Obviously I'm inclined to think so because I happened to read them back to back. However: The Feast of Love (2001) and A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010) are similar enough to make you wonder.
A point in Charles Baxter's favor is that Feast's characters are comparatively ordinary Midwesterners, rather than trendy New Yorkers working in or connected with the music industry, like Jennifer Egan's.
Also, I doubt (as of page 84) that Egan's enjoyable structural choreography (flash-forwards within flashbacks, etc) will turn out to be anything more than that, such as an analog of a world view.
(Egan is being reviewed as a post-modernist, which I guess still applies even though her favored devices don't seem especially radical. Almost the opposite. Gothic novels like The Saragossa Manuscript had lots more embedded stories. And the device now known as the flash forward used to be a prerogative of the omniscient Victorian narrator. It reminds me of Trollope taking his readers aside to reassure them about the outcome of a troubled love story.)
Baxter is a bit of square who believes we're all connected. The book is about the accretion of an extended family. Such literary fancy footwork as he does employ is, arguably, strictly functional; required because the events he's narrating are intertwined. Egan, so far, seems less serious, more playful. Both congenial, but in different ways.
In her first few pages Egan pulls off a neat trick that may or may not be revealing: Introducing both of her major characters, Bennie and Sasha, by plunging us immediately into their most unmentionable secrets, their deepest soutrces of shame. An instant, powerful sense of intimacy is created -- though we hope this emphasis isn't reductive; that she doesn't believe that in all cases the worst thing you can say about a person is also the most fundamental.
COOL UPDATE: Egan on Masur.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Notes on Baxter and Egan
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9 comments:
Of course, many will applaud anyone who can pull off 'enjoyable structural choreography' without demanding some sort of broader meaning....
Enjoyability is a pretty high virtue, seems to me, especially when my tendency is to find most things tacky, pre-digested, irritating, or stupid. Or all of those things.
Anyway, as a means to telling a story that takes place over forty years with a dozen or so important characters, structural playfulness sure beats the old best-seller trick of alternative POVs bringing the story from a to b and then to c....
I plan to live my life from now on so as never to risk doing or producing anything that you will consider tacky, pre-digested, irritating, or stupid. Should be pretty easy. I'll just sit on my hands, like I've been doing up 'til now.
The serious point is that anyone who tries to do anything worthwhile risks failure and public humiliation. So I should have contempt for those people? They're a hell of a lot braver than I am.
(Note to self, if you want.)
You shouldn't let your admiration for all artists to hide the uselessness of most of them - except of course to their friends and family....
What Baxter does that I don't think Egan ever does is reveal himself. Artists who do that are in different category, IMO.
There are plenty of books to read if you want authorial revelation...
Shakespeare never reveals himself, except perhaps in the sonnets.
An over-rated quality, IMO.
A very revealing thing to say, BTW. So there.
I commend to your attention a short 'parable' by Borges, called "Everything and Nothing":
THERE was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one.......
History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of God and told Him: 'I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and myself.' The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: 'Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.'
Nothing from Nabokov?
"Shakespeare never reveals himself, except perhaps in the sonnets."
Then there is the fact that you can read all of his Comedies through the lens of Sonnet 116. For the most part the comedies are a narrative expression of the argument put forth in that poem. Look at "Much Ado About Nothing" as a test case.
On the other hand, one should not look to an author's writings for his/her real thoughts on life. I find it annoying when people say something like "Oscar Wilde said x," when in fact it was one of his characters who said x. Additionally, said quote may have been delivered for the sake of irony and have nothing to do with Wilde's actual opinions.
The only time you know you are reading an author's "real world" opinions is when they are writing non-fiction essays. All else is illusion and projection. You cannot "know" that the written word is the author's opinion.
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