new novels and why they suck and whatever

go nuts

lol thx

http://www.mashmagazine.com/99sep/images/ageofwireandstring.jpg

RIP the "modern" novel, heaven needed novels that adhere to a format developed in the 19th century

^ Mods please add scare quotes around more of those words. You pick which.

haha i realize i want all kinds of information from the haters: what fiction do you like? what fiction don't you like? how would you characterize the difference? when was the last time in your life you read a lot of fiction? etc.

also i just have to say, a lot of different "kinds" of fiction are published! a lot of fiction is published full-stop, really.

I like sad germans mostly

the formal/technical qualities of producing sound alone have changed so much, a pop song produced in 2010 is almost entirely unrecognizable from a popular ditty performed in 1860.

so, this isn't really a fair comparison, but looking at song form might be.

i think there's been just as much experimental fiction that's blown open the structural possibilities of the novel as there's been experimental/innovative music. unfortunately i can't recommend much, because i'm such a sucker for narrative and storytelling that traditional frameworks don't bother me, as long as the writing is good.

What horseshoe said three posts above. Even limiting yourself to American novelists, you could easily throw out a pair of names — Franzen and Cormac McCarthy, for example — that write really different different stuff.

i don't see why this has to be a douchey snarky thread. there's probably a lot of stuff to do with the booker-ification of "literary fiction" that i don't really know abt but i know a lot of ilxors who have real opinions abt this kinda stuff (max, nabisco, horseshoe, shakey) so like turning this into a battle of the strawmen or a zing showdown isn't really my idea of a fun friday

aw

then again I really can't hang in this thread anyway because all I read is mass-market fantasy/SF

the potential for snark is kind of built into the phrasing of the question and first post though?

I read a lot of books, I don't really think about them in any real way other than if I like them or not. I don't hate modern fiction I don't even know what that term means. I just haven't read any new books in a while that I've liked.

idk it was a joke?

my real opinion is basically "new novels dont suck and tons of them are really good, even as good as old novels." its not very much more complicated than that--every year i read a bunch of books, and some of them are new, and oftentimes the new ones are easily as good as the old ones. so, if there is some kind of crisis in the literary fiction world, in my mind it has nothing to do with quality (and whining that published fiction is, i dont know, homogenous, or too samey--i.e., if you use the words MFA or new yorker in your complaint--is just, like, flat-out wrong, as horseshoe alludes to upthread) or experimentativeness or newness or whatever.

if there IS a 'crisis' in literary fiction it probably has more to do with the business of publishing and the culture of reading in this country, two things that i remain pretty well convinced arent related, in particular, to the artistic/literary merit of the produced works

I too wish the title of this thread weren't unnecessarily aggro

i just wanna wait around and see what people thought was good. what if i read something and i don't like it?

you burn the book

then you get to complain about it on the internet!

by the time I have finished writing/posting this I'll probably be like 50 x-posts but whatever...

my initial comment was my problem with modern lit is that so many authors are content to just stay within these narrow confines of traditional novel narrative structures - here's a narrator, plot goes from A to B to C, the end. *yawn*... what can I say, in this day and age I don't see the point in writing a novel that adheres to a format developed in the 19th century

I have always had a fascination with the way stories are told, even from when I was very young, and one of the things that most excited me about reading (and still does) is marvelling at how books were constructed, the formal devices used and the way different authors would play with the physical limitations of the format. I've always been drawn to books that were stories-within-stories, or were written with strange/unique grammar and narrative voices, books with unreliable narrators, books with multiple endings, books that could be read out of order or that required an unusual level of agency on the part of the reader, books that "broke the fourth wall" in the film crit sense - basically the kind of stuff that is hard to predict and full of surprises. There's plenty of prior historical examples of this kind of approach, (Apuleius, the Arabian Nights, Mark Twain, etc.) but 20th century lit really exploded with this sort of thing. So many great examples - Joyce, Borges, Faulkner, Burroughs, Cortazar, Calvino, Moorcock, Bester, Cabrera-Infante, Brandao, Morrison, PKD, etc. - and the best managed to marry ancient, age-old emotional tropes and themes to this kind of wild stylistic variation. What I appreciate about this kind of stuff is the continual push to open up what a book can do, how it can function and be constructed and make yr conventional literary stories and themes resonate in new and different ways.

So when people hand me some new novel that I HAVE to read - say, the Kite Runner or whatever - I just get bored really quickly with the kind of lack of adventurousness in the writing and construction. I'm just not that interested, for example, in books written in conventional language with an omniscient narrator that detail a bunch of stuff that happened to some fictional people. There's a fundamental lack of emotional engagement on my part, I have a hard time caring about anything that happens. I know the book is going to follow a format of introducing the characters, setting up a conflict, there's going to be a climax, and a denouement, with a couple minor subplots/digressions likely along the way. At the end I will have learned something, maybe, about a certain type of people I never thought much about. But rarely do I find the expenditure of energy worth it - like, why did I bother reading this book about bored New England housewives or abused children in the South or whatever? Might as well have just read some non-fiction about the subject, in most cases.

Now it's entirely possible I have been missing out on some new wave of wild fiction writers, if so tell me who they are and I will hunt them down. These days mostly all I read is old sci-fi, history, the odd popular science book. More recent novelists I enjoy have definitely been Victor Pelevin (who is genius-level imho), before that I dunno, Irvine Welsh was fun...

harbl that is basically my problem--never figured out how to tell what new fiction i would like

yeah and i generally know ahead of time what old fiction i like! i'm working on it though, i've read a few books from the 1990s lately

i dont read a lot of fiction but i would imagine that ppl trying to push the boat out hasnt disappeared. I guess, for me the things that are "critically acclaimed" always seem so safe, where do people read about new books that are stranger or at least not Yann Martel-ey?

(someone mentioned Cormac McCarthy upthread and I do think Blood Meridien is a stunning piece of work, way up there in the annals of American fiction. But I haven't read anything of his in awhile, the nihilism can be really oppressive/unhealthy for me)

xp

also like change the title of the thread if its such a thing

i like your title, plax

I guess, for me the things that are "critically acclaimed" always seem so safe, where do people read about new books that are stranger or at least not Yann Martel-ey?

^^^yeah this is how I feel. Looking at critically acclaimed/best-seller lists is like looking at the Oscars, it's all fucking unadventurous garbage, usually praised for all the wrong reasons

someone else new that I really love is Kelly Link. I was on the wagon with Lethem for awhile too, but Fortress of Solitude was awful and the beginning of the end. Matthew Derby's "Super Flat Times" was also amazing, yet dude has not published anything else as far as I can tell. All three of these kinda fall into that weird not-quite-sci-fi/fantasy and not-quite-straight-fiction category tho

Joyce, Borges, Faulkner, Burroughs, Cortazar, Calvino, Moorcock, Bester, Cabrera-Infante, Brandao, Morrison, PKD, etc. -

dunno how I managed to neglect Nabokov from the list. dude is ALL TIME AWESOME

i really liked fortress of solitude

have you read much david mitchell?

and which victor pelevin novel is good to start with?

ok now i have more thoughts--

1) i am pretty sympathetic to the complaint that a lot of new fiction that gets published is just not very interesting. but im not particularly sympathetic to the idea that the majority of critically-acclaimed stuff is uninteresting, depending on which critics were talking about.

2) how do you know these books are unadventurous garbage, if you havent read them--no snark but "bored New England housewives or abused children in the South" can be subjects of extremely adventurous books; ask william faulkner.

3) theres nothing wrong with "safe" books anyway but if we really have to feel like were freaking out the squares or whatever, theres still plenty of it.

4) its v possible to just ignore most book critics the same way you ignore most music critics and most movie critics. i mean, if this is a thing that is making it difficult for you to enjoy book culture.

5) do you guys go to bookstores ever? serious question. i get my recommendations from friends and some from publicists and some from "real life" critics. but it can be really fun to go to a bookstore and just spend twenty minutes looking around at their 'new arrivals' or 'new in paperback' tables! good bookstores have good buyers who recommend good books. ime.

Joyce, Borges, Faulkner, Burroughs, Cortazar, Calvino, Moorcock, Bester, Cabrera-Infante, Brandao, Morrison, PKD

btw this is a list of, you know, mostly all-time heavy hitters. kind of unfair to put them up against the average writers of any period of writing.

just saying, if you head to the library and are like, "where is all the stuff thats as good as joyce and borges" youre gonna be headed for disappointment

and which victor pelevin novel is good to start with?

this was my intro
http://img.infibeam.com/img/4e4341ea/76120/BE/EPB/P-M-B-9781101175262-BEEPB.jpg

I go to the local bookstore all the time & for the past year or so if I read about an interesting book on a blog or wherever I'll order it from them instead of alibris or powells. perusing the new arrivals is a highlight of my week pretty much every week, there are always more books than I'm ever going to get to but holding them in my hands & checking them out still feels to me like actually knowing something about them (as against reading about them online, which I'll forget having done inside of ten minutes or so).

I'm dying to read Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist" but it was £££ in hardback here and had a hideous cover so i couldn't - will have to wait for the pb. Anyway, that sounds exciting.

And the ilx top novels thread has plenty of recommendations on it, I picked up Tom McCarthy's "Remainder" off the back of that but I'm yet to get round to it.

serious question, shakey mo do you hate women

i don't go to bookstores because i end up buying books there!

also shakey it seems pretty strawmanish to list "those" authors and then talk about the fucking kite runner and lethem. i mean have you read anything recently "in that tradition"?

that's not a serious q unless you want to tell him/us why you are asking it.

xxp

yeah was gonna say, why are you even picking up the kite runner, seriously

also, what makes the kite runner suck is not its lack of experimentation, its the fact that its a poorly-written, poorly-plotted, paper-thin excuse for a tv movie masquerading as a book

i woulda been more acker, leyner? i admit i'm a bit of a loser wrt freaking out the squares. I never really got over reading brett easton ellis in secondary school and i kindof tend to like books that feel a bit more aggressive or whatever, and that are really stylish or stylised, that draw attention to themselves as books but not in a precious way (go f urself safran foer)

also shakey it seems pretty strawmanish to list "those" authors and then talk about the fucking kite runner and lethem. i mean have you read anything recently "in that tradition"?

― strongohulkingtonsghost, Friday, June 25, 2010 5:09 PM (1 minute ago)

i kinda genuinely want to know: who is now "in that tradition" i would like a good place to start reading new stuff that i will like from bc i am gen. clueless

have you read much david mitchell?

never heard of him. where to start?

2) how do you know these books are unadventurous garbage, if you havent read them--no snark but "bored New England housewives or abused children in the South" can be subjects of extremely adventurous books; ask william faulkner.

hey I can't read everything, I can get a sense of what things are from reviews (or from reading the first 20 pages or so) if I need to. but this is par for the course with any creative medium. and it's not the subject matter I was objecting to in those particular cases, it's more the relatively straightforward way in which those things are addressed. There's nothing inherently boring about the subject of the Kite Runner or White Teeth, I just didn't like how they were presented - the subject matter on it's own is not enough to recommend it. (And you just KNOW that particularly in the case of something like the Kite Runner, the purportedly "transgressive" nature of the subject matter was used as a selling point).

5) do you guys go to bookstores ever? serious question. i get my recommendations from friends and some from publicists and some from "real life" critics. but it can be really fun to go to a bookstore and just spend twenty minutes looking around at their 'new arrivals' or 'new in paperback' tables! good bookstores have good buyers who recommend good books. ime.

the big one I used to go to closed recently, unfortunately. City Lights is now a bit of a trek but I did enjoy perusing their staff picks (which introduced me to Link, maybe a couple others iirc). Unfortunately most of my friends have stopped reading fiction altogether, with a few exceptions. I do have a gay former lit-major friend who reads a TON, but his taste can be kind of indiscriminate and lately he's been super-into 19th century stuff like Thomas Hardy and the Brontes (which bores me to tears lol)

xp

JM Coetzee is one of the newer cannonized heavy hitters right

like i seriously doubt the middlebrow trade rags of the day were all "if you love fiction, you MUST read 'the ticket that exploded'!"

anyone who is recommending you the kite runner is just flat-out not to be trusted when it comes to book recommendations, end of story

i kinda genuinely want to know: who is now "in that tradition" i would like a good place to start

I echo this question

serious question, shakey mo do you hate women

I'm assuming this is a joke but I don't get it

mitchell is pretty awesome as far as mixing in sci-fi elements with literary fiction in a natural and interesting way, imo. 'cloud atlas' is his biggie, but i think his debut 'ghostwritten' is underrated. ('number9dream' is the only one i haven't read yet).

well i mean what range of years are we talking here? 1980 onward? '90 onward? last decade onward?

it was a joke, I didn't see morrison on your list tho so I guess it didn't even make sense!

btw this is a list of, you know, mostly all-time heavy hitters. kind of unfair to put them up against the average writers of any period of writing.

this is a fair point but just moves the goalposts to well, where are the heavy hitters of today then? Is Coatzee really considered on that level? My gay lit major buddy has a ton of his stuff, I could borrow some

xp

lets say 90 onward

coetzee writes about abused south africans so

i suppose Bolano is supposedly but i genuinely hated what i read of 2666

xxxp

shakey read waiting for the barbarians

the real problem is that yr talking about a clutch of artists who were *already vetted* by the lit establishment before any of us on this thread were reading grownup novels. so when you talk about "places to start" and worrying about "hating them," yr essentially complaining about not wanting to do yr own work. i am sure there were people plowing through the grove and olympia backlists back then because they were turned onto one of the heavy-hitters and had to slog through a bunch of late-modernist/early-postmodernist garbage to find them gems.

all I know about bolano is that thank god for new directions that he died

i guess mark z danielewski, i gave up on house of leaves in school but i've been eyeing it up on amazon again.

the real problem is that yr talking about a clutch of artists who were *already vetted* by the lit establishment before any of us on this thread were reading grownup novels. so when you talk about "places to start" and worrying about "hating them," yr essentially complaining about not wanting to do yr own work. i am sure there were people plowing through the grove and olympia backlists back then because they were turned onto one of the heavy-hitters and had to slog through a bunch of late-modernist/early-postmodernist garbage to find them gems.

― strongohulkingtonsghost, Friday, June 25, 2010 1:19 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm

this feels like someone stumbling into an ILM thread and demanding to know where all the adventurous pop music is

so as not to miss the obvious, have you read 'infinite jest'? i mean, as long as we're talking about experimental structures and sci-fi tropes etc.

shakey read waiting for the barbarians

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Friday, June 25, 2010 1:19 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that is a great novel!

this feels like someone stumbling into an ILM thread and demanding to know where all the adventurous pop music is

― max, Friday, June 25, 2010 5:21 PM (11 seconds ag

I guess, except that really the q. i'm asking is "where can i read abt modern fiction that has a boner for 'experimental' storytelling" which is more specific and the music equiv. would actually be answerable, yall have given me so many not answers that it makes me think there ISN'T an equiv. for books

the real problem is that yr talking about a clutch of artists who were *already vetted* by the lit establishment before any of us on this thread were reading grownup novels

I dunno about that - I feel like I've lived through PKD's critical resuscitation (certainly his commercial one), and Brandao and Cabrera-Infante were basically unavailable in this country for decades. Moorcock is basically persona non grata in the US.

xp

I think Shakey should read Paul Magrs.

I couldn't get through Infinite Jest, something about DFW really puts me off (couldn't make it through his essay collection either)

i don't know what's wrong with not wanting to do my own work? i just wanna like what i read.

i can't deal with DFW either.

the answer is LIT MAGS, people. jesus.

agni
conjunctions
black clock
etc etc etc.

shakey read waiting for the barbarians

the wiki entry on this looks interesting, I'll see if I can borrow it from my buddy

shakey read correction by thomas bernhard

i really liked infinite jest. a lot.

lit mags require a whole other level of work, come on...

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/NewAnswersControllerServlet?boardid=55

lol @ lit mags, I love 'em but it's like if I find one or three good stories in one I am like holy shit they've really done their job

btw this is a list of, you know, mostly all-time heavy hitters. kind of unfair to put them up against the average writers of any period of writing.

― max, Friday, June 25, 2010 1:03 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the real problem is that yr talking about a clutch of artists who were *already vetted* by the lit establishment before any of us on this thread were reading grownup novels. so when you talk about "places to start" and worrying about "hating them," yr essentially complaining about not wanting to do yr own work. i am sure there were people plowing through the grove and olympia backlists back then because they were turned onto one of the heavy-hitters and had to slog through a bunch of late-modernist/early-postmodernist garbage to find them gems.

― strongohulkingtonsghost, Friday, June 25, 2010 1:19 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, both these things. modern fiction is bewildering in that by definition we don't have much distance from it. i get intimidated by the sheer bulk of it all the time and i am also scared to recommend novels itt for fear of revealing my middlebrow taste. lately i've just been reading a bunch of stuff and i don't know, maybe i'm just really tractable but i've enjoyed most of it.

plax try reading jelinek, she's the business

hmmm Cloud Atlas sounds really up my alley, will have to find a copy thx for the rec!

i don't know what's wrong with not wanting to do my own work? i just wanna like what i read.

― Hans-Jörg Butt (harbl), Friday, June 25, 2010 1:26 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i don't think there's anything wrong with that fwiw. personally, i feel like i used to have a near-superstitious fear about getting sucked into reading something "bad" because omg all the good books out there, i don't have any time, fear of death stuff. lately, relaxing that "standard" (which meant in practice that i just reread the same five novels over and over) has been liberating. but yeah, i like to get recommendations, too.

"so you kids want a formally experimental literally magazine where every story is good and that's also totally off the wall and swarming with magic robots."
"also, you should be able to win stuff by reading."

yall have given me so many not answers

that's why it would possibly have been helpful if you had posed the question in the thread instead of the impress me/i'm bored thing you went for.

but you could look at The Quarterly Conversation:

http://quarterlyconversation.com/

and the associated blog Conversational Reading:

http://conversationalreading.com/

but their focus is quite heavily slanted towards work in translation.

i don't know what's wrong with not wanting to do my own work? i just wanna like what i read.

― Hans-Jörg Butt (harbl), Friday, June 25, 2010 1:26 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

nothing wrong with it! theres just a difference between "all modern novels suck" and "im sure a lot of good stuff is out there i just dont have the time to track it down" you know

if there IS a 'crisis' in literary fiction it probably has more to do with the business of publishing and the culture of reading in this country, two things that i remain pretty well convinced arent related, in particular, to the artistic/literary merit of the produced works

I think this is pretty much otm. The cutlture of reading is a big topic and I can't claim to have any real insights, but the number of adults I see reading Twilight on the subway really gets me down. Books are marketed as entertainment (ie as one part of a larger bundle of entertainment offerings), and I think are increasingly consumed as such.

There is plenty of good fiction being written and published these days; I don't keep up on 'new novels' as much as I'd like to but off the top of my head I read and loved 'Netherland' (Joseph O'Neill) and 'The Slap' (Christos Tsialkos) and 'Schopenhauer's Telescope' (Gerard Donovan) in the past year. All amazing literary fiction. That's in addition to the heavyweights, most of whom I've enjoyed at least a bit. And I bloody love Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians is amazing, probably my favourite novel). I tend to get my recommendations from blogs and reviews (and ILB) these days, since I don't have many real life friends who are as into fiction as I am. BUT I need to read more contemporary female writers since I haven't found any to love lately - recommendations welcome.

speaking of which, scott seward, if you stop by this thread, i read a book of joy williams short stories because of you and they were crazy amazing so thank you!

bought gravity's rainbow last week on foot of ilx recommendations in a joyce thread, does pynchon fit in here? (I've not started it yet tbh)

i mean come on guys yr basically asking for an avant-garde oprah

I think Shakey should read Paul Magrs.

specifically this book: http://www.drwhoguide.com/whobbc27.htm

Yes it's a Doctor Who book, but it is also entirely surreal and beautifully written, using the idea of parallel universes in a really fantastic way both in terms of plot and of novel structure.

btw i dont really have a lot of recommendations for like "where to find out about the cool new novels" because unless i hear from friends or ppl i work with mostly i just hear about them from big middlebrow places like the nyt book review or the nyer critics section

i am under the impression that there are several websites out there that "book-themed" though

also I want an avant-garde Oprah, too! Although I'm afraid it would actually end up being Lady Gaga.

but the number of adults I see reading Twilight on the subway really gets me down

I'm reading The Girl Who Played With Fire (pretty overrated imo and I like crime fiction and thrillers, dunno if I'll bother to read the third one in the series) but anyway I ended up in the same subway car with two other people also reading and thought "omg I'm reading the new Da Vinci Code here"

Excellent book blog with A+ recommendations: The Elegant Variation http://marksarvas.blogs.com/

xpost

I just finished Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow, which, as I wrote on the latest reading thread, shows the peril of depending on pages and pages of dialogue to no end.

I don't know if there's any "crisis" in contemporary fiction -- some alarmist is always quick to point to one when technological innovations seem insuperable. For myself, I tend to avoid new fiction that calls attention to itself: a novelist pleased with his erudition (Chabon), or plays a lot of tired narrative and POV games (Foer). Two of the best novels I read last year were written by "traditionalists": William Trevor's Love and Summer and Colm Toibin's Brooklyn. The latter really scored a minor triumph: he took a worn story whose sentimental elements peeked around the edges and purged them.

I think Bolano's The Savage Detectives and 2666 fit the modern and ambitious requirements perfectly.

DMR I know what you mean, but I have to disagree on the overrated bit, I couldn't put it down...

xpost

Yes it's a Doctor Who book, but

lol love ya Dan

Coetzee and McEwan also write novels that are almost always worth reading.

liked the first one better, the second had some things that annoyed me but they're too spoilerish to talk abt (xposts)

a novelist pleased with his erudition (Chabon)

omg I hate this fucking guy. someone else who was recommended to me and then when I actually slogged through it made me want to kill myself

the elephant in the room here is named bill vollmann

bolano's wikipedia page is pretty weird

The old-fashioned ways of picking up interesting novels (and books generally) still works for me: reading the NY Review of Books, New Yorker, and Guaridan; recommendations from friends; footnotes in books I'm reading now.

i am under the impression that there are several websites out there that "book-themed" though

I was on this "Shelfari" site for awhile but got sick of people constantly e-mailing me about whether they should read "The Master and Margarita"

the elephant in the room here is named bill vollmann

hmmm yeah that was an ommission from my list, altho I kinda soured on him. I liked his story collections stuff a lot (Atlas in particular, but also Rainbow Stories)... but his historical stuff made me less interested, and I tired of his odes to prostitutes too. Similar to McCarthy, there's a kind of built-in despair to his stuff that can be oppressive/hard to take

Also, you know, Toni Morrison is still writing great books although i know I'm in the minority for believing that they get better and better. Love and A Mercy are pretty far out imo, i think they are genuinely experimental.

Yep, Larsson can definitely be annoying stylistically.

I haven't read a ton of Vollman but Europe Central was a great slow burner. Loved it.

a novelist pleased with his erudition (Chabon)

omg I hate this fucking guy. someone else who was recommended to me and then when I actually slogged through it made me want to kill myself

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is one of my favorite first novels (perhaps this topic is worth a thread?), but he's spending too much time in libraries learning about Allied expeditions in Alaska in 1943 or whatever. He integrates these historical interludes with a startling lack of finesse.

xxxxxposts jellinek sounds like exactly up my alley btw

Yup. The big problem is not having good new novels to read, it is finding them among the hundreds of new novels you do not want to read. It's easier to find and read decent not-new novels, because the winnowing process of a few decades has caused the great majority of mediocre, not-new novels to vanish.

here's a great article on Bolano for anyone interested.

xp she is one of my favorites

I wish they would hurry up and translate the one she got the nobel for

joy williams's's quick and the dead is pretty good, kind of off the wheels shit. The tricks she has are good but she doesn't have tooooo many tho

javier marias a heart so white was pretty great

The big problem is not having good new novels to read, it is finding them among the hundreds of new novels you do not want to read

^^^this

i feel like this thread is delivering. I really wanna order a shitload of these and come back in a month or two and be like "thanks guys"

i haven't read quick and the dead yet. i read a story collection called "honored guest." it was an intensity.

javier marias a heart so white was pretty great

I'm almost done with the 3rd vol. of YFT & think it's totally incredible btw

yeah, compiling recommendations from this thread for my summer reading list.

but is there anything particularly important about new novels where you ought to read them now versus waiting for the winnowing?
I mean is there some value attached to their currency where it won't be quite the same reading them some years later?

whenever I see any of the yft books I kind of shuffle away quickly

ooh someone else fairly recent I forgot to mention who is obviously a heavy-hitter that I dug: Saramago (RIP)

Yeah, Saramago was good.

sometimes i like to feel like i have a sense for the current moment in literary culture. also, i do like to feel like "aw who the fuck cares if this novel doesn't reflect my superior literary taste" and it's exciting to feel like you're just reading a bunch of uncharted territory stuff. both those things are probably just related to my own reactionary moment against my attitudes toward literature my whole life, though.

xposts to Philip

but is there anything particularly important about new novels where you ought to read them now versus waiting for the winnowing?
I mean is there some value attached to their currency where it won't be quite the same reading them some years later?

― Philip Nunez, Friday, June 25, 2010 1:50 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you wont get invited to any of the good parties

xp what horsehoe said

shakey i would join ur bookclub btw

barry hannah also p good and dead

The big problem is not having good new novels to read, it is finding them among the hundreds of new novels you do not want to read

Another big problem is being broke and relying on an underfunded suburban library system for the majority of your book needs. That might be why I've read Dostoevskey and Proust and Wilde this year instead of the newer writers that the library will never get.

eh you can never read too much Oscar Wilde imho

but yeah I echo plax that this thread has delivered on some interesting recs that I will check out. will be good to have a nice long list for my next trip to Powell's in Portland on July 4th

oh i have to buy everything, public libraries in ireland, i mean i don't know what they're like elsewhere but they always sound better than the decayed donated 70s paperbacks that bulk out the galway city library

okay i should stop being so chickenshit about recommendations. i have been listening to the lol new yorker fiction podcast lately. obvs this is more for people who aren't looking for experimental stuff, but i have recently enjoyed stories by Leonard Michaels and Andrea Lee and I plan to search out more by both of them.

is there anything particularly important about new novels where you ought to read them now versus waiting

Books mean different things at different times and at various ages when you read them. A perfect book for a younger person may not speak to you in middle age. Also, there's the exciting sense of discovery around newer work. No one bothers to write ponderous Introductions to recent novels; the appeal is straight from the author to you.

Look, I started Bleak House yesterday, and it's such an unfamiliar world that it feels "new." Read what you want when you want at your own pace.

of course if it's a new novel about now or an historical novel that's sort-of about now then now can be the most interesting or, if it's less good, the only interesting time to read it.

how would you guys characterize the current moment BTW? I was flipping through the Raymond Pettibon reader which is compiled from excerpts from Plato to Charles Manson and pretty much could not tell what era any selection was from without looking at the author.

Alfred is right, of course. You should always read exactly what you feel like reading. There's no merit points for slogging through something you hate.

in the thread on "The Tale of Genji" someone posts about the world of the novel (11th C Japan) being so alien it's really like reading some quasi-sci-fi novel. that kind of piqued my interest.

i mean it's impossible to characterize the current moment in a way that is accurate; these things are only possible in retrospect and then they're always kind of lies. also i am trying to come up with a useful lie about right now and i can't.

It does suck for me that a lot of friends who love Foer, Murakami, Palahniuk, etc won't touch anything written before, say, 1930; it's baffling!

There's no merit points for slogging through something you hate.

― Aimless, Friday, June 25, 2010 2:01 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

for sure. that's why i asked upthread how recently people who don't like modern fiction have read a lot of fiction. when i have felt that way it has usually been during periods where i wasn't reading much fiction at all. which fucked with my sense of identity, but i mean, whatever. sometimes you don't feel like reading fiction. it's okay.

by "felt that way" i mean "felt like, 'god everything that's being written these days sucks'"

people who love palahniuk are generally best avoided ime

uh oh

Tell me about it. He's one of my closest friends and he wrote his masters thesis on Palahniuk's work.

But you had a good point above, Aimless. Netherland, for example, struck such a chord with me partly because it's the first post-2001 novel I've read that deals with 9-11 in a completely honest and real way. I don't think someone who was born in 2010 will be able find the same resonance when they read it at age 25 or whenever. That said, they'd likely find their own resonance from their own perspective, but sometimes I just want to read fiction about NOW.

xxxposts man, I type slowly.

plax: if you loved Infinite Jest I'd highly recommend Bolano. he's the first *contemporary* author I really got into after reading everything by DFW. I read Savage Detectives a while ago and enjoyed it a lot, now I'm almost halfway through 2666 and loving it.

yeah I don't have any time for Palahniuk either

i was really into palahniuk when i was in school and i would probably still enjoy his first few if i read them now, i lost interest around the time of diary though

i read something by him in HS, don't remember the name of it. hated it.

I'm really glad the dude exists though. If only to endlessly misspell his name. Also he seems really earnest.

yeah he is, but invisible monsters explained felching to me and is intercut w. descriptions of different kinds of vaginal construction surgery and recreational uses for prescription drugs

I have some knee jerk reaction against new fiction and I can't exactly say why. The writers always seem like people I don't want to spend much time with, but of course who's to say that wouldn't also be true of Christopher Isherwood or W. Somerset maugham or Mikhail Bulgakov or whoever?

all my favorite old-timey writers kind of seem like they would have been horrible to be around.

I quite liked that Michael Chabon book about comics and I liked Stephen Millhauser's "Martin Dressler".

xp - yes, sure

I have a similar knee-jerk thing that I consciously try to overcome. Threads like this help, also I find reading good, thoughtful interviews with living writers gets me excited about trying their stuff.

I am reading Under The Volcano now, which is great, but by all accounts Malcolm Lowry was a prick, yes?

yeah he sounds crazy

Speaking of which, wasn't there some profile (The New Yorker, I think) that mentioned his incredibly small penis

that profile is my source for thinking he was bonkers. strangely didn't recall the thing about his penis.

more importantly, did he eat any truffle fries

sometimes i read things that are not the new yorker btw :/

I have some knee jerk reaction against new fiction and I can't exactly say why. The writers always seem like people I don't want to spend much time with,

The novels are better company.

lol

xxp

What about short fiction? Some new short form writing seems good. I read Black Clock sometimes which varies but has good things in it. Expensive, though. How is Granta these days?

She's slipped a bit, but, god, I love Alice Munro.

The novels are better company.

Of course, but I can't help but be hyper aware of the person behind the novel. I'm married to a writer though! =)

granta's pretty :/ these days. The stuff I read in the new electric literature was p. good if kind of relying on big writers in the lit mag or lit conference circuit these days.

Two of my best friends are total Alice Munro freaks. i rly need to check her out.

my older sister has 2666. it is big. she gave it to me and my other sister said "its really hard to find the kind of books i like"

i like agni. should probably read more lit journals.

any suggestions for "historical fantasy that is not about vampires in the '40s"

plax I highly recommend Moorcock's Pyat novels, a re-counting of the first half of the 20th century as told through a highly unreliable narrator who fancies himself a scientific genius but is actually just a deluded stooge. hits all the high points - the Russian Revolution, Roaring 20s and Depression-era America, north Africa and the middle east just prior to WWII, and then of course a love affair with Hitler. Fantastic.

long but REALLY fun

I second the love for Alice Munroe, I've only read Runaway, but it was really good and I'll def be seeking out more.

Munro*

Did anyone read "Tree Of Smoke" and can they recommend it? I hate to admit it, but I do not read enough female authors.

i read about 40 pages of tree of smoke and stopped. couldn't get into it.

Also are who are the good contemporary authors from Asia? I am particularly interested in South and Southeast Asian authors.

Good thread, btw

plax, re: excellent historical fantasy, try anything by Tim Powers (except for his lone vampire one). Anubis Gates and Last Call particularly recommended.

There was a contemporary Chinese novel reviewed in the Times last year, I believe the title was 'Living And Dying Are Getting Me Down', which sounded hella awesome, subversive talking animal stuff.

my older sister has 2666. it is big.

it's easy to read, though. i've read half of it in less than a week.

I started The Savage Detectives but it really annoyed me

what about it?

Too meta? The wrong kind of meta?

Definitely willing to give it another try

huh, i guess i find his kind of meta to be fairly subtle. or well integrated into the story/characters.

Too many characters to keep track of in that second section (says the guy reading Dickens).

i think i'm gonna end up liking 2666 a lot more than The Savage Detectives

There was a contemporary Chinese novel reviewed in the Times last year, I believe the title was 'Living And Dying Are Getting Me Down', which sounded hella awesome, subversive talking animal stuff.

Sorry, missed this. Thanks! Google search not turning anything up, sadly.

What I want is the literary equivalent of an Apichatpong film.

would read ^

ah:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/Spence-t.html

Thanks, JL!

Ha, yes, 'Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out' was it. It's good for me to be reminded, I need to track that book down.

What I want is the literary equivalent of an Apichatpong film.

The good parts of Pound's Cantos?

alice munro is the only living author i truly love. now that muriel spark is dead. and janet frame. and saul bellow. i feel like a grouch when it comes to new books. i'm mostly happy with old ones. i'm sure there is a ton of great stuff out there. hopefully i will get to it before i'm ancient. i can't remember the last "new" book that i've read that i thought was GREAT or a WORK OF GENIUS or EARTH SHATTERING.

people watch too much t.v. these days!

(hahaha, that's my theory on the lack of genius writers out there.)

Also are who are the good contemporary authors from Asia? I am particularly interested in South and Southeast Asian authors.

the couple things I've read (Mian Mian's Candy, for ex.) I was not impressed with, unfortunately. Murakami doesn't appeal to me, at least not as much as say, Kobo Abe did.

i liked "tree of smoke" but long-form is definitely not johnson's strong suit.

scott i thought you liked mary gaitskill, too. but perhaps not "truly love."

I missed this and posted something shouty to the other thread. Too bad I have a bunch of work to finish up today.

But Shakey, immediately upon reading your description about the formal qualities of novels, my first thought was ... David Markson just died. Have you read or heard of Wittgenstein's Mistress?

Also, since I was talking about the interior nuances of fiction on the other thread ... I think there is an argument that could be made that the kind of formal inventiveness you're describing was a very big thing in America through the second half of the 20th century, but might be considered a little exhausted and "over" now, by some people.

I think most people here would sorta mercilessly mock anyone who came to ILM and was like "modern music is terrible -- I listened to the radio in the car, and no one's doing anything like X, Y, or Z." You'd remind them that there's more music in the world than that. If someone said "I really liked music in the 90s, nobody does that stuff anymore," you might remind them to ask what music is doing today, instead of demanding something it did before. Right? I don't expect anyone to know or care about modern fiction, seriously, but I really want to stress that it has the exact same complexity of taste as the music people talk about here. Like if you'd tear into someone or consider them a clueless moron for saying something about music, think twice before saying it about literature.

^^ btw that third paragraph is not intended to really say formal invention is "played out" or something. It's just interesting that plenty of music geeks here would happily say "I am so sick of every act doing this or imitating that." Because you follow music. Modern fiction is obviously less quick and trend-driven than pop music, but if you followed it, you might have some similar feelings in terms of what you were sick of or thought was getting old or imitative!

I think there is an argument that could be made that the kind of formal inventiveness you're describing was a very big thing in America through the second half of the 20th century, but might be considered a little exhausted and "over" now, by some people.

yeah, this seems true to me. and i identify with it as a reader. there's more than one kind of formal inventiveness, too.

the kind of formal inventiveness you're describing was a very big thing in America through the second half of the 20th century,

I wouldn't limit it to America at all fwiw

Plus, the idea that we could return to the narrative hanky-panky of Coover-Barthelme-Pynchon is itself a conservative notion.

a third of the authors I listed are Latin American, for ex

Barthelme and Pynchon were largely too dry for me to get into (altho I do love Crying of Lot 49)

"I really liked music in the 90s, nobody does that stuff anymore," you might remind them to ask what music is doing today

also I don't think this is really an accurate analogy because it's not like a lot of popular literature TODAY is doing anything new, tons of it is still stuck in, as I said, forms that were popularized in the 19th century.

xp The most recent Pynchon, Inherent Vice, is worth a look if you liked Lot 49

that's not true, Shakey!!! i mean i guess it depends on your definition of "popular" and "tons" but it's still not really true.

also depends on your definition of "new" sorry to be pedantic but lol

a more accurate analogy for music would be like, despite tons of groundbreaking, genre-shattering, formal innovations in the 90s and 00s, a majority of popular music was still being produced to sound like it was 1965, with small live combos augmented by orchestras doing 2 1/2 minute songs about teenage love.

xp

xp The most recent Pynchon, Inherent Vice, is worth a look if you liked Lot 49

yeah this is on my list, what I read of it sounded really promising

Omg Music is still made with guitars!!!! AND RHYTHM

okay you're on your own shakey

Yeah, Shakey, that is one of those things that makes you sound like you don't know or care much about fiction. I don't mean that in a mean way. It's just a bit like saying music today is the same as in the 1800s, because it's basically the same scale and harmonic rules and ballad formats and such. I.e., it seems truer the less you care about particulars.

Fiction does have more continuity with its long-term history than pop music, but I tend to consider that a good thing.

"I'd read more modern novels but authors are still stuck on archaically using WORDS."

Like, I don't even read any decent fiction and even I know that you are completely talking out of your ass in the most ignorant manner possible.

that's not true, Shakey!!! i mean i guess it depends on your definition of "popular" and "tons" but it's still not really true.

yeah I know I'm making some horrible strawman generalizations

xp

Da Vinci Code gets a lot of deserved hate, but it's formally interesting -- every part of the narrative is broken into almost uniform chunks of bite-sized pieces, and he's very disciplined about it -- that story about Wesley Willis once hearing about the perfect length of a song being however many seconds, so he makes EVERY song that long -- i feel like maybe Dan Brown heard something about the perfect length of words where a human being can digest a discrete idea is 43 words exactly.

(Naturally I rate Wesley Willis a better formalist than Dan Brown)

The Lost Symbol is even worse in that way. He has multiple 1/2 page chapters for no good reason beyond a point-of-view shift.

^^^good piece of evidence for the argument that formal inventiveness is not inherently to be wished for

xpost

about the davinci code though i'm kind of an asshole since i've never read it

i think i'm gonna end up liking 2666 a lot more than The Savage Detectives

yeah, 2666 >>>>>>>>> savage detectives

a thread called "new novels and why they suck" is like a bug light for dan brown.

you know who else blows? grisham. man does he blow.

savage detectives started out great but became a bit of a slog

Yeah, I kinda thought the move away from overt formal trickery was considered a "thing" now. I think there is a vibe in the air of a sort of synthesis of modern formal invention and story/characters you can sink your teeth into, rather than just a supposed return to good old fashioned story-telling. Like elegantly enfolding the psychological truthfulness of formal complexity into the characters themselves, rather than the formal qualities being what the book is about. I don't really read enough contemporary fiction to know what I'm talking about though.

i think my favorite bolano is still "nazi literature in the americas" but maybe i'm just a sucker for politicized borges rip-offs.

I would be curious what someone more familiar than myself with the publishing industry would say the split is between yr conventional narrative-format novel and more experimental/less straightforward/non-linear stuff. Maybe it's always been 80/20 or something, I dunno.

I'm sure part of my problem is that from an aesthetic perspective, for me in a lot of ways the latter invalidates the former. Like, why do that when you can do THIS, which seems so much more interesting and challenging, for both the author and the reader. My own personal prejudice, I'm sure...

many x-posts

all you motherfuckers need to read this awesome book by Joy Williams, it shreds hard

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/joy-williamss-30-year-old-comeback-novel/

because trickery with the way you tell a story doesn't mean anything unless it's tied to a story, and most people read because they want to be told a story?

xp

there are probably just as many "experimental" novels being published as there are mass-market genre books. they're just published by teeny little presses which means that they're a.) not publicized, b.) not marketed, c.) not reviewed, and d.) not stocked anywhere.

savage detectives started out great but became a bit of a slog

― (e_3) (Edward III), Friday, June 25, 2010 3:58 PM (1 minute ago)

yeah, there were a couple sections i didn't care for at all.

Yeah, I kinda thought the move away from overt formal trickery was considered a "thing" now

that's the impression I get from perusing best-seller and new release shelves at bookstores but yeah, what do I know...

they're just published by teeny little presses which means that they're a.) not publicized, b.) not marketed, c.) not reviewed, and d.) not stocked anywhere.

how convenient

small wonder I don't know about them eh

― Mr. Que, Friday, June 25, 2010 4:00 PM (1 minute ago)

wb

You've managed to find out about indie record labels, right?

hi Mr. Que!

i missed-er que!!

otm

yeah seriously shakey i don't exactly expect to crack a new issue of spin and read about the latest round of fuck it and woodsit releases, you know?

haha okay well is there a lit equivalent of Pitchfork? don't say the New Yorker.

"scott i thought you liked mary gaitskill, too."

i do. and joy williams and lorrie moore too. but these are all people i started reading 20+ years ago. (lorrie's latest made me sad...)

last person to make my jaw drop was probably sebald. and he seemed like some sort of early 20th century holdover or something.

I haven't read it but isn't that girl with dragon tattoo series that has a bajillion holds on it pretty outre?

(lorrie's latest made me sad...)

because you found it bad? i have come to the conclusion that it was kind of bad...

it's a thriller with a mercilessly minimal and narrative-narrative-narrative prose style that some people find "hypnotizing" and some people find to be the literary equivalent of melba toast.

xpost

"all you motherfuckers need to read this awesome book by Joy Williams, it shreds hard"

this is not my fave of hers. but i like whenever anyone says anything nice about joy so i am all for it.

have you read Honored Guest, scott?

this is what i wrote on ilb about lorrie's book. made me sad to post it!

none of it added up for me. seemed too patchwork or something. (or like a short story writer trying to stitch 3 or 4 stories into a novel) the 9/11 stuff too...didn't work. for me. and only one big laugh! certainly a new low from a writer who has made me laugh several times in the course of one 5 page story. (the line about her father getting less respect than the ginseng farmers, that was it. the only chuckle i got in the whole book.) and the couple...i mean, i guess they were supposed to be really unlikeable? but still, nothing to hold on to. didn't care about their baby situation at all. and even the voice of our hero seemed...sketchy. who was she really? didn't get a good sense. i guess the farm/family stuff worked the best. wouldn't have minded a long novella about college girl going back home to her weird rural family.

thanks! yeah, it all kind of fell apart for me after my initial i-don't-know-what-to-think response. also i reread birds of america which made it clear gate at the stairs was inferior.

i've read some of the stories in honored guest in various places, but, no i don't have a copy. she just gets weirder with age. found an old copy of tin house with one of the newer stories in it and a marilynne robinson interview and it was my double whammy of weird women for the week. weird women i love. (i had a hard time with gilead though. i'm mostly into the non-fiction manifestos that both women have been writing. the endtimes are near!)

haha weird women non-fiction or fiction-that-basically-seems-like nonfiction manifestoes (like octavia butler's parable of the sower) is both irresistible and terrifying to me. like, i had to get parable of the sower physically out of my house after i read it. i read an excerpt of that robinson book and was freaked out for like days.

this is the last book to have a profoundly lasting effect on me and i read it, like five years ago. and it's old. i want everyone to read it. not everyone on earth maybe. but everyone here anyway!

The Man Who Loved Children (Christina Stead)

Like, why do that when you can do THIS, which seems so much more interesting and challenging, for both the author and the reader.

Ha, I say this with much love, but this is sort of like the Geir Hongro approach, right? "Why would you NOT want to use more chords?"

The small-press thing is one of the reasons I get on ILM music folks about this -- you might expect someone opining boldly about the state of music to know about independent labels, right? Why is it different for literature?

I personally do not know a ton about small and independent-press stuff (I think fiction is genuinely harder to keep up with than, say, music, for reasons having to do with time and audience and coverage), but ...

.. okay, go here: http://emergingwriters.typepad.com/dzanc_books/2010/06/20-writers-to-watch-an-alternate-list.html

It's sort of an all-ages 20-writers list they made to spotlight slightly more independent stuff in the face of the New Yorker's. Scroll down to the authors. (The ones I know and like on this page are actually in the honorable-mention paragraph before the list begins -- Paul Yoon and Deb Olin Unferth specifically, but take that with a grain of salt because I know them socially.) Notice the presses: Soft Skull, Small Beer, university presses, Unbridled, Caketrain, Keyhole, Future Tense ... I don't know enough to tell you which ones are awesome, and I've only read a couple of the authors on the list they came up with, but the point is that there's a ton there to know about, if you want to. And just like with music or anything else, any statement that "everything is like X" is probably refutable with a rich niche of something that is absolutely NOT like X.

awesome, thank you!

any suggestions for "historical fantasy that is not about vampires in the '40s"

― plax (ico), Friday, 25 June 2010 18:39 (1 hour ago)

Guy Gavriel Kay does this and is also completely awesome. 'Lions of Al-Rassan' is a historical re-imagining of medieval Spain. 'Sailing to Sarantium' and 'Lord of Emperors' is the Byzantine empire, etc. Excellent stuff.

Ha, I say this with much love, but this is sort of like the Geir Hongro approach, right? "Why would you NOT want to use more chords?"

lol that's a fair point in some ways but I think the difference is where Geir wants to see things confined to a specific ideal, to me the more experimental/non-linear/unconventional approach is preferable because it simply gives the writer a much broader palette to work with - it's more like why NOT use all the tools at your disposal to make the most engrossing work possible? why limit yourself to a fairly restrictive and conventional format? I'll readily acknowledge that it can be very rewarding to work within self-imposed restrictions (well-worn genre conventions for ex.) and this is true across a lot of different media; set up some rules and it's fun to see what you can do with them. But in general my position is that it's more interesting for me when writers are breaking these rules or not adhering to standard narrative conventions and that that results in a wider, more diverse range of authorial voices, because it allows each writer to develop something more unique, something more indelibly their own. Burroughs and Nabokov are worlds apart, for example, even though both took extensive liberties with the novel form.

xp

ooh someone else I've neglected to mention who was also something of a formal dazzler and could do both super-straightforward conventional narratives as well as weirder stuff: Naguib Mahfouz (also not American)

t's more like why NOT use all the tools at your disposal to make the most engrossing work possible?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/410191RD07L._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

And just like with music or anything else, any statement that "everything is like X" is probably refutable with a rich niche of something that is absolutely NOT like X.

and that's really the purpose of this thread, in the end - prove me wrong and point me to things to read! which I am grateful for

xp

Might also want to check out Dalkey Archive Press, they put out tons of "experimental" stuff, some reissues, some not

what do you think of poets who rhyme shakey

yeah I never read House of Leaves, what I heard was that it was a bit of a slog, altho I was curious...

there's a sequel on the way i think

alternately: why dont musicians use every instrument and time signature at their disposal

what do you think of poets who rhyme shakey

gotta be iambic pentameter or nothing

alternately: why dont musicians use every instrument and time signature at their disposal

imho any musician who doesn't do this is an idiot. any musician who tries to cram them all into one song/piece, however, doesn't know anything about composing.

sorry shakey but the ilm parallel here is not geir, it's more like l0u1s jagg3r saying "why would you NOT want to create 20 minute songs that jump genres 50 times?"

great writing on a sentence level trumps crazy narratives imo, and i like narrative experimentalism

xps

Oh, wait, I just looked over the paragraph of exclusions and it's also got Lydia Davis and Sam Lipsyte, both of whom I like, and both of whom I'm guessing were nixed based on being relatively super-popular already.

Here is one of my favorite stories by Lydia Davis, in its entirety.

Happiest Moment
If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English-language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say that the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

(I am obsessed with the neatness of how it loops back through the syntax at the beginning; there's no meaningful reason that should please me so much but I'm totally fixated on the neatness of it)

xpost - I know what you mean, Shakey, but you're kinda broadening the palette by rejecting major parts of the palette, aren't you? Also, just like with music, the existing palette is already part of how things work, part of what readers care about. I feel like if I applied your argument to music, I wouldn't be able to listen to anything but experimental music and noise, and possibly not even that. But guitar-pop and hip-hop and reggae and dance music are all pretty great too, and can be inventive in a billion different ways beyond radical obvious formal changes. There is a plenty of meaningful and interesting stuff going on in literature that's not just about big obvious formal techniques. That's sort of the point. (And I say that as someone who has really shared your love of big formal inventions -- I spent college really into metafiction and OuLiPo and John Barth and Borges. But there are other ways to be just as inventive.)

aww damn, why is the code text not wrapping? the story is this:

If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English-language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say that the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

i just read about some new book where like every page is a facebook profile or some shit, i'm sure it's brilliant

lol

but you're kinda broadening the palette by rejecting major parts of the palette, aren't you? Also, just like with music, the existing palette is already part of how things work, part of what readers care about.

I agree that there's certain things that writers simply cannot and should not get away from - as Dan pointed upthread, people like STORIES and if you don't have an absorbing story underpinning whatever else you're trying to do, then it isn't going to work. Same goes for Jordan's point about the writing at a sentence level. There are basic things people want out of reading, and those shouldn't be discounted because really they're pretty basic to human culture. we like to read about love, about triumph over adversity, about mysteries, etc. and those things shouldn't really be sacrificed. But the vehicle that delivers those things can take any number of forms, the possibilities are near infinite, so its weird/disconcerting/boring to me when so many writers seem to settle for so little.

finally found it! it's called visit from the goon squad:

http://blog.taragana.com/e/2010/06/10/in-a-visit-from-the-goon-squad-novelist-writes-serious-fiction-for-facebook-generation-139574/

“A Visit From the Goon Squad” in its way resembles the kind of social novel that Charles Dickens once cranked out regularly. It features more than a dozen disparate but vivid characters, from a powerful businessman to a Latin American dictator to a group of teenage punk rockers; and the action ranges over five decades and three continents.

But Egan has abandoned the straightforward narrative that marks most socially minded novels in favor of a series of linked stories that jump around in time and space and between a set of characters with sometimes tenuous connections. It calls to mind nothing so much as the fragmentary experience of surfing the Web.

I mean I'm not interested in innovation for the sake of innovation (either in music or in writing), it needs to be in the service of some larger, more fundamental goal or there's no potential for any kind of real emotional engagement

xp

I haven't read it but isn't that girl with dragon tattoo series that has a bajillion holds on it pretty outre?

nah they're pretty straight crime thrillers with a few twists and quirks ... lead character is "different" but I wouldn't call it outre

I liked Dragon Tattoo but Book 2 was the one I was talking about upthread as being disappointing to me (Girl Who Played w/ Fire)

shakey otm

liked Tree of Smoke but I'm a huge Denis Johnson fan and would recommend almost any of his other books over that one. it's pretty damn long and the Denis Johnson-y moments were too few and far between for it to be really great.

this is the only new book i want to read right now:

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kzpq62Dqat1qz87jlo1_500.jpg

there's plenty of great literature that doesn't have much on the "story" level, for what it's worth

Shakey, when you put it in those abstract terms, it's pretty difficult to disagree with. The question is what looks like innovation to you. Your sense of invention or innovation is going to be different depending on your level of attention, and what you're paying attention to. For instance, I'm guessing there are things you find brilliant and inventive in music that someone who pays zero attention to music would have no real ability to recognize or understand.

The kind of invention you're talking about is a really noticeable one -- it's huge surface technical stuff. I don't say that to be snobby. I'm just telling you that there are a billion other avenues of invention, so you might feel like a writer is "settling" when they're actually doing amazing things with prose or perspective or meaning or style. Like the great stuff about that Lydia Davis story I posted isn't just the big formal fact that it's super-short.

The use of time signatures as an analogy strikes me as pretty telling, actually, because isn't the lit equivalent of time signatures a bunch of stuff about pacing and prose that is wildly different from writer to writer, or even across a single work by one writer? Writers are using all the time signatures! It just asks you to notice a little.

Anyway though I really do wonder if you'd enjoy that one David Markson book, possibly others.

i don't get how she wrote that story, unless she cooked the duck

wait that's a joke right? I was on the verge of explaining the story like a dumbass

fwiw I think that Lydia Davis bit is great - compact, very slyly done, but also sweet and human

Lipsyte's star has been very slowly rising one reader at a time for ages - seems like everybody who gets asked "what's interesting & good that people don't hear as much about?" mentions Lipsyte - I think a Big Moment is his for the taking if he feels like it

also he's not a novelist but this thread seems like the kinda thread where somebody ought to point out that Gary Lutz is maybe some kind of a genius

he's on that "20 emerging" list I linked, one of the few on the list proper that I've read any of

re: the duck story, You'd probably have to explain the story to me -- the way I read it it seemed like the author was responding to a "what is your favorite story that you wrote" survey, so she wrote one there on the spot because she really liked the idea of a domestic bond over vicarious duck-eating -- that's her special place in her head she goes to when she's feeling low or whatever, and she never had an opportunity to verbalize that idea until the story prompt came along.

i think it was like the guys favourite thing that happened to him was something that happpened to someone else, the story she wrote was written by someone else

like at first your confused and then the internal logic takes hold of the whole

key is that "favorite story she has written" can be unpacked a few different ways

Lipsyte's star has been very slowly rising one reader at a time for ages - seems like everybody who gets asked "what's interesting & good that people don't hear as much about?" mentions Lipsyte - I think a Big Moment is his for the taking if he feels like it

― get your bucket of free wings (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Friday, June 25, 2010 5:19 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think its his big moment right now!

the ask is totally worth picking up fwiw

lydia davis also has a very very nice-looking hardcover of her collected stories AVAILABLE NOW that i really want to get but its thirty bones and i own most of the stories in other collections

I guess, for me the things that are "critically acclaimed" always seem so safe, where do people read about new books that are stranger or at least not Yann Martel-ey

But what about _The Age of Wire and String_, which appeared in the third post of the thread and was never mentioned again? This was hugely critically acclaimed, right? And I will fight any man woman or child who denies that it's great, or that it's strange. Certainly Derby's "Super Flat Times" wouldn't exist without it (though SFT is certainly not a clone of AWS, it's a different thing, with more SF in its upbringing.)

which Davis collection should I start with?

Also, "The Ask" sadly not as good as "Home Land," a little too much fussiness at the verbal level at the expense of THE TIMELESS VERITIES OF CHARACTER AND PLOT (and i am in general way more on the side of verbal fussiness against timeless verities than most readers)

re: "read in a book" I thought maybe that was a distancing device? Like if she purportedly wrote it herself, it wouldn't really "exist"

by the way this really does remind me of those ilm lets-conver-a-rockist threads in that way where theres these two sorta-competing impulses--one being to list things that "prove" that the rockists conclusions about pop music are wrong, and the other being to attack the assumptions the rockist has about "good" music are wrong.

I don't think anyone's doing such a good job of the latter tbh.

have you ever won an argument with geir

no one wins an argument with geir because he doesn't actually engage with anybody. but plenty of people have proven him wrong, repeatedly.

I just don't see anyone on this thread stanning for that much conventional/mainstream narrative novels and/or forcefully arguing that Joyce, Nabokov, Cortazar et al are crap

I mean that would be a pretty ballsy argument to make, if someone's gonna go there let's see it...

i dont think thats the equivalent? i think convential/mainstream narrative novels are as good as and often better than highly "experimental" or "adventurous" novels

i also think that were relying really hard on a distinction that hasnt been very clearly delineated...

i dont think new novels suck i like a lot of them but also i like genre fiction

i also think that were relying really hard on a distinction that hasnt been very clearly delineated...

yeah I agree, where to draw the line is kinda problematic

i think it was like the guys favourite thing that happened to him was something that happpened to someone else, the story she wrote was written by someone else

like at first your confused and then the internal logic takes hold of the whole

^^ yeah, this is what I meant about the neatness of the loop. the syntax at the beginning is confounding and doesn't make sense -- is it a story she wrote or read? -- but once you get to the duck you see it, and then look back to the beginning and go ah. (it also repeats the syntax of the "what is" questions and the "hesitate(d) for a long time")

the collected stories of davis is a great thing to have, though not really something to just sit and read through (a lot of her stories are short and dense like that, or a little singular -- probably best read a little bit separately and individually and not in a big row or anything)

xpost - if my only choices are between Joyce/Cortazar/Nabokov and the entire world history of "conventional" literature my choice is going to pretty easily be the latter!

What Munro does with chronology is pretty "experimental" by my lights, and far from the A-B-C conventions Shakey's complaining about.

i actually dont even know what traditional narrative-type books youre reading besides zadie smith and the fucking kite runner.

white teeth, btw, is arguably an adventurously structured book--certainly nontraditional enough for james wood to hold it up as an example of a new quasi-genre of novel

btw people looking for completely-unsatisfied-with-old-paradigms fiction should read NY Tyrant magazine, about which I feel 1/2 the time v. enthusiastic & 1/2 the time cranky & reactionary "you're just doing that because you know if you tried writing straight narrative they'd laugh you out of here" dude

in lit theory this is known as Indie Kid's Dilemma btw

yeah, i agree. i've talked about that before on ilx somewhere. she is deceptively conventional. on the surface, it looks like the same old same old, but nothing could be further from the truth.

xx-post

did you read 'the corrections', shakey? i avoided it for years because the subject matter sounded well-trodden and boring, but finally read it last month on the strength of a recommendation. franzen does play with the timeline in some very slight ways, but that's not really the point, nor is the plot. and yet the writing is so good that it's totally compelling, and feels very unique and fresh because of it.

xps

this is a list of books that i liked that ive read p recently that i really liked:

the privileges by jonathan dee
your face tomorrow by javier marias
ice by vladimir sorokin

only the 1st is what i think of as "conventional" but it uses convention in strange ways - makes choices about voice & perspective that undermine some conventions idk im typing the word conventions a lot

nope never heard of the Corrections before but someone rec'd it upthread

xp

I avoided The Corrections for the same reasons (I sold a copy to Iggy Pop in 2001 lol) but was also surprised by its effectiveness.

just to avoid confusion, someone recommended thomas bernhard's "correction" upthread and i'm talking about jonathan franzen's "the corrections".

" yeah, this is what I meant about the neatness of the loop. the syntax at the beginning is confounding and doesn't make sense -- is it a story she wrote or read? "

You're gonna have to graph this out for me -- I didn't get Primer, either.

The Corrections is excellent, but (uninformed statement coming up) I'd always mentally lumped him in with the Brooklyn Lethem Safran Foer big-seller-credible crowd, not anything which seemed to be an antidote to rote contemporary trends, or anything under the radar.

privileges is good, yeah

i mentioned franzen as a response to this:

I just don't see anyone on this thread stanning for that much conventional/mainstream narrative novels

fwiw ill stan for a lot of convential/mainstream novels

and imo he can write circles around lethem, and i like lethem (at least up through 'fortress of solitude'). never read any safran foer.

xp

i read both the ask and flauberts parrot last week, and i liked the conventional/mainstream one about 6 billion times more

everyone read correction

yeah yeah its translated whatever

okay!

everone read war and war by Laszlo Krasznahorkai I think it's what shakey's talking about

I got a cheap-ish paperback by Lydia Davis called Varieties of Disturbance a few weeks ago. Was enjoying hugely before deciding that I had to finish my library loan, give it back and not pay any more fines. Interesting that Shakey liked that, given what he's said about 'dryness', because I think that could be a cumulative effect of her stories. They're so concentrated that its a good approach to read a few and take a break to digest.

Quite happy to not bother with 'new' things except the likes of Lydia, which I don't have to trawl for, as I only found out about because of her translation of Proust. Not that anyone new sucks or not but I'm busy sorting out what's good or not between 1912-1949 or so. That's tricky and might be a lifetime's work. After that its a few Euro/Latin American guys and gals with SF/noir from the US, mainly.

also watch Werckmeister Harmonies its a good movie, I didn't even fall asleep in it

Has Nabisco published any fiction prominently, out of interest? I'd be interested to read his stuff.

war and war is basically correction but the main character gets punched in the face every 30 pages. I mean its a lot more but that's the gist of it.

I can't get through this entire thread at work, but here are recent (ie "modern") novels I've read that I loved:

early works by Steve Erickson (everything up through Tours of the Black Clock)
David Mitchell (number9dream isn't that good but the others are extraordinary. I really liked Black Swan Green for doing the 'normal' thing as well)
Katherine Dunn's "Geek Love"
Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping"
Denis Johnson's Already Dead and Angels.
DFW (but I liked the short stories in Girl with Curious Hair more than anything else)
Karen Joy Fowler's "Sarah Canary"
Chris Adrian's "The Children's Hospital"
Barry Yourgrau's "Wearing Dad's Head" (short stories)
Brian Evenson's "Altman's Tongue" (short stories. He has others as well as a novel which I didn't like as much, but Altman's Tongue is a perfect collection).

Some stuff I've read recently that really annoyed: Motherless Brooklyn. I thought Fortress of Solitude was better (actually much better) but it annoyed in a similar way, mainly, I didn't feel like these books had an ending at all. They seemed like they were going somewhere and then just kind of fizzled for me. This is true to a lesser extent with kavalier and clay and that eugenides book I'm blanking on. Does it seem stupid to want a book to have a good ending that seems thought out and pertinent? I kind of like Lethem though and not just because he lived in Berkeley.

I'm reading "The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao" right now and it's ok.

The Age of Wire and String is excellent but I don't know how 'hugely critically acclaimed' it was; it got good reviews where it got reviews. It's an experimental collection and consigned to Dalkey Press afficionados, Oulipo followers, and people who went to Brown. It's good and so is "Noteable American Women". It's kind of the sort of thing that I dont' think would automatically get published by a big house these days. Maybe I'm wrong.

tom rachman's the imperfectionists was p good too but its like - i liked it a lot its funny and smart and p well written but its not like a "big deal" or really impressive its just good idk i guess thats not enough? i want to engage with shakey's argument but i dont really understand whats he saying i think

i really disliked the ask

xp: uh oh im having a fantasy u started a thread about an east european or mb german dude like a year ago whose books i really wanted to read but i forget who it was now. also did i ever ask u about hard rain falling? i really really love that book

Chris Adrian's "The Children's Hospital"

^^ this is really great

so can everyone feverishly post one name in all caps of an author that they really want everyone to read cuz OMG they are AWESOME and you HAVE to read them RIGHT NOW. cuz i'm kinda slow and breathless enthusiasm works best with me. a recent/modern/living author. you don't really have to if you don't want to. but i will remember the names.

HILARY MANTEL

Katherine Dunn's "Geek Love"

oh man I hated this

(and yes i am paying attention and already remembering names mentioned)

It's kind of the sort of thing that I dont' think would automatically get published by a big house these days. Maybe I'm wrong.

It probably wouldn't, but that's a wider thing not confined to literature: if you like some contemporary classical and see the amazing work older, established labels like Deustche Gramophone did for difficult composers like Stockhausen or Kagel, you know. Its just something that has to be dealt with in one way or another.

Wouldn't 'forcefully argue' but I find Murakami, Calvino and Cortazar (bar a short story or two) kinda meh and it annoys me when they get placed alongside Borges. A lot of this stuff needs severe sorting out and its not clear cut at all between experimental and the more straightforward.

VICTOR PELEVIN

xp to lamp

that would probably be Laszlo Krasznahorkai! Yeah you told me about that book, I wanted to read it but it was really expensive when I was at the book store so I bought carpentier's the chase for like a dollar instead (which is a great book too). I still need to get it from the library.

i am finally reading middlesex and it's pretty good tbh

TOM MCCARTHY - REMAINDER. for pete's sake!

I don't understand Murakami's appeal at all. Friends who stan for her won't read, say, Colm Toibin.

him

she's hot though

argh

i think i used to confuse lydia davis with kathryn davis.

consigned to Dalkey Press afficionados, Oulipo followers, and people who went to Brown.

i loled

should i read the crazed by ha jin? i have a copy in the store. looks kinda good. is he gonna be one of those future genius icons a hundred years from now? people talk about him like he is.

btw the age of wire and string is basically tender buttons but whatever

him

― max, Friday,

ha, yeah -- I was thinking of Mary Gaitskill, cuz her last book is on my table.

@ scott i read waiting bcuz ill read books that win prizes but again i liked it a fair amount but idk if it was genius. i didnt feel like a different person after reading it or w/e

btw the age of wire and string is basically tender buttons but whatever

if this is a ref to the Broadcast album I consider this a sterling endorsement...

I couldn't finish Waiting. I can't fully articulate why its dryness repelled me.

it's a ref to gertrude stein

xpost

btw the age of wire and string is basically tender buttons but whatever

if this is a ref to the Broadcast album I consider this a sterling endorsement...

― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, June 25, 2010 3:28 PM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark

nabisco is gonna make fun of you

lol

"DFW (but I liked the short stories in Girl with Curious Hair more than anything else)"

does not compute.

The only thing of DFW's to which I'd give a second look is the essay collection.

i read them first (when the book got published) and always felt that what he wrote afterward wasn't as interesting? I dunno.

Vollman: I think You Bright and Risen Angels is pretty extraordinary, I read it when I was 20, I think it's really good, but the longer he's been around churning out 1000 page books about increasingly niche subjects the more he reminds me of I dunno, Burroughs or some other marginal person whose reputation is bigger than their talent. I just have a hard time reading anything by him now (note: I used to think Burroughs was the most brilliant writer ever and can't read him at all now).

I love The Atlas. Rainbow Stories is the only other thing by him that I'll ever make plans to look at.

Lolz I did see a few of Vollmann's bks bunched together at a bookstore a few weeks ago and just thought 'no fkn way'. Maybe if RS turns out to be one of the best bks ever I'll give one of those door stoppers a go.

rainbow stories is alright but I seem to remember it not really seeming much like fiction (I mainly only remember the SRL story). 13 stories and 13 epitaphs was pretty good as well, or had good stories in it. I guess it's stuff like "ice shirt" and "fathers and crows" that I'm just never going to deal with.

Ugh -- do I have this right yet?

If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an
[you = reader] [her = author proxy1] [she = author] [she/she = author proxy1]
English-language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with
[teacher = reader proxy] [student/his/he = author proxy2]
embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say that the happiest moment of his
[wife = author proxy1 or author proxy 3?]
life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

There's some problems though: While the English teacher is structurally occupying the same function as the reader in the first instance, I have a hunch that it's the author. Was she actually an English teacher in China at some point? and she might also be the duck, but that doesn't make sense.

- I won't make fun of that because I too have devoted far more time to Broadcast than Stein
- I'll have to think on an all-caps writer, but I like akm's list a lot
- (also confidential to akm I am reading through a Damon Runyon collection right now and getting excited about all stories where he mentions Pueblo)
- I really like Pelevin too, by the way, especially the 4 by Pelevin volume
- I have not published any fiction and may not be remotely good at writing it, but I've been building a novel for a long time and if I'm very lucky I'll be able to point you toward it in a few years

13 stories and 13 epitaphs was pretty good as well, or had good stories in it. I guess it's stuff like "ice shirt" and "fathers and crows" that I'm just never going to deal with.

^^^yep, totally agree

i can't read vollmann. he makes my eyes glaze over. i like reading about him though. as a case study or what have you. i like the idea of him, i guess.

as far as deprivation and obsession goes, there are still some jack london books i'd like to get to.

also I don't know how intricate we want to get about the Davis story, but the loop I'm talking about is:

If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once

at which point you might go "huh?" and look over the sentence again, because the question is what she wrote, not read. it seems like an error. but eventually you decide, well, that doesn't make sense, but I guess I'll just keep reading and see if it clarifies itself...

... and then you read the duck bit and you're like oh, and maybe you re-read the beginning and see that her relationship to the story she read is like the student's relationship to the duck his wife ate, and possibly you notice that the syntax is neatly parallel for both, in terms of the question asked and the hesitating for a long time.

also yes, there is an extra layer of the teacher's story being in a book -- and we could say this story is partly about the capacity of stories and writing and books to make other people's experiences practically your own -- but at that point I get simple-minded and don't need to diagram it out or anything

yer blowing my mind man

http://filipspagnoli.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/mc-escher-humanity.jpg

I have to confess that I feel pretty out of the loop on modern fiction in general. I used to write in my early 20's, did writing workshops, and was more on top of things and consequently more bitter and had more insane aspirations and expectations of literature. Now that I'm old, defeated, and play music instead, I feel like most of it has passed me by. I wrote experimental fiction to varying degrees of success (as far as coherence and inherent value is concerned; I had no success getting anything published) and I think I probably gave up a few years too early since McSweeney's and DFW opened the gates for more widespread acceptance of non-traditional narrative structure, blah blah. All that said, my best cowriting friend at the time stuck to it (writing and only now published his first novel, which is about as traditional as you can get (Hummingbirds by Joshua Gaylord). For someone who, at one point, seemed like the second coming of Faulkner to me, it was a pretty big step away from the writing style he was familiar with. It's very good, fwiw.

the one time I went to a Vollman reading he brought a gun.

I may have posted about this here but delmore schwartz has this one or two page story about this dad who's telling this story to his son about a father and son going on a long journey down a road in the middle ages and in the story the two trudge along until all their shit is stolen and they are killed or whatever and at the end of the actual story you find out that the father is beating the kid while the mother is screaming to get in through the closed door. It's done in a couple pages and its hilarious

haha

my favorite new writer is hal sirowitz. i was reading his book of poems to the kids last night and their circular craziness had me in stitches. but he isn't a novelist.

New Sheets

I won't be around forever, Mother said.
One day I'm going to die, so I might
as well nag you a little bit more,
while I have the chance. And when
I'm dead you'll have to rely on someone else
to tell you that it's time to change the sheets,
& I hope for your sake, that it won't
be your wife, because she's going to get
tired of doing it, & she'll start to demand that you
& her sleep on separate beds, which will mean
that pretty soon you'll have to be using separate silverware,
so she won't always have to be the one to wash them.
And before you know it, she'll want you
to live in your own house so you
won't be able to mess up hers, & divorce is more likely
to happen when you aren't living together.

i'm really easy to please, by the way.

Lending Out Books
By Hal Sirowitz

You’re always giving, my therapist said.
You have to learn how to take. Whenever
you meet a woman, the first thing you do
is lend her your books. You think she’ll
have to see you again in order to return them.
But what happens is, she doesn’t have the time
to read them, & she’s afraid if she sees you again
you’ll expect her to talk about them, & will
want to lend her even more. So she
cancels the date. You end up losing
a lot of books. You should borrow hers.

sorry, that's the last one i promise. they're addictive. i'd never heard of him until yesterday. i figured with blurbs by mark leyner and darius james on the back i'd give him a shot.

back to modern fiction!

i wish darius james would write another novel. i love him. (although it was his non-fiction book on film that i was the biggest fan of. he influenced me big time crit-wise.)

Also are who are the good contemporary authors from Asia? I am particularly interested in South and Southeast Asian authors.

― Kiitën (admrl), Saturday, June 26, 2010 3:00 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

I've heard good things about Arundhati Roy but haven't read anything by her. one of my professors taught a Southeast Asian lit course and I could probably e-mail him and ask for the syllabus, if you're interested.

I'm reading "The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao" right now and it's ok.

hah, I recently decided it might be good to take a break from reading ILX and read some novels and I looked at this one because diaz is a pulitzer prize winner & he gave a talk here recently but when I read the first couple of pages I was kind of put off by all the slang. does it get better?

might be good to take a break from reading ILX

heresy

was kind of put off by all the slang. does it get better?

yes it gets much better but then it gets worse again. really, the bits about Oscar aren't great but the sections about the other family members are truly incredible and it's worth reading for those.

As far as South Asian novels go, I loved Vikram Chandra's massive Sacred Games, which I read a couple summers ago. It's doing relatively traditional novel things, I would say. (Disclaimer: I don't really read much fiction at all, so my liking something may not mean a lot.)

I was thinking about picking up the first Joshua Ferris novel. Any good? Second one actually sounds more interesting but I refuse to buy new hardcover fiction.

Also just bought that Stieg Larsson book Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but this thread seems more to be talking about *literary* novels.

shamless plug alert:
i am about to go out, but before i do, i would like to invite you all to read my husband's books. they're marketed as YA but they are not written as YA.
first: THE MONSTER VARIATIONS -- a dark coming of age story (it's out and you can buy it/get it from your local library)
next: (april 2011) ROTTERS -- epic horror novel sort of about graverobbing

they're out on delacorte, which is hardly an indie publisher, but don't hold that against him. if you're willing to read josh ferris, you may also enjoy daniel kraus (that's him <3)

Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things is her Big Novel, and it's just okay. Interesting, but in a kind of schmaltzy, "I'm going to win the Booker" way.

Man, this thread has got me all jazzed and I've added like 6 books to my library holds. Maybe my library does carry new fiction after all! Also just spent an hour reading the Paris Review blog which is packed with interesting recommendations (not all recent, tho).

shamless plug alert:
my plug was intended to be shameless, but i guess it's shamless too. i really am recommending these books because they do not suck.

Oscar Wao is like my first or second-favorite novel of the past few years, I think! I don't know what I can say about being immediately put off by slang (are we talking about the Spanish or the nerd references or just the modern speech?), but I don't think it's a feature that's particular to Diaz -- like a lot of novels, it teaches you its own language as you go along.

sorry, that probably reveals moreso my own deficiencies as a reader - just reread the opening on amazon and yeah, it's the modern speech/nerd references. like, the first two paragraphs do this sort of nice world-building and then it immediately switches into the more casual code of the narrator. and yeah, seeing a footnote about The Silmarillion is kind of jarring especially coming after a footnote about a brutal latin american dictator!

ahh, but IS IT, is one of the things the book is sort of putting into play there

but yeah, that's an issue of your taste -- all I can tell you is that I was not pre-familiar with a lot of the frames of reference in that book, and enjoyed following them and the way that certain very different frames (for instance, sci-fi/comics and Dominican history/politics) reflect off one another

(seriously, this is coming from someone who is a nerd but absolutely not in the sci-fi/comics/fantasy way involved here)

hah, okay - yeah I guess it's nagl to make snap judgments about a book based on the first 5 pages. will definitely give it a chance if I come across it in person.

btw, general question for all the readers itt: do you still read them on dead trees or do you do at least some reading on a computer/iPad/Kindle or whatever?

I've always felt that I would probably increase my book-readin' by 1000% if I would just give in to the notion of reading books on something digital, and at the same time I realize it's kind of silly to hold this prejudice when I have no problem reading, say, a long New Yorker article online.

at the same time, I do feel I get 'book memory' out of reading something on the printed page, where I remember, for example, that it was on the lower right page that revelation X was revealed, or that that chapter was so thick (making thumb and forefinger gesture) etc. that I wouldn't be able to replicate on a digital device.

thoughts?

I don't think I'll ever stop buying physical books, although I could see myself getting an iPad to read things like "a long New Yorker article online" or whatever

I was thinking about picking up the first Joshua Ferris novel. Any good? Second one actually sounds more interesting but I refuse to buy new hardcover fiction.

it's funny you say that! the first one got better reviews but i couldn't finish it. i like the second one, though it's not perfect. he's a gifted writer. i did not think the first one was that great though.

have a serious crush on junot diaz tbh

i liked drown okay, but thought oscar wao was wack as shit.

looking back at my list for the ilm books poll thing i apparently enjoyed a lot more straight up realist-type fiction in the last ten years than i would have thought.

also all of y'all dismissing the seven dreams stuff in favor of vollmann's paens to the beauty of drug-addicted street walkers are way the fuck offbase.

xpost Something about the whole Fiction About An Office thing puts me off. Like when I read the first few pages it seemed so in your face This Is About A Modern Workplace as though that in itself were a bold, contrarian enough move to justify the existence of the novel. I liked the excerpt of The Unnamed that I read recently (I forget where -- Granta?).

Middle of this thread got kind of insufferable, didn't it? Thanks for getting things back to normal!

I for one am not interested in reading books in digital format. I think the value of a physical object is severely underrated. But then again I haven't touched a Kindle, so wtf do I know.

Middle of this thread got kind of insufferable, didn't it? Thanks for getting things back to normal!

Uh, probably don't want to do this then - rather like the school swimming gala I entered when I was 16, this really is water I don't want to dip a toe in, but I was bored at work last night and wrote this, and now I can't sleep, and it's bugging me, but this probably isn't even the place to post it any more - it's all sorts of xposts and xthreads. But it does feed in to sorting through modern lit and why it's easy to get the feeling that the novel's a moribund form.

The thing is I think Shakey's got a point, it's just the wrong point. There is a straw man here, or rather a straw form - which is the idea of '19th century narrative novel'. Narrative's been around since the year dot, it's pretty subservient to the matter of what's being written, to selection and emphasis, and yes, ideas about sensational time, or non-linear story telling are something you can do with narrative, but they won't make a book interesting by themselves. Things like detective stories (the old, classic, clues and revelations sort) and the thriller were just as innovative with narrative in their way. Film had a massive impact. And that's the clue really to the problem.

Because the problem is one of genre. I think the accusation of conservatism is quite often just regarding an awful lot of books that are covered in the mainstream newspaper book pages - it's not a matter of form tho, but of genre. Shakey's right to point the finger at the 19th century, but wrong to point it at narrative, in fact it's the innovation of the realist novel: a great thing in its way, certainly if George Eliot is doing it, say. But it's become the ruling genre (in the mandarin book pages at least). It's not the form, but the content, the people and concerns of the Victorian novel, that hasn't changed a lot. The realist genres structures and styles have become as hackneyed as a weary gumshoe, or a Agatha Christie vicarage. Problem is, it's not even seen as a genre any more, it's seen as serious fiction, the best sort of writing.

I'm personally fairly averse to rerpresentations of how things (supposedly) are, and how people feel about them, character-driven writing is rarely interesting to me because unless the writer is a towering genius (Dostoevsky and Eliot spring to mind, but also Elizabeth Taylor, short-stories of VS Pritchett), I'm not awfully interested in what they think about people - I am interested in ideas and writing, and you're going to have people in there anyway, and they're going to do things and think things, and that's usually enough for me.

I always liked genre stan Bruce Montgomerie/Edmund Crispin in one of his novels, when he got a character to say -

‘The fact is,’ the man went on, ‘that I have no interest in the minds of murderers, or for that matter,’ he added rather wildly, ‘in the minds of anyone else.’ Characterization seems to me a very overrated element in fiction. I can never see why one should be obliged to havev any of it at all, if one doesn’t want to. It limits the form so.’

Certainly nothing gets in the way of a good adventure like someone maundering on about how they feel about stuff.

So yes, a lot of modern fiction, and particularly a lot of what is written about in the mainstream, bores me to tears. The apotheosis of some writers (Roth! I'm talking to you!) seems a mystery, although only the same sort of mystery to me as people who are deeply in to fantasy - no disputing taste, and I'm sure Roth isn't a bad writer (no really) but when that taste proclaims that it is more serious, more important than other taste, well we're back to nabisco's otm point upthread.

Solutions? Well, in terms of writing, everything that isn't realism is a big field, but I'd be quite keen to work the seam of the Romance (ie the adventurous proto-novel, not chick-lit) and speculative fiction, and maybe we could get to a stage where realism is a great option for a writer, but not the default option for a writer who wants to be taken seriously, likewise in reviewing.

The solution for readers? I take what people say about lit mags, but I'm not sure they're for me in a way, I really like a lot of lit blogging, even if it's just knowing it's there, as a form of reference. For instance The Literary Saloon is incredible for anyone who is interested in international writing of any sort, and there's many others (Asylum, ReadySteadyBook to take but two) who write about new stuff they're interested in, without the constraints of newspaper book page editorial policy.

For me? (To get this back to a recommendations thread) Tom McCarthy (Remainder can be read partly as a critique of realism I guess), David Mitchell - the down-to-earth mystical and coming of age novel Black Swan Green and the nesting narratives of Cloud Atlas, are the two modern writers who I've liked most. (Chris Petit's Robinson was interesting too, and actually his airport fiction kind of weirdly continues his obsessions).

These people feel excited by ideas and by the possibilities of writing. And yes, reach back, there's loads of interesting uncanonical writers (and indeed canonical writers) in the 20th century who make the novel anything but moribund - that's partly what's great about it - it's such an elastic thing.

Right, probably time to get up properly now I've got that off my chest. Apologies for dragging up shit people had already happily dispensed with.

(swimming gala btw - I jumped in and it was so cold that I stood up immediately and started going 'HURR HURR' and flapping my arms a bit in front of all my peers who all started laughing and jeering.)

hey dyao, I just realized -- when I said "it's an issue of your taste" I didn't mean you had a taste problem, or anything! that was supposed to mean "it's up to you," you know, to react your own way. snap judgments on the first five pages are actually fine by me.

great post!

Because the problem is one of genre. I think the accusation of conservatism is quite often just regarding an awful lot of books that are covered in the mainstream newspaper book pages - it's not a matter of form tho, but of genre. Shakey's right to point the finger at the 19th century, but wrong to point it at narrative, in fact it's the innovation of the realist novel... The realist genres structures and styles have become as hackneyed as a weary gumshoe, or a Agatha Christie vicarage. Problem is, it's not even seen as a genre any more, it's seen as serious fiction, the best sort of writing.

this makes total sense to me, I appreciate your unpacking this distinction/nuance (also feel you about Roth tbh)

oh another fairly recent unconventional-narrative-style book I absolutely loved: Milorad Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars" (male + female versions)

(also totally agree characterization being completely overrated/overemphasized in modern realist novels fwiw)

thank you for this wonderful gift of a thread ILX.

i kind of worry about how people who hate on "characterization" view their fellow humans.

hah, I recently decided it might be good to take a break from reading ILX and read some novels and I looked at this one because diaz is a pulitzer prize winner & he gave a talk here recently but when I read the first couple of pages I was kind of put off by all the slang. does it get better?

I'm afraid not. I don't agree with nabisco, sadly. The bits of the novel that worked best all involved the women. Reading Mario Vargas Llosa's [fantastic Feast of the Goat two weeks before didn't help.

one thing i will say about oscar wao is that it's one a recent "heavyweight" lit prize winner that you can read in an afternoon, so if you dislike it (which i did) you'll only be out half a day.

It's funny because sometimes I've thought to myself that contemporary novels suck for the opposite of Shakey's reason - ie., that they try too hard to play with narrative form and forget to tell a compelling story. Hating on the 19th century is kind of strange to me, since I think that was kind of a golden age for the novel, and literature in general. There are so many good old books that I don't spend as much time as I should trying to find good recent books - I guess I lack the patience to trawl through the reams of new publishing each year, and I don't trust the critical gatekeepers who are supposed to help us separate the wheat from the chaff. Maybe in about 30 years the NYRB imprint will start reissuing the overlooked gems of the '00s and I can read them then. That's one imprint that hasn't disappointed, but unfortunately they don't do contemporary stuff. I do wish I could find more recent writers that I really like. Many have been mentioned already in this thread. Perhaps I could add a few more: Jana Martin (her book of stories "Russian Lover" has some moving writing), Peter Carey (he's pretty well-known I guess, but I was blown away by "True History of the Kelly Gang" and enjoyed "My Life as a Fake"), Paul Lafarge (I recommend "Artist of the Missing" for anyone who likes a bit of unconvential narrative), Michel Houllebecq (a bit overhyped but "Elementary Particles" is worth reading), and Mischa Berlinski ("Fieldwork" is an unusual kind of detective story).

Ha, Dictionary of the Khazars seals it -- I took a seminar as an undergrad that was secretly "Intro to Books Shakey Mo Enjoys!" That was really my favorite stuff at that point, too -- formally inventive, metafictional, "postmodern," etc. There is probably enough of this kind of stuff just from Europe and North America, from WWII through the 1990s, to keep you having something to read for the rest of your life. (There's some John Barth I'd recommend: Chimera and Lost in the Funhouse.)

i think Wao does a similar thing to Toni Morrison in that they both introduce you to utterly unsympathetic characters and then turns it on its head so that you are right there with those characters and you love them because you know why they hurt so much.

hey dyao, I just realized -- when I said "it's an issue of your taste" I didn't mean you had a taste problem, or anything! that was supposed to mean "it's up to you," you know, to react your own way. snap judgments on the first five pages are actually fine by me.

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Saturday, June 26, 2010 10:20 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

hah, no worries! in fact, I think I'm going to shortlist Lydia Davis based on a snap judgment made on a few sentences of prose posted upthread...

Wait, why did the Ben Marcus book appear up there?! That book is amazing.

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte is indeed hilarious and well worth checking out.

just chiming in to say i really liked oscar wao so that nabisco doesnt look like the only weirdo on the thread

i loved the voice too, slang and everything. i dunno if people appreciate how hard it is to create a voice like that--most attempts are just utterly unreadable.

not that my admiration for diaz's technical ability means you have to like it or anything. just saying.

oh i liked it. for 2/3rds of it i was like wtfamazing!!!! it's so joyous and uncynical.

until the end of course

I dunno -- Spanish is my first language and I know lots of Dominicans, and Diaz tried too hard, I think.

oh i liked wao, too, if that wasn't clear from my serious crush on junot diaz.

one of the proudest moments of my life was getting mistaken for Junot Diaz in a bar

this random guy comes up and asks if I'm a writer, and I say ... well, sort of, why? and he's like: I knew it, you were great on the Colbert Report last night

the most amazing part of this is that I had Oscar Wao sitting on the table in front of me, so I could hold up the author photo so we could discuss the resemblance

you could turn that into a lydia davis story

If you ask him what is the proudest moment of his life, he will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be the time he was mistaken for an author.

wow, full circle. next time someone asks me what I'm proud of, I will hesitate for a long time and say it was probably the Colbert Report, and being interviewed on it.

i happened to come across a copy of oscar wao at the used book store today, so i picked it up in honour of this thread.

i just want to chime in and say that one of the big obstacles keeping me from being more attuned to contemporary fiction is the ambiguity and lack of context between streams of output. like, differentiating between the yann martel and khaled hosseinis of the world from their more literary-minded (or just higher quality) cohorts for example. like to bring up a parallel in music, bands tend to exist in relatively easy to identify streams, from bigger ones like stadium rock, indie rock, to nitpickingly minute ones like termbo/kbd punk and epitath/fat wreck/skater punk or atlanta trap rap and new bay slap. once you've identified a certain stream or micro-genre that you're fond of it's relatively easy to cruise through bands with some degree of faith that you'll like them. i'm aware that these streams do exist in lit, but they're really unclear to someone outside peeking in (or walking around a bookstore, for example.) i'd rebut what max was saying about having to do the work of wading through the chaff of new fiction, and just say that it takes me a while to read a book, and in theory i would love to have the luxury to be a critical, discerning reader, but i'd really appreciate some form of engagement with a publication or publishing house that offered that sort of guided tour. obviously i'm not asking for someone to spoonfeed my perfectly according to my tastes, just some help is all

i don't want to sound like i'm rejecting the existence of this either, just that it has never become apparent to me throughout my life as a reader so far. would love to hear how the resident contemporary lit fans figure out what to check

i'd really appreciate some form of engagement with a publication or publishing house that offered that sort of guided tour.
booklist?

Thanks for the blog links. With LRB+NYRB that works more for me in terms of finding the odd half to a dozen new names I could check out on top of what I'm already interested in.

Was reading about Lebanese author Elias Khoury...wiki is pretty useful at just throwing stuff at random, especially in terms of award lists: Looking now at the Best Translated book award

also all of y'all dismissing the seven dreams stuff in favor of vollmann's paens to the beauty of drug-addicted street walkers are way the fuck offbase.

Fair enough strongo I will look at a seven dreams book.

regarding differentiating between diff't types of fiction, if you can find a blog that fits your tastes, then you're halfway there. Like, if you like adventurous sci-fi, then mumpsimus is a goldmine, and if you like translated lit, then likewise for literary saloon.

Also, never hesitate to ask your local librarian for recommendations! Some libraries even have entire desks devoted to "readers' advisory" or "reader services"

and in answering your question, they sometimes consult...BOOKLIST
i mean, that's why the publication (and website) exist: to recommend books

Booklist is, indeed, an extraordinary magazine.

i'm just saying that there are people out there reading books, writing about them, categorizing them, and publishing this information -- there are few places one can look to find as wide a variety of book reviews as booklist has on a regular basis.

unfortunately, it seems that fiction for adults -- more narrowly, literary fiction for adults -- has a pretty small portion of their coverage. such is the market for books, i guess.

Amanda, don't you or DK know Joshua Ferris somehow?

(I believe I read And Then We Came to the End on your recommendation.)

"(or walking around a bookstore, for example.)"

still say this is a good way to find and find out about things. browsing underrated in post-browser world.

Yes, and yes, you did!

agreed about browsing -- n/a to thread re: browsing -- he wrote a good blog post about that once

Yeah, I have to say, when I was in Portland a month ago, I spent hours in Powell's and never would've predicted the books I walked out the door with. (Plus a half-dozen more whose titles I scribbled down so I could remember later.)

I think it is a little harder to really have a broad view and great bearing with books than it is with a lot of other things -- especially music, which is chattered about by more people, and where you can figure out what two dozen different acts sound like in the space of an hour. Having an equally strong sense of "everything" in books would be sort of a lifetime commitment.

But yeah, there's loads of coverage to follow! Even just obvious things like pre-pub magazines (Booklist), the big newspaper reviews (Times book review, Washington Post book world, Guardian books section) ... Believer notices, New Yorker reviews, bookslut.com (especially the blog -- does everyone here remember Jessa Crispin as an ilxor?), sites like HTMLGiant, GalleyCat, LiteraryKicks ... there are really loads of places to read about books. Not that much tougher than finding a bunch of blogs and websites to follow about music, film, politics, or anything else.

World Literature Today is another publication I'd suggest for keeping track of what's being written. Obviously the emphasis is on clustering things in terms of nationality and ethnicity, but it also necessarily gets into movements and schools and other sub-groups. (For instance there was a recent profile of mostly very literary Catalan detective fiction.)

for people who don't go to I Love Books that often - or ever - and don't know about it, ilxor James Morrison's book cover blog/site is rilly rilly cool and well worth reading. if you like covers and design talk and all that:

http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com/

plus, its another good place to find out about cool new books.

plus, there are the rolling whatareyoureading threads on ilb. for new book tips. i always learn stuff on there.

yeah i really wish more ilxors would post on the rolling what-are-you-reading thread - how bout moving those threads to ILE? there are only a handful of ppl who post regularly and i find i don't really share similar tastes with them at all.

well there is nothing stopping anyone from starting an ile what are you reading thread. you know?

er, as far as I'm aware no one posts on the rolling reading thread to have their tastes reflected back at them.

Also: there are a few posters that have actually come through ILX from ILB. xp

i am reading treasure of the sierra madre. but that's not a new novel

look, it wasn't an insult or anything. i would just like to see more people post, and get more recommendations in literary areas that i am interested in.

that's fine. but ilx often helps those who help themselves. start a thread on the kind of thing you are interested in. here or on ilb.

okay, i don't know about "often", but its worth a shot.

Sure. To add to what Scott said there was a rolling reading thread on ILE back in the day when ILX only had two boards.

and some people got a little mad at me for starting ilb for that reason. that it would mean less book threads on ile. i don't think that happened though. and, yeah, ilb is slow. but some people like slow.

All the threads I have posted on ilb would have gone on ile instead. But when people do a search as long they put in 'all boards' its not a problem if you want to try and find and add on a discussion of a book that someone might have posted about in the past.

guys I keep opening the thread about new novels and why they suck or whatever but it's a whole lot of posts about what board the thread belongs on

req. a diff. thread for this meta discussion

I am shocked and dismayed that an ILX thread would stray off-topic.

anyone ever read anything by Lissa McLaughlin? i got a copy of her short story collection Troubled By His Complexion at the store and it looks really good. and weird. put out by tiny Burning Deck of Providence RI. so, probably kinda hard to come by. plus, it came out in 1988 and has probably been out of print since then. see, random. i like random. i like having never heard of someone and then a book just falls into my hands.

Also: there are a few posters that have actually come through ILX from ILB.

That's me! Not that I am such a prolific ilxor but ILB was my introduction to the place. And remains one of the best spots for online book discussion that I've come across.

in a world where there is site new answers, does it really matter if a thread's on ilb or ile? (i guess sometimes i might not post to 'what are you reading' because i feel like my tastes in reading material might be pedestrian compared to highfalutin' ilb'ers, but that's about me and not ilb so w/e)

i have this loose plan to read more post-2000 books this year, so this thread is a delight for all its new places to find out about things to read! but already it feels like too many - now i have read a chunk of different book blogs the amount of fantastic choice available to me has become dizzyingly wide again.

I was reading some Barthelme short stories recently, and started thinking sadly that no-one else could make the experiments he makes, because it would be obvious that Barthelme had done it already, they'd just be biting his style. That any original way of doing non-traditional narrative would be... good for only one use, as it were. Does that make sense?

(as a child i was afraid of what would happen when all the available combinations of notes were exhausted and the world ran out of tunes.)

(or at least the idea haunted me. i don't know that i was worried about its social consequences or anything. anyway: maybe my worry about non-traditional narrative techniques is just that same idee fixe)

i like having never heard of someone and then a book just falls into my hands.

For me this is "Shamp of the City-Solo," by Jaimy Gordon. Unlike anything else I have seen. I am mostly moved by "traditional" narrative I guess but "Shamp" and the B Marcus book are two "experimental" works that I think anyone who cares about prose must bow to.

Here's a little:

Beyond us the Sump rolled mosquito-flecked in its trench. Behind lay a long stretch of acid pine barren, creased with superhighway, pocked with gas station. Lest they fall upon it, swarms of raindrops clung tremulously to the air.

This is an effing great "lest." Not an easy word to deploy gracefully.

But this is not new, obv., it is 1974 (though I think JG is still at it.)

motorman by david ohle is sort of on the same tip. ben marcus wrote the intro for 2004 edition. came out originally in '72 though

I was reading some Barthelme short stories recently, and started thinking sadly that no-one else could make the experiments he makes, because it would be obvious that Barthelme had done it already, they'd just be biting his style. That any original way of doing non-traditional narrative would be... good for only one use, as it were. Does that make sense?

It does, except if you're good, you can make it work. E.G. I think you would naturally say the same about Ben Marcus, but then Matthew Derby comes along and writes a terrific book which on the one hand is plainly in the wake of Marcus but is really its own thing, not just a pale copy. As for Barthelme himself, I think a TINGE of him at least seeps into tons of people -- e.g. is there Gary Lutz without Barthelme? Is there Miranda July without Barthelme? (ok, I like Miranda July, maybe you don't.) D F Wallace's "Brief Interviews w/ Hideous Men" is in the Q-and-A format that I associate with Barthelme (though I don't know for sure he invented it.) Just saying, NOBODY is such a thorough experimenter that they work through all possible consequences of the experiment!

(Wallace is an interesting case, actually -- his prose style is VERY hard to take things from without imitating it outright. Not sure if I can think of someone who's doing it. But he's so widely read that surely there are examples.)

no one is sui generis anyways. hard to imagine barthelme without james thurber, his predecessor as house absurdist at the new yorker, and earlier slapstic black humorists like nathaneal west and i guess mark twain. hell some of lucian's dialogues from waaaay back in the day read like barthelme set pieces

What's proprietary about what Barthelme does in terms of experiments? I'll grant you there's a sensibility that would be worth appropriating if you wanted to get published in the same spheres as Barthelme, but if anything, I get the sense that being less playful would take you farther.
Outside of nesting footnotes, DFW strikes me as a very neutral writer -- what signature moves does he do that someone wanting to tackle similar material ought to avoid in order to draw comparisons?

he's a very explicit writer

everything is named

and but so

yah srsly it's not just abt the footnotes

If I were going to boil down DFW to his essentials, the thing that pops out as common to everything he writes is tackling a usually ridiculous or absurd subject and taking it seriously, exploring every possible avenue. But this is the same M.O. of pretty much every stand-up comedian. So what I'm left with are the quirks -- and other than the footnotes I'm having a hard time ID'ing anything.

pay attention to the way he diagrams everything out, makes the connections between things 100% obvious. it's very nabisco-like.

Outside of nesting footnotes, DFW strikes me as a very neutral writer -- what signature moves does he do that someone wanting to tackle similar material ought to avoid in order to draw comparisons?

there are lots of little surface things that read as dfw-y to me..."and but so", certain uses of technical language, perfect pitch descriptions of non-musical sounds, lots of little signature phrases, etc.

"the way he diagrams everything out, makes the connections between things 100% obvious. it's very nabisco-like."
Is that a quirk, though? Isn't that what clear writing is supposed to do?

it becomes a style in and of itself, imo, the way DFW does it - he reads to me noticeably different than other non-fiction writers.

pay attention to the way he diagrams everything out, makes the connections between things 100% obvious. it's very nabisco-like.

it's the other way around, imho.

just yesterday i read this passage by wyatt mason about DFW's style (quoted on conversationalreading, linked from this very thread):

The mix of registers here is typical of Wallace: intensifiers and qualifiers that ordinarily suggest sloppy writing and thinking (“unbelievably”; “really” used three times in the space of a dozen words; “something like that”) coexisting with the correct use of the subjunctive mood (“as though the driver were”). The precision of the subjunctive—which literate people bother with less and less, the simple past tense increasingly and diminishingly employed in its place—is never arbitrary, and its presence suggests that if attention is being paid to a matter of higher-order usage, similar intention lurks behind the clutter of qualifiers. For although one could edit them out of the passage above to the end of producing leaner prose—

I felt sorry for him. It was irrational, but I felt as though the driver were me. I wasn’t just sorry for him, I was sorry as him.

—the edit removes more than “flab”: it discards the furniture of real speech, which includes the routine repetitions and qualifications that cushion conversation. Wallace was seeking to write prose that had all the features of common speech.

that mix of precise and sloppy is key, i think.

sorry, 'the passage above' being this:

I felt unbelievably sorry for him and of course the Bad Thing very kindly filtered this sadness for me and made it a lot worse. It was weird and irrational but all of a sudden I felt really strongly as though the bus driver were really ”me“. I really felt that way. So I felt just like he must have felt, and it was awful. I wasn’t just sorry for him, I was sorry ”as“ him, or something like that.

pay attention to the way he diagrams everything out, makes the connections between things 100% obvious. it's very nabisco-like.

it's the other way around, imho.

― Mr. Que, Tuesday, June 29, 2010 12:00 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

well yeah I didn't want to accuse nabisco of anything haha

'"and but so", certain uses of technical language, perfect pitch descriptions of non-musical sounds, lots of little signature phrases'

-I've never noticed the "and but so" thing -- but it must be a thing! : http://www.andbutso-austin.com/
-The technical language comes from his math background, I guess, and there's lots of writers (usually med school dropouts?) who bring some arcana to their prose, or more often than not, fake it, so that doesn't strike me as a quirk peculiar to DFW (though maybe the combination of tennis and math metaphors?)
-"perfect pitch descriptions of non-musical sounds" strikes me as a necessary skill of anyone transposing non-verbal sensations into words.
-"lots of little signature phrases" -- the one thing I noticed and copied is a tendency to use abbreviations like w/r/t because this is really useful! so I feel its utility outweighs its origin -- like manute bol coining "my bad"

polysyllabism

the refusal to deal with (x) unless one has free rein to deal with (x.i), (x.ii) ... (x.x) as well

that last on the level of syntax as well as subject

yeah if i associate dfw's prose style with any one particular thing it's the effects -- emotional as well as formal/experimental -- that he can get with one of those sentences that winds in and out of three or four different kinds of diction, from high-academe philosopher to burnout. i think it's why, at least in inf jest and the later stories, he was able to do a lot of high-end experimenting without making me go "agh no," cuz each burst of jargon-ish complexity was cut (or enriched) by the "so anyway really"s and the swerves into just-this-close-to-sentiment stuff. i think of those pages during the don g. in hospital sequence where there's just reams of almost absurdly specific and very precise descriptions of medical equipment and hospital atmosphere and then he'll just drop some heartwrenching free-indirectish thing in don's brain voice (which is the precise opposite of "very precise") about the physical pain or his childhood or whatever.

various american speech tics incorporated into his prose, both in the essays where the 'i' is wallace and in third person indirect discourse (ick) in the stories. like handing a sentence a subject at the end of it (the sentence.) xpost

the tic i'd forgotten about (and could really do without) is one that really bugs me in that end section of IJ, the rendering of a lot of stuff that's coming via gately misspelled or spelled phonetically

-"perfect pitch descriptions of non-musical sounds" strikes me as a necessary skill of anyone transposing non-verbal sensations into words.

i meant literally saying "some unseen industrial equipment emitted a high b-flat whine" or something like that. it's a small tic but i've noticed other writers, who most definitely don't have perfect pitch, doing that and it seems just a touch bullshitty.

the tic i'd forgotten about (and could really do without) is one that really bugs me in that end section of IJ, the rendering of a lot of stuff that's coming via gately misspelled or spelled phonetically

does he do that anywhere other than IJ? it happens all over the book, as if the character were writing that segment, and it's the only thing that annoys me about it.

vuvuzelas b flat whine amirite xp

surely the "wardine" section is the rubicon for that particular tic, no?

(it also might be the worst thing he ever wrote and the only part i skip on re-reads even though i know it contains important info on future plot developments yadda yadda.)

xpost - i'm not sure, actually (if he does it anywhere else) - i mean, i think infinite jest is also the only place that he has non-educated narrators or central reflectors going on, you know?

it bugs me more in the last section where Don G only comes through indirectly: in the yrstruly bit the narration is so much closer to speech it doesn't seem so bad: though it still seems dumb, because it's not like Minty would write that way

it doesn't bother me much in the wardine section but that's mainly because i wasn't going to like that section much ever anyway (haha xpost again)

(it also might be the worst thing he ever wrote and the only part i skip on re-reads even though i know it contains important info on future plot developments yadda yadda.)

word, that was the only part that made me wonder if i should keep going, as in "really, dfw?"

rinse the lemonade (Jordan) wrote this on thread c/d: 'infinite jest' on board I Love Books on 05-Apr-2010

that was the only section in the whole book that made me go 'really, dfw?'

ANYTIME i think about writing "in dialect" in a story, i think of that second. and i am chastened.