hm.

[electricland]

Our next book club book is Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis. I've never read anything by him -- I figured I had better things to do with my life than read American Psycho even if it is a brilliant satire on and deconstruction of the meaningless consumer-driven yuppie existence of the '90s. Or so I've heard. Anyway. Am putting LP on hold at the library, and its subjects (according to the library catalogue) are:

Novelists -- Fiction.
Suburban life -- Fiction.
Married people -- Fiction.
College teachers -- Fiction.
Hallucinations and illusions -- Fiction.

While I am still dubious about this, I'm somewhat intrigued now.

(Afterthought: On reading it over, I guess I'm only intrigued by the juxtaposition of the last item with the first four. The first four make me think "Oh God, not another self-involved navel-gazing novel about married college teachers who live in the suburbs and write novels." That "write what you know" advice has spawned more craptastic books...)

Comments

[swestrup]

This reminds me of a scene from Spitting Images involving puppets representing Woody Allen and Mia Farrow:

Mia: Woody, what are you doing, writing another novel about your life?
Woody: I have to. My life is the only thing that ever happens to me.

[electricland.livejournal.com]

ha!

I was going to put in a disclaimer on behalf of Mordecai Richler, and then I thought: no. There are exceptions to any rule.

[ex-mthrtong.livejournal.com]

Shit. You mean someone has already written a novel about being a teacher writing a novel? Well now what am I going to do?

[wanderingaengus.livejournal.com]

Just write a novel about being a teacher writing a novel about being a teacher writing a novel. Rinse, repeat, metafiction.

[ex-mthrtong.livejournal.com]

Should I be implicit or explicit about it? Because, according to my students (who apparently thought up this categorization all on their own), those are the two types of metafictional devices.

[electricland.livejournal.com]

I know! How do they come up with these great ideas?

I bet they haven't done it in blank verse yet, though.

[ex-mthrtong.livejournal.com]

A hah! I will write a metafictional novel in verse about teachers writing novels about teachers writing novels. And I will not include either of you in my acknowledgements.

[wanderingaengus.livejournal.com]

I read the first chapter of that book in the library one day, and it looked pretty interesting. I've read a lot of BEE without being exactly a fan. Still not quite sure what I think about him. (I wouldn't recommend American Psycho to anybody, but the first 100 pages, up to the first killing, make for very funny reading.)

[electricland.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. That's a very interesting... non-recommendation. I'll let you know how it goes...