new novels and why they suck and whatever

ATTN: SHAKEY MO COLLIER

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/08/in-search-of-historys-most-innovative-fiction-colin-marshall-talks-to-historian-of-the-novel-steven-.html

^^ You may be interested in this guy, Steven Moore, who is assembling an "alternate history" of the novel, tracing the parts that fit outside whatever standard "modern novel" format we've been talking about here. Plus attempting to "defend" modern experimental/non-standard literature against whoever is allegedly attacking it. (I don't know who's attacking it, besides that one Franzen article, but defense is pretty great anyway.) He's only up through 1600, though.

There are a few things in the interview above that strike me as either total headscratchers or possibly even dumb, but I like the project. His take in this interview feels sort of like the one Barth had toward the end of the 70s, which sounded right to me back when I was grumpy about the "modern novel" -- basically the history of long written works has/had contained loads of things that looked nothing like the narrow format of the "modern novel." (I think the problem with projecting that onto modern "experimental fiction," though, is that I'm not sure how much today's experimental fiction looks like the long wide history of writing, either; a lot of it feels more trapped in a specific environment than more conventional novels.)

Like, just for one example of something that makes me scratch my head:

The avant-garde novel that Joyce allegedly invented has always been a property. There's crazy, avant-garde, weird, experimental novels going back almost to the very beginning.

1. Do people really disagree with this? Are there people who genuinely assert that Joyce/modernism invented the avant-garde novel? Isn't it really commonplace for people to point out, at the very least, how Cervantes or the Tale of Genji or Sterne already did every clever modern/postmodern thing you could dream of? I don't get who's being corrected on this front.

2. Maybe this is the reason he says "almost," but isn't it a given that the very first items in a new form will be crazy, avant-garde, weird, and experimental? They can't help it; there are no existing conventions to compare against, so the statement is sort of trivial. On some level you could say this means that the novelistic conventions that followed were the inventive/experimental ones.

hee, i linked that a while ago, it looks rad

also Shakey this book seems like it would have a lot of good things to read (though not new stuff at all)

http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=9390

― Mr. Que, Friday, July 9, 2010 10:45 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hmmm, link appears to be down, but yeah i want to read the book

Do people really disagree with this?

only stupid people

or people who are being slightly reductionist to make a point. i think the larger point Moore is trying to make is that avant garde novels (besides the obvious Ulysses, Tristram Shandy, Moby-Dick) don't get half the attention that mainstream, run of the mill novels do.

I'm not sure that's his point -- novel for novel, it would be demonstrably untrue, and he says so later in the interview, when explaining things like Franzen being against the experimental/avant-garde:

There's an unstated resentment: these books get the critical attention, these are the books people write dissertations about.

That's critical/highbrow attention, yes, but for a while now there's been no real ongoing pool of "attention" for novels beyond that -- there are always more conventional/mainstream novels than super-inventive ones, but that was every bit as true the day they published Ulysses as it is now, and the culture doesn't tend to remember the conventional things "everyone" was reading. (Or not all of them, anyway: we on this thread could probably name the authors in the critical history of novels from 1950-now, but would have a harder time naming the literary authors that were on "everyone's" bookshelves, you know?)

interesting article (still getting through it). While I'm largely sympathetic to this dude's goals, can't say I agree with this:

I'm not really into the plot. For conventional fiction, when you read a novel, the first thing someone asks is, "Oh, what's it about?" I really don't care what a book is about. I'm interested more in the artistry. What's the language like? What technical devices are going on? I compare this to ballet and opera. When you go see and opera or ballet based on Romeo and Juliet, you're not going for the story. You already know the story. You're going for the artistic performance: the dancers' abilities, the singers' abilities. When I read a novel, that's pretty much what I'm going for: metaphoric language, imagery, interesting structural devices, humor. That's something I appreciate in a novel; that's why I use it myself. I'm going for the artistry, not for the story.

I DO care what books are about, priveleging form over content in this rather literal/heavyhanded way seems strange to me, don't think many readers would agree with him either.

I'm not sure that's his point -- novel for novel, it would be demonstrably untrue, and he says so later in the interview, when explaining things like Franzen being against the experimental/avant-garde:

It is exactly his point, right here:

Yeah, that's the whole thing! Only a handful of us like that stuff.

That's critical/highbrow attention, yes, but for a while now there's been no real ongoing pool of "attention" for novels beyond that -- there are always more conventional/mainstream novels than super-inventive ones, but that was every bit as true the day they published Ulysses as it is now, and the culture doesn't tend to remember the conventional things "everyone" was reading.

??? The part in bold seems to be wrong to me--there's a huge amount of attention for novels. Oprah's Book Club for example. Are you saying that people don't read novels at all, or don't read avant garde stuff?

Also, I kind of disagree with you Shakey. Sometimes I read for plot, but sometimes I read for language and other stuff. Like, I read Moby-Dick because of the artistry involved, not because it's a book about a dude chasing a whale.

hey so i read a victor pelevin's 'the sacred book of the werewolf' this weekend and i did NOT feel it, really at all--or i should say, it was pretty engaging and a quick read but all of the philosophizing and koans and theologizing in it were just majorly barfy. anyway my question is, to shakey, or whoever is a pelevin fan: should i try again, or is it all basically like sacred book of the werewolf?

the zen theologizing is the common thread through all his books. otherwise they're all pretty different.

Also, I kind of disagree with you Shakey. Sometimes I read for plot, but sometimes I read for language and other stuff. Like, I read Moby-Dick because of the artistry involved, not because it's a book about a dude chasing a whale.

right, I guess I was more disagreeing with him because he makes it sound like it's an either/or issue, and it isn't really.

barf, i wanted to take a shower after the last 30 pages. i was kind of bummed too because it started out really fun and i like i said it was a super engaging read.

are you just allergic to zen buddhism or something

no it just felt sloppy. i dont really like it when an authors personal philosophy/theology bleeds out into the text in that obvious way.

thats my own hangup obv

how would you feel about replacing the last 30 pages with some sexy descriptions of horses

sounds like something that would drive me batty as well

xpost: lol

i think the sexy descriptions of foxes and wolves were enough tbh

it's not my favorite of his, and it's definitely more sexual (and perhaps sillier?) than his other novels. but I still really enjoyed it, I never really had a sense of where it was going/what was going to happen, and that's something I always appreciate. It was significantly better than the last thing I read of his, which I would also consider his worst, the Helmet of Horror (which is written as a - wait for it - chatroom dialogue transcription. about a bunch of people trapped in maze waiting for a monster to kill them)

I like the budget-conscious efficiency of that idea!

i appreciated having a REACTION to it which is more than i can say about a lot of books ive read this year

Maybe it is the sort of thing that doesn't translate well to pure text but I've enjoyed pretty much every movie/TV version of that idea (characters in search of an exit, qube) What about it is particularly terrible?

honestly I think the chatroom conceit does it a disservice. It's an attempt to re-envision the Theseus/Minotaur myth - with the chatroom participants/mazedwellers as a kind of collective Theseus attempting to uncover the identity and motives of the minotaur (which is described as a giant, helmeted figure), but the chatroom people are predictable archetypes - a male troll, a flighty female, a couple of practically-minded nerds, etc. - and the resolution is a cheap "we have met the monster and he is US! And now... the game begins AGAIN" denouement. I think there are also some buddhism tangents about the nature of identity. I just got bored with it.

FYI, in case you don't look on ILB.

Book Group: They're reading Helen DeWitt's "The Last Samurai" (nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie!) over at Conversational Reading - Maybe we should do the same here?

Max -- I haven't read that one (partly because of exactly that and partly because of a bad experience with Amon Ra), but I will still rep for the New Directions Four by Pelevin volume.

Que, I think the question here is "what kind of attention" and "over what time frame?" Sure, popular novels (which tend to be conventional/naturalistic/etc.), as a group, get more attention in their given moment, but this does not stop stuff only a handful of people are into from being remembered longer and paid more attention. People in this thread have probably read more Gass, Gaddis, Coover, or Barth than a lot of the "mainstream" 60s novelists that were on more people's bookshelves. We could name Infinite Jest, not exactly an "average reader" book, faster than we could name any other literary-fiction title of 1996, even though most of the others were probably better-read. And I think this is the kind of "resentment" Moore's talking about with someone like Franzen -- that our "canon" leans, well, toward a canon, sometimes toward the academic (allegedly), and Franzen seemed annoyed by the sense that lots of writers aimed toward that private book-people canon, instead of being ambitious about writing meaningfully popular/populist things. (I don't agree with that Franzen essay, but I think that's the frustration.)

Anyway. Oprah's Book Club hasn't done new books in many years, right? What I mean by that bit you bolded is that the critical-attention/canon stuff has a whole apparatus that makes it get discussed and remembered, mentioned in highbrow articles, taught in schools -- but the same doesn't exist nearly as much for popular novels. That's not new: we remember modernists better than people who really sold books at the time, and lot of the writers who seemed like the biggest literary things ever in the 50s and 60s are just sort of half-recognized names now. That's all I really mean by that -- that certain popular things just keep coming and going, while it's often a kind of lit niche where something gets stamped as Legendary and Important. (As I remember the Franzen essay, it seemed almost like a failed attempt at Poptimism with regard to this dynamic?)

OOPS, sorry, bad editing: I don't mean to say MOST other lit-fic was better read than IJ. That's just flat untrue. Just that some of it would have been. (And all of it would have been outsold by Primary Colors and How Stella Got Her Groove Back.)

partly because of a bad experience with Amon Ra

this sounds like you took some bad acid or something. as a satire of the Russian space program, I thought it was awesome. I'm predisposed to the subject matter though. Reminded me of a bleaker, more Kafka-esque Stanislaw Lem.

I'm flipping through the helmet book on google previews and it is pretty hilarious! I'll grant you it's a totally frivolous exercise but was there an expectation of anything different, given the premise?

it seems beneath him is all. also it was tiresome to actually read

reading that interview now...

some modern critics want to narrow that down to: a novel has to be realistic, it has to have a certain amount of psychological depth, it has to be set against a recognizable social or economic background, et cetera, et cetera.

who are these critics?

everything this Steven Moore is saying seems entirely uncontroversial to me

There's writers today like Mark Danielewski and Carole Maso, people like that. I've always liked that unconventional fiction.

mark danielewski sucks

Shortly after Bush stole the 2000 election, I started noticing more and more criticism of the oddball fiction I like. a conservative backlash. I got to be quite angry.

i am really skeptical of this aesthetically reactionary=politically reactionary line of thinking

oh okay i guess "some critics"=jonathan franzen? i thought he meant, like, academic historians of the novel and none of what he was saying made any sense to me

Shortly after Bush stole the 2000 election, I started noticing more and more criticism of the oddball fiction I like. a conservative backlash. I got to be quite angry.

This is utter twaddle.

I'm not really into the plot. For conventional fiction, when you read a novel, the first thing someone asks is, "Oh, what's it about?" I really don't care what a book is about. I'm interested more in the artistry.

argh i'm sorry i'm being such an asshole, but rolling my damn eyes

twaddle is such a great word.

I really don't care what a book is about. I'm interested more in the artistry.

in a lot of ways this means the only books he cares about are books about being a book

everything this Steven Moore is saying seems entirely uncontroversial to me

haha, thank you, horseshoe for going through it line by line. a lot of that interview is like: "I agree! But who doesn't?" I don't know if he's weird or if he's tapped into some part of the lit world I'm not up on, where this stuff is clearer.

I guess he can rest easy knowing that throughout my entire education in English and fiction, most of these points where made at least once a week. I was even assigned that not-so-great Danielewski book in grad school!

i don't really think that's true, tbf; i was rolling my eyes because it's such a college dorm room thing to say.

xp to shakey

i had to stop going through it line by line. i mean, it sounds like a cool project and he seems like a passionate dude, but i don't really get his beleaguered one man against the world stance.

I was even assigned that not-so-great Danielewski book in grad school!

lol, wow

reading Scorch Atlas, about halfway through. the never-ending nihilism is starting to get a little wearing

yah but it doesn't suck, right?

no, I don't think it sucks. it's not great, but it's trying to do something interesting, and certainly the voice is unique, if a little repetitive (so much mold and rotting and sagging etc)

cool dude

was it you that recommended it...? thought it was ref'd on this thread but I can't find the post

yup.