{"id":637,"date":"2009-09-16T17:39:42","date_gmt":"2009-09-16T21:39:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/?p=637"},"modified":"2010-03-21T14:25:06","modified_gmt":"2010-03-21T18:25:06","slug":"92009-fiction-mark-spragg-the-fruit-of-stone-new-york-riverhead-2002","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/92009-fiction-mark-spragg-the-fruit-of-stone-new-york-riverhead-2002\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Spragg, The Fruit of Stone (New York: Riverhead, 2002)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Fruit-of-Stone\"<\/a>

Click the image to buy a copy.<\/p><\/div>\n

There is Fiction, and There Is Literature<\/strong>, by Kevin R. Kosar, September 16, 2009<\/p>\n

Fiction fiends are well aware of the squabble that broke out<\/a> some years back that featured John Irving, John Updike, and Norman Mailer pounding on Tom Wolfe, and Wolfe lashing back.\u00a0 Updike wrote of Wolfe’s then latest novel,<\/p>\n

A Man in Full<\/em> still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form. Like a movie desperate to recoup its bankers’ investment, the novel tries too hard to please us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wolfe lashed back, mocking his tormentors as “the three stooges” and accusing them of writing books that were precious (in the pejorative sense) and disconnected from the real world.<\/p>\n

Whether Wolfe’s novels are entertainment or literature I will take up another day.\u00a0 But, I will defend is the proposition that there is<\/span> a difference between literature and other forms of fiction.\u00a0 Just what characteristics or qualities make a text fall into one category or the other are difficult to enumerate.<\/p>\n

I will hazard, though, that at least one of them is that literature uses language in ways that go beyond simple description and the conveyance of action. For example, The Fruit of Stone<\/a><\/em> opens,<\/p>\n

Birdsong strikes up and musters in the first soft press of dawn. Starlings, sparrows, magpies, meadowlarks, blackbirds. There is the flush and shuffle of feathers. Throat tunings. The hollowing chitter of beaks. Bursts of flights. Wrens, flycatchers, cowbirds, crows. Complaint. Exultation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, complaint, exultation…How much these are part of this novel, and life itself.<\/p>\n

I have been carrying Spragg’s book from new home to new home for the past seven years.\u00a0 I regret not opening it sooner.\u00a0 One thing that kept me from reading it is that I could tell that it was a book that one needs to read slowly.\u00a0 It is not the case that the words are difficult or that the novel’s ideas are abstruse.<\/p>\n

In fact, the story is rather simple. Barnum McEban, a fundamentally decent man who leads a mostly solitary life on an ancestral farm, is reaching middle age.\u00a0 He has recently slept with the woman he has loved since he was a teenager and who is, much to Barnum’s anguish, married to his best friend.\u00a0 The novel plays out what follows their night together.<\/p>\n

Yet, Spragg’s telling of the story forces the reader to slow down, to appreciate the minute details of the scenes he is painting, and to understand what really is occuring.\u00a0 Though only 287 pages long, this book took me six nights at an hour or two per night to finish.<\/p>\n

For the most part, I loved the The Fruit of Stone<\/a> and appreciated its artistry. Barnum’s story is not just about the girl that got away. It depicts the challenges a man faces when he recognizes his mortality and asks himself hard questions about what he really wants from the life that remains.\u00a0 How to live one’s own life, rather than the life that one’s parents lived, or the life that one just meandered into living?<\/p>\n

The only thing that bothered me about this novel is that Spragg injected some mysticism into the story, which I felt detracted from the existential austerity.<\/p>\n

That, though, is quibble, and should not be taken as anything more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is Fiction, and There Is Literature, by Kevin R. Kosar, September 16, 2009 Fiction fiends are well aware of the squabble that broke out some years back that featured John Irving, John Updike, and Norman Mailer pounding on Tom Wolfe, and Wolfe lashing back.\u00a0 Updike wrote of Wolfe’s then latest novel, A Man in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pBCzY-ah","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1036,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637\/revisions\/1036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevinrkosar.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}