Book Review Sunday

Hope everyone is enjoying a fairly lazy Sunday morning. It is July, which is traditionally a dead zone for journalism and the arts — theaters are off season, symphonies are holed up in semi-rustic locals, and the reading crowd all resort to their 'beach reads.' With that in mind, Katherine A. Evans (aka TBG) has reviewed In the Kitchen, the new novel from Monica Ali (of Brick Lane fame) for The Critical Flame :: Issue 2.

* The literary canon: are we all together now? Apparently, we're not. At The Second Pass, the editors choose a sampling of canonized titles they would like to see struck from the (sadly, less and less important) must-read list. I agreed with some deletions (Kerouac's time might be up) and not with others (Marquez; enjoy their racist caricature), but with most I was confused by the book's status as being canonized (Franzen is in the canon? that was clearly a filing mishap; Jacob's Room is hardly Woolf's must-read title; etc.). It seemed a bit unnecessary, considering the titles they chose, but whatever floats their boat.

I had not planned on mentioning it until I saw this rebuttal by Carolyn Kellogg at the LA Times book blog, Jacket Copy. She defends Kerouac's On the Road in a wash of banal truisms, 'the book is a work of literature, one with an intensity of vision and a language of impure steamroller incendiary jazz.' I'd argue that the 'vision' or scope of the book is actually quite diffuse, and that last bit about the language means not a thing, although it sounds nice. Keep in mind that I really loved On the Road when I read it, and still think it is an important milestone in American writing — without his over-the-top American dialect and subversive posture one can hardly imagine later American authors such as Raymond Carver or Denis Johnson being possible.

The danger of the book, as the editors of Second Pass point our (and Kellogg unwittingly illustrates) is that the posture of the novel and its hip, quasi-transgressive content creates a cultish sense of worship. On the Road is a document very much of its time, important for its effect and influence (for better & worse), but perhaps not the great work of literature it is claimed to be.