Nathan Holic

Category: Millennial Literature

  • Natural Disasters, Graphic Novels, Blogs, Bio-Comics!

    “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge” is a graphic novel that demonstrates the underlying theory that made Art Speigelman’s “Maus” so haunting, memorable, and successful. In our current culture, saturated by televised images of destruction, we sometimes need to see major tragedies and disasters in a completely stylized way in order to avoid becoming desensitized.…

  • “Housekeeping vs. The Dirt”: Reader’s Guilt

    Hornby’s introductory essay for “Housekeeping vs. The Dirt” should be required reading for anyone who experiences any conflict in his/her reading life, and for any student or teacher of English/Literature. In the academic world, we are constantly made to feel bad if we don’t read a certain amount each month, if we haven’t read certain…

  • Mixed-Media Fiction: Sink or Swim?

    “The Raw Shark Texts” is an interesting concept that never really rises above “interesting concept.” It’s a breezy read, moves very quickly and sometimes develops real suspense, and the plot is well thought-out, but it still feels superficial by the very end. Perhaps this is because the characters feel as if they could have been…

  • Middle-Class Guilt and “The Blind Side”

    When I first saw the trailers for “The Blind Side,” I thought it was a joke. Sandra Bullock as a rich white lady who helps an under-privileged gigantic black boy to become a successful football player? After I realized it was serious, it just seemed like it would be a blatantly offensive story. Never mind…

  • Shopaholic: The Rise of the Chick Flick

    I once read a Roger Ebert in which he made an interesting distinction between a “family movie” and a “children’s movie,” arguing that some films are great because they *do not* attempt to cater to an entire family, but instead speak solely to the children. Some family movies, he said, get so caught up in…

  • “Iron Man” as 9/11 Literature

    I originally wrote this quick review on the night that I saw “Iron Man” (way back in 2008), but I figure I’ll see the sequel soon, so we’ll see if some theories on 9/11 Literature are furthered… What’s great and interesting about “Iron Man” is that it marks a cultural turning point. We’ve snapped. For…

  • Pre-Post-Racial?

    Adam Mansbach’s “Angry Black White Boy” has been billed as “the first great race novel of the twenty-first century,” and maybe it is. In fact, this novel–the story of a privileged white kid named Macon Detornay, who becomes disgusted with his own white heritage and decides to brand himself a “race traitor” and advocate for…

  • The Great Millennial Novel?

    Finally, I think we have a book worthy of being called the first “Millennial Generation Novel.” Finally! “Attention. Deficit. Disorder.” initially struck me as a gimmicky book, meant to capitalize on the popular Dave Eggers style of mixed-media, mixed-form, mixed-genre fiction. The sentences are short, choppy, and there are constant interruptions, introducing dictionary definitions and…

  • “House of Leaves”: Mixed-Media Fiction or Gimmick Fiction?

    “House of Leaves” falls into the love-it-or-hate-it category of literature, a book all at once intriguing and inventive and mind-blowingly creative…and also gimmicky, needlessly difficult, frustrating, and self-indulgent. It is a book that defies easy genre categorization (just call it “fiction,” and more specifically, “mixed-media/ post-modern fiction,” and don’t try to further label it), but…

  • Hornby’s “Juliet, Naked,” Message Boards, and Wikipedia Pages

    I was recently able to finish reading Nick Hornby’s “Juliet, Naked,” an excellent little novel about music nerds and aging rock stars and women who feel they are past their prime. Great book, highly enjoyable, but also very interesting for how Hornby approaches some of the Millennial concepts/ concerns that I detail on this blog.…