Her spare precise locution rewards not spectatorship but collaboration: the reader's full discovery of the dread she leaves largely tacit.It's not hard to see that Joan Didion is a better writer than Erica Jong, but that doesn't mean that trying to write like Didion and not Jong will make you a better writer.
April 23, 2006
"The yield of her legendary scrutiny informed by a worldliness more political than clitoral."
Do you trust a writer who writes like that to tell you why one writer is better than another?
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...and the shame of it is that he is the author of a book on another great American writer, Mark Twain. And how different his style was from this author.
...and the shame of it is that he is the author of a book on another great American writer, Mark Twain. And how different his style was from this author.
Is clitoral even a word?
Something coined about a Georgia O'Keefe painting, perhaps?!?
So would the antonym of clitoral be penilely, penisly, penisal, dickally, dickoral, or just penal?
No, wait the penultimate one has something to do with Bill and Monica and the last one is a prison term, right?
CB: The year in which Joan Didion won the National Book Award.
... that doesn't mean that trying to write like Didion and not Jong will make you a better writer.
Amen--though it's not a bad idea to figure why one is better than the other and apply those insights in your own way.
I read Didion's "Year of Magical Thinking" a couple of months back and found it wonderful. In it, she makes direct references to Dunne's "taking apart" books to see how they work (in fact, if I recall correctly, he was involved in just such an analysis when he died). She also makes references to herself thinking that way.
In any case, I'd recommend this book in a heartbeat, assuming you like this sort of non-fiction (but written with the stylish touch of an accomplished fiction writer).
CB: I don't quite understand that. I mean, I get the association of Jong and Didion with the '70s, of course (having read both of them then).
But what? If you're not a young writer you're passe? Just curious, truly.
Sometimes I even read books by people who are dead! Bizarre, I know... not sure what I'm thinking there.
Heck, I've been dipping back into the books of Muriel Spark recently, and she just died last week, so I guess you could say I've been re-reading a book by a person while she was alive and while she see was dead.
I must really be off my rocker.
(Cr-e-a-k. Cr-e-a-k.)
I'd like to err on the side of generosity, and assume this is a pretentious parody of Jong's cloacal prose. But I wouldn't bet the farm on it.
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