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Sep. 24th, 2004 04:53 pmI finished Set This House In Order, and it turned out to be pretty much trash after all. The first couple hundred pages went by quickly and fairly enjoyably, but after that I just got sick of all the characters and the plot started spiraling into absurdity. And Matt Ruff's prose style was serviceable at best, so that didn't help. I ended up finishing it quickly just to get it over with, and found the end to be ridiculously facile. I was interested in Ruff's attempt to write a first-person account of multiple personality disorder, but in the end I just found myself wondering if Ruff's depiction was anything like what life with MPD is really like. I would love to know what reaction, if any, the MPD community had to this book.
And now I'm reading Werewolves in Their Youth, a book of short stories by Michael Chabon. It's part of my ongoing quest to read everything that man has ever written or will ever write. The stories are very good, but so far I'm not as impressed with Chabon as a story writer as I am with Chabon as a novelist. The stories are all very much in the vein of Updike or Cheever. They all seem to deal with marriages that are in various stages of falling apart, boredom, financial trouble, things of that nature... Sort of suburbia lit. Chabon's eye for detail is spot-on and his ability to tap into the inner life of his characters is as sharp as ever, but I don't feel like he's stretching himself here the way he did in Kavalier and Clay or The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I'm ever so slightly disappointed that the book does not live up to his best work, but when your best work is Kavalier and Clay, that's a hell of a lot to live up to. And even if the book is a tiny bit of a letdown, after reading Matt Ruff it's a pleasure just to read a writer how knows how to get so much out of language.
And now I'm reading Werewolves in Their Youth, a book of short stories by Michael Chabon. It's part of my ongoing quest to read everything that man has ever written or will ever write. The stories are very good, but so far I'm not as impressed with Chabon as a story writer as I am with Chabon as a novelist. The stories are all very much in the vein of Updike or Cheever. They all seem to deal with marriages that are in various stages of falling apart, boredom, financial trouble, things of that nature... Sort of suburbia lit. Chabon's eye for detail is spot-on and his ability to tap into the inner life of his characters is as sharp as ever, but I don't feel like he's stretching himself here the way he did in Kavalier and Clay or The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I'm ever so slightly disappointed that the book does not live up to his best work, but when your best work is Kavalier and Clay, that's a hell of a lot to live up to. And even if the book is a tiny bit of a letdown, after reading Matt Ruff it's a pleasure just to read a writer how knows how to get so much out of language.
