Ok, so I’m starting to regret including a bunch of literary fiction in my list of greatest novels. I’m also starting to come to the conclusion that literary fiction in general involves trying as hard as possible to avoid anything resembling plot. These two things may or may not be related.
Falconer is a novel written by John Cheever and published in 1977. It’s considered his greatest work, yadda yadda yadda. I didn’t enjoy it.
The prose is readable, and the book is inoffensive enough that I finished it (though I may have skimmed some sections in the interest of staying awake). The biggest problem for me in this book was that I just couldn’t bring myself to care about any of the characters. There was nothing the least bit relatable or interesting about any of them. There also didn’t seem to be any real sense of causality – it read like a series of disjointed, unconnected events. I suppose there are those who would try to sell this element as a commentary on the futility and randomness of modern American life or something, but I think I’d prefer an actually good story to a second-rate commentary.
Next up is The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini (which I’ve finished reading and enjoyed) followed by Perdido Street Station by China Mieville (which I’m currently reading and which so far is [spoiler alert] amazing!). I’ll be skipping An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, as I started reading it and found it impossibly dull.
I think moving forward I’ll be much quicker to skip over books that don’t grab me fairly quickly. I suspect those will be mostly on the lit fic side of things, but certainly not entirely. I forced myself to read the first book of the space trilogy and I won’t be doing that sort of thing again. Life is too short.
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