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Destiny news
Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1977
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October 12, 2013
Robert Fox, Destiny News (December Press, 1977)
While it is undeniable that I have become a much more efficient reader since I have embraced the fifty-page rule (if a book still sucks by page fifty, abandon it and move onto something else), I still feel guilty whenever I abandon a book, and I do it with no more than a handful of books per year. It is an even rarer thing for me to invest in fifty pages of a book that goes less than one hundred pages and still end up abandoning it; in fact, I can think of only two instances in the ten years since I embraced the rule. (Both were books of poetry.) Until, that is, last night, when the ninety-six page Destiny News got kicked to the curb at the beginning of page forty-nine (where a new story started, so it seemed a logical place of abandonment).
There is a particular style of writing that I have always called “eighties fiction”. The defining characteristics include a general rootlessness in its characters, a decided lack of plot, obsession with details of place. It generally pops up in short story format, though a few authors managed to successfully carry it over into novels. (The big triumvirate of eighties authors all specialized in it—McInerney, Ellis, and Janowitz—though it was much more pervasive, and a number of authors did it better; for my money, the real virtuosi of the style, especially when it came to short fiction, were Guy Vanderhaeghe and Ethan Canin.) Turns out that it didn't actually originate in the eighties; Destiny News is a pitch-perfect collection of proto-eighties-fiction, at least what I read of it. But this is lumpeneighties; the heavyweights who would perfect the technique a few years later refined its qualities, gave their stories more focus, found hooks to draw readers in. (Is there anyone who was over the age of fifteen in 1988 who doesn't remember picking up Bright Lights, Big City, reading the first page, and wondering why no one had ever written a book like this before?). Destiny News lacks all of it. These characters are flat, cardboard, unlikable constructs who ghost through both the places they live in and their own lives without making any sort of impression, holding the same kinds of conversations that happen in college dormitories at 2AM when everyone's had way too much Boone's Farm. At the time, of course, they seem so important, but you look back two weeks after graduation and you wonder what the hell you were all on about. Robert Fox, 'twould seem, never grew out of it (and/or never sobered up, though one hopes, given that the author photo on the back shows Fox driving a piece of heavy farm machinery, we can discount that possibility).
In the end, well, if you're a scholar of that whole eighties-fiction movement—and, now that we are thirty-odd years removed from it, I suspect that doctoral dissertations examining dissolute behavior in the works of Bret Easton Ellis or the like will start popping up with regularity at universities—you may well find a place in your collection for Destiny News as a research tool. If you're simply a reader looking for a good book, on the other hand, you would be much better served looking just about anywhere else. (zero)
While it is undeniable that I have become a much more efficient reader since I have embraced the fifty-page rule (if a book still sucks by page fifty, abandon it and move onto something else), I still feel guilty whenever I abandon a book, and I do it with no more than a handful of books per year. It is an even rarer thing for me to invest in fifty pages of a book that goes less than one hundred pages and still end up abandoning it; in fact, I can think of only two instances in the ten years since I embraced the rule. (Both were books of poetry.) Until, that is, last night, when the ninety-six page Destiny News got kicked to the curb at the beginning of page forty-nine (where a new story started, so it seemed a logical place of abandonment).
There is a particular style of writing that I have always called “eighties fiction”. The defining characteristics include a general rootlessness in its characters, a decided lack of plot, obsession with details of place. It generally pops up in short story format, though a few authors managed to successfully carry it over into novels. (The big triumvirate of eighties authors all specialized in it—McInerney, Ellis, and Janowitz—though it was much more pervasive, and a number of authors did it better; for my money, the real virtuosi of the style, especially when it came to short fiction, were Guy Vanderhaeghe and Ethan Canin.) Turns out that it didn't actually originate in the eighties; Destiny News is a pitch-perfect collection of proto-eighties-fiction, at least what I read of it. But this is lumpeneighties; the heavyweights who would perfect the technique a few years later refined its qualities, gave their stories more focus, found hooks to draw readers in. (Is there anyone who was over the age of fifteen in 1988 who doesn't remember picking up Bright Lights, Big City, reading the first page, and wondering why no one had ever written a book like this before?). Destiny News lacks all of it. These characters are flat, cardboard, unlikable constructs who ghost through both the places they live in and their own lives without making any sort of impression, holding the same kinds of conversations that happen in college dormitories at 2AM when everyone's had way too much Boone's Farm. At the time, of course, they seem so important, but you look back two weeks after graduation and you wonder what the hell you were all on about. Robert Fox, 'twould seem, never grew out of it (and/or never sobered up, though one hopes, given that the author photo on the back shows Fox driving a piece of heavy farm machinery, we can discount that possibility).
In the end, well, if you're a scholar of that whole eighties-fiction movement—and, now that we are thirty-odd years removed from it, I suspect that doctoral dissertations examining dissolute behavior in the works of Bret Easton Ellis or the like will start popping up with regularity at universities—you may well find a place in your collection for Destiny News as a research tool. If you're simply a reader looking for a good book, on the other hand, you would be much better served looking just about anywhere else. (zero)
Displaying 1 of 1 review