Letters to the Editor
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By The Same Logic The Contemporaries of James or Joyce Would've Been Entitled To Rejoice At Either's Death
Of course, they were great novelists and Robbe-Grillet wasn't (though Marienbad is a great film and his screenplay is brilliant), but a writer can't be blamed for scaring off readers and causing his contemporaries to go too far in the opposite direction. Whitman had a disastrous influence on thousands of poets, but it isn't his fault that they're not Whitman. Besides, Robbe-Grillet's influence wasn't entirely negative; I like a lot of Barthelme and Barth's work. I also don't know if this more experimental stuff that you allude to at the end of your article is very good. I've seen parts of Junot Diaz and I didn't like it at all. His voice is very odd; it reminds me of one of those annoying narrators you occasionally find in bad teen movies. It's like someone's sitting next to you conversationally telling you an interminable story, replete, of course, with endless lists of meaningless details and signifiers because that's just what writers do these days. And Safran Foer... he's brilliant but to me his stuff is just really, really bad 21st century Tristram Shandy.