It just tells a gorgeous, immersive story, gripping the reader with a tale of disappointment and triumph, damage and healing, fear and wonder, and above all, memory.Īt its core, the plot engine of Schwab’s book is unmistakably Faustian. A typically lush but not intrusive bit of description: “The garden, once overgrown, has been swallowed up by the encroaching woods, and the wild has won its war against the hut, dragged it down, saplings jutting up among the bones.” It doesn’t privilege emotion over plot, or interior complexity over exterior action. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue doesn’t just traffic in beautiful sentences, though it has those a-plenty. How lucky we are that, instead, Schwab decided to write this one. But those books have already been written. Schwab could write a 784-page coming-of-age doorstop about a young man whose in-the-moment decision to steal a valuable painting shapes the rest of his life, or an epic yet intimate exploration of the intertwined dysfunctions of a troubled Midwestern clan, or a novel of irrepressible grief and longing narrated by more than 150 voices, most of them dead. I have no doubt that if she wanted to, V. Schwab’s new book The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue isn’t just an amazing book for its genre it’s an amazing book, full stop. Yet certain genres are still elevated and others dismissed the New York Times “By the Book” feature still regularly asks writers “Which genres do you avoid?”īut there is no particular art to literary fiction that doesn’t exist in fiction of other genres, and V. A sincerely curious, skilled, and committed writer can basically write whatever she wants, genre be damned. I’m tempted to say the modern idea of genre is a joke, except that it’s not funny.
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