Last week, the internet buzzed about and puzzled over the newly unveiled cover of Jonathan Franzen’s Purity, forthcoming in September. While Franzen is sure to grab many headlines in the months to come, we’re also intrigued by Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, which also sports a cover with a blue and white color scheme. Along with the cover above, we have the book’s opening paragraphs below. Fates and Furies has so far been cryptically described as “an exhilarating novel about marriage, creativity, art, and perception,” and, as you’ll see, the book wastes no time, uh, introducing us to its protagonists.
Two people were coming up the beach. She was fair and sharp in a green bikini, though it was May in Maine and cold. He was tall, vivid; a light flickered in him that caught the eye and held it. Their names were Lotto and Mathilde.
For a minute they watched a tide pool full of spiny creatures that sent up curls of sand in vanishing. Then he took her face in his hands, kissed her pale lips. He could die right now of happiness. In a vision, he saw the sea rising up to suck them in, tonguing off their flesh and rolling their bones over its coral molars in the deep. If she were beside him, he thought, he would float out singing.
Well, he was young, twenty-two, and they had been married that morning in secret. Extravagance, under the circumstances, could be forgiven.
Her fingers down the back of his trunks seared his skin. She pushed him backward, walking him up a dune covered in beach-pea stalks, down again to where the wall of sand blocked the wind, where they felt warmer. Under the bikini top, her gooseflesh had taken on a lunar blue, and her nipples in the cold turned inward. On their knees, now, though the sand was rough and hurt. It didn’t matter. They were reduced to mouths and hands. He swept her legs to his hips, pressed her down, blanketed her with his heat until she stopped shivering, made a dune of his back. Her raw knees were raised to the sky.
He longed for something wordless and potent: what? To wear her. He imagined living in her warmth forever. People in his life had fallen away from him one by one like dominoes; every movement pinned her further so that she could not abandon him. He imagined a lifetime of screwing on the beach until they were one of those ancient pairs speed-walking in the morning, skin like lacquered walnut meat. Even old, he would waltz her into the dunes and have his way with her sexy frail bird bones, the plastic hips, and the bionic knee. Drone lifeguards looming up in the sky, flashing their lights, booming Fornicators! Fornicators! to roust them guiltily out. This, for eternity. He closed his eyes and wished. Her eyelashes on his cheek, her thighs on his waist, the first consummation of this terrifying thing they’d done.
I don't want to burst anyone's bubble, but Mr. Wallace was working on a novel back in 2000 when he spoke to a few of us at Illinois State.
I'll be the first to offer an over/under: A new novel from wallace = +/- 2014?
Mr. Wallace got 250 pages into that novel and then, deciding that it wasn't working, stripped it for parts–his words, ca. 2003, also at ISU, where I was a student of his in a couple of grad classes. I'm as eager as anyone to see another long-form thing, but whatever he was working on in 2000, I don't think this is it.
"The Suffering Channel," in Oblivion, felt like it might have been a novel that didn't work out. I can only imagine the difficulty of trying to follow up Infinite Jest – witness, e.g., the ontological self-laceration of "Octet," from Brief Interviews (some kind of line's end's end indeed.) What I liked about the Harper's excerpt this month is how relaxed it seemed. Wallace seemed to have found room to breathe again. Interestingly, one of the core competencies returned to here – one that I had never really thought about – was meticulous, journalistic inhabitation of a subcultural milieu. In IJ, it was AA; here, it was the IRS. Maybe the time doing the essay books has really been nurturing some of the fiction muscles. More optimistic than zk, I'm remembering that Wallace wrote IJ in something like 3 years. Once he catches the right wave…
The clip in Harper's was so wonderful not only because of signature control of language (check out the two sentence paragraph just before the child speaks) but also because of how many metaphors one can draw from this element: a child taking on the characteristics of his father's govermental agency.
William Gaddis let twenty years slip by between Recognitions and JR. If we have to wait until 2014 for DFW's next novel, that's just fine with me.