Alan Jacobs

Finished reading: The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler 📚. I wanted to love this book but I didn’t. It’s just too didactic. Like Richard Powers’s The Overstory, it has an inescapably clear extractable message and the story is always subordinated to that message. Alice Gribbin’s Tablet essay on the visual arts makes the point well: “Artworks are not to be experienced but to be understood: From all directions, across the visual art world’s many arenas, the relationship between art and the viewer has come to be framed in this way. An artwork communicates a message, and comprehending that message is the work of that audience.” When I read Nayler or Powers, I feel that I am being asked to extract a specific message and if I do that I will have done my readerly work. In each of these cases the message is wonderful, necessary, life-giving — but it is a message, and I prefer my messages presented straightforwardly and my stories to be considerably less straightforward. “Tell the truth but tell it slant” is what stories and poems are for; these books are quite upright in their telling.