Claustrophobic Writing

from Michelle:

I think pretty much what is meant by "claustrophobic" is interior, a concentration on the psychological, though certainly I've heard complaints that a piece of writing doesn't leave a certain room, and that that is claustrophobic. My response is "so what?" If that's what the writing is about, someone who doesn't leave a certain room, and that's what a writer is giving me is a deeply felt sense of this interiority, I'm your reader. Give me that any day over writing that is psychologically simplistic, which so much writing is, and yet that might be necessarily so, too. After all, no writing could actually capture all the intricate psychological circuitry of any given moment of a character's head. Right? This is all smoke and mirrors, this trying to get at fully rendered psychological worlds.

I don't read many reviews. I stopped some years ago, because I could lose a week being so flabbergasted that someone's three nasty and moronic paragraphs was considered an appraisal of a piece of art. The pathetic state of book reviewing has hurt both male and female writers; I'm not sure anyone has been spared. This said, I admire the New Yorker and The New York Review of Books for still making room for serious reviews.
http://www.newyorker.com/
http://www.nybooks.com/