Foe

(In the above icon, the Brigadier is questioning Sarah Barton's reliability as a narrator, and indeed what Foe gains from the post-modern ambiguity of its structure. (When it comes to mutinies, maimed masts, and more maritime misadventures, the Brigadier is really more of a Hornblower man, himself.))

The shame about winning a Nobel Prize is that it means people are forced to read your novel as a 'Noble Prize Winning Book,' and subsequently harshly interrogate why some not-terribly-interesting published fanfiction stumbled out of the genre-ghetto to receive this honor.

The book's premise--to include (gasp!!) a woman on Crusoe's island, and through her presence to plumb both the original novel's failings and larger questions about speech, signification and authorship--is fundamentally pretty interesting. The writing is fundamentally sound on a prose level. And yet the novel itself, while no where NEAR the slog Crusoe was, is still really unsatisfying and progressively duller--and not in an 'ah, now I'm really Pondering Complex Shit' way.

For one, the Unnecessary Artistic Vagueness got to me. I'm not sure there were good actual creative reasons to be terribly coy about the facts of the novel (more on Reasons for Choices in a little bit) while insisting on the primacy of truth. The book seems at several points to be pretentiously handing you some Truths about the source novel, the act of writing, and how communication interscects with social justice and feminity. These are... nothing you couldn't come up with in a quick and dirty book review and/or Think about Feminists What Like Foucault And Shit? Nothing particularly worth the book's self-conscious sense of it's own Depth? Whatever, you can write a novel about relatively basic conceptual shit that's your prerogative. But it's weird to sell it as a thinkpiece.

I could talk about factual questions--is or isn't the stranger her daughter, is Susan the First mad--but I'm not sure there's anything solid under there to find, after that digging. The author doesn't know, and the answers don't matter.

It's sort of an anti-Inception. I came away from that with the familiar conclusion that Authenticity was less important than Feeling: it doesn't matter if you're living in a dream, you can't ever know for certain, and as such, given that your experience seems real to you, your only option is to live as normal, in the presumption that your world is real. It doesn't matter if the entire emotional arc of the Heir is stage-managed from the beginning. If The Heir creates and instills meaning in the experiences, then the emotional 'truths' he discovers via this highly artificial means (this 'Inception' process) are valid, are meaningful to him. In Foe, the Truth Susan is initially so insistent on is uncertain and ultimately meaningless--I don't care about these formless characters, and Susan's precious details are only as significant as bits of sidewalk debris are when I'm walking somewhere in a hurry.

Characterization in the novel is unimportant compared to the thematic content (which reads as gross as it sounds), and thus unrealistic (what exactly is Susan's background? She's friendless, sourceless, yet incredibly well-educated and articulate? Unbelievably perfect, capable of making all the smug a-periodical remarks we Enlightened Readers want to when reading the original--and composed in speech as no one actually is in life, archaic language and forms or no.). The fact that this may all be in Susan's mind makes it unimportant that everyone in the novel has absolutely identical, ornate speech patterns.

If the book had done more, I probably wouldn't be questioning who this white South African male professional writer is to talk about a female's gender-related devaluation and Friday's race-related devaluation in the context of an in-story male writer who appropriates their experiences and takes their voices, using them as his own.


It feels cheap to say things like 'there are no plot or characters' because I think, thematically, he meant for there to be none. And if that's his artistic aim... fine, but what now? What have the things we've given up bought us?

This is sort of unreliable narrator gone wrong? Last night it was pointed out to me that Bateman didn't glaringly display his untrustworthiness until you the reader were relatively invested. But in Foe, there's nothing like investment, either in the characters or in the purposefully non-existant plot, to drag you along. Dull, tired questions are raised without hope of answer or even interesting new direction, and little else. The ending is a soupy blah. Coetze does turn a pretty phrase, and I could pull pleasant examples, but ultimately it'd be kind of pointless. Much like Foe. I don't even hate it--there's nothing specifically present enough to hate.

Foe

(In the above icon, the Brigadier is questioning Sarah Barton's reliability as a narrator, and indeed what Foe gains from the post-modern ambiguity of its structure. (When it comes to mutinies, maimed masts, and more maritime misadventures, the Brigadier is really more of a Hornblower man, himself.))

The shame about winning a Nobel Prize is that it means people are forced to read your novel as a 'Noble Prize Winning Book,' and subsequently harshly interrogate why some not-terribly-interesting published fanfiction stumbled out of the genre-ghetto to receive this honor.

The book's premise--to include (gasp!!) a woman on Crusoe's island, and through her presence to plumb both the original novel's failings and larger questions about speech, signification and authorship--is fundamentally pretty interesting. The writing is fundamentally sound on a prose level. And yet the novel itself, while no where NEAR the slog Crusoe was, is still really unsatisfying and progressively duller--and not in an 'ah, now I'm really Pondering Complex Shit' way.

For one, the Unnecessary Artistic Vagueness got to me. I'm not sure there were good actual creative reasons to be terribly coy about the facts of the novel (more on Reasons for Choices in a little bit) while insisting on the primacy of truth. The book seems at several points to be pretentiously handing you some Truths about the source novel, the act of writing, and how communication interscects with social justice and feminity. These are... nothing you couldn't come up with in a quick and dirty book review and/or Think about Feminists What Like Foucault And Shit? Nothing particularly worth the book's self-conscious sense of it's own Depth? Whatever, you can write a novel about relatively basic conceptual shit that's your prerogative. But it's weird to sell it as a thinkpiece.

I could talk about factual questions--is or isn't the stranger her daughter, is Susan the First mad--but I'm not sure there's anything solid under there to find, after that digging. The author doesn't know, and the answers don't matter.

It's sort of an anti-Inception. I came away from that with the familiar conclusion that Authenticity was less important than Feeling: it doesn't matter if you're living in a dream, you can't ever know for certain, and as such, given that your experience seems real to you, your only option is to live as normal, in the presumption that your world is real. It doesn't matter if the entire emotional arc of the Heir is stage-managed from the beginning. If The Heir creates and instills meaning in the experiences, then the emotional 'truths' he discovers via this highly artificial means (this 'Inception' process) are valid, are meaningful to him. In Foe, the Truth Susan is initially so insistent on is uncertain and ultimately meaningless--I don't care about these formless characters, and Susan's precious details are only as significant as bits of sidewalk debris are when I'm walking somewhere in a hurry.

Characterization in the novel is unimportant compared to the thematic content (which reads as gross as it sounds), and thus unrealistic (what exactly is Susan's background? She's friendless, sourceless, yet incredibly well-educated and articulate? Unbelievably perfect, capable of making all the smug a-periodical remarks we Enlightened Readers want to when reading the original--and composed in speech as no one actually is in life, archaic language and forms or no.). The fact that this may all be in Susan's mind makes it unimportant that everyone in the novel has absolutely identical, ornate speech patterns.

If the book had done more, I probably wouldn't be questioning who this white South African male professional writer is to talk about a female's gender-related devaluation and Friday's race-related devaluation in the context of an in-story male writer who appropriates their experiences and takes their voices, using them as his own.


It feels cheap to say things like 'there are no plot or characters' because I think, thematically, he meant for there to be none. And if that's his artistic aim... fine, but what now? What have the things we've given up bought us?

This is sort of unreliable narrator gone wrong? Last night it was pointed out to me that Bateman didn't glaringly display his untrustworthiness until you the reader were relatively invested. But in Foe, there's nothing like investment, either in the characters or in the purposefully non-existant plot, to drag you along. Dull, tired questions are raised without hope of answer or even interesting new direction, and little else. The ending is a soupy blah. Coetze does turn a pretty phrase, and I could pull pleasant examples, but ultimately it'd be kind of pointless. Much like Foe. I don't even hate it--there's nothing specifically present enough to hate.