>Except I get the impression from posts like today's that you
>actually read and enjoy novels a lot. So what does it mean to say
>that you're prejudiced against novels? You don't actually seem to be.
I look forward to Dwayne's answer this time but he gave one answer to this a long time ago that I liked so much I bookmarked it:
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2007/2007-November/021573.html
>McCarthy's "The Road" is a bleak example of what happens when the
>mainstream novelist tries to imagine something beyond his exhausted
>genre's usual concerns. That unrelenting book is about the ultimate
>dead end: an apt symbol of mainstream novelists' failure to examine
>structure and super structure and see what strange, new places that
>might take a story.
>
>
>
>What I want: a fiction as brave as a simple scene in a Michael Mann
>film; the camera's eye patiently settles on an LA street in the dead of
>night in such a way that the hidden things, the vastness, the adapted
>wildlife, the deep technological-ness of the place is made clear.
>
>A Mann shot seems to look through the skin to the skull beneath.
>
>That's what I want. That is not what mainstream novelists are giving.