The Wrights (last iteration)

Here's a good one (from the wikimedia commons) of the Wrights (take 3) -- Olgvanna is in the middle.

What's with the footnotes?

Ok. So, not to get all English-professorial on us...but what do y'all make of the footnotes? Boyle certainly isn't inventing the technique, but it's interesting here. And the whole interplay between Tadishi and the translator (who we don't "know" at all, so we can't read his stake in all of this..except as T explains it to us).

The footnotes complicate the whole historical-biographical fiction thing. So much of the novel is based on "real" stuff (newspaper clippings clearly played a big role in the research). But Boyle takes us much further...do the footnotes lure us into a suspension of disbelief (you see--I do remember bits of my romantic poetry class in college!!).
Thoughts?

From Wik.: Suspension of disbelief or "willing suspension of disbelief" is a formula devised by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge to justify the use of fantastic or non-realistic elements in literature. Coleridge suggested that if a writer could infuse a "human interest and a semblance of truth" into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative.

Narrating "Genius" (Some rambling thoughts)

I am well into the "Miriam" section. I can't help thinking of Boyle's The Inner Circle as I read this. Both The Inner Circle (about Alfred Kinsey) and this novel look closely at groundbreaking "geniuses" who both have private falls (to varying extents). Both novels are narrated by much younger men who are attracted to their respective geniuses, although in the previous novel, the narration does not take place in retrospect. Both of the "central men"--the geniuses--espouse their own version of freedom and subvert convention. TC Boyle is a baby boom-era novelist whose Drop City is about a group of hippies trying to establish a communal living situation in unfriendly environs. In some sense, The Inner Circle is about this, too.

Where is everyone else in the book?

(Just got back from Chicago and read the Olgivanna section there, much of it set in Chicago. Fun!)