this is a review I wrote of noah cicero's book, treatise; the review is kind of hesitant, but I really did enjoy reading the book. a lot of it was lazy and one-sided, but it was just great to see someone who really cares and who really thinks for himself. I mean I would really recommend that you (whoever you are, anyone who can read) read it, and say what you think about it.
one thing I didn't mention in the review is that the book had about a gajillion typos in it, which I don't know why they didn't proofread it, maybe it's supposed to enhance this impression of the lack of education of all the people in it; maybe that was an arrogant assumption, I don't know. in any case at several points the misspellings were totally hilarious. one page said "I had to eat Ramon because I had no money", and I just stared at it, and then realized he meant ramen. for some reason I found this so hysterically funny I almost coughed up a lung.
another funny part was when the sister told the main character she was pregnant and he said, totally out of nowhere, "you have something crawling in you, it is like a smarmy worm."
this post on noah's blog is also pretty funny.
2 comments:
hi,
thanks for the review.
i used the word fashionable because it was fashionable at a time to do a good amout of telling, at anther it was fashionable to write epic poems, etc. That's all I meant by that. If you ever try to get an agent or get published somewhere where they pay their authors a lot of money, they try tell you delete every sentence that is "telling" until it is like a movie scene and not a book at all Tao Lin has several lines per story that "tells" not "shows." And Harpers and Random won't publish him. There is like an extreme aversion currently to any 'telling' at all. But at the same time if you ask a person, "Was proust a genius?" They will go, "yes." Movies have had a really bad effect on literature, people have come to expect these straight scenes, like, here is the scene, it happened, lets go to the next one. With no analysis being made.
For the comment, " the grandfather, really confused me though, in fact a lot of misail's family did. they were so weirdly honest about the fact that their lives were mostly about money. most of the people I meet in the suburban society I live in don't think about money because they have it - they don't see their life as a constant effort to get money."
The grandfather is some kind of Mailer character, he always has this old man giving a monologue about life. He isn't a human, just that subliminal voice that the media and schools have, that this is life, nothing matters but money, money is life, ambition is life. It is kind of like a Hummer or mutual fund commercial or your tenth grade snobbish teacher who constantly lectures the class on how they need to do something with their life and go to college and be this personified.
The upper class people in the book are based off north eastern ohio Sicilians. And they really dont' do anything but watch television and eat. But they still like their master position in the area, but instead of doing anything worthwhile with their money like taking a vacation to Africa or learning a new thing. They buy a really big television and spend 15,000 dollars on weddings. And go to Las Vegas for vecation constantly. And sadly talk about money constantly. And on a little with white british and german north eastern upper class people who behave like rednecks and show their money by buying expensive four wheelers and fishing equipment.
The Rust Belt people are like their own version of America. But there is nothing in the media that represents them. I hope it is read as a thing on America, but at the same time a thing on a piece of america that is usually never discussed. I should have written an introduction or something.
hi noah, sorry it took me a bit to see this comment was here.
re: the telling not showing...this is a fine balance. I agree that not using "telling" ever is going to give you a really bland and pointless piece of work; but it's also tricky to get the telling in there without making it sound really obvious, like a reader could tell the writer is just engineering the story to be a certain way. I think it's interesting to have characters who say what they think, which gives the reader much more insight than trying to have the character just say something inane and forcing the reader to read some deeper meaning into it; but I also think you have to be realistic about how self-aware your characters are. I don't think most people are aware of their own motivations or impulses, so having them say them seems forced most of the time. not that it can't be done though. I've seen some really good writing where the author was able to portray a character who felt a certain way but didn't know it, but it was very clear in the way they talked. the things we say are totally revealing if you really analyze them.
I don't know. I have trouble with fiction sometimes because it's so artificial like this. trying to make it seem natural seems cheap somehow but also necessary..you have to do some amount of convincing the reader of you are saying or there will be no communication.
I haven't read mailer but that paragraph made sense to me, I wish I had gotten that sense when I was reading it. I don't think you want to make an intro though, that means you have to use something outside the text to explain or justify it, which I don't think is good.
you could just include those last two paragraphs to explain what the people in ohio are like, I was entertained while reading them and it wouldn't seem that out of place in a story.
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