201pp
Read: 06/06- 06/08
Miranda July's 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know blew me away. Its honest exploration of how we relate to our fellow man and our belongings; how we strive to reach out to one another; how we want to poop into the butt of someone special, who in turn will poop back into all own butts, which we then will poop back; it all struck some magic balance between quirky inventiveness and heartfelt sincerity, artifice and insight into the human soul.
I'd really hoped, then, that Miranda July's fiction would perform a similarly virtuosic feat. This seems to be the goal of many young, contemporary writers today, and I'd figured July was up to the task. I'm trying hard not to lose esteem for her. It may simply be that fiction is not her forte. She comes from a performance art background, after all, and while standing before a roomful of strangers and speaking about sex & emotions, etc. nakedly and without artifice takes a lot of courage, and is laudable in that context, it makes for some uninteresting writing. July's prose is too plain, and she is frequently concerned with improbable emotional quandaries, or the details of sexual mechanics. This wide disconnect between plain, simple words and charged, intense subject matter can be moving when mediated by flesh-and-blood human beings like actors, or July in her capacity as a performance artist. But July's straightforward, unadulterated accounts of female orgasms and dysfunctional lesbian trysts only manage to occasionally raise an eyebrow, or amused smirk. My tone is harsh, I know, when really what I mean to say is that the book is entertaining, and a light, easy read. Usually this is high praise; I'd just had higher literary aspirations on behalf of Miranda July.
I should point out that this is in fact a book of "stories." Which, I almost never read short fiction. I sometimes feel bad about this; I am almost never as happy with short stories as I am with novels, and yet I know that novels are hardly objectively "better" than short fiction. I seem to have some deep-rooted prejudice against short-fiction. I approach everything I read with an implicit set of expectations which can only be met by a novel. And thus I wind up reading short fiction only rarely. This vexes me: I know that shorter pieces actually better lend themselves to well-crafted writing, and yet I constantly eschew them in favor of their bulkier brethren. Interestingly, for a while I mostly read novels in the 500 - 800 page range. During that time, my literary expectations likewise reflected what I tended to read: I was interested in fiction of sprawling scope, and often enormous casts. This changed for mostly practical considerations: after I got to law school, I was tired of spending months on the same piece of pleasure reading. Seeking higher turnover, I turned to shorter novels, and now that's what I prefer. I doubt that I'll ever do the same for short stories, though.
No comments:
Post a Comment