Charles Johnson has a cure for what ails our schools’ creative writing programs, and it’s not for the faint of heart (link via Bookslut). His epigraph from John Gardner gives you an idea of what he’s about: “If our furniture was as poorly made as our fiction, we would always be falling onto the floor.”
Shirley Hazzard’s Great Fire, about which I am officially excited, gets a nuanced review from Judith Shulevitz at Slate: “The Great Fire is a lyrical rather than social novel, its richest writing reserved for landscapes as seen in the fresh, full light of day.”
My personal plan to whip through Transit of Venus en route to The Great Fire has been slowed up by the arrival of some books I’m reviewing, as well as my compulsion to read most of Hazzard’s wondrous sentences two or three times each. In this regard, and surely no other, she reminds me a little of Barry Hannah. His haywire Southern Gothic plots tend to baffle me, but his sentences are stunning enough to propel me through his novels all by themselves. (I’m at work now, but I’ll give you some examples next time I blog from home.)