Once again Franzen has fashioned a capacious but intricately ordered narrative that in its majestic sweep seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life.
Like Franzen's previous novel, "The Corrections," this is a masterly portrait of a nuclear family in turmoil, with an intricately ordered narrative and a majestic sweep that seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life.
Hindsight makes the clumsiness of ordering the narrative quite apparent.
State propaganda authorities attempted to maintain firm control over the narrative, reportedly ordering local media to recall journalists, reprint official state media accounts and focus on positive news, such as successful rescues.
"Summer Love" isn't a standard western but a series of loosely ordered, vaguely chronological narrative shards and iconographic images that will be familiar to anyone who has a casual acquaintance with the genre.
They have to be able to select and package material from the world in a way that gives it order and narrative drive and swagger.
"It was sloppily typed, with numerous hand-marked additions and deletions -- and more numerous typos -- and it betrayed no obvious order or narrative direction," Christopher Rothko writes in the introduction.
On their own, the pieces of the story were scattered and easily buried in cacophonous feeds of unrelated links, quotations, and thoughts; with Cole to map the story, tweeting the pieces in their proper order, a narrative became clear.
It all begins today when Alfred Dorn, director of the World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets, appears at 7 p.m. at the Mid-Island Y-J.C.C. on Manetto Hill Road in Plainview (516) 822-3636.
The biblical book of Numbers is a dazzling tapestry -- or perhaps more accurately a boggling patchwork quilt, with alternating segments of structuring orders and narrative set-pieces, patterns for marching and encamping and serving in the sanctuary juxtaposed with battles and dramatic episodes and tales of wonder.
