The Mumpsimus

The latest issue of BOMB magazine includes a conversation between Jonathan Lethem and Lydia Millet -- it's unfortunately not online, but it's so good that it's really worth the price of the magazine to read it. One of the best interviews I've read in a while. Here's a sample: Jonathan Lethem: I was recently reading an essay by Mary McCarthy, a quite brilliant, free-ranging one that she first gave as a lecture in Europe, called "The Fact in Fiction." At the outset she defines the novel in quite exclusive terms, terms that of course made me very nervous: "...if you find birds and beasts talking in a book you are reading you can be sure it is not a novel." Well, as the author of at least one and arguably two or three novels with talking animals in them, I felt disgruntled. McCarthy is one of those critics whose brilliance dedicates itself often to saying what artists shouldn't do -- like the equally celebrated and brilliant James Wood, wit...

I've tried to write about Lydia Millet's new novel, How the Dead Dream , a few times now, but I've never been able to get too far. It is one of those books that, for me at least, is so entirely what it is that writing about it feels inadequate, because I can provide little more than summary or illustration, and if that is all there is, then I might as well keep this short and say no more than I liked this book . But I'm going to risk saying a bit more than that. As anyone on whom I foisted it knows, Millet's previous novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart , was one of my favorites of recent years. I had no trouble saying lots about that book; if anything, I had trouble shutting up. How the Dead Dream is an entirely different sort of book, though. It is less vast, less epic: the novelistic equivalent of a lyric poem or a cello suite. What amazes me about How the Dead Dream is that it is a determinedly political book and yet not a particularly didactic one. (I say...

First, just a reminder that Lydia Millet will be reading tonight at McNally Robinson in Manhattan in support of her new novel How the Dead Dream , which is very much worth reading. I'm planning on being there, though will probably arrive a few minutes late. Second, there are suddenly a bunch of free books available for download via their publishers and authors: As many people have noted, Tor Books is giving away a free ebook each week to people who register with them. The current book is Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, which I happen to know is a book Lydia Millet is a fan of... Nightshade Books has a few downloads available, including Richard Kadrey's Butcher Bird , which looks like it could be marvelous. Wired.com's Geekdad blog has an interview with Jeff & Ann VanderMeer from which you can download Jeff's novella The Situation (coming soon from PS Publishing ).

Life has been busy with the grading of piles of student papers and tests that I unwisely let build up (in ten years of teaching, you'd think I'd know better...) and work on a short story that I promised a certain anthology's editor I would have done by March (and yet it keeps wanting more and different words!), and so I haven't had much to write here. I did get some reading some done this weekend, finishing Lydia Millet's marvelous new novel, How the Dead Dream , which I'll be reviewing for somebody or other eventually. (Briefly: In some ways it's about capitalism and extinction, but it's more an affecting character study, though it's also a laugh-out-loud funny satire, yet really by the end it's a lyrical and heartbreaking look at-- Well, you'll just have to read it. And if you're in the NYC area, stop by the McNally Robinson bookstore on Weds, March 5 for a reading .) All of which is just me popping up here to say, Nope, still don...

Niall Harrison has posted links to reviews of the novels shortlisted for the Clarke Award this year, and I looked at it and thought, "Didn't I review Oh Pure and Radiant Heart somewhere other than in the best-of-the-year article for Locus Online ?" And then I realized that, indeed, I had, but that the review was not available online, having been published in the print edition of Locus . Here, then, for the sake of completism (or something) is that review: Lydia Millet builds her fourth novel from a simple extrapolation: What would happen if J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard, three of the designers and developers of the atomic bomb, were to find themselves transported from 1945 to the beginning of the twenty-first century? Millet fully explores this premise while balancing humor and horror, fantasy and reality, history and imagination in a book that is compulsively readable, but also thought-provoking and even disturbing. While the central plot o...