(Untitled)

[molly_may]

This review of the book Zone One, by Colson Whitehead ia absolutely breathtaking in it's obnoxiousness. The review is a week old at this point, and has already been very handily ripped to shreds at I09, but I didn't read it until yesterday, so it's still fresh to me.

Zone One is a zombie novel, but Colson Whitehead is a "literary" writer, and

Comments

[snickfic]

Seriously, I don't think any genre fan has ever taken to his or her fainting couch because they were introduced to vocabulary words they don't know.

Especially considering that genre fiction is so terribly fond of neologisms. And even discounting those, if we genre people didn't like getting our vocabularies stretched, folks like China Mieville (especially China Mieville) would have no audience.

Wow. Just the quoted bits of the review come across more like trolling than serious discussion. Or serious anything.

[molly_may]

That's what I was thinking too; in my experience, genre readers are more than happy to have their vocabularies expanded.

To be honest, I kind of think the review was strongly motivated by bad reviews or inane comments he received for his own book on Amazon. In other words, I think he was using his bully pulpit to troll the Amazon reviewers that pissed him off.

[petzipellepingo]

What a twit. That's all the word play he deserves.

[molly_may]

Indeed!

[empresspatti]

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/10/how-zombies-and-superheroes-conquered-highbrow-fiction/246847/

and = BOOM - the other opinion!

[molly_may]

Indeed!

ETA: Um, that was meant to be a reply to a different comment. To YOUR comment, my reply is: Thanks so much for that link! It was a great article, and it pointed out something I was thinking myself while reading that review, which is that this guy is like, ten years behind the times, since authors like Chabon and McCarthy and Murakami have already proven time and again that genre and literary can co-exist in the same book.