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Subscribe!Most "Rollicking" Book of the Year?
Monday, April 05, 2010
Two months out, and good reviews are still coming, which is great to see. Yesterday the Boston Globe, home of the nation's finest Sports section, gave the book a strong review. (No idea whether they deliberately waited for Easter Sunday to run their review of a book about resurrections. But it makes you wonder.)
Interestingly, one of the adjectives the Globe used in the first paragraph of the review was "rollicking." This is at least the fourth review to call the book rollicking. It's a cool word, and I'll gladly take it. Jess Walter used it in his blurb for the back cover, so maybe he planted the seed in the reviewers' heads. Then again, some reviewers get advance copies of the book before it's been adorned with blurbs, so they might not have been influenced by Jess' snazzy word choice. The book just rollicks, apparently.
You don't often see that word applied to literature. Books are often called moving, stunning, heartrending. They "signal the arrival of an important new voice in fiction," or are the "exciting" work of "a writer to watch," etc. But I seldom see them described as rollicking. The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers may well be 2010's most-often-described-as-rollicking book. I'm honored.
I looked up the official definition, just for fun. According to the inestimable dictionary.com, rollicking (adj) means "carefree and joyous." It also means "swaggering, boisterous."
I wouldn't think a book set in the Great Depression--one that details a family's financial decline and the death of a loved one--could be carefree, but I'm glad that people disagree. I did try quite hard to make sure the book, which details quite a bit of hardship, did not descend into torpor or overly depressing bathos. And "joyous"--who doesn't want their art to be joyous? "Swaggering" is usually used to describe a football team on a winning streak, and "boisterous" too is decidedly unliterary. Norman Mailer was swaggering and boisterous, and maybe early Philip Roth, but that's about it. Rappers are swaggering and boisterous. Not so much literary fiction. Again, I'm psyched to have appropriated a word from hip-hop reviews into my own.
"Rollick," for those of you wondering, is a verb meaning "to move or act in a carefree, frolicsome manner; behave in a free, hearty, gay, or jovial way." I like to think of myself as rather jovial and frolicsome, and I'm glad to hear that this translates into my books.
Also of note: "rollickingness" is a word.
I will do my best to make sure that my next novel has as much rollickingness as Firefly Brothers.
link to this | File:
Interestingly, one of the adjectives the Globe used in the first paragraph of the review was "rollicking." This is at least the fourth review to call the book rollicking. It's a cool word, and I'll gladly take it. Jess Walter used it in his blurb for the back cover, so maybe he planted the seed in the reviewers' heads. Then again, some reviewers get advance copies of the book before it's been adorned with blurbs, so they might not have been influenced by Jess' snazzy word choice. The book just rollicks, apparently.
You don't often see that word applied to literature. Books are often called moving, stunning, heartrending. They "signal the arrival of an important new voice in fiction," or are the "exciting" work of "a writer to watch," etc. But I seldom see them described as rollicking. The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers may well be 2010's most-often-described-as-rollicking book. I'm honored.
I looked up the official definition, just for fun. According to the inestimable dictionary.com, rollicking (adj) means "carefree and joyous." It also means "swaggering, boisterous."
I wouldn't think a book set in the Great Depression--one that details a family's financial decline and the death of a loved one--could be carefree, but I'm glad that people disagree. I did try quite hard to make sure the book, which details quite a bit of hardship, did not descend into torpor or overly depressing bathos. And "joyous"--who doesn't want their art to be joyous? "Swaggering" is usually used to describe a football team on a winning streak, and "boisterous" too is decidedly unliterary. Norman Mailer was swaggering and boisterous, and maybe early Philip Roth, but that's about it. Rappers are swaggering and boisterous. Not so much literary fiction. Again, I'm psyched to have appropriated a word from hip-hop reviews into my own.
"Rollick," for those of you wondering, is a verb meaning "to move or act in a carefree, frolicsome manner; behave in a free, hearty, gay, or jovial way." I like to think of myself as rather jovial and frolicsome, and I'm glad to hear that this translates into my books.
Also of note: "rollickingness" is a word.
I will do my best to make sure that my next novel has as much rollickingness as Firefly Brothers.
link to this | File: