about problems with novel classes
I teach Beginning and Advanced Fiction for Gotham, but the trickiest classes I teach are in novel writing. The classes tend to be large (for Gotham), meaning they have from ten to fourteen people, each one in the middle of writing a novel, which means lots and lots of pages to read and discuss. But that's not the problem.
The scope of the critiquing is more difficult in a novel writing class. Not only are we reading the pages under submission, but we've got to consider them in the context of what came before and what should come after. If we're discussing chapter four, for example, you really need figure out how that builds from chapter one, which we read probably three weeks ago. Given that I have difficulty remembering the day of the week it is, this global viewpoint requires a bit of effort on my part. However, even that's not the problem.
The problem, at the moment, is that one of my students suggested it would be interesting if, on top of the classwork and lectures, I added in a discussion of Jonathan Franzen's big book, FREEDOM. The idea's a great one. Everyone writing a novel today should be familiar with FREEDOM, I think. Certainly if you're writing a literary novel. This has been widely reviewed as the book of the year, or the decade. Whether you like it or not (and I gave it four stars on Goodreads), you have to deal with it.
But how on earth to incorporate that novel into a ten-week class? This has been what's preoccupying me over break. I can't assign the whole book to read. There'd be an insurrection. We could read part of the book. Normally I'd suggest reading the opening 50 pages, but I think the beginning of Franzen's book is the least inviting part of it. Quite honestly, I think only he could get away with such an unsympathetic beginning. I considered having each class member read a different twenty pages and report back, but that would deny us all a certain narrative thrust. Then I considered kicking the student who proposed the idea out of the class and forgetting about the whole thing, but that seemed hostile.
So I have two weeks to go before class starts. Any suggestions?
