![]() ![]() Shapes appear in Alison’s mind as clusters of images, so what begins as literary analysis condenses into a small poem. Her aim is not to classify tales, to pin them like butterflies on a styrofoam board. Is this forced? Alison recognizes the cheekiness of her project, knows her readings of form may not convince every reader. Here are corkscrews and wavelets and fractals and networks of cells. In brief, compelling meditations on contemporary fiction, she teases out figures we might expect to spy from a plane window or in the heart of a tree. bugbear is the dramatic arc, the shape that Aristotle noticed in the tragedies of his time but that has become a tyrant of creative writing instruction. the elegant forms that order nature in the structures of stories and novels. Her book takes the shape of a roller coaster. It is a special kind of literary criticism that can make the reader appear to herself a prune, or a prude. But the fecundity of Alison’s writing is of a piece with her larger mission: to turn narrative theory into a supersaturated mindfuck of hedonistic extravaganza. verbal raptures may ensorcell seventh graders and leave older readers occasionally feeling that they need to lie down. Alison cuts extraneous words for breathless effect. Meander, Spiral, Explode is a deeply wacky book, in ways that are both obvious and subtle. What matters is the ingenuity and beauty of the construction, and Alison’s close readings can be exhilarating. These vulnerabilities are not lethal-a house-of-cards constructedness is a feature of a lot of literary criticism. Another quibble is that Alison is working at a level of abstraction that insures she can apply almost any shape to almost any text. One quibble is that the book’s thesis, that literature is boringly in thrall to Aristotle, is a bit of a straw man. Alison is in a lightly transgressive space, in which chatting about your own sexual pleasure is as unremarkable as mapping a metaphor, and in which the two things are highly relevant to each other. ![]()
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