What desperately unfashionable writers do you really like?

I was looking at my huge pile of H. E. Bates books, and wondered if anyone else alive even gives the smallest of shits about him. And then I read a couple of articles about Nigel Balchin and Pamela Hansford-Johnson, both of whom I also really like, and both of whom the articles go to great lengths to describe as unfashionable and neglected.

So who do you really rate that the world has given up on?

i like bates... though not read him for years. i dunno if george gissing's work is much rated outside of new grub street? also richard jefferies's fiction, if that was ever actually rated at any point! (speaking of, discovered a rj ref in against the day)

Coterie Writers Of Minimum Distinction Memorial Thread

erma bombeck

Jacqueline Susann
Jackie Collins

This is the place to note also that, though i always wanted to dismiss jilly cooper, and never read any of her books, she kept writing amusing, self-effacing and contagiously enthusiastic introductions to lots of books i really liked, and was apparently a really nice, sweet woman too

Jonathan Franzen

i don't know H.E. Bates. is that like being a fan of C.P. Snow?

i think c.p. snow and john marquand both made the cover of time magazine. the franzens of their day.

For a while Bates had a slight revival in his fortunes because of this TV series:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darling_Buds_of_May_(TV_series)

Does anybody still read A J Cronin?

would i like Pamela Hansford-Johnson? probably didn't really make it big over here. i see she wrote a lot.

i don't really know how unfashionable some of the people i like are. Louis Auchincloss has to be pretty unfashionable, no? some people must still read him though...old...white...people.

wanna read CP Snow now

former ILXor Beth Parker does landscaping for Ward Just on the Vineyard and i feel like he's someone who is a living link to all those 50's guys i never read. has he ever been fashionable? and yet he just keeps putting out deep thought fiction that always looks like a snooze to me. maybe i'm wrong though. maybe i would love his stuff.

feel like Snow might scratch my Le Carre itch without the Boy's Own Adventure stuff I'm not so keen on

Anthony Burgess selected Pamela Hansford Johnson's An Error of Judgment as one of his 99 best post-war English language novels (along with Snow's Strangers and Brothers); Johnson also reported on the trial of Ian Brady, and wrote a book (On Iniquity) about the case. So an interesting writer.

Anthony Powell, though I'm never sure if he's unfashionable or not, he seems to go through phases

somewhat related, i am totally into Brit composers these days that i never used to listen to and now i love a lot of them. Elgar, Delius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Holst, Havergal Brian, Frank Bridge, Arnold Bax, William Alwyn, Michael Tippett, Malcolm Arnold, Gerald Finzi, etc.

(so hard to find Holst that isn't The Planets...)

(pastoral must fit my mood at the tender age of 47...)

(don't think many of these people are very fashionable despite their work being a a part of the world repertoire....)

(i doubt i know anyone in real life who listens to them...)

Guy Davenport, Jeanne Thornton, and Caitlin Kiernan, though they seem to fall into the "mostly respected but unpopular" category of unfashionable writers.
xp

i'm still trying to track stuff down from that richard yates interview i read:

Q. Who do you consider some other good, neglected writers?
Y. Read the four spendid books by Gina Berriault, if you can find them, and if you want to discover an absolutely first-class talent who has somehow been left almost entirely out of the mainstream. She hasn't quit writing yet, either, and I hope she never will.

And read almost anything by R.V. Cassill, a brilliant and enormously productive man who's been turning out novels and stories for twenty-five years or more, all the while building and sustaining a large influence on other writers as a teacher and critic. Oh, he's always been well-known in what I guess you'd call literary circles, but he had to wait a long, long time before his most recent novel, Doctor Cobb's Game, did bring him some widespread readership at last.

And George Garrett. I haven't read very much of his work, but that's at least partly because there's so very much of it - and he too has remained largely unknown except among other writers. I guess his latest book, like Cassill's, did make something of a public splash at last, but that too was long overdue. And Seymour Epstein - ever heard of him? I have read all of his work to date - five novels and a book of stories, all expertly crafted and immensely readable - yet he too seems to have been largely ignored so far.

But hell, this list could go on and on. This country's loaded with good, badly neglected writers. Fred Chappel. Calvin Kentfield. Herbert Wilner. Helen Hudson. Edward Hoagland. George Cuomo. Arthur J. Roth - those are only a few. My God, if I'd produced as much good work as most of those people, with as little reward, I'd really feel qualified to rant and rail against the Literary Establishment.

Q. Who among your contemporaries do you feel have been seriously neglected? What about the work of Edward Lewis Wallant?
Y. A fine writer; and yes, seriously neglected today, though he was by no means overlooked or unappreciated when his books first came out. Wallant worked with tremendous energy and tremendous speed. He didn't even start writing until he was over thirty; then he managed to produce four novels in five years before he died very suddenly of a stroke at the age of thirty-six, ten years ago. He and I were pretty good friends, though we used to argue a lot about working methods: I thought he ought to take more time over his books; he'd disagree. It was almost as if he knew he didn't have much time. If he'd lived, God only knows how much good work he might have accomplished by now. Anyway, the four books are there, and I do believe they'll last.

Q. Who among the newer first novelists are you interested in?
Y. I thought Leonard Gardner's Fat City, which came out a couple of years ago, was an excellent first novel, and I was glad to see it win such immediate and general acclaim. Apart from that book, I guess the first novelists I've paid the most attention to are those I've known personally at Iowa over the years. Quite a number of them have been breaking into the field recently, getting their first books published with greater or lesser degrees of success, and I can't say I've liked all of those books. The best of them so far, in my opinion, are those by Andre Dubus, James Crumley, James Whitehead, Mark Dintenfass. Nolan Porterfield, and Theodore Weesner. They're all fine writers - modern writers in the best sense, traditional writers in the best sense. So, by the way, are some five or six other young writers I've known at Iowa who haven't published their first books yet, but who will soon.

James Crumley went on to have a fairly successful career as a crime novelist

Wallant and Gardner have had the NYRB treatment, and I know R.V. Cassill has been recently made available as e-books.

Pamela Hansford-Johnson is very much the sort of writer people who tend to like the old green Virago Modern Classics would enjoy, I think. Rebecca West fans too.

somewhat related, i am totally into Brit composers these days that i never used to listen to and now i love a lot of them. Elgar, Delius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Holst, Havergal Brian, Frank Bridge, Arnold Bax, William Alwyn, Michael Tippett, Malcolm Arnold, Gerald Finzi, etc.

man, when I "discovered" some of these cats and locked into their groove -- R-V Williams and Elgar especially -- it was light a light going on in a high window. "oh, fuck -- this stuff is amazing!"

I just recently got into Frank Bridge, I don't know shit but there is some lovely stuff

Yeah, I don't know anything about him either but I saw someone doing some of his piano stuff a while back and it was sweeeeet.

"people who tend to like the old green Virago Modern Classics would enjoy"

yeah, that would be me.

I read Edward Lewis Wallant's The Children at the Gate when I was like 15, and thought it was a realistic novel with a spiritual point/impact, but I dunno what I would think now, being old and jaded. Don't remember it in detail. He also wrote The Pawnbroker, basis of the Rod Steiger film (never read former, only remember Hollywood black & white DO YOU SEE denouement).
James Whitehead's Joiner might be described as Southern Gothic, but struck me more like Mississippi Baroque, less Faulkner than high-octane 50s-60s youngblood. But otherwise, I know of him, like several others mentioned in the interview, more as a teacher (think he and fellow poet Miller Williams; Lucinda's Dad pioneered Creative Writing programs in Arkansas, Louoisiana) Ditto Fred Chappell in North Carolina, and Andre Dubus in Tuscaloosa (the only thing I read by him was effective non-fiction, about being in a T-Town bar there with a lady friend, and gradually becoming aware that a guy was showing other patrons his pistol). He was said to be super-considerate, as a teacher and otherwise; stopped to help the victim of an auto accident, got hit himself, lost a leg, eventually his life (though maybe via something else). His son Andre III is said to be a good writer too.
Also Nolan Porterfield, who now has a radio show I should prob check:
http://wkyufm.org/people/nolan-porterfield
R.V. Cassill was in several(?) volumes of Ted Solotaroff's fine drugstore paperback anthzine series, New American Review.

DFW

Is Frank Norris unfashionable?

Probably, certainly more so than DFW, who remains ubiquitous in a lot of reading communities: if DFW seems unfashionable because he's been canonized and posthumously sentimentalized so quickly, Norris seems unfashionable because, while some of his work is still in print, it's not clear who still reads him outside academic contexts.

The interesting thing about this thread, I think, is the question of who is being presupposed as the arbiter of fashion from post to post: the unfashionableness of obscurity seems different from the unfashionableness of middlebrow success, past or present.

Xposts Damn really? McTeague really rocked bones as a high school student!

rocked my bones, I should say

(Obviously the discourse of high/middle/lowbrow art is objectionable in all sorts of ways, as should go without saying on ILX, and there should be a more scrupulous word than middlebrow for the success of "the Franzens of their time".)

Xp

I mean, I'm sure people other than students and critics working on American naturalism still read Harris, it's just not clear to me who does, which again points to the way reading communities differ unpredictably.

Norris, I mean

fans of wheat, enemies of the oppressor

I should say that I'm a veritable ignoramus wrt to literary criticism etc

Lol I'm well aware that DFW inspired style is ubiquitous.. Still worth rallying against / waving 2x4s around

Another Frank Norris fan here--found McTeague hilarious. His lesser work can be fairly shabby, but when he was on form he was amazing.

mcteague is the only one of his i've read /outsidetheacademy

was an avid reader of john fowles & lawrence durrell in my teens. both had commercial success/critical appreciation in their day... not so sure now.

do people still read the likes of eric linklater and nevil shute? always associate them with cheap book club editions.

never read but curious: w. somerset maugham

I was going to mention Nevil Shute, too - 'A Town Like Alice' was actually a set book at my school, and 'On the Beach' belongs to that always intriguing class of science fiction books written by non-science fiction authors.

Desmond Bagley, Hammond Innes, Dennis Wheatley, even Alistair MacLean - forgotten UK thriller writers

i actually read about 'mcteague' in dfw's first novel, and thought he was a joke author dfw had made up as part of the on-going problems he had with naturalist tendencies in fiction

and thought norris was a joke author, that is, not mcteague, who was a real fictional dentist

'the NYRB treatment' as morrison puts it is a hell of a thing: i can hardly imagine finding myself reading anything unfashionable enough to manage to fall outside their purview.

do people still read john hawkes? or robert coover? or john barth? all those blazing mod lights that were required on hepcat bookshelves once upon a time. feel like pynchon is the one who came out smelling like a rose. when was the last time anyone read john rechy? a lot of grove press shockers have become old hat i suppose.

unfashionable can mean lots of things obviously. i take it all into consideration. out of print. not read as much by readers/writers/academics now. not talked about. not used as inspiration by current writers. not politically/socially in vogue. but they should have had SOME sort of presence/importance in the past. obviously john rechy will always have a place in history and in queer lit classes but i don't think very many people read him at all anymore. and i'm suspicious about a lot of people who bought his books originally reading them either because every hardcover i see is completely pristine and looks untouched.

(i don't read him now either and i never got very far into his books. though his flat mod affectless prose certainly inspired the hell out of a lot of people i read in the 80's. i can see tao lin being a fan! as dennis cooper was in my youth.)

I read City of Night in the 80s, and it seemed very earnest, kind of old-fashioned in that way, although up-front/non-"graphic" with the sex, which was always part of the latest situation: all adding up to a soap opera for our times? I kind of thought so, though not too assuredly, since it was unfamiliar territory, situation- and reading-wise (I also thought it might be influenced by Kerouac and other Beat novelists, but I'd never read any of them either). A *good* soap opera, mind you: I've always been a big fan of Giant, and some other movies based on novels by Edna Ferber (speaking of unfashionable---is she worth reading??)
"Norris died young, before he got his shit together," I once said on another thread---he was a knock-about freelancer, who did his share of raffish hackery, incl. an enjoyable parody-in-passing of Stephen Crane---but I enjoy the way the way his skills, talent and nascent artistry (a little flame, darting around the pen-pushing) make their way through his merely personal and sometimes stupid opinions and beliefs: he thinks McTeague the Swede is a lesser breed, for instance. Also, he was the son of a railroad baron, which brings out interesting tensions in The Octopus. Those are the only two Norris novels I've read.
PKD could make more of such inner drama, especially in Valis, though of course he lived longer, wrote more, and was prob more talented. But Norris is worth checking out, if you're into 19th-20th Century cusp conflict.

The whole middlebrow etc. thing can make for good exercise, when you're not reading something that isn't obviously Great Literature, via critical approval and/or certain classy magnets in the text(which could make it killer, if not Great): "If I like/don't like this, what does that say about me? How do I read my reading, how do I read me?"

not reading something that *is* obviously etc., I meant.

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.

"I like "Knots" by R D Laing."

i do too! it's cool.

"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..."

lol, still life with woodpecker was PROFOUND, man! i'm with you there. but they served their purpose. i can't look at hunter thompson now in the same way i can't look at a lot of lester bangs now. makes me wince. and the beats should be buried on the bottom of the ocean.

i do wonder what i would think if i read herman hesse now at my advanced age.

also, brautigan was kinda cool in a weird way that maybe people don't remember or give him credit for. i sometimes wish he had just been a short story writer and never done the whimsical poetry thing. there was some element of thurber in his later stories and novels. very deadpan and funny and not shaggy hippie dog at all. stuff like the hawkline monster is unlike a lot of books! (but yeah i haven't read them since the 80's...i think i still have his goofy mystery novel. maybe i'll read that again.)

One of the things I like about Brautigan is that he was the cover star of his own books.

And that Auberon Waugh, of all people, was a big Brautigan fan.

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.

Great list! I think

Brautigan / Vonnegut / Thompson / Robbins

really makes sense as a category of writers whose style is really unfashionable now. I loved Brautigan and Vonnegut once upon a time and feel confident I still would.

Smith is still fashionable (and is great)

Walker I'm not sure ever was, though she was popular

Amis (I assume you mean Martin) and Rushdie another good category: the big, dense, stylistically flashy novel about The World And Everything. American version of this maybe Tom Wolfe, another good example of this (once taken seriously as Important American Writer, now kind of sniffed at I think?)

Dreaming of Babylon?

No, but I have some time for Willard and His Bowling Trophies.

i sometimes wish he had just been a short story writer

Do you know "A Short History of Oregon"? It shows what he could have done. But can you blame him for choosing San Francisco in the 1960s after a poor white trash childhood?

This makes me want to try to map Michael Chabon's career onto REM's -- like, you have the early phase of his work which was loved by critics and in retrospect is really the best

Mysteries of Pittsburgh = Murmur
Wonder Boys = Reckoning

then the gigantic hit that makes them a household name but in the end you don't find yourself going back to it

Kavalier & Clay = whichever of Out of Time and Automatic for the People you don't like anymore

then the ambitious later work that's actually really good but didn't really find its market

Yiddish Policeman's Union = New Adventures in Hi-Fi

and then a lot of other stuff that comes later and that true fans find merit in but no one pays attention to

Telegraph Avenue, Moonglow, etc. = Reveal, Accelerate, etc.

Haha to prove yr point I don't know which ones on your last line are REM and which ones are Chabon, any could be either afaict.

I don't think Chabon ever had a Monster that's a mainstay of every used bookstore in America, though

is there any kind of tool on the internet for seeing how frequently the names of various authors appear in academic papers over the years?

Lol: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Ernest+Hemmingway%2C+Martin+Amis&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CErnest%20Hemmingway%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CMartin%20Amis%3B%2Cc0

You could use Google Scholar as a kind of proxy for this, you can search "since year x" or maybe for all I know in a custom range

Hemingway does better if you spell his name right though https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Ernest+Hemingway%2CMartin+Amis&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CErnest%20Hemingway%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CMartin%20Amis%3B%2Cc0

hah yeah good point!

who was the Martin Amis that was briefly prominent from 1886-1892?

Brautigan / Vonnegut / Thompson / Robbins

really makes sense as a category of writers whose style is really unfashionable now.

I didn't discover Brautigan until my early 30s but I still love him, especially the later stuff.

I think Thompson and Vonnegut are still pretty fashionable with younger readers.

I think Kesey feels really unfashionable and has for quite a while. Whenever I mentally compile a list of favorite novels, Sometimes a Great Notion is way up there, but I wonder how much of that is due to being much younger when I read it.

Yeah Robbins is the hippie Salinger

I don't think Chabon ever had a Monster that's a mainstay of every used bookstore in America, though

As a weird and terrible outlier, his Sherlock Holmes novella - called, ugh, The Final Solution - is very, very, very bad. This would be Monster (which I like!) if every song on it was "Bang and Blame".

I hated Pittsburgh after the great opening chapters, but Wonder Boys & Kavalier I would happily reread someday, although I have a sinking feeling that Kavalier has not aged well. Maybe it's the 2000s take on the "stylistically flashy novel about The World And Everything".

Brautigan - Actually this thread has persuaded me to try him again. Only read Sombrero Floats as a teen but remember *loving* it.

hate Chabon so much, I sure hope he's finally unfashionable

i feel like i saw kavalier paperbacks everywhere for years. thrift stores, etc.

yeah that book was huuuuuuge

I read Kavalier in 2004 and it seemed like every time I had the book on public transport or at a cafe, someone would approach me and be, like, "oh gosh, I love that book". It was weird! Never happened to me for any other book. And, you know, in the height of my "twentysomething bad hair no deodorant" phase, people were generally not breaking down doors to chat to me otherwise.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was a massive influence on me and my sexuality. I was aware of its deficiencies (e.g. way too indebted to Gatsby, indifferent gangland shit), still recommend it.

my dad bought me that book for my birthday when it came out. i think he had read something good about it. and i know for sure he didn't know there was any gay content or he probably wouldn't have bought it for me. because homophobia. i liked it.

i think i probably liked it more than bright lights/less than.

There are some pretty fine sentences in Mysteries of Pittsburgh. One about the "snapped spine of a lemon wedge at the bottom of a drink" is still in my mind. And I'm quite sure haven't read the book in more than 20 years.

It was very influential on me and my social circle but I would not recommend it as a guide to life. (Of course almost no novel is a good guide to life, with a few exceptions like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.)

If MoP was the only Chabon people read, and he subsequently vanished from sight, I think that would be okay. I cannot and will not defend every subsequent career move he's made.

Ditto Wallace's Girl with Curious Hair. I don't THINK I am a "DFW bro" but I like that book a lot.

Ditto Franzen's Twenty-Seventh City, which remains a sentimental favorite of mine because it's set in my home town. It treads a line between being a conventional thriller and a reasonably perceptive realist novel.

based on his first two collections, he's a sharper story writer than novelist -- the American disease.

Yeah Robbins is the hippie Salinger

I swear to God he is

"I like "Knots" by R D Laing."

i do too! it's cool.

― scott seward, Wednesday, June 21, 2017 12:59 PM (eight hours ago)

i also love this book, glad to find other fans of it