What I'm Reading

Reading Peace Like a River, and starting The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I like the first novel, find the narrative engaging and funny, the writing surprisingly accurate given that the main character is an 11-year old boy (so often authors instill way too much maturity--intellectual and emotional--into theoretically prepubescent narrators--Leif Enger narrowly misses this mistake by writing a retrospective text). The only element I really dislike is the messianic, mid-western wholesomeness of the plot; the biblical allusions are self-conscious at least, which implies a level of authorial honesty, but the miracles and joyousness in the Lord can be hard to stomach.

I'm only five pages into the latter novel, but I can already tell that the narrative voice(s) are contrived. Not inauthentic--Junot Diaz is a Dominican American writing from a Dominican perspective--but maybe too cutesy and too reliant on a text-specific dialect to make ideological points. I'm desperately hoping that it doesn't go the way of Jonathan Safran-Foer's work, which is also well-written, clever, and so painstakingly constructed that no accurate human characterization or emotional truths emerge from his fiction. I'm going to have to tread carefully in the Diaz waters to make sure that I'm not seduced by the humor and manipulated by the already emerging language game into believing the text to be far more profound, and better written, than it is. This is sometimes my problem with Safran-Foer.

Trying to finish In Defense of Food, which is interesting, but not for 300 pages. Maybe because I already know to eat whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and have no objection to butter over margarine. Speaking of which, I'm hungry.

Uh, what else? Just finished The Twentieth Wife, which is definitely a romance novel but about Moghul India, so I justify it as educational literature with a lot of juice. I'm trying to convince myself that the same rule applies to Phillippa Gregory's Henry VIII novels, but it's considerably more embarrassing to be caught with one of those. Somehow the corsets and lurid sex scenes strip Gregory's stories of intellectual value.

On the list for future reading is Flannery O'Conner (finally) and 18th and 19th century gothic literature. They seem like a good pairing: Catholic lit. with lit. that demonizes Catholics. And in such delicious, morbid, insidious ways.