In the US, where Tóibín will return for another semester after Christmas, he says ‘there’s a great rule, that if you’re invited to someone’s home you must be standing up leaving by 9.40.’ A couple of times he and novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, a colleague at Princeton, broke this rule and on one occasion a dinner ended in a row. He and Eugenides were on one side, defending their craft, while the art historians on the other side of the argument made the case for the avant-garde. ‘How dare you even mention Samuel Beckett’ was the gist of their attack, ‘when you’re pumping out old-fashioned social realist novels that middle-class consumers want to buy.’
(Guardian Review, 23 October)
You can't answer the unanswerable.
ReplyDeleteI'm no fan of Beckett's prose, but that doesn't mean I'm condemned to read the gormless Eugenides and the boring unruffled calm of Toibin endless I'm-looking-out-over-the-waves-on-some-Wexford-beach-and-thinking...
ReplyDeleteThe realist, bourgeois tradition is in rude good health, as evidenced by the likes of Franzen and Updike. Sounds like a dinner party worth missing.
Yawn.
ReplyDeleteGive me Dan Brown any day.
Didn't know where else to post this but I thought you might enjoy it
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VlPnVLLVGk