Of Snow and Corpses: Facets of Douglas Glover’s Fiction
If you read Glover carefully, all the way through, you start to get the sense that it might be an insult or a slight to aver that his bruising works are beautiful, the fugal structures scintillating, the prose exquisitely titrated. That the only fit response to Glover’s fiction, like the new experimentalism, is indifference and silence. But at the risk of indulging a retro sentimentality, some Baffin Island of the mind, I’ll hazard the acclaim. Glover himself has touched on what’s special about literary form (beauty) and why abjuring it is, if not impossible, a fool’s errand, tantamount to collapsing clear-eyed ambivalence into a blind determinacy, a failure of artistic nerve (but if that’s your thing, go nuts, pilgrim).
By Bruce Stone.