Sunday, July 21, 2013

Quote with a little melancholy

Is it true? From James Salter's new All That Is.

"The power of the novel in the nation's culture had weakened. It had happened gradually. It was something everyone recognized and ignored. All went on exactly as before, that was the beauty of it. The glory had failed but fresh faces kept appearing, wanting to be part of it, to be in publishing which had retained a suggestion of elegance like a pair of beautiful bone- shined shoes owned by a bankrupt man."

Malcolm? What say ye?

3 comments:

Malcolm Brooks said...

I've gotten a rise out of a lot of Missoula MFA's by tossing it out that the novel in particular is a moribund form, which I don't quite believe myself but it certainly ruffles feathers and makes for interesting scenes.

I think Salter's more accurate, and he puts it in the right context. Mainly the novel in particular is like opera or jazz past its historic prime. There's so much obvious competition from elsewhere, much of it more easily or at least more quickly digestible. I watched an amazing documentary on New York in the '50s last night, with a bunch of reminiscing by Joan Didion, Gay Talese, WF Buckley, Norman Podhoretz, and classic footage of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Murray Kempton, Hemingway, PRICELESS Mailer, etc, and you come away from it definitely feeling like writing and books in general in that era carried far more general cultural relevance. Rock and roll rose to major ascendancy in the '60s, and film in the '70s--quick, who are the Me Decade rivals to Hemingway and Faulkner? Exactly. '80s? Jay McInerney, but that's self-declared. True, there's WRITING from those decades that's as great as anything, but the cognoscenti got a LOT smaller...

Writing of course will endure, because there will always be a cognoscenti, and there will always be intellectual or artistic terrain best suited to the form. I'll never not be a reader and a writer, with a default setting for both. But even I'll put the book down to watch "Mad Men," so there you have it...

Malcolm Brooks said...

Part 2: Will be interesting to see what happens with books/reading/writing and publishing revenue now that the e-readers are becoming so popular. I myself still can't fathom curling up with a good Nook, but a lot of people are a lot less anachronistic. I actually hope my own novel sells well in this form, because the royalty rates are so much better--also, like the Golden Age of CD's (from the record company's perspective), e-bought books are a one-customer deal--no more book swapping, lending, etc. Venal, I know. I guess my main point is simply that the "moribund form" becomes somewhat re-vivified by technology, and people's relentless love of gadgets. Oh, Bartleby...Oh humanity!

Steve Bodio said...

Wish I had seen that documentary. Agree, generally.

Our double guns are another example of survivors, hand- made, well- rubbed, still useful relics (like your grandfather's bespoke Lobb's?) in an age of high tech Italian autoloaders and plastic "Transformer" rifles (Libby's term); their equivalents made today, costing way more than my house, are not as ... tangible as their older relatives; the highest- priced examples, largely bought by novo- Russian plutocrats, somehow decadent.