Once upon a time the novel used to be spoken of in the same breath as the nation. It was said that the "rise" of the novel was more or less synchronous with the "rise" of the nation (one has to read Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel to make sense of the affinity between the genre and nation-formation).
Today the typical novel is written within the context of a specific locality. Karl Taro Greenfeld's debut novel Triburbia traces the rise of TriBeCa, an enclave within the borough of Manhattan.
Triburbia traces the rise of TriBeCa from being an artist's colony/bohemia in the 1970s to becoming what it is today: one of the most expensive urban zip codes in the U.S.
The following are some self-reflective lines spoken by one of the characters in the novel:
We are a prosperous community [...] Our lofts and apartments are worth millions. Our wives vestigially beautiful. Our renovations as vast and grand in scale as the construction of the ocean liners, yet we regularly assure ourselves that our affluence does not define us. We are better than that. Measure us by the books on our shelves, the paintings on our walls, the songs on our iTunes playlists, our children in their secure little school. We live in smug certainty that our taste is impeccable, our politics correct, our sense of outrage at the current regime totally warranted.
Who knows, next we might just have a novel named Sohonama?
No comments :
Post a Comment