He's repressed, status- and self-obsessed, and utterly resistant to most types of meaningful thought. This nameless narrator limits Riviere severely. In order to answer the second and third questions, though, he'd have to venture outside irony, which his narrator is incapable of doing. He's also clever on the self-serving, often vacuous nature of social media praise and pile-ons, which he satirizes well. Riviere has good answers to the first: he skewers publishing for ignoring rural and regional writers, for being too driven by social pressure, and for being all but inaccessible to anyone whose parents can't support them financially. His prose is dense with satire, but, stripped down, it seems to ask three plaintive, linked questions: How did poetry get so phony? What even is real poetry? And, whatever it is, will it ever be back again?Īll three questions are indisputably valid. Instead, Riviere works from the premise that "or a long time now there had been no poetry in the poetry." According to his narrator, nearly all contemporary poetry is so derivative and bad that it barely deserves the name.
(Could it be set in Brooklyn? It could.) Nor is it interested in creating a nuanced, intriguing, or even three-dimensional portrait of Publishing World for readers who may not already be involved - or, to use the narrator's preferred word, embroiled - in the literary sphere. It has no paragraph breaks, no chapters, almost no plot, and no interest whatsoever in life outside the publishing industry. “Dead Souls” takes place during one long night at the bar of a London Travelodge, where Wiese tells the story of his downfall to the narrator, a supremely irritating, hyper-self-conscious poetry magazine editor. It is undeniably a smart book, and, in certain ways, a good one. Riviere is sharp and funny, and he fills his novel with insights that are both rude and correct. In general, I feel similarly toward Dead Souls. As a critic who strives to be completely honest, I can't help but take this proclamation as a bit of an insult - what am I, chopped liver? - but still, I know it holds truth. In the sycophantic poetry community, Wiese declares, praise springs from "monstrous insincerity," and is, therefore, deadly. In a scene close to the end of the English poet and publisher Sam Riviere's debut novel “Dead Souls,” a twice-disgraced poetry plagiarist named Solomon Wiese explains that, before he got expelled from the literary establishment, he never listened when people complimented his work.
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