Can’t Cut a Finger

Over at Annalemma there is a great interview with Patrick deWitt, author of Ablutions, the forthcoming The Sisters Brothers and contributor to Annalemma Seven (which is a sexy piece of magazine).

The interview is quite engaging.

deWitt discusses his short-story offering to the magazine’s most recent issue, and talks about the research process for his upcoming novel. But what really caught my attention was a response by deWitt to a question regarding genre, wherein deWitt agrued:

If there’s a problem with genre, it’s that the authors so rarely rise above the inherent conceits. But it’s not as though every work of literary fiction is hitting a home run, either, you know? Oftentimes I have a reaction when I read something that pushes or allegedly pushes boundaries: I wonder if the author could tell a straight story.

This line kind of made my lips heavy, as I’ve been thinking this more and more.

What’s odd is that recently, because perhaps I’m tired of  ”innovative” writing, I’ve been reading folks like Jim Thompson and Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens, and I’ve been finding language offerings that are at times superior to what the boundary-pushers have been chucking up.

Like this from Big Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented the hair from turning grey, it imparted a particular delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine, looked through the little window and sneezed into the sack. It was the sign of the regeneration of the human race. It superseded the Cross. Models of it were worn on breasts from which the Cross was discarded, and it was bowed down to and believed in where the Cross was denied.

It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it most polluted, were a rotten red. It was taken to pieces, like a toy-puzzle for a young Devil, and was put together again when the occasion wanted it. It hushed the eloquent, struck down the powerful, abolished the beautiful and good. Twenty-two friends of high public mark, twenty-one living and one dead, it had lopped the heads off, in one morning, in as many minutes. The name of the strong man of Old Scripture had descended to the chief functionary who worked it; but, so armed, he was stronger than his namesake, and blinder, and tore away the gates of God’s own Temple every day.

Makes most language seem tiny.