What desperately unfashionable writers do you really like?

Barth and Barthelme I both def see second-hand, Franzen too.

But H.E. Bates? Jean Stafford? C.P. Snow? A.J. Cronin? I have no idea who these people are

xp

originally i felt like this would be the thread for Uris and Clavell and Michener stans to emerge.

or Jean M. Auel, and so on

Dennis Wheatley was reprinted a few years ago and I saw him in a lot stores. I doubt they sold much.
His books that is, not new copies of Wheatley himself.

Probably never read a single word written by C.P. Snow, but certainly knew who he was because of "The Two Cultures."

I withdraw Paley; I should have just mentioned the recent New Yorker profile on What Are You Reading, but uncool for most is prob Dreiser----all I've read by him is the Library of America Sister Carrie/Jennie Gerhardt/Twelve Men, and no (great) probs in there with his quirks. Not like slogging through most of Proust's dinner parties, though P. provides higher highs, admittedly. (Actually Dreiser doesn't provide any highs, but he too is a sharp-eyed if excitable tourguide, at least in that volume.) Suppose I should also make time for AE Van Vogt, reputedly the Dreiser of SF.

Maybe if in "highs" you incl. moments when he steers his reader through the sea of words to characters for whom the penny drops in low gravity, glazed clarity: windowshoppers brought to "This is what I want!" Reaching for it---

C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series isn't great literature, but I found it very entertaining and think of picking it up again at some point. And Burgess saw fit to include it in his 99 Novels.

mailer

But H.E. Bates? Jean Stafford? C.P. Snow? A.J. Cronin? I have no idea who these people are

This may be a US vs Commonwealth thing, but over here a row of old Penguins of Bates and Snow are compulsory in any 2nd-hand bookshop

Angela Carter seems to be going through a resurrection right now, which is fine by me: I like her a lot

A variant/rival (?) of the Two Cultures idea which I am more familiar with is put forward by Paul Valéry in "Passage de Verlaine" or "Verlaine Passes By," and taken up by Ernesto Sabato in which he expresses the by-then-impossible desire to be both like the poet Paul Verlaine and the mathematician Henri Poincaré. Recently learned that the mathematician Felix Hausdorff also had a successful literary career under the pseudonym Paul Mongré.

Now trying to remember that old-time latinate word for scientists used for Newton, Hooke etc.

Updike should pwn this thread but ctrl-f Updike, no matches found, huh?

I still dig Barthelme and Coover. Barth less so. Walker Percy to the max.

This probably says something unflattering about me but I still visit and revisit almost everything that was admired by my college professors. Margaret Drabble. William H. Gass. A.S. Byatt. Gaddis. Lorrie Moore.

But can you still read all of Walker Percy's books, YMP, even Lancelot?

Answer to my question: virtuosi

Blecchs, no, not all. But I think Moviegoer, Last Gentleman, Lost in the Cosmos are still up there for me.

What about The Message in Bottle, or Signposts in a Strange Land?

I loved Message when I first read it 20 years ago and soaking up pop linguistics/philosophy of language.

However I didn't know its view of the state of the "science" was already way out of date then. Now it's just a curiosity.

It's like how Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was fresh in the 70s and still regarded as a classic study in the 80s. But there have been a few developments since then, so there's little reason to read it now unless you're specifically studying historiography.

I'm sure there's some good stuff in Signposts but I haven't looked at it recently. There's a defensiveness on race relations that is understandable but unappealing. "I'm one of the good ones!" is nagl in 2017.

hemingway and hammett probably deathless. though come to think of it you don't hear people talk about hemingway too much at the coffee shop...

http://spitalfieldslife.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/img_6129.jpg

Forget to mention that the incident in that Valéry essay shows up in the recently-mentioned-on-ILB Humboldt's Gift although it seems that Bellow willfully misunderstands it.

Hemingway is a good example of the currently unfashionable!

Hemingway sucks

See?

Some writers may fade from current conversation without being "unfashionable." No one is likely to question whether they were ever taken seriously, even if they don't occupy the collective consciousness in a daily way. Faulkner, Nabokov, Joyce.

Others are not exactly "fashionable," but neither are they unfashionable because they have never been submitted for the approval of whatever mechanism governs fashion. They exist as themselves. DeLillo, Kafka, Ellison.

you would think that delillo would be even more fashionable now what with paranoia at an all time high.

and kafka too come to think of it.

kafka will always be kafka though.

I thought this thread would be dominated by stuff that people your dad's age thought was Serious Modern Literature. Muscular 60s/70s doodz - Roth, Mailer, Updike. Are mid-century weirdos - Vonnegut, Burroughs, Salinger, Kerouac - outside the fashion structure or in it?

British Edwardians are deeply unfashionable now- Lawrence, Arnold Bennett, Chesterton, Wells, Galsworthy, Hartley, Forster too I think. The poets of the same era are still well thought of I believe (correction welcome).

re. mid-century US weirdos, my perception is that the Beats' stock has fallen, while Vonnegut's has risen?

Agree on Bennett and Chesterton.

Lawrence and Wells are deeply unfashionable? Okay, but if it were up to me I'd probably put them both in separate "outside fashion" categories - Wells as a scifi progenitor like Verne; Lawrence as a class theorist like Orwell.

I remember Forster and Conrad being taught as modernists avant la letter - this was circa 1990. Forster praised in direct contrast to that fuddy-duddy Bennett. I still like some Forster FWIW.

Seriously, autocorrect? Avant la lettre.

awful steampunk crap (which is still huge afaict) means Well's is def still cool in certain circles

As ever- even more so than with music?- it's difficult to separate one's own opinions from critical consensus, and the latter informs the former to some extent.

For me, Lawrence's sexual politics have dated just as badly as eg. Galsworthy's mechanical plotting. Wells is, I think, more tricky to place since he was one of the inventors of sci-fi, but (again IMO) a lot of his work seems hopelessly dated now.

Forster is a weird one, I remember loving Passage to India and hating everything else he wrote, so perhaps I shouldn't comment. Conrad has never suffered critically and is still very interesting- he seems to transcend or even critique many of what now seem to us hidebound early C20th attitudes.

To Neil S re.: Edwardian poets still well regarded. I guess? Inasmuch as fashion applies to poetry.

Do you mean Bridges (cool), Hopkins (meh)? Maybe Yeats and Auden? It's tricky as some of those doodz had long careers.

When I think about "fashionable" poets I only think of ones that are regarded as fashionable for extratextual reasons. In the 90s, people in my social circle talked about Sylvia Plath like she was a rock star because she was tormented, pretty, and dead. It had comparatively little to do with poetry.

a list of poets who are no longer fashionable would be as long as the empire state building.

Housman? Brooke and the other WWI doodz?

yeah I guess I was thinking of Yeats and Auden plus the WW1 poets, who are forever trapped in the amber of early death

christ. what a question: kingsley amis, wyndham lewis, eden philpotts, peter de polnay (actually not even sure if i like him but so unfashionable it has a weird appeal), jocelyn brooke feels perennially unfashionable (wrongly).

guilty confession: I think perennial ILX whipping boy John Lanchester's first few novels are pretty good. I guess he's not unfashionable as such though

debt to pleasure is fine. it makes capital all the more eye-watering.

Fragrant Harbour I remember as being good too. Capital is obv a gigantic pile of flaming garbage

Fragrant Harbour I remember as being good too. Capital is obv a gigantic pile of flaming garbage

someone gave me fragrant harbour as a present and i've never read it. still got the ribbon around it. for some reason i thought it was autobiography (which is more appealing than a novel for me i think)

Richard Brautigan

Dreaming of Babylon?

A-Level English broke DH Lawrence for me forever. I still enjoy Hardy though.

I love Richard Brautigan and it hadn't occurred to me that he might be unfashionable (though now I think of it, I suppose he is) (though he's more in-print than he was in the mid 80s when I started reading his books, so it can't be all bad news).

I like "Knots" by R D Laing.

I might put Brautigan (unfairly!) into the category of "authors we enjoyed/loved in teens and early 20s but feel mildly embarrassed about now". People like Brautigan, Vonnegut, Hunter Thompson, Tom Robbins, Alice Walker, Zadie Smith, Amis, Salman Rushdie even. I wouldn't call them unfashionable as they're always being rediscovered. But I have (again, possibly unfairly) no desire to re-read them.

British Edwardians are deeply unfashionable now- Lawrence, Arnold Bennett, Chesterton, Wells, Galsworthy, Hartley, Forster too I think. The poets of the same era are still well thought of I believe (correction welcome).

Agree that Lawrence does seem oddly absent nowadays - foundational for the mid century Eng Lit version of the canon, but nothing like as visible now (half-formed idea that his works were a way of managing sex for male academics raised in glum pre-60s Britain). But I think Chesterton and Wells are doing ok, better than they were maybe 20-30 years ago. This might be an internet thing - more room for authors who don't quite fit a post/modernist pattern. Chesterton's quotability v helpful for him.

I think the poets who match that set aren't doing so well - the Georgians -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_Poetry
Some poets I like there, but not much that it made over the modernist canyon.