Reviews for The wages of expectation

The average rating for The wages of expectation based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-06-01 00:00:00 Kelly Smith Do not read literary biographies. Biographies are about people, despicable, every one of them. Literature is about books. Edward Dahlberg was a disastrous human being. I won’t catalog his sins. He sins and offends just as do all creators, all people. You will find enough in his books to which you will object ; you don’t need to know about all of the objectionable characteristics of the person behind the authorship. I challenge you to find even one literary creator who was not a human asshole. I do know better than to read biographies. I even have several more biographies which I would like to read -- of Joyce, Beckett, Wilde, Freud, Elkin, etc. Biographies are inevitable. But they are distractive. And frankly, as with all things human all too human, disgusting. But then why did I read Dahlberg’s biography? It was cheap. I’ve read only two of his books, Can These Bones Live and The Sorrows of Priapus, and naturally did not understand what was going on. Information on Dahlberg and his books is scant ;; he is BURIED. And I like to know a thing or two about an author and his books before I read them. I like to know how to fit individual books into the larger framework of an author’s oeuvre and into the larger movements of literary tendencies. This short biography served that purpose. I have a rough outline in my mind which will help sort out a little bit what I am reading. I can make a little more sense of it ; not because I know something about Dahlberg “the man”, although there is that too, but I know something about his literary projects and aspirations. Listen. Aside from having a chronological outline of the development of the Dahlberg style and the march of his books, I also have a nice word for his prose. “Baroque.” Don’t object to the appearance of my pigeonholing. We have to pigeonhole in order to understand. And I like to understand. This little light bulb, this word “baroque” leads me to this result ;; if you like Alexander Theroux, Djuna Barnes, William Gass, Robert Burton, Melville, Ronald Firbank and such-like whose prose might be described with that same ornamental word, you just might like Dahlberg’s prose. But as to what he is saying, that is still beyond me. Listen to what Irving Rosenthal, “one of Dahlberg’s most steadfast admirers”, says :: Read Edward Dahlberg but pay no attention to anything he says. He is so critical and cantankerous, so grum, so small, and jealous, that if you took him at all seriously, he would drive you as batty as he is. The quotations he burdens his work with are never to the point, and, as he is incapable of placing two sentences in logical order, such a thing as a quiet, scholarly paragraph, let alone essay or chapter is outside his reach. But he is the poet of sentence design.... [I have] thrown myself at his feet, for he is a great pure writer in the sense he will sacrifice any meaning however important he may have made it out to be for any flourish or conceit, and he would sell his soul to the devil and mine too for the power to write one unalterably beautiful sentence. Read him for vocabulary, too, though he never coins words, his motto being “Rob graves, don’t make babies.” This makes me really hungry for Gass’s next book, the one about baroque prose.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-02-28 00:00:00 Lynnette Gunn A masterfully direct and thought-provoking, inevitably poignant, and, above all, elegant meditation on aging.