Emma Vye on Natasha: Better than porridge?
Don't you just love Dasani? It's like cold, natural spring water, only it's been triple-filtered, demineralized, remineralized, bottled and branded, so you can hydrate yourself in perfect peace of mind. It's water, only... more so.
The curmudgeon may protest that this is a lot of trouble to go to just for a drink of water. The same party-pooper may be inclined to point out that you can experience cold, natural spring water by standing in a downpour with your mouth open. As for hydration, that can be accomplished with a twist of the tap. Sure, you're going to ingest a whole lot of squirming little animalculae and non-designer trace chemicals, but life's too short to worry about such trifles, isn't it?
David Bezmozgis' Natasha is the Dasani of modern fiction. It has the crisp, perfected bite of icy bottled coldness. It's reality that's been chilled and distilled to an edge. It's lucid, sensitive writing about people just like you and me, living ordinary lives in a familiar neighborhood. It's life, only more so. And audiences have been guzzling it down.
Ms. Vye's instinctive response to such apparent voracity for reality on the part of the reading public was awe and marvel. After spending a full day exposed to reality, working with people just like you and me, she is content to treat her delicate constitution to a cold compress, a peach daiquiri and a Celexa. She is certainly never tempted to reach for a novel offering more of the same.
Natasha, of course, isn't reality, any more than Dasani is spring water. It's realism, that is, the aesthetic impression of reality without any of reality's vulgar theatrics. And the only people who have ever clamored for realism have been those fortunate few who are able to avoid reality, just as Dasani caters not to those who are thirsty but to those who can afford not to drink out of the tap.
Your friend Ms. Vye would like to propound the hypothesis that books like Natasha are for these privileged few, for whom merely living doesn't already provide an overdose of reality. Unfortunately for the rest of us, these privileged few have their loafers firmly on the neck of modern literature. Realism has become the definitive genre, the white-toothed, Model-UN prom queen, and more imaginative fiction gets wallflowered.
But do not despair! There's more than one prom in this town. The rest of us -- the poor, the dumb, the ugly, the ill, the depressed, the unlucky, the defective, the unfashionable, the sentimental, the alienated or the just plain geeky -- are hereby invited to gather in this corner, where Ms. Vye will be leading Spin the Bottle and telling you how you too can recover from literary serfdom.
Next time: Literary equivalents of your first vibrator.
The curmudgeon may protest that this is a lot of trouble to go to just for a drink of water. The same party-pooper may be inclined to point out that you can experience cold, natural spring water by standing in a downpour with your mouth open. As for hydration, that can be accomplished with a twist of the tap. Sure, you're going to ingest a whole lot of squirming little animalculae and non-designer trace chemicals, but life's too short to worry about such trifles, isn't it?
David Bezmozgis' Natasha is the Dasani of modern fiction. It has the crisp, perfected bite of icy bottled coldness. It's reality that's been chilled and distilled to an edge. It's lucid, sensitive writing about people just like you and me, living ordinary lives in a familiar neighborhood. It's life, only more so. And audiences have been guzzling it down.
Ms. Vye's instinctive response to such apparent voracity for reality on the part of the reading public was awe and marvel. After spending a full day exposed to reality, working with people just like you and me, she is content to treat her delicate constitution to a cold compress, a peach daiquiri and a Celexa. She is certainly never tempted to reach for a novel offering more of the same.
Natasha, of course, isn't reality, any more than Dasani is spring water. It's realism, that is, the aesthetic impression of reality without any of reality's vulgar theatrics. And the only people who have ever clamored for realism have been those fortunate few who are able to avoid reality, just as Dasani caters not to those who are thirsty but to those who can afford not to drink out of the tap.
Your friend Ms. Vye would like to propound the hypothesis that books like Natasha are for these privileged few, for whom merely living doesn't already provide an overdose of reality. Unfortunately for the rest of us, these privileged few have their loafers firmly on the neck of modern literature. Realism has become the definitive genre, the white-toothed, Model-UN prom queen, and more imaginative fiction gets wallflowered.
But do not despair! There's more than one prom in this town. The rest of us -- the poor, the dumb, the ugly, the ill, the depressed, the unlucky, the defective, the unfashionable, the sentimental, the alienated or the just plain geeky -- are hereby invited to gather in this corner, where Ms. Vye will be leading Spin the Bottle and telling you how you too can recover from literary serfdom.
Next time: Literary equivalents of your first vibrator.
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