What desperately unfashionable writers do you really like?

"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.

most of the stuff i love is firmly in the middle. i mean i love a lot of the "greats" too but i don't really spend a lot of time reading them anymore. maybe when i'm older. ILB spurred me on to finally read Flaubert many moons ago when we had a book club thing going and i'm really glad i did just in case i died in a freak accident or something and never got old enough to read him when i got older.

i'm not even sure what current HIGH would be in 2016. that people actually read. lotsa middle and low. i guess there is still fancy poetry that more than 10 people read. actually, you guys here seem to read a lot of stuff that seems to fit the definition of high.

Reminds me: while you haven't gotten into Ulysses, I think, based on what you do like, you might dig Dubliners.

i loved dubliners when i was a teen. haven't read it since. i should read it again.

i get most of my HIGH from movies. and music. they just put up a bunch of Kieslowski movies on Hulu and i'm gonna watch some of those. and right now i'm listening to a ROUSING production of Romeo & Juliet by Berlioz (Boston/Ozawa). which will be followed by Tchaikovsky's Romeo & Juliet (San Francisco/Ozawa). as close as i get to Shakespeare too....

Xp

It's true I don't really hear people talking about Rechy these days (and when I do, it's almost always about "City of Night"), but I have been meaning to read his early work, soap operatic or not, if mostly out of interest in pre-Stonewall trans streetlife, and because I imagine it occupies a space similar to that of early Hubert Selby ("Last Exit" made a strong though discouraging impact on me as a closeted teenager).

(Selby is probably one of the "grove press shockers" who has less of a charge today, though...)

i'm pretty sure if i read The Room again by Selby i would be just as shocked and horrified. that book is a monster. he had a profound effect on me in the old days. but he should kinda be a genre of one. though punks will probably always seek him out.

i actually read one of his later books and enjoyed it. Waiting Period. his last book.

Yeah, it's been years since I've read him and I'm not sure how I would respond to his work now, but my feelings about "Last Exit" will probably always be colored by the fact that when I was 12 or 13, "The Queen is Dead" was one of maybe three narratives about trans women I had access to that weren't just jokes about men in dresses.

I know Selby Jr and Coover have both recently been Penguin Classics-ed in the UK. As to whether that leads to many more people reading them... It made me give Coover a second shot, I guess, but I didn't like it any more than my first one.

I still read all these dudes but they do seem out of vogue to me

coover's latest novel reads like just-slightly-higher-brow stephen king

Hubert Selby Jr is one of those that I always intend to revisit - I had intended to read all of the five novels in a stretch. Brutal yet tender and funny is how I recall it.

Don't think he is "desperately unfashionable". Ok so there are no plans for making any films out of his work, but still, he talks about things that are too present to feel out of time, or conversation.

a lot of people still like that one film

:-(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gregory_Dunne

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.)

― scott seward, Sunday, January 10, 2016 10:21 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and it'd be interesting to hold some sort of poll or something here to see who the 50-100 most "important/remembered/admired" authors ever are

a lot of people still like that one film

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51C802BXB5L.jpg

Coover - who I still read with great pleasure - seems like a clear influence on someone like Ben Lerner, and he's had recentish work published in McSweeney's, so I think his reputation has by and large held up, at least as a kind of grizzled-vet-of-the-avant-garde (whereas yes, John Barth already feels like a fogotten figure.)

james branch cabell.

man i've been meaning to read cabell for so long

Coover - who I still read with great pleasure - seems like a clear influence on someone like Ben Lerner, and he's had recentish work published in McSweeney's, so I think his reputation has by and large held up, at least as a kind of grizzled-vet-of-the-avant-garde (whereas yes, John Barth already feels like a forgotten figure.)

― Chicamaw (Ward Fowler), Monday, January 11, 2016 9:02 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

on the other hand, ben lerner's novels are the epitome of poshlust and anyone publishing work in mcsweeney's this decade is impossibly naff --

I've been kind of amazed to discover what a huge deal Anthony Powell was, even quite recently - I'd somehow managed to reach almost 30 with only the very vaguest awareness that he'd ever existed, whereas I think I were even ten years older he'd register as a much bigger name. I suppose this is probably the exact peak of his unfashionability, somehow.

Anyway 'Dance' is the best.

XPOST
Ben Lerner and McSweeney's are not the gang I would ideally take into hipster battle w/ me, but as John T. Chance says in Rio Bravo, "That's what I've got." And the Coover story in McSweeney's, printed on large size playing cards, really is a beauty - they did him proud.

I've got a three volume set of Dance to the Music of Time tied in to the C4 TV adaptation - which, looking up now, I'm amazed to see is nearly twenty years old.

I didn't know it was adapted for TV. If I can catch it (check youtube later) that might be an option.

It was pretty well done, though shorn of a lot of things that make the Dance... novels so interesting, in particular the vast array of characters and their periodic disappearance and re-emergence. Simon Russell Beale is excellent as Widmerpool, though.

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