Your Favorite Post-Modern Douchebag Writer

Dear everyone who thinks Infinite Jest is so fucking funny,

I want to punch you in the nose. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Love, Elmo
-- elmo argonaut, Tuesday, March 6, 2007 4:27 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Link

Seriously, it is like a New Yorker cartoon amplified a billion times.
-- elmo argonaut, Tuesday, March 6, 2007 4:30 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Link

i don't really think it's that funny, except in certain parts. otherwise, it's more sad and biting than anything else.
-- the table is the table, Tuesday, March 6, 2007 4:34 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Link

so so so RONG

Right? Laugh out loud in parts. Also, I have no issue with proclaiming: IJ = best novel I ever read.

I appreciate Pynchon, and he's fighting the good fight, but I just don't know whether his stuff is for me. Diff'rent strokes.

I've only read one book by any of these authors and found it so aggressively off-putting that I have no interest in pursuing any of them. (For those curious, the book was V.)

Je ne regrette rien!

letting V put you off ever reading any Don DeLillo is pretty off the wall, but to each his own I guess

V. is kinda. . .mehhhhh. Pretty unenjoyable Pynchon, for me. I've read everything by him except Vineland and the new one and not much of it has stuck with me. I have no desire to look at it ever again. Maybe Mason and Dixon, but that's it. Actually, I think I tried to re-read V. a few years ago and just stopped. The Crying of Lot 49 is a good entry level Pynchon, I think.

The correct answer for me, in this thread, is William Gaddis.

Yeah Dan, you should read White Noise. I know it's one of those books people are ga-ga over, to the point of it being obnoxious, but it's definitely better than anything I've read by DFW.

full disclosure, V is my least favorite Pynchon (that I've read.) xp

yeah, DeLillo is enjoyable, easy to read, interesting, etc.

oh god mr que OTM

i've tried reading "Carpenter's Gothic" and "A Frolic of His Own" and gotten no more than halfway in either. AFOHO is particularly annoying with it's extended dramatic excerpts; I get the impression you're not even supposed to read them, that they're just a tedious running joke. xp again

where do you start with Gaddis, just dive right in w/ The Recognitions? - xposts

As mentioned a couple of days ago, I have a tattoo inspired by a passage from "V." so I think you are all insane and the thread results are AOK.

Is it from the smug part, the racist part, or the needlessly incomprehensible part?

ian I think you said "que otm" and then started making the opposite case, lol

Gaddis is sort of not (enjoyable, easy), but The Recognitions is pretty killer even when it's sophomoric and yes the place to start with Gaddis.

Also Dan for god's sake passing on SAUNDERS b/c you didn't like V.?? It's like skipping Barthelme because you couldn't finish Portrait Of A Lady...

oh i dunno, i thought the answer to "favorite douchebag" implied that he disliked him oops.

oh ian i meant gaddis was my favorite post modern writer, is that what you meant? probably not, ha.

AFOHO and CG are both like, sort of second rate Gaddis? Sort of his V. equivalent. Neither one, I think, are as good as The Recognitions or JR which are both very very awesome. They take a while to click, but once you do, he's really funny and great. But it takes like a hundred pages or so to warm up to him, I think.

many many xposts

V is the worst of Pynchon's big novels (the South African section in particular is one of the most unpleasant things I've ever read) but it does contain his best joke.

ooh ooh which one? "because without it you'd be dead"?

where do you start with Gaddis, just dive right in w/ The Recognitions?

yeah, i would just jump right in. it takes awhile but it's worth it. this sounds totally stupid, but i enjoyed the Recognitions the second time I read it a LOT more than the first. But LOL, I realize how stupid that sounds when it's a huge-ass book. but he really is great!

the South African section in particular is one of the most unpleasant things I've ever read

SO FUCKING OTM

I read it for a philosophy class in college but remember practically nothing about it.

anyone have recommendations for William Gass? read and liked Omensetter's Luck but I've never run across anything else by him

i've only read The Floating Opera by Barth. Don't remember a thing about it.

i don't know that gass has much besides a handful of stories, novellas, and the two novels, the big one and the little one. and lots of essays. his recent essay called the sentence seeks a form or whatever was really awesome. i was going to try and tackle The Tunnel this summer. i liked the first section of Omensetter's Luck (the old guy at the auction) but it fell off after that for me.

I've only read Barth's Chimera and found it pretty annoying in a "wow, witness the birth of a whole strain of postmodern meta douchebaggery" sort of way

probably not really the birth but it's one of the earlier things I've read where the plot reads like charlie kaufmann, the author is a character in his own story etc etc

I've only read Cervantes' Don Quixote and found it pretty annoying in a "wow, witness the birth of a whole strain of postmodern meta douchebaggery" sort of way

probably not really the birth but it's one of the earlier things I've read where the plot reads like charlie kaufmann, the author is a character in his own story etc etc

zing

anyone have recommendations for William Gass? read and liked Omensetter's Luck but I've never run across anything else by him

-- dmr, Thursday, May 8, 2008 1:28 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

i just read in the heart of the heart of the country and loved it, see if u can find it

i picked up a collection of william gass essays and skipped through them a little while ago - now i can't remember the goddamn name - but it looked really really good.

i got 'the recognitions' from the library last year, but it just sat on my bedside table cuz i was too scared to read it... heard WAY too much stuff about its difficulty beforehand so now i'm completely intimidated.

in re: Gass, I read <i>The Tunnel</i>; I don't know if I can recommend the experience, but if the postmodern novel with loads of unpleasantry is what you go in for, it's as elegantly executed a version of that as I can imagine. some of the scenes in it will be with me forever. When Gass released his reading of the entire novel on something like half a dozen CDs I couldn't resist getting them though, felt like I sort of had to, having already invested so much time & effort on the book. The mp3s make for great airplane listeneing.

in re: DeLillo - I always find the "novelist who lost it narrative" kinda "hmm, is there more to this?" - it feels like it owes a fair amount to the way we parse rock and roll (where the band whose first album rules but whose work is in continual decline is a known trope), when the more common literary trope is or was "early work immature; middle period = height of powers; late period = maturity." I mean there's Wordsworth, who's generally conceded to have "lost it," but late novels of great writers are often the heavy hitters: Jude the Obscure, Middlemarch, Great Expectations, just off the top of my head; struggling to think of great-or-considered-really-good writers whose late work is thought of as having fallen drastically off. I mean, unless one's craft is "I am insanely inventive and always coming up with new! new! stuff," it seems to me that writers would reliably get better with practice. that said though I haven't read any recent DeLillo, once I'd done White Noise & Great Jones Street & Libra & Mao I figured I'd had about enough.

Underworld is great! definitely recommend that one.

struggling to think of great-or-considered-really-good writers whose late work is thought of as having fallen drastically off

maybe Updike? I don't really know what type of reviews he gets.

do people rep for Roth's late work?

I think Roth has a better rep right now as far as his older stuff goes versus Updike. dmr OTM, Updike's stuff has fallen way off. he got okay reviews for the first couple of these, i think mostly on his rep. but Terrorist got horrible reviews. Exit Ghost got some bad reviews, but American Pastoral, Sabbath's Theatre and The Plot Against America have gotten raves, nothing like Updike's had in years, IMHO.

(1996) In the Beauty of the Lilies
(1997) Toward the End of Time
(2000) Gertrude and Claudius
(2002) Seek My Face
(2004) Villages
(2006) Terrorist

compare this with Roth:

Sabbath's Theater (1995)
American Pastoral (1997)
I Married a Communist (1998)
The Human Stain (2000)
The Plot Against America (2004)
Everyman (2006)
Exit Ghost (2007)

someone on this board just wrote their doctoral thesis on roth, but i dont remember who. g00blar?

yup

Ask me about the work of Philip Roth