The Late American Novel by Jeff Martin

Author:Jeff Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781593763992
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2018-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how the transformation of that “page”—the migration of texts from paper to screens—will transform the practice of literature. But the fact is that, through the word processor and the web browser, the migration is already well underway. And insofar as we accept DeLillo’s premise that the writer needs critical distance from the forces around him, the digitization of his tools has been no help at all.

That’s not to say that email hasn’t made life beyond the desk more convenient and efficient. For writers, it can be a point of connection with the republic of letters and an avenue to freelancing checks without end. But it also promotes, at least in your correspondent, the same strange admixture of commodification, narcissism, and inertia that seems hardwired into each new marvel of information technology: the cell phone, the webcam, the Facebook wall. We might ask ourselves if it will be somehow encoded in the e-book, particularly on devices that also allow us to watch movies and Skype and skim the newspaper while we mean to be reading The Magic Mountain.

Then again, one doesn’t imagine good writing has ever been easy. Maybe difficulty is even necessary, somehow. And so, after signing off here, I’m going to try once again to be “Out of the Office,” but only in order to be more fully in it, on the green slopes of fiction, in the Peru of the mind. It’s unclear how long the trip will take. But in the meantime, please know that I am doing my best really to think of you—the actual you, the Esteemed Correspondent, the independent reader, whom I do genuinely value. And that I look forward to returning.

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