{"product_id":"the-novel-poem","title":"The Novel: Poem","description":"Paul Hoover's \u003cem\u003eThe Novel\u003c\/em\u003e is a booklength poem written in response to the author's experience of having his first novel, \u003cem\u003eSaigon, Illinois\u003c\/em\u003e (Vintage, 1988), published after a mere six months in the making. Hoover examines the privilege of the novelist from the poet's point of view, asking in both astonishment and disappointment: why is the novelist at once the most lordly and common of authors? A mosaic in organization, the poem's thirty parts mix, among others, Shakespeare and deconstructionist \"shoptalk\" with an account of Graceland when Elvis was alive and a gloss of the mass-market paperback of James M. Cain's \u003cem\u003eThe Enchanted Isle\u003c\/em\u003e, whose heroine Mandy appears in the poem as the fictive author's lover. \u003cem\u003eThe Novel\u003c\/em\u003e presents no dichotomy between pop culture and the intensely literary, resisting closure by replicating the counterpoint speed of obsessive TV channel-changing. \"The closer the look one takes at a world\/the greater the distance from which it looks back.\"","brand":"New Directions Publishing Corporation","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48833668907213,"sku":"9780811211482","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0557\/1529\/9533\/files\/imageloader_135d8e03-9574-46c4-b221-c0eaf736f2fc.gif?v=1790892759","url":"https:\/\/booksatmidnight.com\/products\/the-novel-poem","provider":"Books At Midnight","version":"1.0","type":"link"}