new novels and why they suck and whatever

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.

"She treated you, no matter who you were, exactly as she treated everyone else, so that after she had talked to you a while you almost doubted that you existed, except in some statistical sense. Except when she was indignant, she was cheerful; she was good, honest, and sincere; and she was so thin you could have recognized her skeleton."

Just quoting this again for terrificness. Nabisco is right, Mr. Que is wrong, this is great. "recognized," well played. Read this long ago, really liked it, but remembered nothing of it.

Couldn't we just as easily say they didn't move away from Updike/Bellow/Roth? W

Why are there backslashes? These are very different writers. Roth is very far from the "realist" paradigm that Shakey proposed (so is Updike -- and Gore Vidal!-- for that matter).

Re Asian authors: _Brothers_ by Yu Hua is a good BIG HISTORICAL novel from China w/ lots of scatology and sex:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/books/review/Row-t.html

Re Lethem: people should recognize that CHRONIC CITY is his best since, I dunno, since THIS SHAPE WE'RE IN at least -- and Shakey can take comfort in the fact that it represents a return to his SF roots (which did not keep it from being considered an Important Serious Contemporary Novel.)

You know, Shakey, I love you, and because I love you we tousle just about every day, so please don't take this personally...

BUT...you wouldn't have made these generalizations about "realist" fiction if your responses here had indicated you'd kept up with the kinds of realism practiced in the 20th century. To hold up as a dismissal the idea, as you wrote upthread, that the "realist" novel generally follows a chronological pattern, etc is a fantastically wrong mistake when you're dealing with writers as different as Hamsun, Mann, Lawrence, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Bellow, Waugh, Forster, Roth, to name a few of the major writers of the twentieth century. What the fuck connects these writers EXCEPT a devotion to the novel in its marvelous, infinitely recombinable form?

The novel swears no allegiance to any credo except what the novelist imposes. Whether it's George Elot or Colm Toibin or Ursula K Le Guin, the novel is concerned with human beings; what form it ultimately takes matters insofar as it reflects what the novelist wants to propose about human life as lived. From my experience, the worst affliction is trendiness, which is why the Barthelme-Coover-Barth route looks so shallow to my eyes: a lot of tricks the modernists I'd mentioned upthread had explored without the chicness and devotion to surface pleasures.

If you want to read a well-written novel about aliens, go to it, dude! But, please, don't make generalizations about The Modern Novel. I don't know what it is, but it's thriving and boring as it was at the time of Joyce.

I mean, seriously, to dismiss Roth when he wrote Operation Shylock and the Zuckerman Bound trilogy?! Can they be any more different from a "conventionally" realist coming-of-age story like Goodbye Columbus?

If there's anything I've learned from reading all of James and the critical prose written by him, Conrad, Lawrence, and Woolf, it's that for them "realist" meant "I can do whatever the fuck I want with this thing."

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whoa this thread got pretty good after i left yesterday

que did you read the whole thread? everyone gave shakey recommendations already, like a million years ago, we were just piling on him because he came BACK to the thread to like copy-and-paste the nyt bestseller list for no reason

and anyway when ppl come to ilm saying shit like "all modern music sucks" we laugh at them instead of giving them recommendations so i dont know why hed expect any different

finally the real reason the literary scene sucks nowadays is cause all the smart people on this thread are posting shit on ilx instead of writing articles for important critical publications

Agreed that this thread got good. This is the kind of thread that got me into ILX in the first place so many years ago.

I read a bit more carefully upthread, and understand the flare-up a bit better - the Joyce-Borges-Nabokov-Dick thing is a fairly common taste cluster, more narrow than it at first appears, so the spicy-only analogy makes sense to me now.

But 'why does modern fiction suck?' can be turned into some actual questions: does midlist literary fiction sell? Who buys it? What role does the rise of the bookclub play? If it's not profitable, by-and-large, are publishers publishing it because a) lottery - you might land The Corrections, b) self-image as custodians of the literary tradition, which is important and must be kept c) they just really like it d) a mixture? Publishing/reviewing/bookselling is a narrow world in the UK at least - does it have echo chamber problems? Conservative replication of recognisable forms? (For me, sure; the former's a problem, the latter not so much. And it doesn't account for that much - The Raw Shark Texts was hyped pretty heavily, yknow - the machine is happy to deal with odd stuff. Or maybe that's just Canongate, who are a bit of an exception.)

What are current manifestations of glaze-over midlist? (bcz there's a Nabisco otm upthread about style and themes of this stuff changing over time: fantastic elements are entering, but UK answer, I think, is double plot contemporary/historical - return to family home, uncover something in the distant-ish past, second narrative of these events kicks in alongside). Who likes this and why? (Not meant as a loaded question - I don't especially think that ppl who are happy liking descendants of Austen + Eliot social and psych realism need to read Beckett).

Like, I think it's a real set of questions if it isn't 'why does modern music suck', and more 'Who are these major-label bands who are quite boring, who clearly won't break properly, who are being slightly half-arsedly hyped by the labels', which is maybe a question that, in music terms, makes more sense ten? 15? years ago, and would be open to actual answers.

Other random thoughts on thread: think Scott's take on the 70s/80s literary scene is convincing - lots of weird stuff sitting in unexpected places - Kathy Acker seems a good example - she was latterly in Picador over here, not sure if there's still room at a large-ish house for someone in that tradition, they're pretty much guaranteed to be at Serpent's Tail. I feel like that's because the money's gone, maybe, as much as a narrowing of taste.

Probably should just have let this thread stand at its 'hmmm interesting thread' natural end, but kept thinking abt it yesterday during an 8-year-old's birthday party. They didn't have any answers, but did recommend Skulduggery Pleasant.

georg lukacs appeared to me in a nightmare and mumbled something about the relationship between the conservative tilt/yuppie ascendancy since reagan-thatcher and how contemporary lit, a product of this culture, is as bankrupt as most western economies. he then explained reification to me, and here it gets fuzzy

He took off his pants so that D.H. Lawrence could bugger him.

skulduggery pleasant is kind of weird actually

like it's v obv an attempt to game the kid's lit marketplace but also introduces elements of like china miéville and h.p. lovecraft

my sense of things isn't that things suck as bad as people seem to make out, but a huge percentage of my reading is stuff in translation, and I'd say of the reading I do that's new/contemporary stuff, it's close to 75% literature in translation. most of the English-language books that get buzz/crit-love just do not sound like the sort of thing I'd be interested in.

Like, I think it's a real set of questions if it isn't 'why does modern music suck', and more 'Who are these major-label bands who are quite boring, who clearly won't break properly, who are being slightly half-arsedly hyped by the labels', which is maybe a question that, in music terms, makes more sense ten? 15? years ago, and would be open to actual answers.

so 'polite realism' is a nicer way of saying "landfill realism"!

wait what

it is the landfill indie of the realisms

idk it made sense to me, in my head

no, i got that

i wonder if there's a literary 'some of your friends are already this fucked'

that makes me think there could be an indie rock MFA programme, which would be the worst idea ever

shut the fuck up thom p, I will have my tenured job yet

I could totally see NYU offering that.

my name is not actually 'thom p' :/