new novels and why they suck and whatever

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

landscapes vs. spaceships

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

That too.

'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'

They've kind of converged though, right? If you pick at random a page from a Bolano and a Warhammer novel, someone uninitiated might have a hard time picking out which was the "literary" one.

Also, is realism as much a constraint today as it was say a few decades ago? Would Gibson need to set Neuromancer in a fantastic setting if he wrote it today?

If you pick at random a page from a Bolano and a Warhammer novel, someone uninitiated might have a hard time picking out which was the "literary" one.

really now

thread keeps giving

Would Gibson need to set Neuromancer in a fantastic setting if he wrote it today?

speaks more to the failings of the imaginations of modern sci-fi writers than anything else (Gibson himself has already conceded the fact, no longer feels writing about the future is "necessary" etc. But he's been shit for like 25 years now anyway so who cares)

We don't have a Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction thread, do we? Would people be interested in that? I would. If anyone else would too, I'll start one on ILB.

I think Gibson's gotten better at writing, but his novels have gotten worse, if that makes any sense. But if it's a collective failure of imagination, that failure stretches back pretty far then -- which great genre works cannot be re-written as realist novels today?

not that I think accurate prognostication is what makes sci-fi interesting (it isn't), and it's a given and well-worn truism that all science fiction is actually about the present anyway - but to me one of the most enduringly fascinating things about science fiction is this creation of other worlds, whether they're in the future or on other planets or other dimensions or whatever. These "what if?" scenarios that are fired by speculation and imagination seem so much more engaging to me, they encourage the reader to shift perspectives and see things, real world things, in a new light. Sci-fi writers like Lethem or Gibson essentially abandoning this tool altogether in favor of realism just seems like a weak capitulation. Their books suffer for it.

xp

Boom: Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

I used to love that Ben Marcus book pictured up above when I was in college, and I recently tried to re-read it and decided it was bullshit

I'd agree that Lethem suffers for it, in that he's more adept at pure invention in the fantasy realm, versus say, places he happened to have lived in, but Gibson's schtick was always more pastiche, when the source realism could be rendered in just as perspective-shifting and exotic a fashion as necessary.

But even Lethem with some effort could translate a lot of his genre stuff no-problem. The fact that some characters are kangaroos in Gun With Occasional Music isn't particularly crucial. Michael Jordan shoes could be reformulated as a story about Moneyball-type statistics-based changes affecting basketball. Amnesia Moon could be morphed into a more Oliver Sacksian story.

There might be some stories that are just pure philosophical thought experiments that have no easy analog in realism, but even then, I feel a writer with enough will and skill could make it happen.

I disagree that Gibson's fiction has gotten worse. Pattern Recognition is one of his best novels. None of his books hold up very well plotwise and never have; all of them have been pretty contrived. It was one of the lesser contrived ones. But I do think the Difference Engine was his most interesting book. No idea how much of it he wrote.

Someone give me a compelling writing prompt and I'll go and save literature

there once was a message board,

Pride and Prejudice and Bearotaurs?

Someone give me a compelling writing prompt and I'll go and save literature

Provincial academic sees a cat being run over which prompts a sudden realisation that his life is empty, that results in him staying exactly where he is and gradually watching his life is unravelled, that's before a mysterious stranger turns up on his door with an unusual proposition...

Then aliens land in massive shiny spaceships and blast them all to shit.

not that I think accurate prognostication is what makes sci-fi interesting (it isn't), and it's a given and well-worn truism that all science fiction is actually about the present anyway - but to me one of the most enduringly fascinating things about science fiction is this creation of other worlds, whether they're in the future or on other planets or other dimensions or whatever. These "what if?" scenarios that are fired by speculation and imagination seem so much more engaging to me, they encourage the reader to shift perspectives and see things, real world things, in a new light. Sci-fi writers like Lethem or Gibson essentially abandoning this tool altogether in favor of realism just seems like a weak capitulation. Their books suffer for it.

xp

― Master of the Manly Ballad (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, July 9, 2010 1:26 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is just nuts to me, assuming im reading you right

Anyway, Bolano Warhammer isn't enough inspiration for you? xpost

These "what if?" scenarios that are fired by speculation and imagination seem so much more engaging to me, they encourage the reader to shift perspectives and see things, real world things, in a new light.

this is what all books do, or are supposed to do, and if woolf or carver or... whoever were trashing here arent doing that to you im inclined to think its your fault

but i also have a pet peeve with people who are demanding toward their books/music/art i.e. "why isnt this thing doing what i want it to do"