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My friend James Hynes’ Next is a departure from his prior novels in many ways, not least in that the action is set in a single day. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Tod Goldberg says the book, is “wildly inventive, stunning… an essential piece of American literature that is both of its time and ultimately without present compare.” Michael Schaub calls it “a shocking, original masterpiece.” Janet Maslin praises it for the New York Times.

I’m able to enjoy Next at last, now that my Muriel Spark extravaganza is winding down (for me, not for readers of this site), and as I read I am privileged to post Hynes’ characteristically charming and smart day-in-the-life reading list.

There are all sorts of reasons to write a novel — personal, political, religious, economic, or any combination thereof — but sometimes it’s technical. In other words, the writer wants to try out a certain structure or technique that he hasn’t attempted before, just to see if he can bring it off. It’s usually not the only reason, of course, but often it’s the motivating one, the proximate cause of the book. I heard once that Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men as a play that was meant to read like a novel, and I’ve heard something similar about Henry James’s The Aspern Papers. In the case of my new novel, Next, I wanted to see if I could write a day-in-the-life novel, a narrative that would be set in a single day, or part of one, and by working backwards and forwards through flashbacks, encompass the entire life of a single character. There are lots of previous examples of this, including, of course, two of the most famous novels ever written. I wish I could say that I’d made a thorough study of the genre, which would make the following list vastly more instructive and rewarding, but the fact is, in the reading I did to psych myself up before and during the writing of Next, I pretty much limited myself to the Big Two famous ones and a couple others. And, in the interest of comprehensiveness, I’ve included in the list several other books that also had a big influence on me, but aren’t actually day-in-the-life novels.
 

Ulysses, by James Joyce. The Big Kahuna, the great white whale, the Everest of day-in-the-life novels. Like a lot of serious readers, I’d attempted it without success several times over the years, never getting past the first fifty pages or so, but by time I was in the early stages of Next, I told myself that I couldn’t write a day-in-the-life novel and not have read Ulysses. So one summer a few years ago, I took a running start by rereading Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (both of which, truth to tell, I still prefer to Ulysses), girded my loins with a copy of Anthony Burgess’ Re Joyce, and started once again to scale the face of Ulysses. This time I made it all the way to the top, and, for the most part, enjoyed myself, though it was often slow going, and I never would have made it without Anthony Burgess. How useful reading Ulysses was to me in the writing of Next, however, is unclear. Ulysses is a big toolkit of a novel, as a brilliant young writer sets off to encompass all of Western culture in one book, set during one day, with only two main characters, all the while showing off, with each new chapter, his vast erudition and his mastery of nearly every literary technique you can

The formidable Ishmael Reed (Mumbo Jumbo) argues, in “Fade to White,” that responses to Precious (trailer above) break down along racial lines, with white viewers applauding its candor, and black viewers infuriated by its offensive, ham-handed stereotypes.

This stratified response is no surprise, he says, because the film intentionally panders to white audiences: “In guilt-free bits of merchandise like ‘Precious,’ white characters are always portrayed as caring. There to help. Never shown as contributing to the oppression of African-Americans. Problems that members of the black underclass encounter are a result of their culture, their lack of personal responsibility.”

I haven’t seen the film, and probably won’t, but below Adalena Kavanagh, a New York City public school librarian, defends

Ishmael Reed writes, “Among black men and women, there is widespread revulsion and anger over the Oscar-nominated film about an illiterate, obese black teenager who has two children by her father.’ While this may be Mr. Reed’s experience, his statement runs counter to my own experience with Push, by Sapphire, the book that the movie Precious is based on. I am a teacher and a librarian who has worked in the New York City public school system since 2003. There hasn’t been a more sought-after, talked-about, or frequently-read book among my students than Push. My students are, and have been, predominantly African-American and Latino. The students who demand Push have been predominantly African-American and Latino. These students live in Harlem, Washington Heights, the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.

As a librarian, when students demand a book, I am inclined to give it to them. We struggle every day to make literacy important to our students, so when they find something that actually speaks to them we can’t ignore it, or wish it would go away, no matter how controversial it is, or how uncomfortable it makes us feel. To call Precious a stereotype is to believe that readers cannot distinguish between a character’s experience and a racial group’s reality, and that is giving readers and Sapphire very little credit.

I’ve read the book several times and I didn’t come away from it believing that Precious and her family represented all African-Americans. That would have been ridiculous, and I’m not inclined to believe that any one character can represent any one race. If a reader does think that Precious stereotypically represents most African-Americans, then that speaks more to that particular reader’s ignorance and inexperience than to Sapphire’s work.

My students are drawn to the book because it is set in a location that many of them are familiar with — Harlem — and because the book it’s written in collo