new novels and why they suck and whatever

^^^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.