Laureate

Jackie ♦ July 18, 2008 ♦ Leave a Comment

Kay Ryan was recently named the new U.S. poet laureate, and while I’m not familiar with her work, the more I read about her, the more I like her. Her essay about going to an AWP conference is hilarious, candid and sincere, and she seems like a great role model for people who see themselves as outside the literati (though not a mentor, per her thoughts on the word in that essay!).

Reading list progress: finished Uses of Enchantment, which I continued to find somewhat disturbing, though incredibly well-crafted. It’s a strange experience to read a novel where the main character is both dysfunctional and still the most likeable, functional character! I don’t know if I would read it again, but the elaborate structure and shifting narration did make for an interesting read.

This week, I read The Final Solution, by Michael Chabon, another one of my favorite authors working today. This was an elegant little novella about an elderly, retired Sherlock Holmes who gets back in the game for one last mystery, and was full of Chabon’s trademark dazzling sentences. I also read Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris, a great novel for anyone who has enjoyed Dilbert/Office Space/The Office but also full of resonant characters, great dialogue, and more than one scene that made me laugh out loud. Also, Ferris uses a collective third-person narration strategy that feels perfectly suited to the material, not at all the gimmick it could have felt like. Highly recommended! Last night, I read my third book for the week, Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang, who is both the first woman and the first Asian-American to head the legendary Iowa Writers’ Workshops. I had first heard her name when she first took leadership at Iowa (I think probably via Poets & Writers magazine), so was intrigued by her novel.

I have blogged before about my love of a great sentence and all the different ways a writer can wow me on the sentence level. I would put Chang closer to Marilynne Robinson than Michael Chabon as far as sentence-level brilliance goes: Chang’s sentences are often spare, elegant and provocative, and she has the same sense of placidity in her work as Robinson, though it is a placid surface that is often masking the deep disturbances below. I enjoyed Inheritance as well, though in the end, I didn’t find to be as deeply resonant as Robinson’s work (for me, at least– your mileage may vary, as always).