"I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real"
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Young is drawing a hard border in a literary culture that loves to pretend borders don’t matter. “I would never write realistic prose” isn’t just an aesthetic preference; it’s a refusal of the prestige that “realism” has long enjoyed as the adult, responsible mode. In her mouth, realism reads like a betrayal: a retreat to the supposedly solid ground of “how people really are” when the writer gets scared of their own intensity.
Her real target is inconsistency dressed up as versatility. She doesn’t mind the surreal; she doesn’t even mind the poetic. What she can’t stand is the writer who sets up a contract with the reader - this book will sing, it will risk strangeness - then reneges midstream, dropping into reportorial clarity as if beauty were a phase you’re expected to outgrow. The “drunkards” image is brutal and revealing: not the joyous intoxication of experimentation, but the sloppy staggering of someone who can’t commit, who can’t keep their balance between registers. It’s also a dig at fashionable modernism-by-numbers: the tasteful sprinkle of lyricism, then a quick return to realism to prove you’re still “serious.”
Contextually, Young’s work sits closer to the maximal, baroque American strain (Melville’s biblical pressure, later echoed by writers like McCarthy or even Pynchon) than to minimalist realism. The subtext is moral: style is not decoration, it’s worldview. If you believe reality is strange, layered, and excessive, writing “realistically” can feel like lying by omission.
Her real target is inconsistency dressed up as versatility. She doesn’t mind the surreal; she doesn’t even mind the poetic. What she can’t stand is the writer who sets up a contract with the reader - this book will sing, it will risk strangeness - then reneges midstream, dropping into reportorial clarity as if beauty were a phase you’re expected to outgrow. The “drunkards” image is brutal and revealing: not the joyous intoxication of experimentation, but the sloppy staggering of someone who can’t commit, who can’t keep their balance between registers. It’s also a dig at fashionable modernism-by-numbers: the tasteful sprinkle of lyricism, then a quick return to realism to prove you’re still “serious.”
Contextually, Young’s work sits closer to the maximal, baroque American strain (Melville’s biblical pressure, later echoed by writers like McCarthy or even Pynchon) than to minimalist realism. The subtext is moral: style is not decoration, it’s worldview. If you believe reality is strange, layered, and excessive, writing “realistically” can feel like lying by omission.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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