Ronald Sukenick Dies

Via the Literary Saloon, Ronald Sukenick, the avant-garde novelist, has died, aged 72 (obit at Newsday). Sukenick was a difficult, post-modernist innovator, experimenting in narrative technique and voices. From a piece called "In My Own Recognizance":

Innovative fiction is not inherently better than any other kind of fiction. It’s a genre like any other, and like any other there are mediocre examples as well as a few brilliant ones.

I personally am enamored of the traditional Canon but not interested in repeating it. My ways of avoiding it are through the practice of certain mental gymnastics, or, rarely, through the use of constrictive form as with the Oulipo group whom I consider creative cousins.

Like many literary experimenters, not all of his stories work, but there is usually something interesting in them to make them worth reading. Reading his work, I was often inspired into trying something different with my own fiction, and for that, he will be missed.