francine prose reading like a writer sparknotes

Her observations are generally detailed and wise and knowledgeable, but it's a lot like reading the MFA or English lit classes that she talks about once teaching. It's mostly just Francine Prose's views on literature and what makes for good writing.

The thing is, this book, which is subtitled 'A Guide for People Who Love Books and For Those Who Want to Write Like Them,' is really not much of a guide at all and contains very little writer's advice. I'm still willing to listen to what an accomplished writer has to say. So Prose (who does have the perfect name for an author, doesn't she?) doesn't have much use for science fiction or fantasy or thrillers or adventure novels or any of that pop culture stuff.

Like most writers writing books like this, she ends it with a list of her personal 'books you must read,' and there is a lot of high-falutin' literature (Balzac, Calvino, Marquez, Franzen) a sampling of the usual classics (Dickens, Austen, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Hemingway), but the only book that could be remotely considered a modern genre novel is John Le Carré's A Perfect Spy - Le Carré being the usual go-to for people who need someone who writes genre fiction that they can grudgingly acknowledge as literary. She never names any of those 'big crappy novels' or 'childhood classics' that were so unworthy of her attention, but you can infer quite a bit from what she doesn't mention. She makes a few comments about how when she was young she read everything voraciously, 'big crappy novels' and 'childhood classics' - before she discovered there were 'good books' out there.

In this book full of sometimes multiple-page excerpts from books that highlight her points, not one is from a popular or 'genre' novel. She doesn't actually put it like that, and she never comes out and says 'Genre fiction is shit,' but reading between the lines, that seems to be her attitude. Meaning, books should be Important and Literary and Art and Say Something About the Human Condition. This was another one of my forays into 'Books about writing written by writers,' some of which have been quite interesting, a few of which have been useful, but often they turn out to be tedious.įor starters, Francine Prose (who is apparently a highly regarded novelist with many books to her name, but with apologies, I've never read anything by her nor had I even heard of her before) is very much a literary writer.

Francine prose reading like a writer sparknotes