"As I understood it from the books that I read and read reviews of, novels were about when you were a man in an unhappy marriage. Sometimes you were English and sometimes you were a college professor and sometimes you worked in The Business Industry, but that was about the size of things as far as I could tell."
"But even when that was what I understood this work to be, and what I wanted to do with my life, there was something that felt confining about it. This was not just because I had not yet had many or any of the experiences that these books lavished over and raged against, although I'm sure that didn't help. But the idea that this was all there was-all that unhappy grown-up stuff, over and over, unfolding in spaces I mostly recognized from other such stories-didn't feel right to me."
"But I think it explains, in retrospect, why the books I read that kicked holes in those familiar walls or just declined to make the gestures I'd come to expect felt so thrilling and vital to me. I had been so busy and so serious in examining the fixtures and finishes and clever design elements in those rooms that I hadn't realized how claustrophobic it felt in there, and how thi"
Novels were initially understood as stories about men in unhappy marriages, with settings that varied but themes that stayed similar. Even when admired, the focus felt limiting because it offered only a narrow range of adult experience and repeated familiar spaces. The narrator did not abandon the ambition to become a novelist, but the early certainty shifted into relief after years outside school. Later, books that disrupted expected gestures or punctured familiar walls felt especially important. The narrator realized that obsessing over recognizable rooms and their details created a claustrophobic sense of confinement, and that novelty and deviation from the pattern carried strong energy.
Read at Defector
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]