Wednesday, January 12, 2005
bookprostitute
Two novels that I finished recently: William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and Henry James' Daisy Miller. Writers are weirdos (trust me on that one), but both Bill Gibson and Henry "My Brother is a Psychology Nerd" James display their eccentricities through disparate prose styles and vastly different methods of narrating stories. One is like reading a novel by Autechre: cold, mechanical and jumpy but with underlying structures that are oddly human. The other one is like listening to the German minimal-tech producer, Lawrence: a thick style that questions, picks at and probes the feelings of people in abstract ways.
Pattern Recognition is about multiple things all of them pretty new to American lit. Chat room obsessive people who drool over a fragment of film footage that they dont know the source of. From there, Cayce Pollard (the protagonist), a "cool hunter"--the real people who get paid by marketers to hunt cool shit--travels to strange depths to find the meaning behind this footage. Though real, real slow, the novel shows Gibson at his illest since Neuromancer as the story is achingly unique and the last 100 pages are worth inching through his robot prose and lack of poetics that I dig. Then again, if Sonic Youth can dedicate a song to you (check the first song on their latest record) then you're okay with me.
Daisy Miller on the other hand is a whole different world as James examines America as an idea in Italy and Switzerland through Winterbourne's (the main character) lusting over proto-punk character Daisy Miller. She's punk in that she refuses to acquiesce to Italian social norms. But, as The Clash and stores such as Hot Topic prove: the youthful swagger of punk rarely is enmeshed in reason. So, she juggles Winterbourne's company with some snazzy Italian who wants her. The plot may sound thin, but James makes up for it through a well-constructed, concise prose that keeps it low.
go outside, already.
