And another thing

The other day elsewhere contrasted her idea of the "noisy" plot-driven novel with heaps of characters like Shantaram* it to the "quiet" novel which depends on beautiful writing and thoughtful character development where nothing much may actually happen. She was trying to establish whether there was a trend in Australian lit towards preferring "noisy" to "quiet" and I don't know the answer but I realised that after a decade of tending towards the "quiet" books (Marion Halligan, Drusilla Modjeska, even the quite marvellous Shirley Hazzard) I've been reading an awful lot of these "noisy" books lately. I mean, in between the dodgy sci-fi and thrillers, there was The Ballad of Desmond Kale and Vernon God Little, both pretty "noisy" books.

So, even if there isn't such a trend in publishing, I suspect I've moved on from navel-gazing emotional delicacy to wanting THINGS TO HAPPEN to LOTS AND LOTS OF PEOPLE meanwhile complaining loudly about the clunkiness of plot devices and ridiculousness of some of the cardboard cutout characters.

*which I haven't read but a guy on the train was carrying it round for weeks so it will probably take a really long time