And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola, Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear Pouf !
Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins, Little Brown and Company, 2015.
This is a strange and rather adventurous route for a novel to take: it turns out that Teddy Todd did not live to the ripe old age depicted in the novel, but rather died in World War II. It is unclear to me what Atkinson is trying to accomplish here; is she trying to tell us that these characters never lived and she just made them up? Who among us does not know that? In her previous book, Life After Life, she told continuing different stories of people's lives, suggesting that it is random fate that drives us and our accomplishments, or lack thereof. I have to admit I prefer the rigor and intelligence of Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels, which show a new and intriguing approach to the private detective genre.
Afterwards the wife sits on the toilet for a long time because her stomach is twisting. She feels something rising into her throat and spits into her daughter's pink plastic bucket. Just a little bile. She dry-heaves again, but nothing. The longer she sits there, the more she notices how dirty and dingy the bathroom is. There is a tangle of hair on the side of the sink, some kind of creeping mildew on the shower curtain. Their towels are no longer white and are fraying along the edges.
Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation, Alfred A. Knopf, 2014
Offill takes an approach more like that of Renata Adler's Speedboat (1976), many small, wry observations, with little actual narrative. I don't think this miniature approach -- sometimes rather amusing -- is much more effective than Atkinson's immense "realistic" approach that is then brought crashing down. If one is looking for something effectively "postmodern," a new way of saying new things, I recommend the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, especially Pale Fire (1962).
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