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Just posted the full version of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s amazing review of Through the Pale Door online. Now let’s get right down to business. The Wall Street Journal yesterday published an even more amazing article on books. I’d never read anything like it before. In it, Lev Grossman hits the nail on the head.

This article makes all kinds of insightful assumptions. Boldly speaking for “the novel,” but focusing mainly on Americans, Grossman says the trick to fiction in the new century lies in tight, quick-paced literary stories. Forget Rushdie and Marquez. What about House of Leaves or The Corrections or Beloved? Screw ‘em. What about the Harry Potter books? No comment.

Wait. Here we go: “The revolution is under way. The novel is getting entertaining again. Writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Richard Price, Kate Atkinson, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke, to name just a few, are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction…” This is news to me. Who are these people? I’ve never heard of Neil Gaiman before. Is he that folk singer? No, no, hold on. That’s Neil Diamond. Neil Diamond. Or Neil Young. Now what about this Jonathan Lethem, was he the guy on “Third Rock from the Sun” and The World According to Garp? Come to think of it, what was The World According to Garp? There’s some guy out there I heard who’s also part of the revolution. Name’s John Irving. Another one, Tom Wolf or Wolfe or something.

I’m getting distracted. Back to the main point. Grossman goes on to make a lot of fine pronouncements. Previously literary authors are turning their eye to this thing called popular genre fiction, whatever that is. Ha! I guess I just can’t keep up with the ever-changing world of literature. (Good thing we got Grossman!) So here’s what he says: “Look at Thomas Pynchon—in ‘Inherent Vice’ he has swapped his usual cumbersome verbal calisthenics for the more maneuverable chassis of a hard-boiled detective novel.” This is absolutely right on the money, Liv. I heard that Pynchon also has plans to write this short, plot-driven mystery novel called The Crying of Lot 49. Can’t wait to read that one. Oh, wait, it’s already out? Even better!

Here’s another great comment: “The Modernists introduced us to the idea that reading could be work, and not common labor but the work of an intellectual elite, a highly trained coterie of professional aesthetic interpreters.”

You better believe it, brothers and sisters. Those traditionalists were way too easy. Henry James, get out of here with your simplistic three-page sentences. Same with you, Thomas de Quincey and Tristram Shandy. Your stuff belongs in the elementary school.

And take that, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein: “To the Modernists, stories were a distortion of real life. In real life stories don’t tie up neatly. Events don’t line up in a tidy sequence and mean the same things to everybody they happen to.” I always thought Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo and Balzac were way, way to kind to their characters. And Flaubert. His novel Madame Bovary wraps up a little too neatly for my taste, as well. So does The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Scarlet Letter. Those Gothics and Romantics. You can have them. I want tough, sad, drama.

“There was a time when difficult literature was exciting. T.S. Eliot once famously read to a whole football stadium full of fans.” Well, hmm. By football, do you mean soccer? And what do we mean by fans? I also wonder if this was the football team at Yale or Harvard. Makes a difference, you know.

Grossman also says that The Modernists thought pleasure wasn’t the point of their writing. I couldn’t agree more. I really hated reading all that stuff and the only reason I stuck to it was the lessons it taught me. In the 1920 we was just learning good compared to the now-times. But the answer is plotting. Plotting, let it ring from the stove tops and bell towers. Let plotting ring from the shores of Allegheny to the mountains of California. Let plotting ring. We should dispense with commentary on life and leap full on into the headlights of pure entertainment – the new, uncharted waters in writing. It’s murky, foggy territory out there. Who knows what we’ll find. Certainly none of the familiar insights afforded by Tolkien or Kurt Vonnegut. Plot-driven fiction. Woo. Boy. Pack your bags. Make sure you’ve got plenty of beef jerky in there. Gonna be a long trip.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I leave you to go enjoy (sigh) some mindless Pynchon novel.