Style and Critical Reception
The novel is written as a literary pastiche of various forms of media, incorporating purported magazine interviews, academic articles, scripts from unaired television shows and even transcripts from psychoanalysis sessions. In the words of critic Kel Munger, this inventiveness is one of the book's key strengths:
"Altschul skewers everything from the contemporary graduate poetry workshop (which he’s obviously seen from the inside) to the way that the media (frantically) and academia (disingenuously) jump on the fame bandwagon. In between, there are delicious parodies of magnificent poems, including some by Sylvia Plath, Sexton, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Charles Baudelaire, Frederico García Lorca (sic) … While it doesn’t take a graduate degree in English to follow, recognizing the allusions no doubt adds to the fun."
Another critic, Patrick Schabe, has asserted that the book's playfully discursive nature makes reviewing it problematic:
"Lady Lazarus presents the critic with a challenge: How to unpack and analyze the text that deconstructs itself? The feedback loop is total, and each gesture revealed to be recursive—every critique already anticipated and incorporated into the work itself."
Writing in Pop Matters, Shabe makes the observation that Altschul even anticipates that readers will note the similarity between the name "Andrew Foster Altschul" and that of David Foster Wallace; the author pointedly compounds this by introducing a (fictional) interview—between David Foster Wallace and Calliope Bird Morath—into the text. As Shabe concludes:
"Altschul plays both sides of the fence, pulling off tricks and then revealing the phoniness of the illusion with a wry smile. Rather than being all-too-academic, Lady Lazarus toys with these conventions in a commentary on the issue of their worth, and manages to reaffirm the role of story in the process."
Read more about this topic: Lady Lazarus (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words style, critical and/or reception:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“His misfortune was that he loved youth—he was weak to it, it kindled him. If there was one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant. That ardour could command him. It hadn’t worn out with years, this responsiveness, any more than the magnetic currents wear out; it had nothing to do with Time.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)