new novels and why they suck and whatever

it seems beneath him is all. also it was tiresome to actually read

reading that interview now...

some modern critics want to narrow that down to: a novel has to be realistic, it has to have a certain amount of psychological depth, it has to be set against a recognizable social or economic background, et cetera, et cetera.

who are these critics?

everything this Steven Moore is saying seems entirely uncontroversial to me

There's writers today like Mark Danielewski and Carole Maso, people like that. I've always liked that unconventional fiction.

mark danielewski sucks

Shortly after Bush stole the 2000 election, I started noticing more and more criticism of the oddball fiction I like. a conservative backlash. I got to be quite angry.

i am really skeptical of this aesthetically reactionary=politically reactionary line of thinking

oh okay i guess "some critics"=jonathan franzen? i thought he meant, like, academic historians of the novel and none of what he was saying made any sense to me

Shortly after Bush stole the 2000 election, I started noticing more and more criticism of the oddball fiction I like. a conservative backlash. I got to be quite angry.

This is utter twaddle.

I'm not really into the plot. For conventional fiction, when you read a novel, the first thing someone asks is, "Oh, what's it about?" I really don't care what a book is about. I'm interested more in the artistry.

argh i'm sorry i'm being such an asshole, but rolling my damn eyes

twaddle is such a great word.

I really don't care what a book is about. I'm interested more in the artistry.

in a lot of ways this means the only books he cares about are books about being a book

everything this Steven Moore is saying seems entirely uncontroversial to me

haha, thank you, horseshoe for going through it line by line. a lot of that interview is like: "I agree! But who doesn't?" I don't know if he's weird or if he's tapped into some part of the lit world I'm not up on, where this stuff is clearer.

I guess he can rest easy knowing that throughout my entire education in English and fiction, most of these points where made at least once a week. I was even assigned that not-so-great Danielewski book in grad school!

i don't really think that's true, tbf; i was rolling my eyes because it's such a college dorm room thing to say.

xp to shakey

i had to stop going through it line by line. i mean, it sounds like a cool project and he seems like a passionate dude, but i don't really get his beleaguered one man against the world stance.

I was even assigned that not-so-great Danielewski book in grad school!

lol, wow

reading Scorch Atlas, about halfway through. the never-ending nihilism is starting to get a little wearing

yah but it doesn't suck, right?

no, I don't think it sucks. it's not great, but it's trying to do something interesting, and certainly the voice is unique, if a little repetitive (so much mold and rotting and sagging etc)

cool dude

was it you that recommended it...? thought it was ref'd on this thread but I can't find the post

yup.

Liked FINANCIAL LIVES OF THE POETS a lot. I guess one could knock it for lightness. But it is well-constructed.

^yeah that book was not bad. some good scenes & lols

just want to say i've never heard of like 80% of these books but i love this thread! i want it to keep going.

i've become a huuuuge offender in the "comfort books" category.. between biographies and scandinavian crime fiction i pretty much don't read anything else at all.

i remember reading some george pelecanos quote (or somebody like him) where he said he couldn't imagine writing a literary novel, he always needed a murder or a mystery to solve "otherwise it's just people standing around in rooms, feeling things". this is incredibly stupid, obviously, but i wonder if this sentiment points to something. that it's become harder to tell stories somehow, or harder to tell stories outside of a few kinds of understood categories. maybe it's always been hard to tell stories outside of a few understood categories. there's a great book by oliver wendell holmes called "the poet at the breakfast table" - http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2666 - which details the mundane activities of a group of lodgers who all stay at the same boarding house. this kind of set-up is unavailable to fiction writers today. there are so many kinds of understood environments that formed the backdrop to the explosion of the modern novel - big country houses, for instance, or boarding houses (cf "old goriot") - that just don't exist any more even for people writing plain old "realist" literary fiction. i have a feeling this is all old news for people who think seriously about books, so sorry if i'm being obvious.

i did read that victor pelevin book about theseus but i couldn't finish it. it really was terrible. everyone had the same "voice" despite them all supposedly being different.

I've always thought the workplace is underused in fiction (in fact genre fiction is often streets ahead in this area). Groups of disparate types, thrown together, and also, if the writer's got a good eye, will necessarily have lots of contemporary details and opportunities that more conventional novel types don't offer.

All that said, and not wishing to restart an old argument on which I have made my stance reasonably plain, I'm certainly with Pelecanos on this one. To take a slightly different angle on it, I think genre novels, by not needing to have 'feelings' as the central focus, give a lot more latitude to exploring how people respond to imaginative situations. In fact, the feelings that a lot of 'standing around in rooms' novels, seem to change very little, that they're actually quite conservative in the emotional sets they deal in. In a slightly more wild development of that (tho genuinely not intended as trolling - I realise it's a bit bats), I tend to see that conservatism in emotional content as like a detective story writer not being arsed to include, say, mobile phones in his or her plotmaking. Christ, got to get back to work, but yeah, the workplace. More of it imo.

tracer i'm not entirely sure what you mean: do you think there are LESS potential social situations to describe c 2010 than there were circa 1810 or 1860 or 1910? or do you mean that 'the realist novel' is adapted to country houses and such and thus couldn't manage, say, a hostel?

franzen's on the cover of 'time'
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2010000,00.html

i did read that victor pelevin book about theseus but i couldn't finish it. it really was terrible.

I told you not to read it!

i just re-read this thread and i srsly have no idea what its abt including the things i say in it

thomp i mean that in the time when realist novels were really getting their legs under them, circumstances forced people to live amongst each other more, either as part of a large family (either in a tenement or a country house) or as a lodger somewhere. (the solitary dude with only a housekeeper to talk to was strange enough to merit interest.) i think these situations were a boon for setting scenarios and creating drama and having entertaining dialogue. this may all be very facile, i don't know.

another new novel that doesn't suck

http://quarterlyconversation.com/february-forever-light-boxes-by-shane-jones

didnt want to read too far into the article to avoid spoilers, but that book looks awesome

it's not really the kind of book that has "spoilers." but yeah, it's very cool.

but that book looks awesome

srsly! thanks q

added to amazon wish list

When I was heavily into poetry, I tended to be interested in (or at least say I was interested in) novels with an emphasis on surface linguistic properties. Now that I am both very uninterested in poetry and a little more drawn to fiction than has generally been true in my life,I definitely am not looking for anything close to prose poetry when I look for a novel to read. I'm not sure exactly what my shift toward fiction is related to, but I think it's because my life feels more like a narrative. As mentioned before, a couple years back I quit my job and relocated to an unfamiliar city (not on a whim or anything) without having work lined up in advance. I think that sense of truly not knowing what was going to happen next and how things were going to turn out made me more receptive to fiction. This may be a little tangential to the thread, but then, it's all over the place and the OP did recently say:

[quote]i just re-read this thread and i srsly have no idea what its abt including the things i say in it[/quote]

Why do you have to make the code so simple?

Battling between my hatred for the author photo of LIGHT BOXES and the fact that the book actually does sound pretty interesting

I am struggling with the same dilemma. I mean everyone I've everyone met in my life who dresses like that is an asshole so...

second everyone should be "ever" obviously

Wow, you guys nailed it. I've seen a few photos of that guy and he looks like a twat and lives in Brooklyn. I like my writers broke, drunk, and from unfashionable boroughs of unfashionable cities.

Jive-ass H&M novelist.

Does he live in Brooklyn? Ok I'm definitely not reading it then.

Fine, I didn't say I wasn't going to read it, I'm just saying I had a visceral reaction to dude's photo.

v neck t-shirts and why they suck and whatever

i only read people who wear v-necks and live in brooklyn

i have only my own beard to burden

hello i picked up a copy of oscar wao in part because of this thread/max & nabisco's rec and i really enjoyed it & so did my girlfriend

kind of a silly thing to say since the book has won a pulitzer prize and was book of the year 2007 on like a billion ppl's lists but i am not hip to these things and this was the first i'd heard of it

i wish the new franzen book was coming out a week earlier, i'm going out of town this weekend and need something new to read.

oh god what will u do