Sam Lipsyte’s latest: Less than the sum of its “Fun Parts”

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:58:00 +0000

PERHAPS NO LITERARY FORM is more a creation of market forces and tradition than the short story. A novel can go on for as many pages as the author needs to finish the tale, and most book reviews clock in under 2,000 words, because, really, who needs more space than that to say whether a book is any good? The modern short story is short, however, because it fills a very specific niche: a tale that can be read in one sitting, first designed to fit the fiction slot in popular periodicals, and now repurposed for use in literary magazines and as a training exercise in creative writing classes.

Lydia Millet’s “Magnificence” offers anything but

Tue, 25 Dec 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Fifty pages into Lydia Millet’s novel "Magnificence," her heroine Susan Lindley, a recently widowed secretary, inherits an enormous mansion from an uncle she barely knew. The mansion, located in an upscale neighborhood of Pasadena, is filled with a small museum’s worth of stuffed wild animals: gazelles, a full-grown lion, eagles and owls, a pink flamingo, and an entire room full of bears.

The novel, which until this point has been flatlining through page after page of perfunctory-seeming scenes of Susan being angry at herself for not mourning her late husband enough, suddenly perks up as the reader thinks: What a great place to set a novel. Then, for another hundred pages or so, it becomes clear that this weird old house full of dead animals isn’t so much the setting for Millet’s novel as a distressingly accurate metaphor for the experience of reading it.

Salon.com > Michael Bourne

Sam Lipsyte’s latest: Less than the sum of its “Fun Parts”

Lydia Millet’s “Magnificence” offers anything but