In fact, his immense talent is part of what people seemed to find suspect about him in the years before his death. Critics and writers seem to hold the fact that he writes beautiful sentences against him, as if his writing is too well crafted, too flamboyantly, extravagantly good. James Wood wrote a decade ago, “He is a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys what a novelist must convey.” Here, of course, one has to wonder about that special handbook of “What a Novelist Must Convey,” and the rules and regulations contained therein. And yet many other writers over the years have harbored the same odd objection. Take this critique in The New Republic: his “sheer verbal power, the cormorant-like ingestion of experience and its seemingly effortless conversion into ‘brilliant’ language isn’t itself sufficient for great fiction. It may even in some ways be inimical to it.” Or this one in Commentary: “He simply can’t pass up any opportunity to tap dance in prose.”
What do You think about In Praise Of Messy Lives (2012)?
