In Slate we read: “Some of the longest novels are those in which not much happens. James J
In Slate we read: “Some of the longest novels are those in which not much happens. James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place over the course of afairly ordinary day. Henry James’ already lengthy novels grew increasingly protracted as he went on—but not more eventful. Dare someone to summarize Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Or don’t, actually—you’ll get terribly bored, despite the brilliance of that novel. As a character in Caleb Crain’s new book, Necessary Errors, says: “Nothing whatever happens for pages and pages, and one doesn’t mind somehow.” The same can be said of Crain’s novel, his first. At 472 pages, it’s not quite a tome, perhaps, but it recalls the dreamy pacing of Henry James or Elizabeth Bowen, herself a great reader of James (both come up in Necessary Errors). It takes place over the course of a year in Prague, just after the Velvet Revolution, and follows the daily meanderings of Jacob Putman, a young gay man newly out of Harvard. Jacob is trying postgraduate life abroad, teaching English at a local language school. His circle of Prague friends consists largely of his co-teachers, fellow expats testing a precariously post-Communist Prague while they test themselves as new adults. “Do you ever wonder what you’ll be some day?” they ask one another. No one seems able to give a straight answer. Necessary Errors is a bildungsroman, but it’s about the coming of age of these friends as well as Jacob, who needs them badly. Canceled plans invariably leave him feeling desolate, and the great euphoria of his time in Prague lies significantly in the fact that it is spent together. Jacob and his friends—elegant Melinda, ironic Carl, pettish Annie, cryptic Kaspar—meet in bars, visit monuments, discuss fiction, discuss life, are frequently drunk. There is, in fact, a general haze that surrounds the novel (and perhaps your early 20s as well). If nothing really happens, it does so deliberately.” Read the rest here HOMO MAGAZINE -- source link