Zadie Smith and the new literati

Canada
January 26, 2007 9:50pm CST
I think that White Teeth, delightfully writen by Zadie Smith, is a near-perfect example of the newest trend in english literature. The zany family tragicomedy. For other examples, consider The Corrections, (Jonathan Franzen), or Jpod (Douglas Coupland). Now, I do realize that zany fiction is not a break out genre, and that Gore Vidal, Graham Greene, and Mordecai Richler have been writting it for years. That's not what I'm interested in. I was wondering, if any of you folks out there have an opinion on the prevelance of zany fiction in the market today? Why do we love it so much? Why is zany fiction the award winning stuff of the present day?
1 response
• Canada
18 May 07
In the 80s I studied at York when only the congenitally dull were not post-modernists. That was the time when Derrida came to the UofT and there were as many outside as there were inside the auditorium. What was that? The last exuberant walk in the foothills of paternalist capitalism? Oh look how variegated the foliage is and imagine the vista if only we can keep climbing to the next rise. Commoditization pervades every last particle of social life. You can sense that atomization reveals itself as so much a term belonging to a Newtonian world. Now it's particle-ization in which the new social-physics works a parallel frag-men-tation of the human world to that of production itself. All the Orders find their proper resolution in the absurd - Godot still stands as the last statement of the rich text-ure of a human age. Look, look here quick; another piece of MYLIFEITSELF is on the shelf at the Dollar Store... Dollerama - the mirror of production of selves. I called at York last year. Somewhere in their among the commercial operations is ther still a UNIVERS-ity? Is anyone really writing today in the age of SOCHIST00110110. What can be written ON? I will not go down to the sea again to feel the sound of breaking waves like time washing over my life.