{"id":764,"date":"2013-09-09T09:21:13","date_gmt":"2013-09-09T17:21:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=764"},"modified":"2017-12-18T13:27:34","modified_gmt":"2017-12-18T21:27:34","slug":"review-the-locked-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/09\/review-the-locked-room\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Locked Room"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>
\n The Locked Room<\/a> by Paul Auster<\/a>
\n My rating: 1 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

I know this guy who used to be a poet. He told me about how he would go to these writer\u2019s retreats, and sit around with other poets who would just blather on, all these anecdotes meant to pre-inform their poetry. And he hated it. And I hated The Locked Room<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Because I feel like City of Glass<\/i> and Ghosts<\/i> where just blatherings setting up icons in The Locked Room<\/i>. There\u2019s the various names of people, the various artifacts. Graves and Alice in Wonderland and red notebooks. Borrowing an overcoat might be a metaphor for something, at the reader\u2019s discretion. But when it\u2019s mentioned in one story and then another, the reader no longer has a choice. And as a reader, I do not want the author telling me what to think.<\/p>\n

This is not a screed affirming \u201cshow don\u2019t tell.\u201d I don\u2019t even want the author to show me anything, not on purpose any way. Just write your damns story. I\u2019ll find meaning in it if I want to. The Locked Room<\/i> is so damned Freudian, and I mean that pejoratively. The main character has sex with his child-hood friends wife\u2014and it\u2019s angry sex! Bullshit.<\/p>\n

The only part of The Locked Room<\/i>\u2014or the entire New York Trilogy<\/i>, for that mattered\u2014that I found the least interesting was Fanshawe\u2019s sister. Finally, I thought, a part of the story leaked through and not \u201cexpertly crafted\u201d as a symbol of something. That is, until the sentence: \u201cEllen is no more than a literary device.\u201d I gnashed my teeth. I decided that no, Auster must have realized that she\u2019d leaked in, and so he came to grips with his lack of control by shoving in that sentence. Ha.<\/p>\n

Whatever. I\u2019m done with the novel(s) now, and I can move on to middle-class meaninglessness. Fiction forwarded by cognitive dissonance, existential angst held at arm\u2019s length and not propped-up by so-called Post-Modernism. Post-Modernism can bite my ass.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Locked Room by Paul Auster My rating: 1 of 5 stars I know this guy who used to be a poet. He told me about how he would go to these writer\u2019s retreats, and sit around with other poets who would just blather on, all these anecdotes meant to pre-inform their poetry. And he … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Review: The Locked Room”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","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,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-ck","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=764"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":765,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764\/revisions\/765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}