One of the five books (this is a regular thing for me; please don’t freak out) I’m reading right now is Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity.  I do plan to discuss its rather interesting structure (which is not without its problems) when I finish the book, but for the moment, I direct all interested parties to Book World and a discussion at a blog I hadn’t heard of called Classical Home.

I’ll only say for now that what Perlman is up to is very ambitious and that, as such, he was predictably ridiculed.  I do, however, agree with Daphne Merkin, when she writes, “It makes you wonder about the nature of literary ambition and the immense vulnerability of any writer who attempts not just to describe the cacophonous everyday universe we live in but to impose a pattern — a semblance of meaning — on it.”

I’ll have more to say about literary ambition and vulnerabillity when Megan and I finally compile our Black Swan Green discussion at some point next week.