Volume 53, Number 15 · October 5, 2006
Men Without Qualities
By Joyce Carol Oates
The Emperor's Children
by Claire Messud
Knopf, 431 pp., $25.00
OTHER BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
When the World Was Steady
by Claire Messud
Granta, 270 pp., $11.95 (paper)
The Last Life
by Claire Messud
Harcourt, 400 pp., $14.00 (paper)
The Hunters
by Claire Messud
Harcourt, 181 pp., $13.00 (paper)
Nietzsche tells us: 'Poets behave shamelessly toward their experiences: they exploit them.' But is this so, invariably? In prose fiction, as in poetry? It has become a commonplace assumption that even writers of ambition are inspired primarily by their own lives, and by the experiences of their generations, fed by the influence of the great, self-absorbed and -obsessed Modernists (Joyce, Proust, Lawrence) and by mid-twentieth-century American 'confessional' poets (Lowell, Berryman, Sexton, Plath); as if the autobiographical pulse is ubiquitous, beating visibly, or invisibly, fueling the very act of creation. Who needs a muse, where there is a mirror? What need for any effort of the imagination, in the creation of poetry or prose in the mode of Robert Lowell: 'Yet why not say what happened?'
Review, 3983 words
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