans man--I would not be at all surprised. This kind of idealization of gay men seems very similar to what some closeted trans male writers of my acquaintance have written during their fanfic days. It's definitely not to everyone's taste, but it is real art.
I’m a bit of a Yanagihara defender. Definitely the weakest of her three books (and iirc she said she disliked it in that big profile in The NYer a few years back), but a lot of what makes ALL readable (the descriptions of the island’s flora & fauna feel very self-indulgent) is kind of present there, too.
Happy to see a defender here! I think A LITTLE LIFE is really good! It is so bananas, but I am happy it exists. Definitely a mark in favor of lit-fic rather than against it.
to be fair, while 90% of my hatred of TPitT is because of the book itself, 10% is because I accidentally stole it from the NYPL and had to pay them a bunch of money and they sent their debt collection agency after me
I would like to read that, too. I have a feeling the pulps were the dividing line, at least in the 20th century, but nothing more than that. And in the US, comics fell on the pulp side -- I've heard that was less true in other places.
I also have feelings on this issue, but less knowledge. I know that at least in America, the stand-alone sci-fi or fantasy novel was a category that needed to be specifically created and sometimes re-created. Until relatively late in the history of sci-fi (I want to say the 50s or 60s), all the energy was still with the journals, and it was quite hard to get any traction with stand-alone novels unless you'd already built a following through the journals.
Yeah, paperbacks sort of replaced the pulps. The kind of cover art that sold the pulps from newsstands (and which has finally made the jump to fine art now)
I’ve read Kushner’s first book, Telex from Cuba, which probably suffers from the same problems as Creation Lake (haven’t read it). When you read Telex it is obvious how much research Kushner has done, and you think, wow, there’s a lot of information in here. You’re learning about the United Fruit company, the Americans running the plantations in Cuba, the rise of Castro, the racial dynamics…it’s actually sounding good from my description, isn’t it? But the book has no soul. The characters, for the most part, are lifeless, and I couldn’t tell you much about them. There’s no atmosphere. I would like to read a Kushner book where she doesn’t do any research and just writes from her own being…I’ve read some of her essays and they’re good, the fact I even read Telex was because she wrote somewhere that when she was writing it she would stare out her window for hours and watch the light change…I know that would make some people roll their eyes, but for me I was like, ya, that’s what I want! But that mood wasn’t in the book.
I don’t know if you’ve read Patrick Modiano, but he writes crime novels where the mystery is rarely solved. His novels are literary (he won the Nobel some years ago), but he’s working with genre conventions. It seems like Kushner was going for something like that, but with Modiano the atmosphere is just so…deep. There’s so much there. I hate to refer to the adage “write what you know,” because I think people should be able to write about anything they want, but I feel like it might apply in Kushner’s case. Her essays about LA, where she lives, are good. But she always seems to write about other times, other countries, does a ton of research, and the book falls flat. I could be wrong about her other books, but that’s the impression I get.
I read a Modiano novel at some point, but don't remember much about it. I mean to be honest, with Kushner...there's so much desire on peoples' part to be charitable, but...these are the books she's decided to bring into the world! If they're unworthy of her talents, then...she has wasted those talents. On what basis can anyone say that she is better than these books? At some point doesn't the promise need to actually materialize?
I clearly liked this book more than you did. And I’ve previously explained why. But you have persuaded me to like it less. Maybe I’m easily influenced. Or maybe it’s because there’s a smugness and arrogance at the core of the book that you’ve opened my eyes to. I mean the flimsiness of the main characters arc is a very arrogant, I can get away with anything move. Anyway, good review.
"fiction... that is aggressively hostile to the reader’s enjoyment"—this is what I hate so so much about the vast majority of literary fiction, and I'm so glad you said it!! The distinction between "literary" fiction and "genre" fiction has always seemed so silly to me—bad writing is bad writing, no matter how "literary" it is, and good writing is good writing, no matter how "genre." Also your description of the "Emperor’s New Clothes scenario" of MFA programs and the literary establishment clarified a lot of things for me. There are so many books like this that get glowing reviews, and then when I go to read them, I find them vacuous and underwhelming in exactly the way you describe. It makes one lose trust in book reviewers—but I'm glad there are people like you to tell it like it is!
It is really hard. I took have scrambled for years being like, "What am I not getting about these books?" Eventually I realized...it wasn't me. It really is as simple as, "People are afraid to say something negative in print about a book that's supposed to be a hot new release by a talented author."
I just finished Creation Lake and I loved it. Perhaps because I’m familiar with the central subject - the opposition to megabassines, French eco-activists and elitist French bobos men - I thought this American take on these topics was pure joy. I didn’t experience this book as vacuous at all - quite the opposite- although it took me about a half the book to realise that. The sections about Neanderthals are really about Bruno’s struggles with his past in occupied and postwar France, and the loss of his daughter - as is made clear in his last email. The book ends on a drawn out epiphany. I also think the whole subplot about the sub-minister - including its denouement - is funny. The novel is a complete send-up of a certain section of the French elite, while a sympathetic look at those at the hard end of activism.
I read it as half-comedy and half-thoughtful fiction, but it’s true that people who don’t like digressions in fiction (I do) will probably dislike it.
This is the first thing I’ve read that’s made me want to check out the book. I read a decent amount of French fiction and this is making me think Kushner might actually be doing something really interesting. I’m curious to see what the French reaction to the book is but I guess we’ll have to wait for it to be translated.
It’s a tongue in cheek parody and she doesn’t diss his books. She must have watched a lot of his filmed interviews and debates on French TV! The narrator-protagonist, Sadie, has a critical- not to say disdainful- view about the French intellectual tradition, but her deadpan delivery makes it funny.
That’s funny, I was watching an interview with him last night. I’ve always thought that the English speaking lit world has a bit of a warped view of him because I assume they don’t watch his interviews. He comes off kind of shy and timid, whereas if you just read his writing he seems pretty different. Sounds like Kushner nailed it though!
I read The Mars Room by Kushner and it was much like you describe Creation Lake. The germ of the idea was the desire to write a prison novel, and the desire to enter into the experiences that bring people to prison, and the experience of actually being in prison, and to explore the possibilities of sympathy for the apparently unsympathetic. But there was all this extraneous matter in it, too many perspectives from people without interesting connections to the central concerns, and I could feel this barrier that was Kushner's assumption that the core of the novel just wasn't enough, that it needed to be padded out to make weight, even though she'd chosen a core that ought to have been heavy enough for anything. It felt like an honest but unexamined assumption from someone conscientiously trying hard to do Good Work on an intellectual level while subconsciously avoiding emotional and imaginative work. The main character, a heroin-addicted lapdancer, never quite rings true, and while there's always the danger of demanding cringy stereotypes in the cause of "ringing true" ie meeting expectations, I wasn't surprised when I read interviews with Kushner where she admitted struggling to get into the head of such a person and ultimately deciding to base the character on her own self.
There is always a confusion in the time of works being produced between high art and the middlebrow. Many of the people involved in the production and reception of the middlebrow believe it to be high art and this is one of the defining features of the middlebrow. Many of the creators of mediocre and poor work in both "high art" and "low art" genres are true believers trying to reproduce what they love but able only to produce an inferior copy of the form of the work without importing the magic. I have always been alienated by people howling at the Booker prize lists and so on, "This is not real art! This is supposed to be a list of the very best work, why is it all so mediocre?" This is like being distressed by the fact that most people are average. Awards are <i>for</i> the middlebrow.
Oh god, I thought STATION ELEVEN was bad. A prime example of a book that uses some nice sentences to cover up a complete lack of substance. But then, I also read it back to back with Ling Ma's SEVERANCE, which has similar aims but with the distinction of being very very good.
Two thirds of the way through this book, I asked myself why Kushner wrote it and why I continued to read it. And so I stopped. Thank you for writing this essay.
i find genre fiction so compelling because there tends to be a lot of attention put on structure (not necessarily plot, but i like good plotting too, and that is obviously a kind of structure). to engage with a genre and then reject the tools that the genre has developed to create not just readability, but depth seems like a doomed enterprise for me. i am currently going through a john le carre phase and his best books are incredibly nuanced BECAUSE of their intricate plotting! i think it's a mistake to assume that character or ideas driven novels have to foreground these things at the expense of plot -- to my mind, characters and ideas are best expressed through a narrative structure!
Agree completely. I think many times authors have ideas that they feel conflict with the structure of the genre novel, but instead of reworking that structure, they just subvert it to no effect and dissipate all the energy of their critique.
I have an MFA and have attended juried writing conferences blah blah blah blah, but have not once been given instruction/guidance on plot. I'm trying to learn it now by reading commercial fiction. Like, Emily Henry!
I mean an MFA--it's all basically just short stories. Really nothing to teach you about structure. Definitely a shame that there is so much writing instruction and virtually none of it focuses on writing novels--the main thing people want to do.
This is why I've enjoyed crime fiction so much lately--it generally gives me quality prose, depending on the author, along with an actual plot. Like, Tana French is a stronger author than 2/3rds of literary fiction. Also why I'm throwing in my lot with genre--I lack the credentials to work those literary angles!
Crime fiction seems like the right move for you, personally, and for many male writers, I think.
This is so insanely thought-provoking!! I am a television writer old enough that when I started there was no such thing as “prestige TV. “ If you wrote TV, by default you had no prestige. What they gave you instead was money. We were craftspeople who worked on deadline, constantly outlining, writing, and producing — and that’s what the money was for. When this whole concept of “prestige” came for us, everyone started making less money. Heartbreaking. Although I guess we got some good TV out of it.
Wow, you were the show runner on Dare Me? I am very starstruck. Loved that novel.
Yes, that was me! Very proud of that show and how we brought the novel to life.
Another fantastic essay!! Thank you.
This bit really resonated:
“You might ask, what is the point of being a success if it really has so little do with literary quality? Well...I don't know, I would imagine that many successful writers don't have a strong sense of what's important or what they'd really like to say.”
It seems like the single most important metric for writers these days is output. All the advice is about sitting in that chair and typing. Acronyms like “BIC” for butt in chair are treated like the deepest wisdom.
When I was in a writing workshop in the ‘90s, an author spoke to us and said, “The writer’s goal is to be prolific.”
Daily word counts are celebrated as achievements in themselves. NaNoWriMo is a marathon that’s also a sprint to get words on the page.
A LITTLE bit of that advice makes sense. But only after what I think is much more important and never gets discussed: why do you want to be a writer? What do you have to say? How will your writing matter? What are you using this form to accomplish? Do you want to serve an audience or do you want your audience to serve you?
I very seldom read or hear anything about purpose in literary workshops, but the sci fi writing workshops I took later had a strong point of view on those matters. They talked a lot about the craft and work of writing for readers. It was revelatory.
Thank you! Yes, my early workshop experiences were at Clarion--a workshop for sci-fi writers--and in various online workshops for sci-fi stories. And in those forums, there was a very strong sense of what exactly we were doing: trying to write stories that could sell to Asimov's, Analog, F&SF and other sci-fi journals. And I think this made it a a lot simpler to provide feedback, because everyone's purposes were just so much clearer, and we all understood what kinds of stories worked and which didn't, etc.
Later on, coming into the literary fiction world, everyone just seemed so adrift. Nobody seemed to know what was important and what wasn't.
Clarion! That's the Harvard of SF workshops! I went to Viable Paradise years ago. It was incredibly helpful. I remember looking back on feedback from literary workshops and hearing things like, "I'm curious about the emotional landscape of this story."
What?
Years later, I also went to Breadloaf twice and I had a great time there.
I am pretty willing to give an author whose other works have provided art + enjoyment the benefit of my attention through the whole book, even if I am not enjoying it the same way. I agree with you on most of this as it pertains to Creation Lake specifically— I definitely would not have put up with this from a writer I was unfamiliar with or had not previously enjoyed. And I do think she wrote this for her writer friends rather than readers, and maybe even to test: will they still nominate me (and not pick me) even if I do THIS?? But I think writing a review of a book you thought was totally pointless, and should have instead been Zola, without offering anything else of much substance to your reader is a bit rich. Here you connect your opinion to some insight about literary fiction and prize criteria in general, which I respect. Good one!
Rhetorically speaking, the Zola thing was a bad move--definitely a lesson to me too in what not to say when taking down a book
I don't have anything smart to say about this very enjoyable essay or Creation Lake, but I will be forever tickled by the description that some books are "aggressively hostile to the reader’s enjoyment" because there have been many a book where I wonder if it was mostly written as an exercise to see how far it could go to provoke displeasure in the reader.
there’s an interesting term i picked up through my interest in perfume called “masstige”—in perfume terms it is stuff that is priced like a luxury good without having the qualities of a luxury good. (I learned about it here: https://takeonethingoff.com/blog/2018/06/29/the-business-of-perfume-artisan-as-the-new-niche/) Anyway when I read this it was one of those moments when I felt something click into place, mentally, about book publishing.
also, I haven't read ALL, though I probably will eventually—I hated, hated, HATED The People in the Trees so much I just couldn't get myself to try. but when it's described it reminds me a lot of fanfic, especially hurt / comfort fanfic… both because of the dynamic of over the top brutality and sensual luxury but also in that there seem to be no women in it? (or if there are, they don't seem to rate a mention from anybody)
so it's not surprising to me that a book like that could really take off, though it probably would be surprising to a publishing executive. even without fanfic, these are the kind of grand guignol stories i was putting my dolls through (minus the sexual abuse but with some cannibalism).
It is A LOT like fanfic. I have trans friends who swear that Hanya must really be a trans man--I would not be at all surprised. This kind of idealization of gay men seems very similar to what some closeted trans male writers of my acquaintance have written during their fanfic days. It's definitely not to everyone's taste, but it is real art.
I’m a bit of a Yanagihara defender. Definitely the weakest of her three books (and iirc she said she disliked it in that big profile in The NYer a few years back), but a lot of what makes ALL readable (the descriptions of the island’s flora & fauna feel very self-indulgent) is kind of present there, too.
Happy to see a defender here! I think A LITTLE LIFE is really good! It is so bananas, but I am happy it exists. Definitely a mark in favor of lit-fic rather than against it.
to be fair, while 90% of my hatred of TPitT is because of the book itself, 10% is because I accidentally stole it from the NYPL and had to pay them a bunch of money and they sent their debt collection agency after me
OMG wut, they have a debt collection agency?????
i think they sent it after me three times before they stopped doing library fines https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/nyregion/26library.html
Girl, wow! I would have no credit if the DC or SF libraries were like this.
should have sent a nice handwritten note saying it wasn’t even that good.
This makes me want to read a history of the divide between genre and “Literary” fiction. When and how did it happen?
I would like to read that, too. I have a feeling the pulps were the dividing line, at least in the 20th century, but nothing more than that. And in the US, comics fell on the pulp side -- I've heard that was less true in other places.
I also have feelings on this issue, but less knowledge. I know that at least in America, the stand-alone sci-fi or fantasy novel was a category that needed to be specifically created and sometimes re-created. Until relatively late in the history of sci-fi (I want to say the 50s or 60s), all the energy was still with the journals, and it was quite hard to get any traction with stand-alone novels unless you'd already built a following through the journals.
Yeah, paperbacks sort of replaced the pulps. The kind of cover art that sold the pulps from newsstands (and which has finally made the jump to fine art now)
http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?do=issue&vol=i65&article=_interview
were the same images that Frank Frazetta made a hundred careers out of -- his own, and all the people who copied him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjOJMFIvncU
I’ve read Kushner’s first book, Telex from Cuba, which probably suffers from the same problems as Creation Lake (haven’t read it). When you read Telex it is obvious how much research Kushner has done, and you think, wow, there’s a lot of information in here. You’re learning about the United Fruit company, the Americans running the plantations in Cuba, the rise of Castro, the racial dynamics…it’s actually sounding good from my description, isn’t it? But the book has no soul. The characters, for the most part, are lifeless, and I couldn’t tell you much about them. There’s no atmosphere. I would like to read a Kushner book where she doesn’t do any research and just writes from her own being…I’ve read some of her essays and they’re good, the fact I even read Telex was because she wrote somewhere that when she was writing it she would stare out her window for hours and watch the light change…I know that would make some people roll their eyes, but for me I was like, ya, that’s what I want! But that mood wasn’t in the book.
I don’t know if you’ve read Patrick Modiano, but he writes crime novels where the mystery is rarely solved. His novels are literary (he won the Nobel some years ago), but he’s working with genre conventions. It seems like Kushner was going for something like that, but with Modiano the atmosphere is just so…deep. There’s so much there. I hate to refer to the adage “write what you know,” because I think people should be able to write about anything they want, but I feel like it might apply in Kushner’s case. Her essays about LA, where she lives, are good. But she always seems to write about other times, other countries, does a ton of research, and the book falls flat. I could be wrong about her other books, but that’s the impression I get.
I read a Modiano novel at some point, but don't remember much about it. I mean to be honest, with Kushner...there's so much desire on peoples' part to be charitable, but...these are the books she's decided to bring into the world! If they're unworthy of her talents, then...she has wasted those talents. On what basis can anyone say that she is better than these books? At some point doesn't the promise need to actually materialize?
I clearly liked this book more than you did. And I’ve previously explained why. But you have persuaded me to like it less. Maybe I’m easily influenced. Or maybe it’s because there’s a smugness and arrogance at the core of the book that you’ve opened my eyes to. I mean the flimsiness of the main characters arc is a very arrogant, I can get away with anything move. Anyway, good review.
"fiction... that is aggressively hostile to the reader’s enjoyment"—this is what I hate so so much about the vast majority of literary fiction, and I'm so glad you said it!! The distinction between "literary" fiction and "genre" fiction has always seemed so silly to me—bad writing is bad writing, no matter how "literary" it is, and good writing is good writing, no matter how "genre." Also your description of the "Emperor’s New Clothes scenario" of MFA programs and the literary establishment clarified a lot of things for me. There are so many books like this that get glowing reviews, and then when I go to read them, I find them vacuous and underwhelming in exactly the way you describe. It makes one lose trust in book reviewers—but I'm glad there are people like you to tell it like it is!
It is really hard. I took have scrambled for years being like, "What am I not getting about these books?" Eventually I realized...it wasn't me. It really is as simple as, "People are afraid to say something negative in print about a book that's supposed to be a hot new release by a talented author."
I just finished Creation Lake and I loved it. Perhaps because I’m familiar with the central subject - the opposition to megabassines, French eco-activists and elitist French bobos men - I thought this American take on these topics was pure joy. I didn’t experience this book as vacuous at all - quite the opposite- although it took me about a half the book to realise that. The sections about Neanderthals are really about Bruno’s struggles with his past in occupied and postwar France, and the loss of his daughter - as is made clear in his last email. The book ends on a drawn out epiphany. I also think the whole subplot about the sub-minister - including its denouement - is funny. The novel is a complete send-up of a certain section of the French elite, while a sympathetic look at those at the hard end of activism.
I read it as half-comedy and half-thoughtful fiction, but it’s true that people who don’t like digressions in fiction (I do) will probably dislike it.
This is the first thing I’ve read that’s made me want to check out the book. I read a decent amount of French fiction and this is making me think Kushner might actually be doing something really interesting. I’m curious to see what the French reaction to the book is but I guess we’ll have to wait for it to be translated.
Yes, I'm curious too. If it makes it to Le Monde des livres, we'll know it's arrived.
Oh, by the way, there's a parody of Michel Houellebecq in there too (barely disguised).
I’ve heard that, thing is, I like Houellebecq
It’s a tongue in cheek parody and she doesn’t diss his books. She must have watched a lot of his filmed interviews and debates on French TV! The narrator-protagonist, Sadie, has a critical- not to say disdainful- view about the French intellectual tradition, but her deadpan delivery makes it funny.
That’s funny, I was watching an interview with him last night. I’ve always thought that the English speaking lit world has a bit of a warped view of him because I assume they don’t watch his interviews. He comes off kind of shy and timid, whereas if you just read his writing he seems pretty different. Sounds like Kushner nailed it though!
I read The Mars Room by Kushner and it was much like you describe Creation Lake. The germ of the idea was the desire to write a prison novel, and the desire to enter into the experiences that bring people to prison, and the experience of actually being in prison, and to explore the possibilities of sympathy for the apparently unsympathetic. But there was all this extraneous matter in it, too many perspectives from people without interesting connections to the central concerns, and I could feel this barrier that was Kushner's assumption that the core of the novel just wasn't enough, that it needed to be padded out to make weight, even though she'd chosen a core that ought to have been heavy enough for anything. It felt like an honest but unexamined assumption from someone conscientiously trying hard to do Good Work on an intellectual level while subconsciously avoiding emotional and imaginative work. The main character, a heroin-addicted lapdancer, never quite rings true, and while there's always the danger of demanding cringy stereotypes in the cause of "ringing true" ie meeting expectations, I wasn't surprised when I read interviews with Kushner where she admitted struggling to get into the head of such a person and ultimately deciding to base the character on her own self.
There is always a confusion in the time of works being produced between high art and the middlebrow. Many of the people involved in the production and reception of the middlebrow believe it to be high art and this is one of the defining features of the middlebrow. Many of the creators of mediocre and poor work in both "high art" and "low art" genres are true believers trying to reproduce what they love but able only to produce an inferior copy of the form of the work without importing the magic. I have always been alienated by people howling at the Booker prize lists and so on, "This is not real art! This is supposed to be a list of the very best work, why is it all so mediocre?" This is like being distressed by the fact that most people are average. Awards are <i>for</i> the middlebrow.
Oh god, I thought STATION ELEVEN was bad. A prime example of a book that uses some nice sentences to cover up a complete lack of substance. But then, I also read it back to back with Ling Ma's SEVERANCE, which has similar aims but with the distinction of being very very good.
A case could definitely be made that STATION ELEVEN is bad, I'm sure. I read it like ten years ago, so will not go to the mat for it.