new novels and why they suck and whatever

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)