I think that The Lost Ones, by Sheena Kamal, is an excellent mystery novel. It is its own thing, but if you liked Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, or the Easy Rollins novels of Walter Moseley, you should like this novel too! For more on this, see my review recently published in Washington Independent Review of Books.
From time to time, I have had mixed feelings about Gore Vidal. The man was, on occasion brilliant (Julian; his essays), but also had a streak of cynical elitism that sometimes put me off. That said, I want to shout “HIP HOORAY for his statement at the end of his essay, “Thomas Love Peacock: The Novel of Ideas,” published in the New York Review of Books, December 4, 1980. Vidal wrote:
…write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect: that is the only way out of the dead end of the Serious Novel which so many ambitious people want to write and no one on earth–or even on campus–wants to read.
Vidal began this essay finding fault with the American idea of the “Serious Novel,” stating, “…for Americans, sincerity if not authenticity is all-important; and requires a minimum of invention,” and “During the last fifty years [fifty years before 1980, when he wrote this–but also largely true today, I think], the main line of the Serious American Novel has been almost exclusively concerned with the doings and feelings, often erotic, of white middle-class Americans, often schoolteachers, as they confront what they take to be life. It should be noted that these problems seldom have much or anything to do with politics, with theories of education, with the nature of the good. … Irony and wit are unknown while the preferred view of the human estate is standard American…For some reason, dialogue tends to be minimal and flat.”
Vidal suggests that to salvage the novel form, a tactic that might work is to infiltrate the genre forms. “To fill them up, stealthily, with ideas, wit, subversive notions… .” To some degree, in the years since Vidal wrote those words, so-called genre novels have done so. (eg. Walter Moseley’s work; much of Stephen King’s work–the metaphor of IT, for example; and most certainly, the short stories of Connie Willis which I have recently been reading).
For Vidal’s term, “Serious American Novel,” I might substitute the term “Literary Novel.” I’m not sure when that latter term was coined, but I suspect it was after 1980. In any event, there is a difference between a literary novel and true literature. I believe it is that difference to which Vidal was speaking.
I declare here and now to Ms. Willis and to the world: I LOVE CONNIE WILLIS. I love her short stories. I love the way she writes. And, most importantly, I love the way her mind works!
I am in the midst of reading The Best of Connie Willis, Award-Winning stories, which also features her lively short afterwards to each story. All so far exhibit a very sharp mind and humor. Where she is going with them tends to sneak up on you. The serious stories make me tear up towards the end; the humorous stories also make me tear up even while I am laughing at the beauty of what she is doing. (And her humorous stories, like At the Rialto, are not just light pieces but also have a depth to them.) READ HER!
In the department of “close but no cigar, but YAY anyway,” I was informed on June 21st that I was a finalist (ranking 6th out of 13 finalists) for a grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation.
My story, The Words Strike Back is out in Peacock Journal.
My last quotes from Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (from chapter 36):
“More and more, as I think about history,” [Doremus] pondered, “I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.”
Eventually, there is a revolt against Windrip’s dictatorship, but it does not get very far:
“…there the revolt halted, because in the American which had so warmly praised itself for its ‘widespread popular free education,’ there had been so very little education; widespread, popular, free, or anything else, that most people did not know what they wanted–indeed knew about so few things to want at all.”
Doremus [and so Sinclair Lewis] on the press (from chapter 20):
“All these years he had heard responsible men who weren’t being quite honest–radio announcers who soft-soaped speakers who were fools and wares that were trash, and who canaryishly chirped, ‘Thank you, Major Blister’ when they would rather have kicked Major Blister, preachers who did not believe the decayed doctrines they dealt out, doctors who did not dare tell lady invalids that they were sex-hungry exhibitionists, merchants who peddled brass for gold–heard all of them complacently excuse themselves by explaining that they were too old to change and that they had a ‘wife and family to support.'”
and Doremus [and so, Sinclair Lewis] on the commonality of fascism and communism (from chapter 36):
“He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism. But he saw tooth in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor.”