Comments above give good examples of the kind of small details that can create a character in the reader's mind with an economy of effort. One doesn't have to repeat such things throughout a novel to get the point across. Such minor delineations of character -- remember the maxim "action is character" -- are often worth ten thousand physical descriptions. And...
more Comments above give good examples of the kind of small details that can create a character in the reader's mind with an economy of effort. One doesn't have to repeat such things throughout a novel to get the point across. Such minor delineations of character -- remember the maxim "action is character" -- are often worth ten thousand physical descriptions. And these characters aren't wildly quirky in the gonzo sense -- precise observations of small (but character-revealing) observations are excellent. These are WRITERLY observations of a very high order. Just as becoming an artist demands a new way of SEEING (such as seeing negative space), so does becoming a writer demand a new and more careful way of OBSERVING (such as plucking a very few revealing character traits from the overwhelming penetralium of mystery that is human behavior -- i.e. the glasses stems, once or twice remarked upon, which a later character observes to have been well-chewed. This is, to cite an obscure reference I won't elaborate on, Madame Bovary's umbrella all over again). ADA is a revelation. Read it and explain to me why it and he didn't win a World Fantasy Award. Actually, I also find much of Nabokov's short fiction among the best there is. (Beware the Vine Sisters!) And his teaching notes to such novels as MADAME BOVARY and BLEAK HOUSE are also in print. In Vladimir Nabokov's wonderful introduction to his lecture notes for MADAME BOVARY (and also for Austen's MANSFIELD PARK, Joyce's ULYSSES, Stevenson's DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, Kafka's METAMORPHOSIS, and Dickens's BLEAK HOUSE), VN talks about the "good reader" and says that he or she cannot be too much the slave to imagination and feeling and the wish to feel (ala Emma Bovary) nor too much the objective scientist, but rather a dynamic blend of both. And the same must be true, I think, for the writer -- or as Nabokov says of the great writers -- "Part teacher, part scientist, part enchanter." I don't believe there's a single "sympathetic character" in Flaubert's MADAME BOVARY -- we want to root for Emma, but she's such a selfish, shallow, self-destructive idiot that it's very hard to identify or root for her in any terms of "sympathizing" -- but the writing is so incredibly powerful that generation after generation of readers find Emma Bovary and her literally sordid tale unforgettable. What a silly question. "Lethal cocktail" -- what a foul euphemism. Why enrich pharmaceutical companies, Obama's bane, when good old rat poison is so cheaply and universally available? Have you not read Madame Bovary, sir? That was a fine death . . . and physician attended! Is anybody interested in these films? Cate Blanchett in The Good German, which apparently is Soderbergh's homage to noir in general and The Third Man in specific. Factory Girl, which is the Edie Sedgwick story, basically. I must confess to a perverse curiosity about Guy's Pearce's performance as Andy Warhol. Todd Fields' Little Children. I actually have seen this one, and cannot recommend it. Even if you liked American Beauty, this melodrama about suburbia gone bad is, except for Kate Winslet's performance as Sarah, excessive. I really liked Fields as an actor (he was in Ashley Judd's one good movie. Ruby in Paradise), and coming out of indie film, I had hopes for him. But In the Bedroom didn't do much for me and in this...well, he does deliver a film full of beautiful images, but this story about suburban moms who gather in a park and talk about men etc is dreadfully overcooked. Winslet's Sarah is supposed to be a dowdy housewife (she looks absolutely gorgeous, even though she dresses the part) doesn't fit in with the other wives, a situation made clear when she defends Emma Bovary at her book club and is told that Emma is "a slut." She initiates an affair wit Brad, who's called "The Prom King" by the other wives, a hunky idiot married to Jennifer Connely (in an utterly thankless role). Eventually judgment is rendered courtesy of a creepy Deus ex child molester. Just as in American beauty judgment comes in the form of a gay marine. It's all so very Puritanical. And ridiculous. And just bad. But Winslet is pretty damn good. There's been very little talk of Thomas Pynchon, but also no discussion of William Gaddis, of Proust, of Flaubert's novels outside of Madame Bovary, of Don DeLillo's astounding work, of the shocking originality of Flannery O'Connor or Walker Percy or Jose Saramago or Philip Roth. MADAME BOVARY -- don't read it for the first time or re-read it in the same week that you're looking at THE GREAT GATSBY. Your head will explode. We could apply the question to Flaubert. By choosing a bourgeois topic and banal bourgeois characters in MADAME BOVARY, he poured the fullness of his talent into a slender vessel . . . but Emma Bovary still reaches out to us as a human being, however provincial and flawed. The result of Flaubert's deliberate restrictions upon himself seems to produce a powerful -- perhaps not totally intended -- synergy. But in his later novels Flaubert worked harder on literally "writing about nothing" and thus depending most heavily upon irony as a constant thread -- a precursor to our modern literary age, of course -- but also an effort in which, even when he succeeds, he leaves us in awe of the prose but with little or no attachment to the people in the tale.
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