Your take is much more reasonable than Byron’s. I probably won’t read either book. my impulse is to back away when anything gets this much buzz, positive or negative, and wait a year or two after the hype dies down. i miss out on being part of the discourse but that’s ok. i’m adding Patricia Lockwood to my list.
Yes, if I didn't have this blog I'd likely have avoided the whole thing too, but felt I had some sort of duty to weigh in on the thing. I've got two more responses to recent books in the pipes but after that I'm going to take a well-deserved break from "hype books" as I think it's bad for my soul. Lockwood's book is stylistically interesting but the second part of the book fell a little flat for me, but it's worth checking out as example imo of "virtual realism" as its been dubbed (perhaps more appropriately "virtual SURrealism," but maybe that's really the same thing at the end of the day). An old collaborator cum bitter rival of mine, Adam Haiun, recently published a book I'd once helped workshop that I think manages something similar, which I think he nearly reaches but falls just short, it's a difficult balancing act to pull off that's for sure.
Well, I'll say that it's at the very least "okay." The one I would recommend would be Cash's first book, Earth Angel. As I said, it's a bit uneven, but when it hits it hits. Reminds me a lot of Fawn Parker's first collection, "Looking Good and Having a Good Time" from ten or so years ago.
Has a race to produce a zeitgeisty novel ever produced anything really good? I think competition is helpful for writers, but it's usually like, who can better depict insomnia, not "who can best summarize the mood in the moderately edgy parts of the internet." The impatience and obsession with topicality is exhausting.
The conspiracy to elevate Cash's book just seems like the invisible hand at work. It's widely understood that there's a market for zeitgeisty novels by young, attractive women and if everyone cooperates, everyone gets paid, not paid off, just normal paid. I do think the tendency of contemporary publishing to encourage this type of collusion should be criticized, but it needs to be a structural critique of how publishers and critics are incentivized, not a conspiracy theory.
Your take is much more reasonable than Byron’s. I probably won’t read either book. my impulse is to back away when anything gets this much buzz, positive or negative, and wait a year or two after the hype dies down. i miss out on being part of the discourse but that’s ok. i’m adding Patricia Lockwood to my list.
Yes, if I didn't have this blog I'd likely have avoided the whole thing too, but felt I had some sort of duty to weigh in on the thing. I've got two more responses to recent books in the pipes but after that I'm going to take a well-deserved break from "hype books" as I think it's bad for my soul. Lockwood's book is stylistically interesting but the second part of the book fell a little flat for me, but it's worth checking out as example imo of "virtual realism" as its been dubbed (perhaps more appropriately "virtual SURrealism," but maybe that's really the same thing at the end of the day). An old collaborator cum bitter rival of mine, Adam Haiun, recently published a book I'd once helped workshop that I think manages something similar, which I think he nearly reaches but falls just short, it's a difficult balancing act to pull off that's for sure.
Hey if you say it's good, I'm gonna have to check it out
Well, I'll say that it's at the very least "okay." The one I would recommend would be Cash's first book, Earth Angel. As I said, it's a bit uneven, but when it hits it hits. Reminds me a lot of Fawn Parker's first collection, "Looking Good and Having a Good Time" from ten or so years ago.
Has a race to produce a zeitgeisty novel ever produced anything really good? I think competition is helpful for writers, but it's usually like, who can better depict insomnia, not "who can best summarize the mood in the moderately edgy parts of the internet." The impatience and obsession with topicality is exhausting.
The conspiracy to elevate Cash's book just seems like the invisible hand at work. It's widely understood that there's a market for zeitgeisty novels by young, attractive women and if everyone cooperates, everyone gets paid, not paid off, just normal paid. I do think the tendency of contemporary publishing to encourage this type of collusion should be criticized, but it needs to be a structural critique of how publishers and critics are incentivized, not a conspiracy theory.