Thus “style” was born: this was Flaubert’s sec­ond gift to nov­el­ists, and one they are as like­ly to curse him for as to thank him. Of course, writ­ers before Flaubert had ago­nized about style: don’t we feel that Jane Austen was a ruth­less cen­sor of super­fluity? But no nov­el­ist ago­nized as much or as pub­licly, no nov­el­ist fetishized the poet­ry of the sen­tence in the same way, no nov­el­ist pushed to such an extreme the poten­tial alien­ation of form and con­tent (a book “about nothing”).

The God­head, revealed.

Don­na con­sult­ed her twen­ty-dol­lar elec­tric Timex wrist­watch, which he had giv­en her. “About thir­ty-eight min­utes. Hey.” Her face bright­ened. “Bob, I got the wolf book with me — you want to look at it now? It’s got a lot of heavy shit in it, if you can dig it.”

“Life,” Bar­ris said, as if to him­self, “is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For every­one and everything.”

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Minor­i­ty Report: First Quar­ter Sin­gles & Albums 2006. Com­ing soon!

Gene Pit­ney — 1940 — 2006

Set in post-war York­shire, This Sport­ing Life tells the sto­ry of Frank Machin, a coal min­er turned rug­by star. A damn­ing com­men­tary on the sti­fling Eng­lish tra­di­tion of val­ues and class, mak­ing it the very antithe­sis of George Cuko­r’s My Fair Lady. Mach­in’s hard-bit­ten expe­ri­ences pre­fig­ure mod cul­ture: an upstart dying to be accept­ed, yet does­n’t fit in despite his best efforts and in turn rebels against received notions of what’s prop­er and right. In some respects, Machin plays out as a brow­beat­en fig­ure for change in post-war Eng­land and it’s through him that one can envi­sion the social rev­o­lu­tion that was about to take place there.

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