In situ

"Bless an author with a long enough career, and even the most outcast elements can get a second chance. In Thomas Pynchon’s encyclopedic, pull-out-the-stops first novel, V. (1963), the Upper West Side merits only a withering dismissal:

     This was on Broadway in the 80’s, which is not the Broadway of Show Biz, or even a broken heart for every light on it. Uptown was a bleak district with no identity, where a heart never does anything so violent or final as break: merely gets increased tensile, compressive, shear loads piled on it bit by bit every day till eventually these and its own shudderings fatigue it.

     Fifty—fifty!—years later, Bleeding Edge, his latest, situates its heroine, Maxine Tarnow, and much of its action firmly on the 'Yupper West Side.' Though the area retains a rep as 'a vague sort of uptown Dubuque,' Pynchon’s affection for Maxine means the neighborhood gets his signature treatment, three parts laughing gas to one part subterranean profundity."
— Ed Park, BookForum
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Hot Off The Press

From: Wrong Side of the Art!

"It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if, a decade or two from now, some prominent novelist or cultural tastemaker were to amend Virginia Woolf ’s iconic 1923 claim — 'On or about December, 1910, human character changed' — to something like 'On or about November, 2012, the climate changed.'
     Certainly near-future novelists will feature the relationship between humans and the environment more centrally than do most current writers. The seas are rising and the seasons are unraveling: It is inevitable that our fictional landscapes will evolve in tandem with our physical landscapes. Indeed, as our climate becomes ever less certain and more hostile, we might expect our fiction to start resembling the highly ironic, world-weary works that emerged from Woolf ’s war-stricken generation."
— Stephanie Bernhard, The New Inquiry
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Border Lines

" [...] Ford wants us to imagine, we live at the mercy of larger forces, forces outside ourselves, forces that determine who we are. And yet, he insists by phone from his home in East Boothbay, Maine, that's not the case — or not exactly, anyway. 'Growing up in Mississippi,' he recalls, 'and being told that this defined me, set me on a path away from place as generative. When I started writing, I took the Toulouse-Lautrec attitude that place is background scenery. I didn't want the place I came from to be responsible for me.'
     What Ford is getting at is a dual set of burdens: that of Southern history — '[W]e lived in an absurd racist society,' he told the Paris Review in 1996 — and of the Southern literary tradition, which, encompassing William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers, left him feeling 'there was no place here for me.' With his new novel, Canada (Ecco: 420 pp., $27.99), however, he has come to acknowledge that the issue of place is perhaps less clear-cut, more deterministic, than he may have thought. [...]
     The book, which takes place primarily in Montana and the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, is a return, of sorts; set in summer and fall 1960, it is narrated by 15-year-old Dell Parsons, who must learn to fend for himself after his parents are arrested for robbing a bank."
— David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
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