Gass’s sentences were the least datable, are the least dated.
Nicholas Dames
All articles by this author
Tired as a Mother
On the exhausted reader
What is the tone of this literary-theoretical tone? Take away anything from reading these books together and it’s their similar vibe: something quietly persistent, invested in its own disinvestments, obsessive rather than obsessed; something that can’t notice without feeling implicated in what’s been noticed and so isn’t prone to anger. Hard as it is to wrap one’s hands around the vaporousness of tone, I’d still risk a label. The tone of the moment, if you take these books as a guide, is a habitual mordancy.
Outside the Museum of Literature
On Mircea Cărtărescu
Solenoid’s parasites take us well over the horizon marked out by any kind of realism. In one of Cărtărescu’s odder fantasias, his narrator comes to know a librarian with a messianic vocation: to find a way to communicate with the subject of his obsession, the world of mites, on whose astonishing variety, beauty, and omnipresence at the edges of our attention he soliloquizes at length.
June 5, 2020
Departures and Returns
It is, at once, 1933 and 1968 and 2020
Read More
No genre is more masculine than the spy story, more impervious to revisionary feminist versions.
Coming in from the Cold
Let’s face it: there’s nothing cool about someone else’s sentimentality.
Seventies Throwback Fiction
Theory might be most interesting not when it changes the form of fiction, but when it becomes an uneasy part of fiction’s content.
The Theory Generation
What if a certain neurotic investment is really the source of the best intellectual work?
Why Bother?
August 11, 2010
For intellectuals to stake a claim on such things as “attention” or “concentration” is an abdication of our best ground.
This Will Kill That
To admit to a fondness for, say, the Climax Blues Band is embarrassing in a more complicated way than it would at first seem.
