Nell Zink, Nicotine (Ecco)
”Today, if a novel is accepted into the American canon, it is as a masterpiece of individualism that subsumes material and social being into the spirit of a lone genius. If a social world is present in a novel of repute, our critics gobble it up and excrete it as imagination. In the early twenty-first century, realism has come to be synonymous, in the blinkered American critical consensus, with a curiously antisocial novel. It never occurs to critics that realism could only seem real because of the dilapidation of collective dreams. Nor do critics worry that the ‘social issues’ presented in our novels rarely attain the complexity of cable television. Or that a novel genuinely concerned with social life (or even the social role of a single person) could itself, against this backdrop, be idiosyncratic. It’s sad, in other words, that the novels of Jonathan Franzen register to most as sociopolitical literature. Freedom isn’t a social novel […]. It’s a decelerated twenty-four-hour news channel.”
Citerat ur ”Divine Indigestion. The endlessly fabulized American self” av Jonathan Sturgeon i The Baffler. Sturgeon går upp räkningen med den amerikanska samtidsprosan i allmänhet och Jonathan Franzen och Jonathan Safran Foer i synnerhet, som påstås ha givit upp alla ambitioner på, eller förlorat förmågan, att gestalta och problematisera viktiga samhällsfrågor. Kritiker, som James Wood, får sig också en skopa av sleven. De karakteriseras med begreppet ‘the imperial self’ och påstås vara programmatiskt navelskådande. Som ett hoppfullt motexempel nämns Nell Zink, som är helt aktuell med sin tredje roman.
Ola Wihlke
BearBooks 