Watching Your Hairline Recede, My Vain Darling

I haven't posted in ages -- I've been waiting for beckett to show up and give his opinion on the Elliot Spitzer thing. But he, beckett, is very busy right now and it seems unlikely he will drop by, though I wish he would -- I miss him.

I'm not enjoying London Fields by Martin Amis. I started it in a Granta magazine someone left in the lobby of my apartment building. You know how the font and presention of a piece of writing can affect your response? I found the opening of London Fields (in Granta) riveting. The magazine is so high quality and the excerpt seemed excellent - Amis in control, some vivid characters, some well-crafted trouble brewing. I got the book out of the library and am finding it interminable and sour in mood. The woman character is sheer male fantasy; the male characters unappealing to the point of horror. It goes on and on in the same mood about the same subjects, and is so boring... I think Amis might be trying to emulate American gigantism, a la Saul Bellow (his idol), but that blathering-about-any-old-thing-at-length isn't a good tendency in any writer, I don't think. James Wood rightly denounced it as an emotional-distancing ploy in American writers, citing J. Franzen's flights of erudition about chemical compounds, industrial parks etc. in The Corrections.

In general I like Amis, though -- he writes with a real snap. That sharp, caustic narrative voice is very welcome to me after I plowed through Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman. That novel was devoid of humor and nothing made up for it. Certainly not the plain, artless style. Not the poignancy of the romance though that was definitely the best thing in the book. For a novel about two young men who have a steamy affair one summer, it just feels too elegiac, somber and lifeless. Aciman may be trying for a Proustian tone -- he's a Proust scholar -- but it's a misfire. The tone is more like one used by and about middle-aged lovers who are stunned by the beauty of the past as much as the love affair they had in it.

Today I learned ... after Googling for a while, that Martin Amis's wife, Isabel Fonseca, has very beautiful ankles.