 |
| My battered and much read copy of Carpenter's Gothic |
"I cannot really work unless I set a problem for myself to solve. In Carpenter’s Gothic the problems were largely of style and technique and form. I wanted to write a shorter book, one that observes the unities of time and place to the point that everything, even though it expands into the world, takes place in one house, and a country house at that, with a small number of characters, in a short span of time. It became really largely an exercise in style and technique. And also, I wanted to take all these clichés of fiction to bring them to life and make them work. So we have the older man and the younger woman, the marriage breaking up, the obligatory adultery, the locked room, the mysterious stranger, and so forth." William Gaddis, The Paris Review
Whenever I return to a favorite book, or writer, after a gap of some years there is an element of fear. I'm afraid that what I once saw will have disappeared or no longer mean as much. I suppose I distrust my younger self or feel that I may no longer be prepared to work as hard at a book as he was.
But I need not have had any worries here. If anything, Carpenter's Gothic improves with age. From a dingy house on the banks of the Hudson we hear reports, half truths and rumours from across America and Africa. Greed, money, religion, politics, all human life is here in a more concentrated form than the two large novels that preceded it. The main action takes place out of our vision and the main carriers of the news are totally unreliable, but from these scraps we can build our own edifice.
