into the realms of magical entertainment

what i like most of all are novels that start with a precise constraint in the shape of a machiavelic structure but then fail to remain restrained by it. curtis white's "memories of my father watching tv" is such a baffling work. i actually needed to read it twice in order to grasp the way it goes wrong. you have to read that part where "the son" (he is some kind of C.W. alter ego, yet the autobiographical stance is very blurry) actually begins to speak with his father, in the middle of a "chamallow" reverie because it's damn amazing. dave eggers' "you shall know our velocity" follows a somewhat similar, breathtaking serpentine path, going up-stream to its initial pitch plot. the sensation of vertigo when a book goes mentally ill is a very sexual tinted kind of enlightenement and a very entertaining experience as well. we have this thing with French writers: when they want to play with shapes and constraints, they never manage or simply show a will to free themselves from the forms they're supposed to play with (take Perec's W or Regis Jauffret's Univers Univers, which are, from any other perspective, true masterpieces). postmodernism in france seems to be a matter of painstaking guilt, when it is always a matter of playfulness for their american counterparts, even the ones with the most serious auras (Gaddis, Vollmann). Hail to Mrs White, Eggers, Elkin, Evenson, Abish, Barth, Barthelme, Sorrentino. Your sense of modernity never fails to be breathtaking, no matter how tragic the stakes in the undercurrents of your mindfucking pieces of art. what's the point of a stangely shaped object if you don't play with it?