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 and, style, critical and/or reception:
“The difference between style and taste is never easy to define, but style tends to be centered on the social, and taste upon the individual. Style then works along axes of similarity to identify group membership, to relate to the social order; taste works within style to differentiate and construct the individual. Style speaks about social factors such as class, age, and other more flexible, less definable social formations; taste talks of the individual inflection of the social.”
—John Fiske (b. 1939)
“It is not in our drawing-rooms that we should look to judge of the intrinsic worth of any style of dress. The street-car is a truer crucible of its inherent value.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)
“The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable rôle with the promise of rewards—material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the Garden of Eden.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“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)