Great essay on writing (and reading) fiction by Zadie Smith.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)I’m sure I’m not the first novelist to dig up that old Whitman chestnut in defense of our indefensible art. And it would be easy enough at this point to march onward and write a triumphalist defense of fiction, ridiculing those who hold the very practice in suspicion—the type of reader who wonders how a man wrote Anna Karenina, or why Zora Neale Hurston once wrote a book with no black people in it, or why a gay woman like Patricia Highsmith spent so much time imagining herself into the life of an (ostensibly) straight white man called Ripley. But I don’t write fiction in a triumphalist spirit and I can’t defend it in that way either. Besides which, a counter-voice in my head detects, in Whitman’s lines, not a little entitlement. Containing multitudes sounds, just now, like an act of colonization. Who is this Whitman, and who does he think he is, containing anyone? Let Whitman speak for Whitman—I’ll speak for myself, thank you very much. How can Whitman—white, gay, American—possibly contain, say, a black polysexual British girl or a nonbinary Palestinian or a Republican Baptist from Atlanta?
Source: Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction | by Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books
HT: Bill Sundstrom
My neighborhood book group read this and we had a fun discussion. This is a great novel. Sure some parts are no longer politically correct, but you have to read past that. Chandler’s writing is so literary: crafted, thoughtful, evocative. Practically every page the modern reader is impressed by his sentences, vocabulary, metaphors, and style. And the plot is convoluted enough that you are impelled to go back to certain sections and read them again, and get a wonderful feeling of satisfaction as you see pieces link together. And it’s LA….
From 2006. Not the best-written book. Lots of vignettes, often little narrative flow. He drops characters that he should be coming back to: Cheney is never mentioned after page 100 for example. I don’t think any Iraqi leaders other than Chalabi and Moqtada al-Sadr are mentioned, and even then only tangentially. But if you want to be convinced that the whole invasion and occupation was a fiasco, and the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz were responsible, this is a great introduction and heard to beat. I was convinced. Usually I am pretty skeptical. I remember my parents had The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by Shirer (they kept it out of sight, in the garage… imagine!), and that kind of a book about the Iraq invasion would be worth reading.
From a great blog post on the film The Big Sleep: 
