Literary fiction: the best-written recent releases III
Including a pick from our subscribers' submissions
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Photo by Jesse G-C
IN TODAY’S ISSUE
—The opening pages of Time of the Child by Niall Williams, our next pick from the recent releases in literary fiction. The full list of books considered is here.
—Our challenge for Auraist readers: can you prove that you exist?
—Extracts from our next pick, Arreshy Young’s CODON.
—Young answers our questions on prose style.
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1
This is what happened in Faha over the Christmas of 1962, in what became known in the parish as the time of the child.
To those who lived there, Faha was perhaps the last place on earth to expect a miracle. It had neither the history nor the geography for it. The history was remarkable for the one fact upon which all commentators agreed: nothing happened here. The geography was without notable feature but for being on the furthermost edge of a fabled country, where Faha had not so much sprung up as seeped out when the ice retreated, and the Atlantic met the western coast of an island with a native weakness for the heroic.
Resolve was the first requisite of life here. It was the hares that discovered it. They came from the fringes of the forests, drawn like all after them to the mesmerism of the River Shannon. They stood on their hind legs and in the sublime stillness of their surveillance were persuaded they had found paradise.
The first floods drove them back.
The first storms put salt in their ears.
Still, what began as a hare-track along the riverbank soon enough became a road, the watering hole a stopping post, camps and earthworks a settlement that took a name to become a village, opened a public house, a second one for those who would not darken the door of the first, five more for customers with complaints and grudges too various to catalogue, two general grocers, a blacksmith’s forge, a butcher’s, and soon enough a church and graveyard, all of which had the Fahaean character of sinking, but so slowly as to defeat reality.
'Line by line, it may be the most beautifully written novel I've read this year' Washington Post
Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in the little town of Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from his community. A visit from the doctor is always a sign of bad things to come.
His youngest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father's shadow, and remains there, having missed her chance at real love – and passed up an offer of marriage from an unsuitable man.
But in the advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy's lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. As the winter passes, father and daughter's lives, the understanding of their family, and their role in their community are changed forever.
COMING SOON
—More of the best-written recent releases in literary fiction.
—Han Smith and Kia Corthron answer our questions on style.
—The best-written works on the shortlists for the Gordon Burn Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Awards.
A paid subscription to Auraist gives readers access to our full archive of dozens of author masterclasses on prose style, hundreds of picks from recent releases and prize shortlists, the best-written books of the century, and extracts from many of these. Or you can join the 32K discerning readers who’ve followed us or subscribed for free access to posts for a fortnight after publication.
CHALLENGE FOR AURAIST READERS
Can you prove that you exist? Or more specifically: can you provide a valid (non-circular) justification for the existence of the self, as that term is commonly understood?
If you can, we’ll give you a complimentary lifetime paid subscription and publish your answer here.
Examples of circular justifications would be ‘I think, therefore I am’ and ‘When I hurt my arms, you don’t feel any pain’.
Nobody has yet met this challenge. Thaddeus Thomas’ response was non-circular and accurate (IMO), but his understanding of the self is unusual, to say the least.
And it almost goes without saying — though curiously few ever say it — that the self is what our entire civilisation is based upon. So another way to put this challenge: Can you show that our civilisation’s foundational idea, the one we base most of our lives on, is anything more than just brainwashing?
And if not, and if nobody can, then where does that leave the foundations of our civilisation and our lives?
FUNVERAL STORIES
Monomeron
Postscript to a speech delivered at the 23rd International Majlis and Retrospective on Medicine, Hotel Kerkur, Colonial Cherfis, 298 D.E.:
“I recall that Sa’di said, ‘A person wept the livelong night beside a sick man’s bed: when it dawned the Sick was well, and the mourner, he was dead.’ And then it occurred to me, too late to add to my lecture, that there is one way in which the aqaladoctor has merited the respect due to the Great Reconciliators— Buddha, Solon, Salman, Hallaj. We have made loyalty possible in times of plague. Historically, compassion for the Contagious was impossible. To betray one’s friends was not a choice. Either a man abandoned them willingly or by catching the disease and dying.”
*
The Death of PSC Cenote Lancôme
Has been revoked.
The so-called “death” we attribute to the mass delusion of crowds (LSD in the CHQ water reservoir? Organizations wishing to claim responsibility for the attack are invited to apply at the link below).
For as is stated by Ajami Private Diction law “the legal person status of the Private Service Commune gives them perpetual life, the deaths of syndics or cellholders do not alter the commune’s biological function.” No matter how many psychedelic cellholders claim they have “died” by ballistic affliction imposed by subversive hallucinations, rest assured we are forever. Your service packs will be delivered on time and with the same indulgent altruism as before.
*
Crudo
The easiest way to crack your crudo-style frozen egg is don’t. Don’t do it! Instead, rhythmically tap (gently now!) the egg with a plastic spoon to wake the sleeping chick. Once you hear the “peep,” place egg in well-oiled bowl. Be patient and let the hatching instinct take over.
While you wait, mix lime juice, garlic salt, cumin and a dab of Hassiba cuck-pepper sauce in a shot glass and set aside. The chick’s adorable escape attempts should coat it nicely.
Drizzle chickadee bald patch with aioli then stuff in mouth and hold. For an extra electric tang, allow chick to peck around your tongue for a bit. Then right as it begins to melt, swallow whole. Shoot the chaser.
If properly gestated, the initial meta-gravy dribblings will congeal into the most pristine gobs and giblets you’ve ever tasted.
For a candied twist (a dessert version of “yemas de Santa Hallaj”), shorten gestation period in the alembic dyncubatorTM from four weeks to one. Instead of oil, coat bowl with confectioners’ sugar. Right as chick starts to melt, roll with chunks of ginger and candied cherries until evenly coated. The moisture will help it stick. For advanced home cooks, an intravenous cream filling can be a delightful alternative.
RECOMMENDED
ARRESHY YOUNG ON PROSE STYLE
Our cultural life is increasingly ideological, substance-centred. Does this help explain certain prominent writers’ indifference to style, and reviewers’ and critics’ indifference to their indifference? How do you feel about these writers’ work?
Politeness is key. Unawareness is the essence of courtesy. I can't talk trash about what I don't read.
There is widespread anxiety that our tech-overloaded world’s making our species more mechanistic, less human. Wouldn’t it be arrogant to assume that writers, traditionally well-attuned to their cultures, are above such a transformation?
Yeah, writers aren't above all that. Part of the problem is that no one has come up with a way to avoid mass starvation except through automation and a dead artist can't make art. You can call it a fault in our stars or an anatomical goof or a cosmic (providential) plug on brain energy or whatever you want but we sadly need automation to stay alive long enough to fear automation.
Is there an alternative? I'm sure this is a controversial opinion, but I personally think the diffusion of easy genetic engineering hacks is our only escape. I would distinguish this from transhumanism which I haven't studied enough to comprehend, but if we don't exceed the limits of human biology, it seems to me that we have to either destroy our machines and risk sliding back into a cringing Dark Ages or our machines will absentmindedly annihilate us. I say absendtmindedly, because I think the machines will accidentally wipe us out in the process of enjoying more sublime or thrilling tasks unless some coder/trainer is actually dumb enough to inject malice or Social Darwinism into a Dementia AI.
Many readers who no longer buy novels cite their inability to fully immerse themselves in fiction, to suspend their disbelief. How important are voice and style in CODON to casting the fictional spell that helps such immersion?
Voice... I'm not sure I want to know what voice is speaking through CODON. A bland or biting nerd, a demented oracle, a may-or-maybe goo monster who through drive and enterprise has congealed from putrid figures of speech, the unpalatable consequence of heredity or forgotten injuries or pharmacology, or the ruthless balancing act and mediocrity of game theory.
Nabokov recommended never beginning two adjacent paragraphs with the same word, which many writers might see as overly fussy. Which stylistic suggestions have you rejected as too trivial?
For dialogue, it's probably fine to stick with "said" over and over again. I don't mind "growled, asked, mumbled, blurted, etc." But screenwriters and game developers rarely need these tricks to foreshadow their meaning. More and more I'm skeptical that prose writers need that kind of variety.
Also, I love the submissiveness implied by passive tense which can be modulated as needed from wariness to weed paranoia to bed-wetting terror. That's the kind of naturalistic fiction I believe in, whose grammar taboos are a microcosm of the macrocosmic fear the writer is forced to subsist in (I'll leave it to a more fortunate generation to swap out "taboo" and "fear" for "edicts" and "bliss"). Twisted grammar for a twisted world; deranged syntax structures for the deranged.
It's weird to me that Orwell would pimp so hard for active tense. Politically and socially he must have known that was wrong, he being the prophet of social terror algorithms, of voracious hierarchies ruling over a butcher shop of hooked and neatly portioned human meat and bureaucrats as panting vacuum cleaners for the latest attitudes and truth.
What ratio between writing and editing would you recommend, and has this ratio changed over time?
I think ultimately it's a matter of memory. If you have a good recall for both details and major themes, then you'll probably spend a large proportion of your time writing. I forget easily, always have, so I spend far more time on gestation, recombining ideas, experimenting with opening lines, researching, recording pellet stories within stories that don't yet exist, and obsessively recording all of the above than I do writing actual drafts.
That means when I actually begin a story, I'm pretty much done writing. It's 95% editing from there. On a more general note, I would say if you're still making major edits after 6 months, the piece probably needs to be rewritten completely.