What desperately unfashionable writers do you really like?

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