new novels and why they suck and whatever

Bennigan's once boasted a fantastic beer selection imo. I even had a Copper Clover card.

I said Bennigan's instead of Applebee's because I haven't read The Kite Runner and therefore should be fair/neutral about it.

"my niggas, tonight we will be reading The Kite Runner"

(sorry)

^^ ha, I still always picture this accompanied by Kadeem Hardison's little dance in White Men Can't Jump, when he's like "we goin' Sizzler, we goin' Sizzler"

"My favorite novelist is Henry James but I sure don't expect other novelists to mimic him."

james was totally in outer space. he will blow your earthly mind.

motherless brooklyn totally turned me off from reading any more of lethem's books. blah.

James was a weird motherfucker.

btw James' novels -- especially the later ones -- bear no resemblance to any realistic fiction I know. They may as well be sci-fi.

shakey, you ever read any toby olson? you might dig him. try The Woman Who Escaped From Shame. such a strange book.

yeah, that's what i mean about james. i mean, some of his stuff is as far from realism as you can get.

it's true; i have been wondering whether Shakey would like James. not that that helps with the new novels problem.

Shakey, what was the last "realist" novel you read? Just curious about what repelled you.

I'll ignore the ongoing misrepresentations of my reading habits and opinions in favor of answering this actual earnest question. To be honest it's been awhile. Couldn't finish Aryundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" or Zadie Smith's "White Teeth". (I did not actually read "The Kite Runner", my father's gf gave me and my wife a copy insisting we read it. This was a couple years ago). I read a friend of mine's historical novel "The Obedient" which was great. Really enjoyed Soehnlein's "The World of Normal Boys". Some Russell Banks stuff (Rule of the Bone is great til he gets to Jamaica then it gets kinda stupid). Tons of Naguib Mahfouz and RK Narayan, but I'm not sure if classifying some of that stuff as a realist novel is accurate (Mahfouz in particular gets pretty heavily allegorical). Read a bunch of Jose Saramago but again the realism angle is debatable. I'm sure I'm forgetting tons of stuff, and I don't have my library in front of me.

fwiw I don't really appreciate being cast as an illiterate on this thread, it's fairly insulting.

the categorizations "realist" is not really holding up, is it?

fuck lethem. everyone should read olson's the blond box. if they dare!

Review
"Of all the writers of his postmod generation, Toby Olson is the most forgiving. Even when writing of the most mundane acts--performing in a backwoods porn show, for example, or inaugurating an outhouse--he grants all his characters the full wonder and mystery of their lives, and strokes language as a lover might the flesh of his beloved. The Blond Box, like the most memorable of his work, skirts borders--geographical, artistic, metaphysical--and explores the mysteries found there, especially the unfathomable mysteries of art. Toby Olson is one of America's most important novelists, and The Blond Box is perhaps his best book ever. A rich compelling read." --Robert Coover, author of The Adventures of Lucky Pierre
-- Review
Product Description
El Malabarista, pianist and juggler for a troupe of sexual performance artists, is found dead in the dusty wilderness, his fingers crushed. Beginning like a murder mystery, The Blond Box then defies all the usual expectations of a murder mystery plot, by juxtaposing "real" events in two different decades with a draft version of a hack sci-fi novella. This mixed narrative serves as a meta-fictional commentary on the efforts of a retired sex-theater artist, a hairstylist/pulp writer, a doctoral student, and a host of other characters to, not only solve the murder, but uncover its motivation, which seems to be linked to El Malabarista's knowledge of the whereabouts of a certain boxed treasure. By turns lyrical and scatological, puerile and cerebral, The Blond Box is at once a daring formal experiment and a good yarn.

Mian Mian's "Candy" was terrible (I think I may have already mentioned that one tho...?) Not sure where Rushdie falls on the scale, his stuff is kinda Dickensian-level ridiculous rather than realist but I was on board with him up until the Moor's Last Sigh. Tried to read some Philip Roth, hated it.

xp

i don't know what you mean by realist if Dickens isn't realist o_O

kinda Dickensian-level ridiculous

this is a good thing, right?

totally imo

huh thx scott sounds innarestin!

xp

or kobo abe. every school child should have abe on their reading list. one abe book beats most american half-ass pomo crap to a pulp.

fwiw I don't really appreciate being cast as an illiterate on this thread, it's fairly insulting.

― Master of the Manly Ballad (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, July 9, 2010 3:59 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

no one is casting you as an illiterate! i totally believe that you can read words

kinda Dickensian-level ridiculous

this is a good thing, right?

oh yeah, not knockin it at all. Midnight's Children, Shame, the Moor's Last Sigh - all great

scott seward you should have a literary recommendations newsletter!

I've read a fair bit of Abe - Woman in the Dunes, the Ruined Map. the one about the guy who lives with a box on his head was fun

"I said Bennigan's instead of Applebee's"

They're not interchangeable?

On the spicy food analogy - I might have missed some stuff upthread, but isn't the realist/anti-realist thing here more like someone in, say, the Britain of the 1960s trying to explain that i) they like Indian, Thai and Mexican food (I mean let's say they've travelled a bit) and think it can be as delicious as any recipe printed in Family Circle or a meal at any top London Restaurant and ii) they feel frustrated that when people talk about 'fine food' in newspapers, magazines, etc, they exclusively mean French haute cuisine and perhaps Italian cooking? I can imagine a range of weak responses to the proselytising - 'I don't really like that foreign muck', 'I don't like spicy food', 'It's interesting, but c'mon the European tradition is what matters', 'Yes, but European food is popular for a reason', 'I've tried a Findus curry, didn't like it' etc, etc; and there are serious responses - having tried a good version of the spicy cuisines and not being that interested, being open to the idea of trying it, etc etc. I get frustrated with the dominance of polite realism in English fiction, but I'm less het up about it nowadays because the old three way structure that cleaved to that sort of fiction - big booksellers/big publishers/broadsheets - is in trouble, plus the web has opened a lot of alternative space. But much of this has been said upthread, and better.

as an exercise, let's review the NY Times current best-seller fiction list:

1. SIZZLING SIXTEEN, by Janet Evanovich. (St.Martin’s, $27.99.) The bounty hunter Stephanie Plum comes to the aid of a cousin with gambling debts.

*yawn*

2 THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST, by Stieg Larsson. (Knopf, $27.95.) The third volume of a trilogy about a Swedish hacker and a journalist.

*more yawns*

3 THE OVERTON WINDOW, by Glenn Beck. (Threshold Editions/Mercury Radio Arts, $26.) A public relations executive and the woman he loves fight to expose a conspiracy to transform America.

okay this is probably pretty funny

4 FAMILY TIES, by Danielle Steel. (Delacorte, $28.) A woman who raised her deceased sister’s three children must juggle their needs, her business and the new man in her life.

um

5 THE LION, by Nelson DeMille. (Grand Central, $27.99.) John Corey, now a federal agent, pursues a Libyan terrorist who has returned to America bent on revenge.

spy shit. do not care.

6 THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett. (Amy Einhorn/Putnam, $24.95.) A young white woman and two black maids in 1960s ­Mississippi.

Let me guess, everyone learns important lessons about racism.

7 THE PASSAGE, by Justin Cronin. (Ballantine, $27.) More than a hundred years in the future, a small group resists the vampires who have taken over North America.

good god kill me now.

8 WHIPLASH, by Catherine Coulter. (Putnam, 26.95.) The F.B.I. agents Dillon Savich and Lacey Sherlock help investigate misdeeds at a pharmaceutical company.

more spy shit.

9 FRANKENSTEIN: LOST SOULS, by Dean Koontz. (Bantam, $27.) Book 4 in the reimagining of the classic tale.

why is this necessary.

10* DEAD IN THE FAMILY, by Charlaine Harris. (Ace, $25.95.) Sookie Stackhouse is exhausted in the aftermath of a Fae war.

I dunno what a fae war is..? dunno about this one.

11 LOWCOUNTRY SUMMER, by Dorothea Benton Frank. (William Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.99.) In this sequel to “Plantation,” a woman returns home after her mother’s death to encounter old secrets and lies.

family melodrama. no thank you.

12* THE SPY, by Clive Cussler and Justin Scott. (Putnam, $27.95.) In 1908, a detective investigates spies who are trying to keep America from developing dreadnought battleships.

No.

13 MISSION OF HONOR, by David Weber. (Baen, $27.) Honor Harrington defends the Star Kingdom of Manticore as it is besieged by many enemies.

sounds like a terrible sci-fi novel.

14 BROKEN, by Karin Slaughter. (Delacorte, $26.) There is friction between the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Grant County Police Department when Dr. Sara Linton calls in Special Agent Will Trent from Atlanta.

booooring.

15* 61 HOURS, by Lee Child. (Delacorte, $28.) Jack Reacher helps the police in a small South Dakota town protect a witness in a drug trial.

no

Complain about the poor tastes of the masses all you want, but this is what gets stocked on bookshelves at your average bookstore.

sooooo much realism on the ny times bestseller list

cant believe how much literary realism dominates that list

Weber's space opera books are actually great; the real problem is that there are too many of them and he started writing the same story over and over. If you only read two or three, it would be fine, but trying to read all of them is an endurance exercise I recommend to no one.

I dunno what a fae war is..? dunno about this one.

Sexy vampires

You're laughing at people choosing a Dean Koontz novel?

conversely, let's survey what's currently being reviewed in the NYT. None of this fiction interests me in the slightest, and I think most of them could be accurately categorized as realist novels to some degree.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/

Anthony Lane and Gore Vidal each have essays poking fun at the NYT list.

i feel like i am finally catching on to this game where stuff you dont like is "realism" and stuff you do like isnt "realism"

do you want a medal or something

honestly "realist" is kind of slippery here, in a way where i think you could endlessly argue that contemporary fiction is too "realist" for you, example by example. you seem to be using it kind of arbitrarily yourself, and even though i agree with scott and Alfred that Henry James novels could be considered experimental in form, he wrote about human consciousness, which counts as pretty realist to me.

xpost oh never mind, max covered it

currently on review at the nyt:

biography
thriller
biography
BOOK ABOUT A HALF-APE GIRL
non-fiction about anti-semitism
kidnapping book
**REALISM ALERT** book about relationships in new york

kinda bummed i read that possible true blood spoiler

nonfiction = realism duh

like how can you look at either the nyt bestseller list OR the nyt recently reviewd books and say "literary realism dominates the landscape"?? all the books are about spies or fairies or fucking half-ape teenagers

AND YES I WOULD LIKE A FUCKING MEDAL

biography
thriller
biography
BOOK ABOUT A HALF-APE GIRL
non-fiction about anti-semitism
kidnapping book
**REALISM ALERT** book about relationships in new york

way to include non-fiction dude. now who's being disingenuous. If you think the books about spies and fairies garner the same critical attention as, say, the book about the kidnap victim or the book about a young woman dating an older man, you are bonkers.

would categorize the thriller and the kidnap book as realism fwiw

also the book about Facebook, probably

for one thing, I do not want to read a book about fucking Facebook

so "realism" = takes place on Earth.

Shakey you're arguing so all over the place! do you want the books about spies and fairies to be accorded more critical attention? or do you despise the masses for liking them? i seriously am not sure what that nyt bestsellers post is doing on this thread.

it was just an exercise to lay out some concrete examples about what's out there, since people were giving me so much shit for apparently being ignorant of the market.