Collected Miscellany

Some stimulating pixels for your viewing pleasure:

– Ross Douthat discusses Jules Verne sans Captain Nemo over at Books & Culture:

Memory forgives a multitude of literary sins. Middling prose, wooden characterization, boilerplate dialogue—all of these will be overlooked, if a writer can only seize upon one great story and carry it off reasonably well. James Fenimore Cooper’s novels are bathed in bathos and bad writing, but he has survived two centuries of critical disdain because of five thrilling words: The Last of the Mohicans. H. Rider Haggard churned out 69 books that are forgotten by everyone save scholars of Victorian arcane—but King Solomon’s Mines ensured his immortality even so. Bram Stoker wrote 12 terrible novels, but nobody cares, because the thirteenth was Dracula.

Then there is Jules Verne. He is remembered by the critics as “the father of science fiction” and hailed for his uncanny technological forecasts: submarines and skyscrapers, rocket ships and long-range missiles. But in the popular imagination, it doesn’t matter much anymore that Verne wrote about space flight 90 years before it happened, or that his descriptions of a deep-diving submarine inspired inventors to improve upon the primitive designs of the 1860s. What endures are his stories, not his prophecies: Phileas Fogg racing around the world and against the clock; Captain Nemo, the deep-sea revolutionary, plotting his course through depths where even Ahab feared to tread.

Robert Birnbaum has another interview up at Identity Theory. This time he talks with Elizabeth Benedict author of The Practice of Deceit. Here is his description:

Elizabeth Benedict and I (and Rosie) met on a fair, late summer Saturday at a favored venue, The Mt. Auburn Cemetery, for a wide-ranging conversation. It, of course, included her latest novel, literary generational divides, cultural distractions from literature, Philip Roth’s Everyman, high school literature, the con artist story, Grub Street, sex (or at least writing about sex), Sigrid Nunez and a generous portion of snappy repartee (which may have been edited out).

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Some stimulating pixels for your viewing pleasure:

– Ross Douthat discusses Jules Verne sans Captain Nemo over at Books & Culture:

Memory forgives a multitude of literary sins. Middling prose, wooden characterization, boilerplate dialogue—all of these will be overlooked, if a writer can only seize upon one great story and carry it off reasonably well. James Fenimore Cooper’s novels are bathed in bathos and bad writing, but he has survived two centuries of critical disdain because of five thrilling words: The Last of the Mohicans. H. Rider Haggard churned out 69 books that are forgotten by everyone save scholars of Victorian arcane—but King Solomon’s Mines ensured his immortality even so. Bram Stoker wrote 12 terrible novels, but nobody cares, because the thirteenth was Dracula.

Then there is Jules Verne. He is remembered by the critics as “the father of science fiction” and hailed for his uncanny technological forecasts: submarines and skyscrapers, rocket ships and long-range missiles. But in the popular imagination, it doesn’t matter much anymore that Verne wrote about space flight 90 years before it happened, or that his descriptions of a deep-diving submarine inspired inventors to improve upon the primitive designs of the 1860s. What endures are his stories, not his prophecies: Phileas Fogg racing around the world and against the clock; Captain Nemo, the deep-sea revolutionary, plotting his course through depths where even Ahab feared to tread.

Robert Birnbaum has another interview up at Identity Theory. This time he talks with Elizabeth Benedict author of The Practice of Deceit. Here is his description:

Elizabeth Benedict and I (and Rosie) met on a fair, late summer Saturday at a favored venue, The Mt. Auburn Cemetery, for a wide-ranging conversation. It, of course, included her latest novel, literary generational divides, cultural distractions from literature, Philip Roth’s Everyman, high school literature, the con artist story, Grub Street, sex (or at least writing about sex), Sigrid Nunez and a generous portion of snappy repartee (which may have been edited out).

Continue reading →

The Christian Fiction Blog Alliance rolls on this week with Something That Lasts by James David Jordan. Seeing how I am ridiculously behind in my reading I had to skip this one. But it looks interesting. The book’s description certainly grabs your attention:

When Ted Balik rises from his pew to speak, no one in the crowded sanctuary of the O’Fallon Bible Church can imagine that their peaceful community will be shattered by his shocking disclosure: Reverend David Parst, beloved husband and father and pastor, committed the unthinkable crime. He had an affair with Mrs. Balik. As the church members explode into an uproar, Ted silently grabs a gun out of his pocket, raises it to his temple and pulls the trigger. These few moments of horror plunge the reverend, his wife and their twelve-year-old son into a struggle with God and one another that will span generations – a struggle to find something that lasts beyond the rage, lies and fear.

More information can be found at the author’s website.

The Christian Fiction Blog Alliance rolls on this week with Something That Lasts by James David Jordan. Seeing how I am ridiculously behind in my reading I had to skip this one. But it looks interesting. The book’s description certainly grabs your attention:

When Ted Balik rises from his pew to speak, no one in the crowded sanctuary of the O’Fallon Bible Church can imagine that their peaceful community will be shattered by his shocking disclosure: Reverend David Parst, beloved husband and father and pastor, committed the unthinkable crime. He had an affair with Mrs. Balik. As the church members explode into an uproar, Ted silently grabs a gun out of his pocket, raises it to his temple and pulls the trigger. These few moments of horror plunge the reverend, his wife and their twelve-year-old son into a struggle with God and one another that will span generations – a struggle to find something that lasts beyond the rage, lies and fear.

More information can be found at the author’s website.

This week is the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance tour for the novel Squat by Taylor Field.

What in the world is a book with the title “Squat” about? Here is the publisher’s description:

“We live in a squat. We don’t know squat. We don’t have squat. We don’t do squat. We don’t give a squat. People say we’re not worth squat.”

In the shadow of Wall Street’s wealth, homeless people with names like Squid, Saw, and Bonehead live in abandoned buildings known as “squats” where life is hand to mouth, where fear and violence fester. The light in Squid’s obsessive-compulsive mind’s eye is Rachel, a loving soup kitchen missionary who tells him about faith and unfaith, hypocrisy and justice, the character of God and finding identity in Him. And in the wild twenty-four-hour passage of literary time that is Squat, Squid begins to believe that his life may actually amount to something.

When I first heard about the book and saw the blurb I was intrigued by the potentially unique perspective it offered; particularly as the author has a great deal of real life experience in this area having worked in inner city ministries in New York since 1986. With an M.Div. from Princeton and Ph.D. from Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, and a well received non-fiction book on the subject, I was interested to see how he communicated his world and experiences in fiction form.

Unfortunately while I did find the subject matter and perspective interesting, I was mostly disappointed with the book as a whole. Field sets up the story with a strong first chapter and the novel successfully helps the reader to conceptualize and experience the daily issues that the homeless face. But after a strong start the story begins to drag and mostly falls flat. The Publishers Weekly review sums it up well:

While Field may know this world well, the characters he creates are not compelling enough to get readers to care very much about what happens to them. The dialogue is decent (if a few of the witnessing scenes feel improbable), but the story moves far too slowly to an unsatisfying conclusion. While this could have made a fine short story, there’s not enough material for a book.

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