Enough with the diversity criticism. Has anyone taken the time to wikipedia Austin grossman? It seems that the creative juices are flowing in that family, every one in his family has a page about their work, but surprisingly not his mother… shall we claim sexism/etc./etc.? Whatever.
What interested me was Austin’s comment about the review of Soon I will be Invincible in the New York Times. He seemed to grumble a bit when mentioning it. I went home, forgot about it for a day or two, soon remembered, and decided to check it out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/books/review/Itzkoff2-t.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1193285087-c6/rQckJyfe50n/xW45lQQ
To be honest, some of the critiques reflect a lot of my feelings when reading the book. I totally sympathized with Dr. Impossible, wading through the Champions drama only to get to the next chapter. And it’s hard to believe that Austin didn’t feel the same way. Dr. Impossible is just so damn lovable. What I didn’t like about the review was the final paragraph where Itzkoff denounces Invincible by comparing it to similar works in other mediums (ie. Spider man films, heroes tv show, etc.). But Austin’s book seems to be the first novel portraying the seemingly 2-d characters as having substance. Maybe this is why he so adamantly kept talking about literature the whole time he spoke to us. He doesn’t seem to like the comparison being made between his novel and films/comics/tv shows.
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