“To Hank, the crime blotter was not simply a sadly neglected literary genre but a profoundly and uniquely American one as well. In every one-hundred-fifty-word entry, no matter how extravagant or seemingly irrelevant the crime in question, you had the makings of a miniature novel, with a clear narrative arc, heroes, villains, drama, conflict, and a resolution. Each entry was an encapsulated moment — a photograph — of physical or emotional violence in which someone’s life was changed forever. If approached with the proper attitude, the crime blotter was a reflection of the entire culture at that particular moment in history. It said all that needed to be said about who we were and how we lived.”
There’s a thing that’s happened to me a couple of times recently, where I’ve read a piece — a review, a bit of criticism — about a novel I’ve also read, and find that I disagree with the assessment of the writer completely, in the ‘did I read the same thing’ kind of way, while really liking the argument he or she has made. Garth Risk Hallberg’s piece on Lightning Rods in The Millions recently is one of those pieces; he places Lightning Rods in the satiric tradition, of which he writes there is a loose and a strict version, and that book belongs to the strict: “Its genius is to invent a single premise – the proposal of “A Modest Proposal,” the catch of Catch-22 – and to follow it without flinching to the most absurd ends. The excitement comes from watching the writer chain himself to the implacable machinery of his own logic.” I like this argument, and I like this analysis (setting aside the fact that there are also two classical types of satire, and Horace and Juvenal have little to do with loose and strict; setting aside also that Lightning Rods is too all-over-the-place to be called implacable in any sense).
This is the long way of getting around to the point here, about Jim Knipfel’s book: this is the strict lunatic-of-one-idea reductio-ad-absurdum satire that Hallberg is looking for in the wrong book. The Blow Off, while only slightly less messy, fits his identikit much better. And it’s actually often funny, too.
November 10, 2011, 12:16pm Comments
