The piece below originally appeared in the January 2011 issue of Metro magazine, billed rather provocatively on the cover as "What's wrong with NZ novels?"
I'm grateful for the softening effect of that question mark: "A few diagnostic gestures towards a working theory of some current plot trends in the New Zealand literary novel" would have been more accurate, but probably wouldn't have helped sell copies of the magazine.
The article got a lot of feedback; most of it positive, and pretty much all of it off the record (both of which surprised me). One correspondent summed up the general…
A new (old) sensation
↧
↧
