Reply To: What are you reading?
wm. gibson is fantastic. my favorite author, in fact. neuromancer, while excellent, is not my favorite novel of his. i think to this day i have to go with idoru, although count zero is also a strong contender. lately he has been doing work in a much more near-future setting – stuff that could and probably does exist with today's technology, sort of bleeding-edge tech and its implications for our immediate future and personal lives.
i guess what i like about gibson is the way his characters, who are generally in pretty terrible and miserable situations, still go about their lives. no matter how oppressive their environment, they never lose their humanity.
right now i am reading underworld by don delillo. it is a good 827 pages, and so intense and thought-provoking that you really have to put it down for a while after each chapter to sort of absorb and process it.
his prose style was a little distracting, at first – if you are familiar with the 'reader's manifesto', delillo is one of the authors he attacks. partway through i realised what delillo's doing with the dialogue is trying to replicate the texture and pacing of real human conversations, which are nothing like what you read in a normal novel. he doesn't do it true-to-life, because that would be burdensome and unmentionably tedious. instead, he sort of takes the feel of a conversation and normalizes it, translates it into sentence structure. it's really made me think about the way we as humans communicate and what writers are doing when they write dialogue.
your 'plain writing' as exalted in the reader's manifesto is great for telling a tight, coherent story. i will be the first to say that underworld is not that. the narrative does wander and you do have to invest some effort to assemble it in any kind of order in your head. however, by giving up that coherence, he gains a certain amount of power, an ability to change how you think and see the world. that, i think, is the power and defining characteristic of literary fiction – its ability to change your mind, to take you out of your own perspective and put you into a completely different one.
what i like the most about delillo is the way he takes the ordinary, mundane events of daily life and – i want to say he makes them seem magical, but it's almost more accurate to say he looks at them and shows the reader how to look at them in a way that exposes a certain magic that was there the whole time. i dunno. i guess that probably sounds kind of trite.