Often this album attempts to anonymize her rather than highlight her particularities.
As in the new novel, the clerk selects one citizen from the ranks of the ever-dying and living, and gradually, without ever naming her (the cellist likewise goes unnamed), endows her with metaphysical particularity.
But in a race where she appears to be counting on her record to seal the deal with voters, being able to remind an audience of her husband's achievements, particularity in overseeing a successful economy, may be a powerful ploy.
"In Zanesville," by Jo Ann Beard (Little, Brown; $23.99) On the threshold of sex and selfhood, Beard's heroine records her world with a lush particularity and a wry comic tone that we suspect she will lose with her first kiss.
On the threshold of sex and selfhood, Beard's heroine records her world with a lush particularity and a wry comic tone that we suspect she will lose with her first kiss.
The steadfast banality of Drakulic's prose, her preference for summary and indirect narrative rather than live scenes, the decision to render characters' names as letters, the paucity of personal history: it all keeps us at a distance and prevents her characters -- even her protagonist -- from developing much particularity.
And the women themselves, while differentiated in terms of personality and circumstance, grow more and more alike as Cusk probes her way past the particularities of their lives toward her own despairing articulation of what it is to be the woman of the family at this moment in middle England.
The Brooklyn songwriter and poet Jasmine Dreame Wagner, in her own recent memoir, "On a Clear Day," learns to notice particularity — and to get outside her own wish to generalize, to let big theories explain her life.
Because she never forgot that literature was made from human experience, she was astringently sceptical of theory: particularity and clarity grounded her work.
