new novels and why they suck and whatever

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.

Liked FINANCIAL LIVES OF THE POETS a lot. I guess one could knock it for lightness. But it is well-constructed.

^yeah that book was not bad. some good scenes & lols

just want to say i've never heard of like 80% of these books but i love this thread! i want it to keep going.

i've become a huuuuge offender in the "comfort books" category.. between biographies and scandinavian crime fiction i pretty much don't read anything else at all.

i remember reading some george pelecanos quote (or somebody like him) where he said he couldn't imagine writing a literary novel, he always needed a murder or a mystery to solve "otherwise it's just people standing around in rooms, feeling things". this is incredibly stupid, obviously, but i wonder if this sentiment points to something. that it's become harder to tell stories somehow, or harder to tell stories outside of a few kinds of understood categories. maybe it's always been hard to tell stories outside of a few understood categories. there's a great book by oliver wendell holmes called "the poet at the breakfast table" - http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2666 - which details the mundane activities of a group of lodgers who all stay at the same boarding house. this kind of set-up is unavailable to fiction writers today. there are so many kinds of understood environments that formed the backdrop to the explosion of the modern novel - big country houses, for instance, or boarding houses (cf "old goriot") - that just don't exist any more even for people writing plain old "realist" literary fiction. i have a feeling this is all old news for people who think seriously about books, so sorry if i'm being obvious.

i did read that victor pelevin book about theseus but i couldn't finish it. it really was terrible. everyone had the same "voice" despite them all supposedly being different.

I've always thought the workplace is underused in fiction (in fact genre fiction is often streets ahead in this area). Groups of disparate types, thrown together, and also, if the writer's got a good eye, will necessarily have lots of contemporary details and opportunities that more conventional novel types don't offer.

All that said, and not wishing to restart an old argument on which I have made my stance reasonably plain, I'm certainly with Pelecanos on this one. To take a slightly different angle on it, I think genre novels, by not needing to have 'feelings' as the central focus, give a lot more latitude to exploring how people respond to imaginative situations. In fact, the feelings that a lot of 'standing around in rooms' novels, seem to change very little, that they're actually quite conservative in the emotional sets they deal in. In a slightly more wild development of that (tho genuinely not intended as trolling - I realise it's a bit bats), I tend to see that conservatism in emotional content as like a detective story writer not being arsed to include, say, mobile phones in his or her plotmaking. Christ, got to get back to work, but yeah, the workplace. More of it imo.

tracer i'm not entirely sure what you mean: do you think there are LESS potential social situations to describe c 2010 than there were circa 1810 or 1860 or 1910? or do you mean that 'the realist novel' is adapted to country houses and such and thus couldn't manage, say, a hostel?

franzen's on the cover of 'time'
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2010000,00.html

i did read that victor pelevin book about theseus but i couldn't finish it. it really was terrible.

I told you not to read it!

i just re-read this thread and i srsly have no idea what its abt including the things i say in it

thomp i mean that in the time when realist novels were really getting their legs under them, circumstances forced people to live amongst each other more, either as part of a large family (either in a tenement or a country house) or as a lodger somewhere. (the solitary dude with only a housekeeper to talk to was strange enough to merit interest.) i think these situations were a boon for setting scenarios and creating drama and having entertaining dialogue. this may all be very facile, i don't know.

another new novel that doesn't suck

http://quarterlyconversation.com/february-forever-light-boxes-by-shane-jones

didnt want to read too far into the article to avoid spoilers, but that book looks awesome

it's not really the kind of book that has "spoilers." but yeah, it's very cool.

but that book looks awesome

srsly! thanks q

added to amazon wish list

When I was heavily into poetry, I tended to be interested in (or at least say I was interested in) novels with an emphasis on surface linguistic properties. Now that I am both very uninterested in poetry and a little more drawn to fiction than has generally been true in my life,I definitely am not looking for anything close to prose poetry when I look for a novel to read. I'm not sure exactly what my shift toward fiction is related to, but I think it's because my life feels more like a narrative. As mentioned before, a couple years back I quit my job and relocated to an unfamiliar city (not on a whim or anything) without having work lined up in advance. I think that sense of truly not knowing what was going to happen next and how things were going to turn out made me more receptive to fiction. This may be a little tangential to the thread, but then, it's all over the place and the OP did recently say:

[quote]i just re-read this thread and i srsly have no idea what its abt including the things i say in it[/quote]

Why do you have to make the code so simple?

Battling between my hatred for the author photo of LIGHT BOXES and the fact that the book actually does sound pretty interesting