Village Voice: Fall Books Preview

I missed this when it was posted a week ago, but they take a look at some good books. More importantly, they try to create a context for the books they are looking at.

From The Village Voice:

In the Dark

by Giles Harvey

September 5th, 2007

If you strain your eyes for a moment and look beyond the smokescreen of hyperbole, mawkishness, and more or less euphonious drivel to be found in the pages of the publishers' catalogs, it is plain to see that in the oversaturated and underfed marketplace of literature, business is going on very much as usual: Philip Roth has written another novel about what it's like to be a novelist in American; John Updike has decided that the time has once again come to garner the fruits of his journalistic endeavors into a stout block of prose; J.M. Coetzee continues his attempts to wrestle the materially comfortable portion of mankind out of its complacency; and so on.

Beneath it all, however, one senses a dark current tugging at the contemporary imagination. Indeed, as unregulated American capitalism continues to rape the earth and infantilize the minds of millions, and the doltish brinkmanship of the administration inches the world ever closer to the end of days, it is no surprise to find that rage, disgust, and terror should register not infrequently on the sensitivity radars of our foremost authors. From Roth's The Ghost Writer we can expect such fulminations as: "The despising without remission that constitutes being a conscientious citizen in the reign of George W. Bush was not for one who had developed a strong interest in surviving as reasonably serene—and so I began to annihilate the abiding wish to find out."

Or again, here is Coetzee, in a remarkable sentence-long epic, summarizing the career of Tony Blair, and providing a needful antidote to the fawning valedictions that have marked the end of his premiership: "An ordinary little middle-class boy with all the correct attitudes (the rich should subsidize the poor, the military should be kept on a tight rein, civil rights should be defended against the inroads of the state), but with no philosophical grounding and little capacity for introspection, and with no inner compass save personal ambition, embarks on the voyage of politics, with all its warping forces, and ends up an enthusiast for entrepreneurial greed and the sedulous monkey of masters in Washington, turning a dutifully blind eye (see no evil, hear no evil) while their shadowy agents assassinate, torture and 'disappear' opponents at will."

But things cannot be as bleak as they seem so long as there are books and a little leisure time in which to read them. Emerson put it rather well: "Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire."

Read the reviews at their site.

Tags: The Village Voice, In the Dark, Giles Harvey, books, reviews, literature