I think some people need to understand the difference between "promoting" authors who yes, were marginalized in certain industries for a long time, and heaping endless praise on mediocre works. Who does that actually help at the end of the day? If a reader can take a look at this and say "god, this book was a real slog", then what are they to make of hyperbolic praise in the reviews that seem to serve no other purpose than social justice aims? As if the cynicism that currently exists about those aims isn't enough?
At least for me, you start to read reviews really critically. If the review boils down to "it's a black (or LGBT, Muslim, woman, etc) person writing about [topical issue]", it's a crap book. Or maybe it isn't, but I've been burned enough that I'm not going to touch it.
"he book taught me more about being Ifemelu than it taught me about being Nigerian, more about being Nigerian than about being African, and more about being African than about being Black, and I wish that the narrative priorities matched that hierarchy"
Really good way to express something that I feel with a lot of modern authors and author-influencers... they have a very specific perspective that's interesting, but an underlying assumption that what they're doing is political and universal (it's not) and another underlying assumption that if they were to just be a well-done representation of a highly idiosyncratic perspective (which is, in fact, what they actually are, and that's a strength), that would be a failure.
I was about to copy that same sentence. I didn't give this much thought to Americanah (I guess because I wasn't reviewing it) but this phrase is clarifying. And your analysis, Benny, is also apt.
I wonder how this book would've gone had it been written after Adichie's brush with cancel culture? Maybe it would be focused a lot more on the love story and a lot less on woke lectures.
From 2013-2016, I was a lot more Woke-friendly and embracing of the various jargon. 2017 was when I first started having qualms about the whole thing.
Blame the audience as much as the author, perhaps. Books, especially literary books, are written by and for a vanishingly small subset of the population - upwardly mobile, status-conscious, affluent, label-obsessed, neurotic, and completely self-centered. Little wonder that a book with a fascinating launching point end up mired in the muck of Lake Me. Little wonder that a book that could be about an immigrant's experience instead becomes about The Immigrant Experience, and why You, the Reader, are Bad. The book's a mirror.
It's hard to escape the feeling that they are mostly written to be read by reviewers who will in turn be read by the actual purchasers, and to simply sit on those purchasers' shelves.
Upfront: I have a serious problem with what is considered literary fiction; I have very little respect for it, for many reasons. I am a very successful writer; I know the craft. Still, for the most part I hate the literary world and its pretensions. I believe that for every student who found wonder in Moby Dick, a thousand others learned to hate reading from being forced to read it (or any of its brethren). The books I was forced to read in middle and high school almost drove me to give up reading entirely. The only reason they did not is that there are other forms of story out there, the poor relations of the literary world, looked down upon, patronized, and denigrated. Continually.
I have read since, well, i could read. I read anything, from milk cartons to the ingredients list on ketchup bottles. But what really kindled my interest in the written word was adventure stories. And I think (believe) that the literary world's focus on "meaningfulness" has killed their ability to tell stories. They have forgotten that inside most people there is a little child who just wants to curl up beside their mother or grandfather and hear a story. One that is embracing and warm and which enfolds them in, well, story. I have made my living as a writer by telling stories in just that way. Because i love it, because i have respect for my readers, because i believe that the craft is sacred, that something has been passed down to those of us who now write and that in our turn it must be passed on to new generations, to every child that has stayed up late, flashlight on, under the covers, reading until late in the night.
I remember a literary review i read once, in either the NY review of books or the LRB, about the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The reviewer, a literary writer, was embarrassed that she continually got caught up in the story. Finally she said that Tolkien had cheated. His backstory was so deep and comprehensive that it seemed real and so tricked the reader into believing it. He was cheating because no real writer has the time to create that kind of backstory. What she failed to understand is that Tolkien did more to get children to read than she would if she lived a million years. As Elif Batuman once put it (from memory), "Never in the history of writing have so many well written books been published that no one in their right mind would ever want to read." Her article, Get a Real Degree, was a take down of the MFA programs proliferating like weeds in the US education system.
To be clear: I love Freddie's work and writing (which is why i subscribe). But on this point, i have to disagree, and strongly so. When I have taught I have given people books that are stories, not literary works. Stephen King pulled more people into writing than Maya Angelou ever did. Graphic novels have as well. Science fiction (most of which is suffering from a bad case of literary envy these days) did for a time, and fantasy still does. Dick Francis, though not lauded for it in the literary world, could bring to life the essence of a character in just a few sentences better than any literary writer I have ever tried to read. These are the kinds of books i suggested to people and it pulled them in. If some of them then went on and found something in the literary world that moved them, good. Most did not, they stayed with what they loved. Stories that reminded them of the best in people, of the good, of the struggles they themselves go through, and let them know that in the end, they could endure and survive if they only let the best in them come out. While this may seem like the description of a literary novel. it is not. In the literary world, they don't consider it real unless some existential despair is present as essential to the experience of life. They believe that wonder and joy and simple love of story is naive and unsophisticated. Well, then let us all be unsophisticated. the world would be a better place for it.
Richard Curtis, the man who wrote Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral summed it all up very well: "If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind. Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental." That sums up the mindset of the literary world. It has not done any of us any good. Quite the contrary.
Give the children stories that children can love. Maybe later, when they are 40 they will then read Moby Dick and find something in it they or their soul needs that day of all days. But at 16, no. It is just an overlong and rather boring story about whales and this weird guy who dies in the end. What is the fun in that?
Kids should be given a "good parts" edition of Moby-Dick that takes out the chapters on the color white and so forth, and a good number of digressions on the inner structure of whale flesh and the like. I think there's still a pretty good adventure story in there, or at least a pretty good Shakespearean tragedy.
Freddie just got another subscriber because it felt very important for me to second this. The first time I read it, something like 12 years ago, I spent a month on it, reading nothing else, and it was a slog.
The second time, which was 5 years ago, I read a chapter or two every morning, and while this obviously took a little longer, I felt no pressure to race through it. I deliberately slowed down, the "difficult" chapters were easier to digest, and I was a whole lot more engaged.
Last year, I read it uninterrupted again and was very ready to be finished with it long before it ended. Lesson learned.
All that said, if anyone knows of an actual high school where they read Moby-Dick these days, I'd be pretty surprised. My impression, based on conversations with the various high school English teachers I know, is that the reading lists have veered toward the contemporary/current in a pretty big way in the 20-ish years since I graduated.
It's so funny that you guys are having this conversation, as I'm currently rereading it for the first time since I was in college. I'm about 150 pages in, which of course means that the Pequod has just barely left port. But it's transporting. I strongly cosign taking your time.
Chapter 52 has one of the most arresting images, for me, that I've come across. It's not flashy, there's just something about it. At 150 pages in, though, I think you have not yet reached that point.
well, i do know of one. And i know many who believe that genre fiction of any sort is not legitimate reading material. Only literary fiction, whether YA or not.
When I was a kid, I got a collection of the "distilled" version of classic books, many of which I later re-read in their full form as an adult and enjoyed a lot. I often find that knowing the basic beats of how a story progresses allows you to better appreciate how it unfurls, although maybe that's just the ADHD talking.
I write genre fiction, so I've spent a lot of time learning craft with the goal of keeping readers engaged. If I include even one paragraph of exposition about the character's past, the editor will flag it. So I've internalized all of these rules: Stay in the present. Avoid info-dumping. Reveal things like backstory and setting through action and dialogue. I break these rules on occasion, but I always assume I'm writing for an audience that will drop the book the second they get bored.
I am a defender of genre fiction, obviously, but I like literary fiction too. I just don't understand how the authors get away with long stretches of exposition, lulls in the action, political speeches, lengthy descriptions of scenery.... Why didn't the editor make them tighten the book so that it's consistently engaging? And how did it become a bestseller when it's such a slog to read? Maybe I just don't give the public enough credit. Anyway, it's a mystery to me.
I'm always a little bemused by comments like this, just like I am by comments on movies that take it as a given that a movie needs nonstop action to avoid being "boring."
There's an art both to writing passages of exposition, speeches, descriptions, etc., and to fitting them into the larger context of the book. Many readers find them very engaging when done well, and in fact find a book that indulges in them far more engaging than one that keeps our nose relentlessly to the grindstone of plot.
Beyond that, the novel is one of the most versatile narrative forms ever invented. One of its greatest strengths is that exposition, lulls, speeches, and lengthy descriptions can be so easily accommodated. In fact, novels include writing of almost every conceivable kind. Sacrificing everything to make the story "engaging" on a superficial level is a terrible diminishment of everything that fiction can do and be.
I don't disagree -- and I didn't mean to imply that every book needs to read like an action movie. I don't even like action movies. 🙂
I should have said that some literary books have lengthy passages that I personally find tedious and overwritten--where I believe the editors could have enforced discipline that would have made the book a lot more readable, without sacrificing the style or message or mood.
For example, I haven't read Americanah, but Freddie reports that there are a lot of long lectures that made him impatient to get back to the story. I wonder why the editors didn't cut those down.
Lectures, exposition, descriptions, etc. can be engaging. For example, a strong voice can save almost anything. I'm talking about times where I personally feel that a book has many passages that are boring and a chore to read. But of course, what is "boring" is a matter of opinion and taste.
Whenever I read literary fiction, I notice the same thing: long tracts that seem like they ought to have been edited out. They seem a lot like the noodling I'll do when I'm not entirely sure what I want to do with a passage and am just feeling out my options, with the difference that I don't leave mine in when I'm done.
I aso recently read a more experimental book where an entire chapter consisted of the same sentence repeated over and over again. I'm curious whether anyone did anything other than just flip to the next chapter. I assume the author was going for some sort of effect (semantic satiation, maybe?) but I'm not going to sit there and read the same sentence for ten minutes...
Case in point: Freddie criticizes the section of 1984 that expounds on the nature of the world and governing body, but I found that whole section the most delicious and captivating in the novel. So this is certainly a different strokes for different folks thing.
I love this comment. My mom was a reading specialist for 30 years; she worked with high school students who couldn’t pass the state reading exam because they had learning disabilities, were emotionally disturbed, suffered from secondary trauma as the children of Hmong refugees, etc. She always advocated for letting kids read absolutely anything they wanted to, just so long as they were reading—People, Sports Illustrated, all the way up to Stephen King (I love Stephen King!).
The truth is that very, very few people enjoy reading literary fiction, and if we want students to learn to read, we should give them plot-driven stories or nonfiction pieces about topics that interest them.
I’ll just add that I volunteered in my kids’ school libraries for about 12 years, and invariably the books I reshelved the most were Diary of a Wimpy Kid (and other graphic novels), Rick Riordan’s mythological adventures, romance novels, Matt Christopher’s short sports novels, and dinosaur and other nonfiction books. When we let kids choose for themselves, they make their preferences clear!
Yes, totally agree, read anything! But with a caveat, there is magic in introducing kids and adults to novels, nonfiction, etc. that they wouldn’t have picked up in themselves in a million years but once in a while rocks their world 😃
I read Americanah for a book club several years ago and liked it very much. It also made for a great book club discussion. But I remember thinking that it read more like a memoire than fiction and I wondered how much was autobiographical. I also didn't read the blog parts as ironic or the author making fun of herself, though this is entirely possible. I found the lecture-y parts of the book interesting, but agree with Freddie that it takes you out of the story in a lot of ways, which is part of what made if feel like a memoire rather than fiction. I'm not on social media a lot so when I read the book, I also wasn't inundated with wokeness and culture wars. These days you can't get away from wokeness and I probably would have less patience for the lectures now than I did when I read it originally (2015 or 2016).
I contrast "Americanah" with "A Place For Us," by Mirza (which I adored). The latter is also an immigrant story, but it reads as both a unique story about the challenges of being an immigrant family in this country, but also as a universal story in the way that family can inadvertently be toxic to members of that family, while only wanting the best for those individuals. And that is what Americanah is missing; it's an interesting story, and Adichie writes well, but as Freddie points out, it reads as an individual's story rather than a universal story (again feeling more like a memoire).
Hey Freddie! Forgive me if this comes across as trite, as this is a genuine question that I’ve sat on for a while now (and have not waded through endless comments sections in search of an answer since subscribing), and I hopefully my questions ties into elements of this post in a convincing way, but I digress.
Is there a particular reason you capitalize the b in black but not the w in white? Given what I understand of your particular ideological orientation towards politics, culture, and identity, I find it quite interesting that you do this.
Perhaps this is simply due to my own perspective on such issues, and it is not actually all that interesting, but. Since you state that your identity confers a function of privilege as a result of your race and gender, I find it odd that you do not ascribe the implication of being white as being White with the same consistency as you do with being black as being Black. The inconsistency of this essentialization of ethnic categorization strikes me as misaligned with your politics, especially given that you have a critical eye for when you comment on the use of blackness as an identity; as you do within the work of Adichie here as an example.
Again, forgive me if this ground is too trodden or if you’ve gotten flack on this too many times under poor pretense. It is just something I have noticed while enjoying your writing on topics such as “Anti-Racism is an Inter-White Struggle” and the consumption of rap music, wherein you link the possession of a white identity (whether socially ascribed or otherwise essentially read as such, given our current social fixations on ethnicity groupings) as being inherent to the cultural and financial success of rap due to the dominance of a politicized white identity and its consumption of a politicized black art form-as-identity, and how that affected rap’s status as a language of rebellion.
As an aside - being a degree-laden musician myself, I am deeply interested in the analysis of political messaging and the spaces of political dialogue that are opened via musical performances for communities to discuss said topics through. Although I disagree that rap, in terms of politics and rebellion, was necessarily just a plaything for white people to consume and assimilate into a broader “white culture” at the time, I find the inherent essentialization of “rap-as-black” and the stereotyping of “white culture” in that example to be of the same form as the assumptions being made by essentializing blackness or whiteness as an ethnic grouping and identity-in-itself in this post. Perhaps you are simply speaking to the realities of how these ethnic groupings have been enforced on a larger societal scale consistency for a while now, but I can’t quite tell given your stance on self-perception and assumptions of racialized ethnicity groupings and their cultural output.
(My convenient tie in for having brought up the other article is the Clinton connection between his Sister Souljah Moment and Toni Morrison’s perception that Clinton was treated as a black person for his scandal. Curious how he could embody both positions at once!)
I capitalize the B in Black because Black people have asked me simply and sincerely to do it, and it costs me nothing. In contrast, the only times I've ever been asked to capitalize the W in white it's been as part of some convoluted thought experiment or as some transparent troll. I don't know, I don't see why it would contradict any of my basic politics to acknowledge that Black people have been systematically denied respect in our culture, and since that's the case when Black people ask me to extend them what they see as a simple demonstration of respect, I'm happy to do it. And I don't meet many white people who sincerely feel a similar need to be treated with that same extension of respect. I don't say the n-word and I don't avoid "cracker" or whatever, not because I don't like white people but because I recognize that context matters and that the white and Black contexts are not the same.
Thanks so much for the reply Freddie. Really appreciate it.
That makes plenty sense to me, and yea I don’t think that perspective contradicts your politics. Just didn’t know where you were coming at it from. I do think that it reflects what I’m sure is an obvious history of how bodies have been placed into colorized ethnic groups and politicized as a result, and how those social grouping perspectives manifest themselves in current cultural perceptions within these groupings. My questioning of ethnic groupings in general is my own then. I also find it funny that, as you point out, many white people who recognize and accept an acculturation of whiteness, that they do not wish to confer respect to this acculturation in turn, perhaps for also obvious reasons.
Really love your literary criticism, and of a book I have not had the pleasure of reading (yet). Suggestion:
Does it make sense to provide short excerpts to illustrate the point s you make? For instance, it could be helpful to see an example on your comment that the the first half of the book being engaging while the 2nd half a bit less.
Also this would help to understand your thinking.
Excellent critique, I'll likely end up reading this book.
Sometimes do. It's hard though to demonstrate a problem that's repetitive throughout a text by quoting one long passage, as in isolation that passage can seem perfectly unobjectionable. More, though, it's a pain in the ass to copy from a paper book word for word, so I only do it when really moved to.
I think some people need to understand the difference between "promoting" authors who yes, were marginalized in certain industries for a long time, and heaping endless praise on mediocre works. Who does that actually help at the end of the day? If a reader can take a look at this and say "god, this book was a real slog", then what are they to make of hyperbolic praise in the reviews that seem to serve no other purpose than social justice aims? As if the cynicism that currently exists about those aims isn't enough?
It's just baffling to me.
At least for me, you start to read reviews really critically. If the review boils down to "it's a black (or LGBT, Muslim, woman, etc) person writing about [topical issue]", it's a crap book. Or maybe it isn't, but I've been burned enough that I'm not going to touch it.
"he book taught me more about being Ifemelu than it taught me about being Nigerian, more about being Nigerian than about being African, and more about being African than about being Black, and I wish that the narrative priorities matched that hierarchy"
Really good way to express something that I feel with a lot of modern authors and author-influencers... they have a very specific perspective that's interesting, but an underlying assumption that what they're doing is political and universal (it's not) and another underlying assumption that if they were to just be a well-done representation of a highly idiosyncratic perspective (which is, in fact, what they actually are, and that's a strength), that would be a failure.
I was about to copy that same sentence. I didn't give this much thought to Americanah (I guess because I wasn't reviewing it) but this phrase is clarifying. And your analysis, Benny, is also apt.
It’s like they say. Race & gender are really the least interesting things about most people.
Re the cancel culture essay, it's still there -- https://www.chimamanda.com/news_items/it-is-obscene-a-true-reflection-in-three-parts/
So apparently her great sin (per the Successor Ideologues) was saying "trans women are trans women". The New Lysenkoists came down hard.
I wonder how this book would've gone had it been written after Adichie's brush with cancel culture? Maybe it would be focused a lot more on the love story and a lot less on woke lectures.
From 2013-2016, I was a lot more Woke-friendly and embracing of the various jargon. 2017 was when I first started having qualms about the whole thing.
Blame the audience as much as the author, perhaps. Books, especially literary books, are written by and for a vanishingly small subset of the population - upwardly mobile, status-conscious, affluent, label-obsessed, neurotic, and completely self-centered. Little wonder that a book with a fascinating launching point end up mired in the muck of Lake Me. Little wonder that a book that could be about an immigrant's experience instead becomes about The Immigrant Experience, and why You, the Reader, are Bad. The book's a mirror.
It's hard to escape the feeling that they are mostly written to be read by reviewers who will in turn be read by the actual purchasers, and to simply sit on those purchasers' shelves.
Upfront: I have a serious problem with what is considered literary fiction; I have very little respect for it, for many reasons. I am a very successful writer; I know the craft. Still, for the most part I hate the literary world and its pretensions. I believe that for every student who found wonder in Moby Dick, a thousand others learned to hate reading from being forced to read it (or any of its brethren). The books I was forced to read in middle and high school almost drove me to give up reading entirely. The only reason they did not is that there are other forms of story out there, the poor relations of the literary world, looked down upon, patronized, and denigrated. Continually.
I have read since, well, i could read. I read anything, from milk cartons to the ingredients list on ketchup bottles. But what really kindled my interest in the written word was adventure stories. And I think (believe) that the literary world's focus on "meaningfulness" has killed their ability to tell stories. They have forgotten that inside most people there is a little child who just wants to curl up beside their mother or grandfather and hear a story. One that is embracing and warm and which enfolds them in, well, story. I have made my living as a writer by telling stories in just that way. Because i love it, because i have respect for my readers, because i believe that the craft is sacred, that something has been passed down to those of us who now write and that in our turn it must be passed on to new generations, to every child that has stayed up late, flashlight on, under the covers, reading until late in the night.
I remember a literary review i read once, in either the NY review of books or the LRB, about the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The reviewer, a literary writer, was embarrassed that she continually got caught up in the story. Finally she said that Tolkien had cheated. His backstory was so deep and comprehensive that it seemed real and so tricked the reader into believing it. He was cheating because no real writer has the time to create that kind of backstory. What she failed to understand is that Tolkien did more to get children to read than she would if she lived a million years. As Elif Batuman once put it (from memory), "Never in the history of writing have so many well written books been published that no one in their right mind would ever want to read." Her article, Get a Real Degree, was a take down of the MFA programs proliferating like weeds in the US education system.
To be clear: I love Freddie's work and writing (which is why i subscribe). But on this point, i have to disagree, and strongly so. When I have taught I have given people books that are stories, not literary works. Stephen King pulled more people into writing than Maya Angelou ever did. Graphic novels have as well. Science fiction (most of which is suffering from a bad case of literary envy these days) did for a time, and fantasy still does. Dick Francis, though not lauded for it in the literary world, could bring to life the essence of a character in just a few sentences better than any literary writer I have ever tried to read. These are the kinds of books i suggested to people and it pulled them in. If some of them then went on and found something in the literary world that moved them, good. Most did not, they stayed with what they loved. Stories that reminded them of the best in people, of the good, of the struggles they themselves go through, and let them know that in the end, they could endure and survive if they only let the best in them come out. While this may seem like the description of a literary novel. it is not. In the literary world, they don't consider it real unless some existential despair is present as essential to the experience of life. They believe that wonder and joy and simple love of story is naive and unsophisticated. Well, then let us all be unsophisticated. the world would be a better place for it.
Richard Curtis, the man who wrote Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral summed it all up very well: "If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind. Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental." That sums up the mindset of the literary world. It has not done any of us any good. Quite the contrary.
Give the children stories that children can love. Maybe later, when they are 40 they will then read Moby Dick and find something in it they or their soul needs that day of all days. But at 16, no. It is just an overlong and rather boring story about whales and this weird guy who dies in the end. What is the fun in that?
Kids should be given a "good parts" edition of Moby-Dick that takes out the chapters on the color white and so forth, and a good number of digressions on the inner structure of whale flesh and the like. I think there's still a pretty good adventure story in there, or at least a pretty good Shakespearean tragedy.
But they have to sign a contract saying they'll read the whole thing when they turn 18. That stuff is important in its own way.
I'm fine with that. I think the book is extremely digestible at the pace of a chapter a night read before bed.
Freddie just got another subscriber because it felt very important for me to second this. The first time I read it, something like 12 years ago, I spent a month on it, reading nothing else, and it was a slog.
The second time, which was 5 years ago, I read a chapter or two every morning, and while this obviously took a little longer, I felt no pressure to race through it. I deliberately slowed down, the "difficult" chapters were easier to digest, and I was a whole lot more engaged.
Last year, I read it uninterrupted again and was very ready to be finished with it long before it ended. Lesson learned.
All that said, if anyone knows of an actual high school where they read Moby-Dick these days, I'd be pretty surprised. My impression, based on conversations with the various high school English teachers I know, is that the reading lists have veered toward the contemporary/current in a pretty big way in the 20-ish years since I graduated.
It's so funny that you guys are having this conversation, as I'm currently rereading it for the first time since I was in college. I'm about 150 pages in, which of course means that the Pequod has just barely left port. But it's transporting. I strongly cosign taking your time.
Chapter 52 has one of the most arresting images, for me, that I've come across. It's not flashy, there's just something about it. At 150 pages in, though, I think you have not yet reached that point.
well, i do know of one. And i know many who believe that genre fiction of any sort is not legitimate reading material. Only literary fiction, whether YA or not.
When I was a kid, I got a collection of the "distilled" version of classic books, many of which I later re-read in their full form as an adult and enjoyed a lot. I often find that knowing the basic beats of how a story progresses allows you to better appreciate how it unfurls, although maybe that's just the ADHD talking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books
yes, the book would make a good short story
I write genre fiction, so I've spent a lot of time learning craft with the goal of keeping readers engaged. If I include even one paragraph of exposition about the character's past, the editor will flag it. So I've internalized all of these rules: Stay in the present. Avoid info-dumping. Reveal things like backstory and setting through action and dialogue. I break these rules on occasion, but I always assume I'm writing for an audience that will drop the book the second they get bored.
I am a defender of genre fiction, obviously, but I like literary fiction too. I just don't understand how the authors get away with long stretches of exposition, lulls in the action, political speeches, lengthy descriptions of scenery.... Why didn't the editor make them tighten the book so that it's consistently engaging? And how did it become a bestseller when it's such a slog to read? Maybe I just don't give the public enough credit. Anyway, it's a mystery to me.
I'm always a little bemused by comments like this, just like I am by comments on movies that take it as a given that a movie needs nonstop action to avoid being "boring."
There's an art both to writing passages of exposition, speeches, descriptions, etc., and to fitting them into the larger context of the book. Many readers find them very engaging when done well, and in fact find a book that indulges in them far more engaging than one that keeps our nose relentlessly to the grindstone of plot.
Beyond that, the novel is one of the most versatile narrative forms ever invented. One of its greatest strengths is that exposition, lulls, speeches, and lengthy descriptions can be so easily accommodated. In fact, novels include writing of almost every conceivable kind. Sacrificing everything to make the story "engaging" on a superficial level is a terrible diminishment of everything that fiction can do and be.
I don't disagree -- and I didn't mean to imply that every book needs to read like an action movie. I don't even like action movies. 🙂
I should have said that some literary books have lengthy passages that I personally find tedious and overwritten--where I believe the editors could have enforced discipline that would have made the book a lot more readable, without sacrificing the style or message or mood.
For example, I haven't read Americanah, but Freddie reports that there are a lot of long lectures that made him impatient to get back to the story. I wonder why the editors didn't cut those down.
Lectures, exposition, descriptions, etc. can be engaging. For example, a strong voice can save almost anything. I'm talking about times where I personally feel that a book has many passages that are boring and a chore to read. But of course, what is "boring" is a matter of opinion and taste.
Whenever I read literary fiction, I notice the same thing: long tracts that seem like they ought to have been edited out. They seem a lot like the noodling I'll do when I'm not entirely sure what I want to do with a passage and am just feeling out my options, with the difference that I don't leave mine in when I'm done.
I aso recently read a more experimental book where an entire chapter consisted of the same sentence repeated over and over again. I'm curious whether anyone did anything other than just flip to the next chapter. I assume the author was going for some sort of effect (semantic satiation, maybe?) but I'm not going to sit there and read the same sentence for ten minutes...
Case in point: Freddie criticizes the section of 1984 that expounds on the nature of the world and governing body, but I found that whole section the most delicious and captivating in the novel. So this is certainly a different strokes for different folks thing.
I love this comment. My mom was a reading specialist for 30 years; she worked with high school students who couldn’t pass the state reading exam because they had learning disabilities, were emotionally disturbed, suffered from secondary trauma as the children of Hmong refugees, etc. She always advocated for letting kids read absolutely anything they wanted to, just so long as they were reading—People, Sports Illustrated, all the way up to Stephen King (I love Stephen King!).
The truth is that very, very few people enjoy reading literary fiction, and if we want students to learn to read, we should give them plot-driven stories or nonfiction pieces about topics that interest them.
I’ll just add that I volunteered in my kids’ school libraries for about 12 years, and invariably the books I reshelved the most were Diary of a Wimpy Kid (and other graphic novels), Rick Riordan’s mythological adventures, romance novels, Matt Christopher’s short sports novels, and dinosaur and other nonfiction books. When we let kids choose for themselves, they make their preferences clear!
Yes, totally agree, read anything! But with a caveat, there is magic in introducing kids and adults to novels, nonfiction, etc. that they wouldn’t have picked up in themselves in a million years but once in a while rocks their world 😃
I read Americanah for a book club several years ago and liked it very much. It also made for a great book club discussion. But I remember thinking that it read more like a memoire than fiction and I wondered how much was autobiographical. I also didn't read the blog parts as ironic or the author making fun of herself, though this is entirely possible. I found the lecture-y parts of the book interesting, but agree with Freddie that it takes you out of the story in a lot of ways, which is part of what made if feel like a memoire rather than fiction. I'm not on social media a lot so when I read the book, I also wasn't inundated with wokeness and culture wars. These days you can't get away from wokeness and I probably would have less patience for the lectures now than I did when I read it originally (2015 or 2016).
I contrast "Americanah" with "A Place For Us," by Mirza (which I adored). The latter is also an immigrant story, but it reads as both a unique story about the challenges of being an immigrant family in this country, but also as a universal story in the way that family can inadvertently be toxic to members of that family, while only wanting the best for those individuals. And that is what Americanah is missing; it's an interesting story, and Adichie writes well, but as Freddie points out, it reads as an individual's story rather than a universal story (again feeling more like a memoire).
Hey Freddie! Forgive me if this comes across as trite, as this is a genuine question that I’ve sat on for a while now (and have not waded through endless comments sections in search of an answer since subscribing), and I hopefully my questions ties into elements of this post in a convincing way, but I digress.
Is there a particular reason you capitalize the b in black but not the w in white? Given what I understand of your particular ideological orientation towards politics, culture, and identity, I find it quite interesting that you do this.
Perhaps this is simply due to my own perspective on such issues, and it is not actually all that interesting, but. Since you state that your identity confers a function of privilege as a result of your race and gender, I find it odd that you do not ascribe the implication of being white as being White with the same consistency as you do with being black as being Black. The inconsistency of this essentialization of ethnic categorization strikes me as misaligned with your politics, especially given that you have a critical eye for when you comment on the use of blackness as an identity; as you do within the work of Adichie here as an example.
Again, forgive me if this ground is too trodden or if you’ve gotten flack on this too many times under poor pretense. It is just something I have noticed while enjoying your writing on topics such as “Anti-Racism is an Inter-White Struggle” and the consumption of rap music, wherein you link the possession of a white identity (whether socially ascribed or otherwise essentially read as such, given our current social fixations on ethnicity groupings) as being inherent to the cultural and financial success of rap due to the dominance of a politicized white identity and its consumption of a politicized black art form-as-identity, and how that affected rap’s status as a language of rebellion.
As an aside - being a degree-laden musician myself, I am deeply interested in the analysis of political messaging and the spaces of political dialogue that are opened via musical performances for communities to discuss said topics through. Although I disagree that rap, in terms of politics and rebellion, was necessarily just a plaything for white people to consume and assimilate into a broader “white culture” at the time, I find the inherent essentialization of “rap-as-black” and the stereotyping of “white culture” in that example to be of the same form as the assumptions being made by essentializing blackness or whiteness as an ethnic grouping and identity-in-itself in this post. Perhaps you are simply speaking to the realities of how these ethnic groupings have been enforced on a larger societal scale consistency for a while now, but I can’t quite tell given your stance on self-perception and assumptions of racialized ethnicity groupings and their cultural output.
(My convenient tie in for having brought up the other article is the Clinton connection between his Sister Souljah Moment and Toni Morrison’s perception that Clinton was treated as a black person for his scandal. Curious how he could embody both positions at once!)
I get asked that a lot.
I capitalize the B in Black because Black people have asked me simply and sincerely to do it, and it costs me nothing. In contrast, the only times I've ever been asked to capitalize the W in white it's been as part of some convoluted thought experiment or as some transparent troll. I don't know, I don't see why it would contradict any of my basic politics to acknowledge that Black people have been systematically denied respect in our culture, and since that's the case when Black people ask me to extend them what they see as a simple demonstration of respect, I'm happy to do it. And I don't meet many white people who sincerely feel a similar need to be treated with that same extension of respect. I don't say the n-word and I don't avoid "cracker" or whatever, not because I don't like white people but because I recognize that context matters and that the white and Black contexts are not the same.
Thanks so much for the reply Freddie. Really appreciate it.
That makes plenty sense to me, and yea I don’t think that perspective contradicts your politics. Just didn’t know where you were coming at it from. I do think that it reflects what I’m sure is an obvious history of how bodies have been placed into colorized ethnic groups and politicized as a result, and how those social grouping perspectives manifest themselves in current cultural perceptions within these groupings. My questioning of ethnic groupings in general is my own then. I also find it funny that, as you point out, many white people who recognize and accept an acculturation of whiteness, that they do not wish to confer respect to this acculturation in turn, perhaps for also obvious reasons.
Really love your literary criticism, and of a book I have not had the pleasure of reading (yet). Suggestion:
Does it make sense to provide short excerpts to illustrate the point s you make? For instance, it could be helpful to see an example on your comment that the the first half of the book being engaging while the 2nd half a bit less.
Also this would help to understand your thinking.
Excellent critique, I'll likely end up reading this book.
Sometimes do. It's hard though to demonstrate a problem that's repetitive throughout a text by quoting one long passage, as in isolation that passage can seem perfectly unobjectionable. More, though, it's a pain in the ass to copy from a paper book word for word, so I only do it when really moved to.