new novels and why they suck and whatever

what about Pale Fire?

for sure that's gotta be a major influence. difference is in 'pale fire' kinbote explicates shade's poem while in 'infinite jest' the commentary occurs on the whole diegetic milieu, as the narrative unravels, a la vance

"some unseen industrial equipment emitted a high b-flat whine" or something like that. it's a small tic but i've noticed other writers, who most definitely don't have perfect pitch, doing that and it seems just a touch bullshitty.

this complaint reminds me of certain sections of richard ford novels where frank bascombe talks about, like, the genus of field mouse that's scampering along the shoulder of whatever road he's driving on. it lends this rich texture to the writing and embeds you in the place and helps build the impression of a complex natural history of new jersey but at the same time i'm like frank, i know you, and you don't know your field mice that well

In Pale Fire the footnotes are used as they would be in a Norton Anthology -- the only place for another voice to interject. Whereas in DFW and Baker, they're often part of the same narrative voice, just made more discursive.

Yeah, there are distinctions. What he attempts in Human Smoke reminds me of what Martin Amis did in Experience.

are there canonical lists of what are thought to be the best books of the past decade or so? i need to read more.

ILX BOOKS OF THE 2000s

ILX BOOKS OF THE 00s: THE RESULTS! (or: Ismael compiles his reading list, 2010-2019)

I haven't read it in years, but didn't Tolkien use footnotes to flesh out the Lord Of The Rings? Or was it just appendices?

appendices

Yes, Return of the King appendices. As a child I was dreadfully disappointed, but it beats the slo-mo rubbish of the films. Alexander Pope's Dunciad full of early footnote fun.

I don't know how I've missed David Mitchell in recent years. Here's James Wood's review of his latest.

i just read 'ghostwritten' yesterday! there's this bit where an 18-year-old kid describes the sound of various jazz records that was so beautiful I had to stop reading for a while.

I've only read Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green, but they're both great.

Mitchell is excellent. Just got his new book yesterday, excited to start it.

read this kinda lol response to wood's review the other day

http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2010/06/james-wood-vulgarian.html

interesting link abt his treatment of Bolano @ "domesticator"

so, this exists: http://contrajameswood.blogspot.com/

Someone emailed that link a few months ago to me. That blogger has nothing better to do.

I mean, is Wood so terrible that he constitutes a public menace?

God so tired of talking about James Wood, no offense but his relevance to making literature better is like zero. Anyone wanting to find the new ambitious funky massive 2010-style novel need look no further than I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita, which I took a chance on and is rewarding me tenfold. She traces ten years of Asian American life in San Francisco, uses 20 diff. narrative strategies, vital, alive, funny, serious, etc.

Obv. no one bitching about James Wood is doing anything important either.

Well, he's important to me. The Broken Estate is one of my favorite volumes of criticism. Fantastic essays on Mann, Lawrence's travel writing, Chekhov, Flaubert.

i do not really 'get' that whoisoz piece on james wood - though i am glad someone else thought the 'more nabokov than eco' thing about mitchell was weird, because that so does not make sense - but this

This whole shtick about Cervantes inventing postmdernism a billion years ago and therefore ergo propter hoc et veritas logo scientia prestochangeo sim sim saladin we can transmogrify all fiction into an undifferentiated whole from which we can extract moderate lessons about the human heart in conflict with itself the mild human soul in gentle colloquy with itself is really worn.

is hilolrious

ioz is funny but i bet hes annoying to hang out with after a while

oh man, for some reason i thought that new david mitchell book wasn't out until next month. just read this decent wyatt mason profile: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/magazine/27mitchell-t.html

Difficulty sets a high price upon achievement; and the artist may easily fall into the error of the French naturalists, and consider any fact as welcome to admission if it be the ground of brilliant handiwork; or, again, into the error of the modern landscape-painter, who is apt to think that difficulty overcome and science well displayed can take the place of what is, after all, the one excuse and breath of art - charm. A little further, and he will regard charm in the light of an unworthy sacrifice to prettiness, and the omission of a tedious passage as an infidelity to art.

We have now the matter of this difference before us. The idealist, his eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines, loves rather to fill up the interval with detail of the conventional order, briefly touched, soberly suppressed in tone, courting neglect. But the realist, with a fine intemperance, will not suffer the presence of anything so dead as a convention; he shall have all fiery, all hot-pressed from nature, all charactered and notable, seizing the eye. The style that befits either of these extremes, once chosen, brings with it its necessary disabilities and dangers. The immediate danger of the realist is to sacrifice the beauty and significance of the whole to local dexterity, or, in the insane pursuit of completion, to immolate his readers under facts; but he comes in the last resort, and as his energy declines, to discard all design, abjure all choice, and, with scientific thoroughness, steadily to communicate matter which is not worth learning.

http://cutewriting.blogspot.com/2008/08/note-on-realism-by-robert-louis.html

God so tired of talking about James Wood, no offense but his relevance to making literature better is like zero. Anyone wanting to find the new ambitious funky massive 2010-style novel need look no further than I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita, which I took a chance on and is rewarding me tenfold. She traces ten years of Asian American life in San Francisco, uses 20 diff. narrative strategies, vital, alive, funny, serious, etc.

― T Bone Streep (Cave17Matt), Wednesday, June 30, 2010 1:36 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

plz to tell me more

yeah, I'm curious as well

I once blogged something about Wood and "How Fiction Works," and whoever runs that contrajameswood blog asked me if he could reprint it over there

if I remember correctly I was like "why don't you just link it?" and then I never heard back?

Not sure what more to say about I Hotel -- so far it has painted some indelible atypical Chinese characters (and shockingly gets rid of one of them) in kind of a post-modernist Dos Passos sort of way. Next chapter focuses on Japanese story, Pilipinos come later, not sure. But damn does it bring San Francisco '68 to life, so far -- nine more years to go.

Reading The Ask by the pool is A+++++++

Oh wait wrong thread.

Ha -- no it isn't!

I finished The Ask last Thursday: fun, especially any scenes between the protagonist and Don the Gulf War vet.

Is "Infinite Jest" the only work of fiction anyone can think of that requires two bookmarks?

Danielewski's "Only Revolutions", I suppose. It's sort of like an Ace paperback where you can turn the back upside down and backwards and read one story each direction.
I believe the trick is that it tells two related stories, which finally meet in the middle, with a lot of references back and forth between pages x and n-x.

Keep reading James Wood as James Woods, who is more offensive.

also, even though there are other threads about him, should state again that Paul Auster's early works are pretty great. Has anyone bothered with Invisible? The reviews seem to claim it is the best thing he's ever written. But I think they say that about all of his novels, and I've just hated the last four or five.

Is "Infinite Jest" the only work of fiction anyone can think of that requires two bookmarks?

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, July 4, 2010 9:51 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

pale fire!

Invisible is great, and I also disliked his last few before it.

lol http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/07/gary_shteyngart_james_franco.html

I am in the middle of Housekeeping and it is tremendous

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.

the more I think about it, the more I think this is the most OTM thing in this thread. modern realist novels, I hate them - but it seems largely taken for granted in the publishing industry that that is what "serious" fiction is made of.

modern realist novels, I hate them

lol

I think "most people" want to read "modern realist novels" though? Which is why that form/genre is so dominant?

yeah well most people are idiots

(sorry I'm grumpy today)

Because realism is the easiest form of art to identify with. Because people enjoy reading stories about people more or less like themselves.

(and there's nothing wrong with that)

(xposts) I'm happy with what you've quoted there Shakey, I think, but the more I thought about it, the less happy I was with how I said it, but I didn't want to draw attention to the fact by hedging and putting caveats all over the place. Or at least I'm happy with what I was gesturing towards, but...

Well, for a start, I really don't hate character (anyone who's read a book without any sense how to draw character will know how dull they are). I guess that was shorthand for books devoted to investigations of a certain type of character (how the educated middle classes see themselves and those around them?), again, caveats and handwaving, I think this is dull and (if importance is important, which is moot) is also unimportant (and probably self-important).

I'm not sure a person who isn't particularly interested in strongly character based novels necessarily hates humans tho (an accusation I saw above) - I quite like relatively flat characters put in unusual situations for instance, because it's exciting and exercises the imagination about what a human is far more, imo, than 500pp of involved agonising.

Also, I don't hate the 19th century novel (19th century novel as English Lit construct here - anyone who's looked through a bibliography of Victorian literature will know there was an awful awful lot of novels published, most of them forgotten by everybody I'd imagine, probably most of them really quite dull by any standards, even those of the time, and probably a handful of really weirdly bad, or perhaps even weirdly good, but hey, I ain't goin to search through them). I don't think we should be re-writing the 19th century novel now, unless it's an appropriation of genre for a reason.

Finally (god how boring this can be) I certainly didn't want to suggest a) I think this is all that is being published, although I do think the lack of money in the frontline publishing industry means a loss of abundance in Britain certainly. Nor did I want to suggest b) all mainstream lit pages do is review modern versions of the 19th century novel. There's probably vareity there, but when I see the sort of things they champion, and go on about quite a lot of the time, my eyes glaze over, and I don't really trust anything they write, and so I'd rather go elsewhere, somewhere less entrenched in the world of the people being reviewed.

Finally all that is irrelevant if something is good, but, you know, that's a whole other can of worms, and we're kind of back at the beginning.

I guess I was pleading for a demotion of serious literary fiction as a selling concept (the airport novel for the self-regarding if you like) not its abolition, just a bit of equivalence, for the lit press to open its doors a little, no, a lot to stuff that it doesn't already have a long tradition of reviewing, fewer reviews of a literary group, by a literary group for a literary group.

quite honestly I have been super happy for pretty much my entire life reading pulpy genre-bound science fiction and fantasy and the idea of reading most "literary" novels makes me want to scream

This reminds me of an artist who was up for the Tate prize a few years ago, Glenn Brown, who painted huge canvases of spaceships mostly cribbed from sci-fi novel covers. Ignoring the whole plagiarism angle, I think one of his points was why should 'good' painting be all about portraits and figures and human landscapes? Perhaps the stories suggested by his paintings could be just as moving and important. I'm a sci-fi lover myself but thought that was mostly bullshit because most people just don't give a fuck about giant spaceships or the stories behind them, and why should they?

cuz they're cool