Friday, April 08, 2011

Bleak House

I reviewed Blake Butler’s new novel There Is No Year for Bookforum. Here’s how the review starts:
In an interview published in the winter 2010 issue of the Paris Review, Jonathan Franzen said to Stephen Burn, “I’ve never felt less self-consciously preoccupied with language than I did when I was writing Freedom. Over and over again, as I was producing chapters, I said to myself, ‘This feels nothing like the writing I did for twenty years—this just feels transparent.’” Franzen added that this struck him as “a good sign”—an indication that he was “pressing language more completely into the service of providing transparent access to the stories I was telling and to the characters in those stories.”

Blake Butler is the opposite of that.
Read the rest.