new novels and why they suck and whatever

^^^mindblowing post

i didn't wanna suggest that smith 'agrees' with shakey's position - more like "hey u guys, here is a thing which is a pretty nuanced and smart take on the whole thing we're arguing both sides of"

lol Que btw you're coming at this as a practitioner of the form, right? i think i probably agree with you about many things; i just have a different outlook because for (too) many years i was training to be a critic of the form and a historian of it to some degree.

she even overstates the case just like we are doing!!

Yes, & I think Remainder came up in this thread a couple of times from the anti-polite-formal-midlist-nineteenth-century-bourgeois realism end (but Remainder not exactly formally innovative).

lol Que btw you're coming at this as a practitioner of the form, right? i think i probably agree with you about many things; i just have a different outlook because for (too) many years i was training to be a critic of the form and a historian of it to some degree.

yeah this is almost a conversation i prefer to have over a drink, b/c you and i are probably closer than we think. but yeah.

now that's it's clearer to me that this opposition lines up with that Smith article that i actually read and understood, i feel much more confident dismissing the opposition entirely. to write that article she came up with a total strawman polite realism, which she actually called lyrical realism, iirc, which is a phrase she invented afaict, and the reason you know it's a strawman is that she used FLAUBERT as her example of it which is hilarious and insane.

largely because Zadie describes it correctly and does not use it to jump to the conclusion that modern literature is garbage

*sigh* come on dude yr better than this

that would be awesome, Que; one of these days!

I mean I've called specific authors/books garbage, I've disparaged a particular style/form that I've tried to provide examples of and discuss in more general terms but I haven't said ALL MODERN LITERATURE IS GARBAGE

i think it is true that post-coover/barth/barthelme many self-consciously "literary" writers(<---cringing at the way i put that, but not sure how to do it better) purposely moved away from those kinds of experiments with form. which is what happens, right, anxiety of infulence-wise?

Couldn't we just as easily say they didn't move away from Updike/Bellow/Roth? Why weren't writers driven from that more realist style by anxiety of influence?

you kind of did! i mean this thread has this title for a reason.

xpost yeah, woof, i was thinking of roth when i typed that. i don't know. barthelme and coover were younger and hipper than those dudes, right? lol i'm talking about coover like he's dead. this ultimately become all about which lying and selective history of the novel you want to tell.

oh come on the thread title is a joke (and I didn't even write it!)

also Shakey this book seems like it would have a lot of good things to read (though not new stuff at all)

http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=9390

I didn't! Find a post where I said this. This is the kind of thing that makes me sad on threads - misrepresent something enough and eventually it becomes accepted as the reality

um x-post

felt like this for years tbh. modern fiction blows. except for Victor Pelevin.

― insert your favorite discriminatory practice here (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, June 25, 2010 12:06 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

xpost -- haha well, Shakey, you have described modern literature as primarily composed of a type of book you later and separately described as boring/garbage, with the remainder being small-press stuff generally beneath notice ---- no but seriously, I'm not gunning at you here, but if you're gonna make broad comments about literature you're gonna have to let us make some broad comments about your broad point, you know?

I just mean there is a huge difference between correctly describing a kind of fiction that indeed forms a mainstream (especially in the UK), fairly acknowledging the value of that style, and yet sort of wishing people forward from it -- versus a more dismissive stance that denies any value to huge swathes of undifferentiated literature that the speaker might not really be engaged with in the first place.

(Also I think Zadie is sort of a head-down Good Student type who therefore has a things-I-don't-do admiration for formal advancements -- for the record this is a quality I love about her and even her Good Student fiction)

so, fine, more like: ALL MODERN LITERATURE (except Victor Pelevin) IS GARBAGE

― Master of the Manly Ballad (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, July 9, 2010 6:41 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hahaha

(Also I think Zadie is sort of a head-down Good Student type who therefore has a things-I-don't-do admiration for formal advancements -- for the record this is a quality I love about her and even her Good Student fiction)

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Friday, July 9, 2010 6:48 PM (13 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is true, but i find this tendency in her self-hating and suspect she could write circles around many of the dudes (there, i said it) she identifies as formally inventive.

so this is kind of sidetracky but er in re. What American Fiction Did Next --

i think claiming that later generations cleaved from barth/b.elme/coover or cleaved to roth/bellow/updike is pretty reductive --

i. 'dirty realism' (or w/e) happened
ii. barthelme is a latent presence in everyone writing short stories in the past 20 years that isn't in (i)
iii. i think the only ppl who are writing REALLY like roth and updike are roth and updike
iv. only one of barth's books is really about 'experimenting with form'; the others are more ironic-revisitation-of-older-form (i think)
v. howabout 'the intuitionist' or 'the white boy shuffle' or something; which of these lines is that more along?
vi. eh

(xposts)

Horseshoe, yeah, had second thoughts when I wondered if they weren't a generation down, but they're actually the same age as Updike and Roth at least - but Roth has at least a foot in that formal experiment camp (ugh sounds like SS exploitation movie) too I guess. Lol things are complicated when you look closely, we should stick to shouting generalisations across party lines.

she came up with a total strawman polite realism, which she actually called lyrical realism,

Hey polite realism is my strawman dammit and and it's completely different from that 2nd-rater's lyrical realism.

lol okay words, eaten

xp

yeah it's fun to pick on Shakey but i would like to point out that he liked my linked book a lot, and that list of boring mid list stuff. . . not so much!

i mean i think i at least "get" what he's trying to "say"

okay, self-hating was too strong a word, i'm not her shrink, but that was one of many things that drove me crazy about that article.

this is true, but i find this tendency in her self-hating and suspect she could write circles around many of the dudes (there, i said it) she identifies as formally inventive.

totally

to be fair, i pulled that Shakey quote from the M.I.A. thread. i'm sure he's going to like a lot of the stuff recommended to him in this thread.

i mean maybe we should just be suggesting stuff for him to like instead of being all "oooooooh Shakey! ya burnt! I got you!"

and if he doesn't like it try again. seems like a nice thing to do.

well what i meant about 60's and 70's was there was ROOM for both barth and roth and it was all a part of the literary discussion and there was excitement from all kinds of people for all kinds of things. people were going in all kinds of directions and were taken seriously. and now it really does feel like "experimentation" or whatever is treated as a "dead end". people are only willing to go so far. or only go for the most simplistic kinds of fabulism. its almost like the majority of people out there don't want their art TOO arty these days. they DO want comfort food. even smart people. hey, even me, probably.

Also I think Zadie is sort of a head-down Good Student type who therefore has a things-I-don't-do admiration for formal advancements -- for the record this is a quality I love about her and even her Good Student fiction)

Wasn't the Pynchony end of things her earlier aspiration? I can't reread this article now, but it's an account of her shift towards Forster (and hence lots of the realisms we're talking about here) iirc.

So otm about the good-studentness btw.

all the serious young men i knew in grad school seemed to find plenty of arty fiction and poetry to read, being published these days!

Wasn't the Pynchony end of things her earlier aspiration? I can't reread this article now, but it's an account of her shift towards Forster (and hence lots of the realisms we're talking about here) iirc.

that account of her shift toward forster was more of an apologia for being forster-esque iirc. that article pissed me off too (lol nothing gets me madder than fiction, i guess). like, it's one thing for you to hate what you're good at, zadie smith, but don't hate on e.m. forster for being a totally lovely-seeming dude, which is what she kind of did, with her backhanded compliments!

i should take that link over to the forster thread so i can use it to assist me in hating on forster

1. que: that stuff isn't midlist and it wasn't meant to be of interest to shakey, it was for the other book-lovers of the thread -- also I've said many times that I used to sit pretty close to where shakey is, but then I turned 19 or whatever

2. no, I agree about Zadie's tendency being self-critical! I mean I like the Good Student quality in her own fiction sometimes; it's interesting and charming and earnest with her, being like the Hermione Granger of British fiction

3. also agree about a latent presence of Barthelme and similar -- part of my irritation with various definitions of the dominant "realism" here is that I'm positive people here would include like Aimee Bender or something (who I don't really like and think is indeed "polite" and not super-inventive and typical of a lot of modern writing -- "simplistic kind of fabulism" quite possibly) even though she'd probably match whatever definitions you were using to make Barthelme special -- this is why broad lumping-together is just not useful

4. it's easy to look back and say that in the 60s/70s there was room for this and that, but part of that is that time has swept away the thousands of unremembered things people were reading instead of either, right? the table has been cleared and left this spread of majors. and part of how more-experimental stuff could be part of that conversation was really that there was more of a lit elite to put it there

haha she loves him is the thing, she just knows loving him is uncool.

xpost

are authors nowadays more balanced mentally than in the 60s/70s?
I feel like there's a lot more emphasis on medication and writing about being medicated than being/writing bonkers.

dude nabisco are you really arguing that Antonia Nelson, Lan Chang, Allegra Goodman, and that Per dude are not midlist?

i just think for lit fic by the 80's there was a kind of gordon lishification of fiction happening and it won the hearts and minds of normal brainy bookreading people. kathy acker lost. and this kinda stuff thrives to this day. and i like some of it! but it is favored. "craft" in a writing program sense is favored. which is okay...i dig a good sentence.

umm are you arguing that moody, shteyngart, kundera, franzen, roth, naipaul, rushdie, gordimer, tom clancy, and david foster wallace are midlist? it's a rundown of "most anticipated summer reading," the concept is sorta inherently not "midlist."

moody, shteyngart, kundera, franzen, roth, naipaul, rushdie, gordimer, tom clancy, and david foster wallace

I didn't cite any of these people except for Franzen fyi

i thought we were talking about the list I posted. that's what Que referred to. anyway, this is a dumb thing to argue about, it really doesn't matter. although I will say I think Petterson is pretty well-liked, for lit-fic, at this point?

I posted a subset of the list you linked to, that's what Que was referring to

he's challenging me about my reasons for posting something that actually you posted? okay you are all awesome and I thank you all and I am going over THERE for a while

anyway, this is a dumb thing to argue about, it really doesn't matter.

hey you're the one who dismissed my complaint with a wave of the hand saying "it's not midlist"

maybe try posting some more lists of books for shakey to read instead of trying to get into some kind of argument?

you posted that list flagging it as a "a better place to survey the levels of "polite realism" or whatever else"...?

like I thought you posted that list as an example of the kind of thing we were trying to pin down... and then I picked out a bunch of stuff that matched my criteria and posted their descriptions.

what happened i am confused

That's nothing, I just got back from the pub and I have no idea what the fuck happened here. Imma go to bed and see if this makes sense in the morning.