B.S. Johnson
It's exciting to see that not only has B.S. Johnson's 1969 novel The Unfortunates been republished by New Directions—and months ago, which shows how well I've been paying attention—but that it's also received a full-page review in tomorrow's NYTBR:
Though I greatly admire Johnson's later novel House Mother Normal (and used to teach it in an advanced fiction writing seminar), I've never read The Unfortunates, in part because the original copies are fairly to very expensive and/or difficult to track down. I will certainly be buying this edition.
Charles Taylor's review of the novel might be more exciting if Taylor did not feel the need to assure "readers—those sometimes forgotten creatures who quite rightly don't care much about form, preferring to invest themselves in narrative, emotion, and character—[that] The Unfortunates, despite its unorthodox presentation, offers exactly that." I'm sorry that Taylor felt the need to include this assurance for this mythic "reader" the publishing industry still wants to believe exists; this reader is far more "invested" in the form of any sort of writing, and nearly exhausted by recitations of narrative, emotions, characters.
(Is it possible to offer a book review of a work of fiction in which praise for the language and the form of the book was not mere afterthought, a list of details offered as "proof" of a story's believability, authenticity, urgency, etc.? In which banal language and inherited, thoughtless forms were not taken as givens but instead dealt the critical lashings they deserve? In which a description of the novel's plot and/or main character does not constitute the majority of the review?)
Handsomely reconstitued by New Directions from the scarce original editions, The Unfortunates comes in a box of 27 unbound chapters (plus the novelist Jonathan Coe's invaluable introduction). The "First" and "Last" chapters are designated as such. The intervening 25, ranging from 12 pages to a single paragraph, are to be read in any order we choose. Far from some modernist stunt, the form of the book dovetails beautifully with Johnson's subject—the accidental yet persistent nature of memory.
Though I greatly admire Johnson's later novel House Mother Normal (and used to teach it in an advanced fiction writing seminar), I've never read The Unfortunates, in part because the original copies are fairly to very expensive and/or difficult to track down. I will certainly be buying this edition.
Charles Taylor's review of the novel might be more exciting if Taylor did not feel the need to assure "readers—those sometimes forgotten creatures who quite rightly don't care much about form, preferring to invest themselves in narrative, emotion, and character—[that] The Unfortunates, despite its unorthodox presentation, offers exactly that." I'm sorry that Taylor felt the need to include this assurance for this mythic "reader" the publishing industry still wants to believe exists; this reader is far more "invested" in the form of any sort of writing, and nearly exhausted by recitations of narrative, emotions, characters.
(Is it possible to offer a book review of a work of fiction in which praise for the language and the form of the book was not mere afterthought, a list of details offered as "proof" of a story's believability, authenticity, urgency, etc.? In which banal language and inherited, thoughtless forms were not taken as givens but instead dealt the critical lashings they deserve? In which a description of the novel's plot and/or main character does not constitute the majority of the review?)
Labels: B.S. Johnson, reading, reviews
posted by Josh at 9:57 AM
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