NEW YOUNG WRITERS: YARGH!

I can't believe it. I've spent my life--I'm 73--trying to master my craft as a poet, writer and novelist, and these young people come along and they are not even playing the same game.

Their rules are different, if they have any, and so are their sensibilities.

Take a look at Amelia Gray, soon to have a new novel out by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in March: http://vimeo.com/19614728

Here are three quotes from "Threats" (these are apparently notes from a wife who is leaving her husband):

"I am testing for structural weakness in your skull.... I will hold my finger half an inch away from your left eye until the end of days.... I will lock you in a room that looks very much like your own until it begins to fill with water...."

I can't believe it. This seems to be performance writing. I don't get the appeal. On that video, people are laughing and cheering, like this is great stuff, as if this is enlightening, as if it expresses their own feelings. But the writing seems shallow and superficial and tossed-off, without thought or craft or any intention at deeper meaning.

I can't believe professional editors at a major publishing house are spending time and money on this writing and putting their reputation behind it. Amazing.

It reminds me of “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer, a novel that I hated. It has now become a big-time movie. Here are my notes, from when I first tried to read it:

Extremely erudite and incredibly clever, at first, then too clever for its own good. I loved it for 18 pages, then the meta-fictional elements started to turn me off. Oh, it is so, so, so damn clever. A brilliant 10-year-old who speaks French and turns everything into an intellectual game tries to deal with his grief. The series of pages with just a phrase on each one breaks the “fourth-wall” illusion that is necessary to fiction. The photo of the doorknob is so tedious, boring, and banal.

Yes, this novel is clever, in a way, but it’s so pleased with its own cleverness that it becomes boring and stupid. Sorry, Mr. Foer, wrong number. I lasted about 75 pages. It got to be a chore to read, not a pleasure, which is what fiction is all about. I’m not the right reader for this kind of book. You need a left-brain person who is tickled to be in on the joke. I get it, but I don’t care.

Where does this leave old writers like myself? I have no clue. Maybe the world is just moving on. I am reminded of a scene in a movie, "No Country For Old Men":

"You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you..."

It isn't all waiting on me, that's for sure.

-- Roger