Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
While reading, I frequently catch my mind in the act of wandering off. I call it back to the text: Focus! damn you. Self-recrimination is an integral part of my reading experience. I compare myself unfavourably to history’s great readers. Samuel Johnson would never have let his mind wander off like this. Surely Northrop Frye…
My reading life is full of coincidences. Last month I read The Old Curiosity Shop. A month later, I find myself reading what I take to be Charles Dickens time-traveled and teleported into 21st century North Carolina. What that means is that, while Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing is a good novel, it doesn’t…
I have a special pile of books, purchased with the best of intentions, which nevertheless go unread. What lurks in the background is, perhaps, a species of gluttony. I want to read everything. I want to swallow it whole, digest it, ruminate until I pass it into my second stomach, break it down and draw…
Another author whom I willingly read even as I claim to despise his writing is Charles Dickens. Here, my distaste is not specific to Dickens but directed generally at Victorian novelists and, because it is directed generally, is more obviously a function of taste than of an objectively grounded theoretical claim.
Berger’s writing has a quality about it that I call opacity. It is language that conceals as much as it reveals. It is the opposite of hashtag writing or search engine writing, irreducible in a way that algorithms can never parse.
More than 10 years after the publication of The Matter with Morris (2010), David Bergen has revisited the characters from that slender novel to create a slender companion, Out of Mind. Taken together, the two novels offers us a single substantial portrait of middle-class life in the early 21st century.
In a time when the Black Lives Matter movement and anger around Residential Schools have thrust issues of identity and histories of colonial oppression into the foreground of public conversation, the question arises as to the function of the arts in this regard. Are the arts yet another forum for public conversation? If so, who gets to speak? And what are the rules?
See The Child falls squarely within the commercial realist fold, and David Bergen is one of its great stylists.
Leaving Tomorrow, David Bergen (Toronto: HarperCollins), 2014. I am a proposer of projects aimed at answering arcane questions but, because of their arcaneness (arcanicity?) and because they would require more time of me than I have lifetimes to give, most of my projects go unprojected. One such project is to conduct a novel census. Create…
We watch discrete acts of consciousness unspooling themselves on every page. Like you and me in mid-thought, there is less attention to grammatical propriety. Instead, we have choppy bits. Subjects gone missing. Or implied. More fidelity to emotional states and to memory than to the logic of algorithmic prose.
Bergen is willing to investigate the quiet moments that stitch together experience while eschewing the tendency to give greater weight to the momentous events.
One could easily imagine the principal character here, Morris Schutt, meeting Barney Panovsky in a hotel bar and, together, the two of them putting a serious dent in a bottle of McCallan.
In a way, Bergen is the perfect author to read during a pandemic lockdown. History may record the Covid-19 global pandemic as a dramatic crisis worthy of its own straight-to-Netflix movie. But sitting here in the midst of it, I experience it not so much as a crisis as I do a chronic state to be endured.
For me, what drives the comparison [to Denis Johnson] more deeply is the style of the writing. Both writers deploy a crisp detached prose that is perfectly suited to evince an emotionally lost protagonist looking from the outside in.
This tetralogy is a remarkable achievement, offering a clear-eyed view of the times without resorting to the usual maudlin emotions—outrage, disbelief. Instead, through her wise art, she offers us reassurance.