Or there’s this novel, Swing Time, by Zadie Smith. Naturally, there are good novels and bad there are plot-driven novels and sentence-level novels there are insufferable diaries of middle-class anxiety and essential mirrors to our middle-class anxiety there’s workshopped prose from your insular MFA vs rangy fiction from the West Indian Day Parade on Eastern Parkway all the way to Box Street in Greenpoint (feral cats living in milk crates) there’s maximalism, minimalism debuts and late style there’s “Fail better” and real, absolute failure there are the 73% who have read at least one book in the past year according to the Pew Research Center, and the outdoorsy 27% there are Norwegian novels from life, and adult coloring books - which are about life there’s YA and Dinosaur erotica romans à clef and Bildungsromans (though if they were on a menu I’d just point) and there are coming-of-age novels and something of an alternative, where time just happens. Taking exception to Zadie Smith’s seminal “Two Paths for the Novel” has always been as simple as counting off the paths less binary.
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