new novels and why they suck and whatever

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.