Novelists get the girls, scholars get the footnotes

“You,” Father said with a sad smile to his friend Israel Zarchi, “write a new novel every six months, and instantly all the pretty girls snatch you off the shelves and take you straight to bed with them, while we scholars, we wear ourselves out for years on end checking every detail, verifying every quotation, spending a week on a single footnote, and who bothers to read us? If we're lucky, two or three fellow prisoners in our own discipline read our books before they tear us to shreds. Sometimes not even that. We are simply ignored.”

Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness (Nicholas de Lange trans., 2003), p. 133.

George Eliot is for grown-ups

One of the harshest indictments of contemporary society is that there seems to be no place in it for George Eliot’s novels. The Edwardians rejected Eliot as a sensibility against which they needed to rebel; she was the antithesis of the experimental styles and iconoclastic politics of modernism. But our society has not rejected her on esthetic or ideological grounds. Her moral seriousness simply doesn’t register on our cultural landscape; most people don’t have the time or patience to read her "baggy monsters."

Ironically, she still appears in the one place she ought not to be: the high school curriculum, which often insists on assigning Silas Marner to 10th graders (when it is not performing the greater error of assigning Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome). As Virginia Woolf observed, Eliot wrote novels for grown-up people. Our society and our relationships would be saner and better if more grownups read her.

-- Paula Marantz Cohen, “Why Read George Eliot?” Am. Scholar, v. 75 no. 2, Spring 2006, 129, 132.

No time for novels, harumph

I have no patience with minutiae. I have spent my life cutting through trivia, getting to the core of a story. Maybe this is why I have read, from beginning to end, only two long novels in my lifetime: Gone with the Wind and Dr. Zhivago.

Leon Jaworski with Mickey Herskowitz, Confession and Avoidance: A Memoir (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979), p. 3, quoted in Jack Hamann, On American Soil: How Justice Became a Casualty of World War II (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2005), p. ____.

Writing with friends

When I began to make friends, writing was the vehicle. So that, in the beginning, writing, like reading, was less a solitary pursuit than an attempt to connect with others. I did not write alone but with another student in my class at school. We would sit together, this friend and I, dreaming up characters and plots, taking turns writing sections of the story, passing the pages back and forth. Our handwriting was the only thing that separated us, the only way to determine which section was whose. I always preferred rainy days to bright ones, so that we could stay indoors at recess, sit in the hallway, and concentrate. But even on nice days I found somewhere to sit, under a tree or on the ledge of the sandbox, with this friend, and sometimes one or two others, to continue the work on our tale. 

Jhumpa Lahiri, "Trading Stories," New Yorker, June 13 & 20, 2011, at 78, 79.

Real world versus fiction

“A lot happens in the real world for no good reason. If this were fiction, this little incident would have relevance thirty or so chapters from now; as it is it means nothing—after all, not every incident in life has a meaning."

"Tell that to the scholars who study me," Hamlet snorted disdainfully, then thought for a moment before adding: "If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher. Over-long, detailed to the point of distraction—and ultimately without a major resolution."

“Perhaps," I said thoughtfully, "that’s exactly what we like about it."

Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten (London: Hodder, 2004), p. 75.

Reality and fiction are that close

“The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think; a bit like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, but then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through; the hole is frozen over by the following morning.”

Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 206. (speaker is Victor Analogy, a SpecOps LiteraTec)

Stories have shape

The moment you put pen to paper and begin to shape a story, the essential nature of life—that one damn thing after another—is lost. No matter how ambiguous you try to make a story, no matter how many ends you leave hanging, it’s a package made to travel.

Dorothy Gallagher, “Recognizing the Book that Needs to Be Written,” in Writers on Writing Vol. II: More Collected Essays from The New York Times (introduction by Jane Smiley) (New York: Times Books, 2003), p. 65.