The Death of the Novel and Other Stories

by Ronald Sukenick

Originally published in 1969, The Death of the Novel and Other Stories remains among the most memorable creations of an unforgettable age. Irrepressibly experimental in both content and form, these anti-fictions set out to rescue experience from its containment within artistic convention and bourgeois morality. Equal parts high modernist aesthete and borscht belt comedian, Sukenick joins avant-garde art with street slang and cartoons, expressing his generation's anxieties by simultaneously mocking and validating them. These are original works by a writer who will try absolutely anything.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

175 pages, Paperback

First published March 2, 1969

About the author

Ronald Sukenick was an American writer and literary theorist.

Sukenick studied at Cornell University, and wrote his doctoral thesis on Wallace Stevens, at Brandeis University.

After Roland Barthes announced the "death of the author", Sukenick carried the metaphor even further in "the death of the novel". He drew up a list of what is missing: reality doesn't exist, nor time or personality. He was widely recognized as a controversial writer who, frequently humorously, questioned and rejected the conventions of traditional fiction-writing. In novels, short stories, literary criticism and history, he often used himself, family members or friends as characters, sometimes quoting them in tape-recorded conversations. He did stints as writer in residence at Cornell University, the University of California, Irvine, and Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. But his books were never best-sellers. Sukenick once commented that he had “only forty fans, but they’re all fanatics.”

He referred to his career as a university professor as his "day job". He taught at Brandeis University, Hofstra University, City College of the City University of New York, Sarah Lawrence College, Cornell University, the State University of New York (Buffalo), and l'Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France. His most prolonged teaching career was at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he was professor of English from 1975-1999.

He was actively committed to publishing and promoting the writing of other unconventional writers. He was founder and publisher of American Book Review, and a founder of The Fiction Collective (now Fiction Collective Two). Sukenick was chairman of the Coordinating Council of Little magazines, and on the executive council of the Modern Language Association and the National Book Critics Circle.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

True to the (actually pretty amusing) title, Roland Sukenick's stories that toy with the exhausted edges of literature and form. The title track, really a novella, with its structural and temporal dislocations, interior notes on construction and sense of improvisation and chance, is really the showpiece here. Everything else in here feels like a pencil test or warm-up version by comparison. The couple that shoot for verite by being dictated or incidentally recorded onto tape in the instant of their composition or occurrence work pretty well, while a few others seem too simultaneously arch and senseless to really bear recommending. But these are the lesser part of the total volume, fortunately. As MJ noted in his review, Sukenick the author seems at great pains to paint Sukenick the narrator as something of a womanizer, always juggling girlfriends and wives and ogling, but it seems to come less out of sexist bravado than from an impulse towards an often unflattering and unsexy honesty. Of course, he also knows that nothing makes a fragmented metafiction seem readable like sex. Still, it mostly works.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://youtu.be/JdntHX819ao

[MJ Nicholls]

Hope to return to this later: stalled only since my copy is enshrined in a reference library halfway across the country, so makes reading somewhat challenging. Quite interesting so far, although Sukenick seems pretty intent on showing himself as a sexist womaniser in almost every story (either biofictionally or notherwise).

[Jacob Wren]

Ronald Sukenick writes:


There’s one of the ideas we have to get rid of: the Great Work. That’s one of the ways we have of strangling ourselves in our culture. We’ve got enough Great Works. Once a work becomes Great forget it. What we need is not Great Works but playful ones in whose sense of creative joy everyone can join. Play, after all, is the source of the learning instinct, that has been proved by indispensable scientific experiments. And what characterizes play? Freedom, spontaneity, pleasure. This is as distinguished from games, games are formalized play. I’ve always had a prejudice against games, I got stuck at some infantile pre-game stage. I like to make-up my own games. And anyway, what games are there today that you can play without a sense of camp, which is to say, without a sense of hollowness, meaninglessness, self-consciousness – a ploy against the abyss? And self-conscious pleasure is perverted pleasure, ultimately nihilistic. No, we have to invent new games – and then discard them and invent more. This, then, is the beginning of our literary re-education. A story is a game someone has played so that you can play it too, and having learned how to play it, throw it away.

[Willard Brickey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of stories written in the 1960s that range from kind of banal to very clever, sometimes aided and sometimes marred by a somewhat experimental approach. Worth reading in its own right, but more interesting as a snapshot of what adventurous American literature was up to in that era.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What's Your Story" is one of my favorite pieces ever.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

compared to Up. I really like Sukenick's work.