“I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel that presents itself unselfconsciously as a novel, since it’s not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now,” the novelist David Shields, who heaped praise on Speedboat, once wrote.
Eye roll. Spare me. The idea that novel should convey such a thing is absurd. Who needs a book to tell them what life is like right now? And if so, if life is torturously boring, exactly what is gained by conveying that via a torturously boring book? This is pretentious intelligentsia in the extreme.
