If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. — Toni Morrison
Hence the most important question facing any young writer may well be: How often should I masturbate and when? — David Gordon
Let’s get this out of the way first: David Gordon can write. Every scene, no matter how far-fetched or ridiculous or random, feels natural. Even cliché’d ones, like getting punched in the face by a big, burly, male relative of the girl he was hitting on, feel natural. Like these are stories your buddy would tell you at a bar, if you had the sort of buddy who frequently gets punched in the face (I don’t, but I assume other people do).
So Gordon can write. He is a good writer. He is a great writer. We can probably say he is a fucking amazing writer —
— who then writes a bunch of stories about how women sleep with him, some dreams (actual zzzz ones, not aspirations), some drug trips, and, as well, a vampire because really that’s just the sort of thing that keeps happening in the books I read lately (see here and here). So we can pretty much sum up my feeling on that with my review of 10:04 by Ben Lerner: Reading about white guys getting boinked, doing drugs, and futzing about bores me.
But Gordon can write, my mind reminds me. He writes so well.
And he’s clearly written the novel (well, short story collection) he wants to read, where lots and lots and lots of women want to have sex with him, and I’ll say him for while the stories aren’t all about David Gordon, there’s a similar tonality and voice that goes through all the stories, even in the ones when David is called Larry. And the sex is about as erotic as waiting around for an airplane to de-ice, my mind answers itself back.
Some people might find planes de-icing erotic.
I feel we’re missing the point. I have twenty-nine annotations I made in my kobo on White Tiger on Snow Mountain. Twenty-eight of them are about women improbably attracted to Gordon. One is about being a writer. I suppose two, if you take the quote above since that’s less about women being attracted to Gordon than just about sex. Also, I stopped making these annotations part way through, so there are likely more.
But Gordon can write. He writes so well, my mind says again.
So good writer writing a bunch of stuff I do not care about one tiny little minute epsilon bit. So do I rank this book on the writing (5/5) or the tedious content (1/5)?
David Gordon can write. Really fucking well. Let’s just leave it at that.
White Tiger on Snow Mountain by David Gordon went on sale November 28, 2014.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.