A pessimist because of intelligence and an optimist by will

I missed it completely yesterday, but Sara Nelson's last column for Publishers Weekly is especially sad in light of her dismissal.

"Call me gullible or impressionable, but I'm actually feeling kind of hopeful this week. It's not just the new year or the inauguration (which I loved most for its goofs and gaffes) or even that—please, please—publishing business firings are coming to an end, at least for a while.
Then again, maybe I am buoyed by the start of the Obama presidency: While I know change is going to be slow in coming, it's energizing to look at what we've already started, at what we can do now."
Oy.
The tag line above is from Antonio Gramsci, the Italian philosopher and it applies to most of life, the publishing industry in particular.
While it's nice to be mentioned in Sarah's blog I'd much rather have Sara Nelson back with PW.
The tag line above is from Antonio Gramsci, the Italian philosopher and it applies to most of life, the publishing industry in particular.

Another reason to love Nelson is that she's a fan of Zoe Heller. I just got the advance of the new novel and it's a beauty.
The Believers strikes me as inhabiting similar turf to Claire Messud's Emperor's Children, but I'll follow Zoe Heller anywhere.
Her previous novels are perfect reads, a joy to handsell and they occupy a spot that many modern novels seem to run away from. They tend to the here and now, their characters are somewhat difficult to like and the moral failings at the centre of Heller's characters are too finely drawn out and complex to easily dismiss as an entire and irreversible failing.
In short they run counter to too many of Canadian fictions earnest citizenry who have horrible childhood maladies and strive in their adult years to overcome long odds to zzzz....
Of course that's a gross exaggeration, but Zoe Heller writes novels that are just a delight to read, and too often readers both casual and serious pick up the middling stuff that's in the news or in the (shrinking) book review pages and end up dismayed at the wrong turn.
To quote from Nelson's PW piece:
"Zoe Heller’s books aren’t hard to read or pretentious or opaque, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy. What they are is deceptively complex, in the way they wrap a high-concept plot around extremely complicated characters."
Spot on, that.

Posted by David