The Rock Novel and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude
January 20, 2013
Perhaps it makes sense, then, to acknowledge that the impersonal has always been part of the personal; perhaps the generic and anonymity have been part of the private all along. When, in his discussion of Clarissa, Ian Watt describes the cult of letter-writing that motivated Fielding as a “microphone already tuned to the tones of private experience,” we might be tempted to claim that all novels, at least as filtered through Watt, are rock novels.
