Synopses & Reviews
What makes a novel a novel? How does a novel create a world different from that of drama or poetry? What kinds of truth can be told uniquely by the novel? And what role can the literary critic play in the egalitarian age of the Internet? The attempt to capture the multifariousness of experience through character, narrative and style is at the heart of the novelist s art, and it is evaluated and celebrated in the thirteen specially commissioned essays collected here. The Good of the Novel brings together some of today s most perceptive critics, several of them novelists themselves, and puts them in contact with some of the finest novels of the past three decades. Insightful, intelligent and illuminating, The Good of the Novel seeks to answer probing questions about the role of the modern novel, and, by implication, the role of the modern critic, bringing rewarding new perspectives to some of the most fundamental questions in contemporary fiction.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan1. Ian McEwan, Atonement James Wood2. Don DeLillo, Underworld and Falling ManAndrew O'Hagan3. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace Tessa Hadley4. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small ThingsAmit Chaudhuri5. Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac Mary Hawthorne6. Martin Amis, The Information Jason Cowley7. Philip Roth, American Pastoral Ian Sansom8. Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy Frances Wilson9. Paul Auster, Leviathan Kevin Jackson10. Ross Thomas, Briarpatch Michael Wood11. Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of BeautyRobert Macfarlane12. Colm Tóibín, The Master Benjamin Markovits13. John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising SunRay RyanContributors