Tuckasegee Reader reports on some southern mountain writers' reactions to a recent New York Times book reviewer's critique:
On October 21, writer Randy Boyagoda reviewed mountain novelist Charles Frazier’s latest book, Nightwoods, for the Sunday New York Times Book Review section. ...
Boyagoda’s review, in one of the nation’s most influential publications, was critical of Frazier’s book and his style...
For example, Boyagoda, a faculty member at Ryerson University in Toronto, chided Frazier’s “cheap ornamentation” in his use of many material objects – cigarette brands, pinball machines – without what the reviewer considers broader cultural touchstones of the time, like the Civil Rights movement. ... “At their worst,” Boyagoda writes, “[Frazier's] books offer something … like baroque costume drama starring hothouse Southerners with M.F.A.’s: their words and interior lives are so incessantly stylized and exquisitely evoked that they come across less as believable people than as literary confections straight out of Willy Wonka’s Faulkner Factory." ...
Tuckasegee author and poet Thomas Rain Crowe took umbrage, and rallied the literary legions. ... Other regional authors chimed in, and ultimately a lively personal exchange kicked up ... Read the full article
On October 21, writer Randy Boyagoda reviewed mountain novelist Charles Frazier’s latest book, Nightwoods, for the Sunday New York Times Book Review section. ...
Boyagoda’s review, in one of the nation’s most influential publications, was critical of Frazier’s book and his style...
For example, Boyagoda, a faculty member at Ryerson University in Toronto, chided Frazier’s “cheap ornamentation” in his use of many material objects – cigarette brands, pinball machines – without what the reviewer considers broader cultural touchstones of the time, like the Civil Rights movement. ... “At their worst,” Boyagoda writes, “[Frazier's] books offer something … like baroque costume drama starring hothouse Southerners with M.F.A.’s: their words and interior lives are so incessantly stylized and exquisitely evoked that they come across less as believable people than as literary confections straight out of Willy Wonka’s Faulkner Factory." ...
Tuckasegee author and poet Thomas Rain Crowe took umbrage, and rallied the literary legions. ... Other regional authors chimed in, and ultimately a lively personal exchange kicked up ... Read the full article
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Charles Frazier's response that he does not read reviews is probably the best way to deal with Randy Boyagoda and other critics. Thomas Rain Crowe and others might have heeded what Adolphus William Ward said about Antony Ulric's calumnies against the Electress Sophia and the Hanoverian Succession: "An authority so signally untrustworthy is best ignored; though it would be idle to pretend that the copious stream, which has flowed through all sorts of channels from this turbid source, is unlikely to be wholly devoid of some admixture of truth."
By Longtime Reader
11/12/2011