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a fiction of adequacy II When trying to think of novels that contained something of the sweep and attention to detail that would qualify them as examples of the type of fiction I talked about in yesterday's post, I came up with the following (very short) list: Don DeLillo, Underworld Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (and possibly The Crying of Lot 49 & Vineland) [Pynchon's fictional worlds are recognizably one step removed from our own, but their unfathomable complexity makes them ring true to me in a way that more ostensibly "realistic" representations don't] Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon [The main problem here is that Stephenson and I have ideological differences: I think of him as libertarian Right whereas I'm anarcho-communist Left, so although Cryptonomicon has a grand scope and a definite sense of "the fine grain of everyday experience" it's still not exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for. But close.] That's about it, really. If anybody else has suggestions that they think might qualify, use the ol' comments link down there. The shortage of good examples underlines a nagging concern that I have when talking about this stuff, which is that I'm not even entirely sure that a novel is the right fictional form for representing the Big Picture of the present. But if not a novel, then what? I still kind of believe that it might be "do-able" with a serialized form like Imaginary Year—I was happy with the way that I was able to integrate a ground's-eye view of big geopolitical events (9/11; the war in Iraq) into that work. There are other fictional forms that might also be well-adapted for telling "this type" of story, too: maybe an "augmented reality" fiction like 2001's Majestic or 2004's I Love Bees? Or maybe a graphic novel, full of complicated Chris-Ware-ish diagrams? Ware is a master of drawing out an impossibly complicated Big Picture and then zooming in and transfiguring a data-point into a narrative. If only I could draw better. Labels: novel_of_adequacy, writing

Sunday, October 09, 2005 2:32 PM   Comments: Post a Comment