Sunday 15 July, 2007

Whacked

I thought this article(Has the novel been murdered by the mob?) which asks whether the Sopranos has whacked the novel was pretty spot on. And I'd recommend following up on the article's reference to The Wire. We've watched 2 seasons - you can get it on DVD - and it's just fantastic.

'Novelists from Norman Mailer to Gary Shteyngart have described the show - which as yet does not exist between two covers - as a Great American Novel, and for good reason. Spread across nearly 100 hours of viewing time, The Sopranos developed characters to a degree unparalleled in American television, save that other current HBO drama, The Wire, which is, in fact, occasionally written by a novelist, George Pelecanos.

The Sopranos also covered some of the primary themes of the Great American Novel. Like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, it explored the ways in which each new generation attempts to fix the parenting mistakes of the one before; like John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, it hitched its star to the emotionally complicated but intellectually unsophisticated inner life of an unreconstructed American man; and like Philip Roth's American Pastoral, it depicted the death of an American city, revealing the rupture between classes (and races) around its grave.'