Friday, June 25, 2004

Eugenides on the multicultural novel.

Couldn't agree more. I dream of writing a novel one day that has nothing to do with foot-binding, learning to use chopsticks, or Chinese railroad workers in the 1890s. Fuck Amy Tan and all her wanna-bes.

But I imagine that the prevalence of multicultural novels is really the product of a readership yearning to read this stuff (and likely the publishing industry feeding this tendency), and certainly not for lack of minority writers aiming to write about expansive, non-ghettoized subjects.