american fiction of the early 90s

last summer i was at value village (which is like goodwill but cdn i think) and somebody had donated a bunch of early 90s serious guy books in hardcover ('vineland', 'mao ii', 'the barnum museum', 'rabbit at rest') which i bough and have been reading over the last 14 months or so. they seem to share a kind of illusive sensibility w/ both each other and some of the other roughly contemporaneous stuff i associate w/ that time period - 'the border trilogy', 'american psycho', maybe 'the broom of the system' and im kinda interested in fleshing out some of the ideas i have abt these books but dont really know what else to read

so i was curious if anyone had any recommendations abt books from this time period but also if im right abt there being a few throughlines specific to the 80s hangover period - specifically an interest in adopting some of the tropes of genre (partic. male genres like scifi and the western) and using the 'shock of violence' as a formal play. but also the prose, this idea of 'denseness' that seems impt. w/o being too vague i also think theres a preoccupation with 'mass media' or 'mass culture/consciousness' thats impt as well

a couple of things spurred this: one was thinking a bit abt the formal qualities of 'ada' and how much it seemed like a book from this time period the other is 'the marriage plot' and the vogue of 'theory' a decade or so earlier, another is the way that some of these same preoccupations are reemerging again in american lit. this is probably too loose and big an idea for a successful thread but idk, well see i guess

Richard Ford's The Sportswriter was published in '95 but is still suffused with that getting-over-the-sixties trope of the seventies and eighties.

stuff like this was why I spent the early 90s reading George Eliot & Herman Melville

imo ford firmly belongs to another well, not tradition, but lets say group of writers with different preoccupations (haha that being their dicks) that also have a much different quality to their prose, no interest in genre, no real interest in capital-i Ideas &c updike belongs to both camps imo (although maybe i havent read enough updike)

i think my idea as presented here is probably too amorphous to be useful, idk

fwiw in my mind the other big preoccupation w/ serious american lit in this time period was identity - obv all the writers i can think of fitting into my first post are (white) dudes, have no real sense how these too (made up by me?) groups related w/each other or w/in the 'culture'

I think the early '90s was a time when the influence of Pynchon was in the ascendant: "postmodern" use of genre trappings, density of prose, society as conspiracy-theory. Other books I associate with this period: Martin Amis "London Fields", Denis Johnson "Jesus' Son", Mark Leyner "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist".

paul auster-mania

i would still recommend The Things They Carried. meta-fiction/autobio that was good. at least i think that came out in the 90's.

although my fave american white dudes of the 90's were probably larry brown, barry hannah, thom jones, harry crews. tough guys! and they had all probably read a lot of hemingway or something.

though they all fucked with genre/form/etc. in their way.

so i guess i prefer hardboiled dudes who might be worshipped by the french instead of dudes who might wish to be french.

chris offutt. i liked him too. another tough guy. but not andre dubus. his name is too french.

chris offutt also hasn't put out any more fiction since the 90's as far as i know.

cannot honestly think of books with more different approaches/ends than the ones lamp lists in his opening post, though i think i get what he's getting at

late 80s/early 90s seems like one of those pauses between falling/rising "schools"

minimalism burned out and those claimed for it struggling in search of where next, neo-meta stuff still consigned to the margins but would rear itself to prominence by mid to late 90s, 60s dudes on the way out entirely

delillo and mccarthy feel like outliers here, but maybe its telling that this was when they'd finally ascend into the canon?

what i was reading usa fic-wise, early 90s, was: beat (burroughs) post-beat (tosches, meltzer, dennis cooper) old guard experimental (ballard, gaddis, selby jr, donald bartheleme, robert coover who is always GREAT). so i guess i had the mindset that ppl like ellis, delillo, auster, mccarthy, ford etc etc were to some extent 'mainstream' guys, the 'establishment' - THE MAN, literally as well as figuratively - sold in wankmags like playboy, vanity fair, cushioned by academia blah blah. all bullshit of course but - in my actual experience of meeting similar fellow readers - not an uncommon feeling then, maybe not uncommon now.

american psycho, which i love, is obv partly inspired by/riffing on thomas harris, who is in his way a BIG part of this kind of fiction in the early 90s (hasn't martin amis spent his post-Money career trying - and failing! - to emulate some of the atmosphere/feeling of 'masculine' crisis as found in Silence of the Lambs, or some of james ellroy's major bks?)

i can't read richard ford or john updike. i've tried. i've really tried.

no offense to any of their family, friends, or fans.

how do you feel abt raymond carver, scott? i remember tosches REALLY slagging carver off in something or other.

i liked him a LOT in the 80's. a ton. i feel funny now knowing the whole editing/re-writing story, but, heck, some of those stories are just some of the best amerikan short stories. period. no matter how they got written.

still kinda wonder how i would have felt about carver back then if i had known about richard yates back then!

I discovered Alice Munro in the early nineties, and in my mind this is the period when she really hit her stride.

i mean, yates wins any and all devastating/excruciating small moment prizes in ameri-lit.

i don't think i actually started reading her that early. unless i read some new yorker stories and just don't remember. probably later 90's for me. fave living fiction writer at the moment. now that muriel spark is dead. and janet frame. r.i.p.

Mine too.

Lamp, I know I've railed against this exact moment/movement in fic before, because I HATE IT, like I really cannot read it without throwing things, and I guess I was looking for fiction with "credibility" in the mid/late '90s when this stuff was out in PB and solidifying as "cannon" for its era, and I got it recommended to me ALL THE TIME. So I will be reading this thread with increasing excitement that this was a moment and is not some kind of universal fiction truism.

There's someone that I always mistake for being W Gaddis, btw, another novel about a white academic man having a midlife crisis/thinking with his (declining) libido, wrote a book that is called The...Something-ist? Not The Intuitionist. It has a scene in which he believes himself to be floating around with some young nubile waitress from the diner where he goes to eat w his academic colleagues...WHAT is it called??

The Intuitionist, Donald Antrim

cannot honestly think of books with more different approaches/ends than the ones lamp lists in his opening post

yeah, thats why the strong but hard to articulate sense of commonality struck me so much, i think! what you say abt the time being a pause is good too - im really interested in these periods of flux where there are no real 'dominant' styles and all sorts of undercurrents and revivals start to play out in, as ward fowler puts it, the 'mainstream'. like i can think of dennis copper as fitting into this moment ('frisk' is 91) but he certainly predates it, selby as well.

btw is o.nate right that pynchon is probably the impt touchstone here? society as conspiracy-theory is p perfect

also i def should have mentioned noir/detective fiction in my first part probably as influential as science fiction or westerns

There's someone that I always mistake for being W Gaddis, btw, another novel about a white academic man having a midlife crisis/thinking with his (declining) libido, wrote

Gaddis doesn't have any novels like this BTW

yeah fwiw i dont really think of gaddis as 'belonging' in this, which is partly abt a specific time period...

i like alice munro more than any other writer listed itt and maybe more than any other writer alive right now but i def dont think this is her 'moment'. in some ways im interested in how much this stuff is posed against the sort of spare, elegant, moment-of-truth fiction that i associate her with (and with being dominant in the culture like a decade later? idk theres a real danger of this just all being in my head isnt there). like i think of this kind of stuff as coming out of the academy rather than like, the newyorker/paris review culture? its probably less adversarial than that tho

xxp Oh well that explains it! I kept thinking "The Intuitionist!" and telling myself it was the Colson Whitehead one about elevators. Donald Antrim. I don't know why I confuse him w Gaddis. Maybe they were recommended in the same thread. It was Antrim I meant to include in the thread category.

NO!!!! It's The Verificationist!!!!

oh shit that's what i meant

i think of that one as "The Pancake Supper"

It's okay, you gave me Antrim, that was all I needed.

mr. que what do you think of this thread?

is pynchon like lester bangs or someone like that. like oh yeah he's good but DON'T EVER DO THAT. cuz i can't think of any pynchon-esque writers that i like and i think a LOT of 90's people were definitely in his camp. dfw definitely the mostest.

well i like nicholson baker okay but he's probably more of a barthelme kinda guy maybe.

been thinking hard about books to add to it. weird stuff like the shipping news. i was thinking lives of the monster dogs fits in here but turns out that was late 90's. i worked in a bookstore during the late 90's it's all confusing

. . . your inheritors of the Roth/Updike scene (Moody, Franzy Pants, Eugenedies, DFW) hadn't written anything "major" yet, it was a weird time. Garden State, The Ice Storm, Virgin Suicides, Broom, 27th City.

i gotta say alice munro does not fit in here (with what you're talking about) but the early 90's i feel is like when she took the fuck off. Open Secrets. and let's not forget Birds of America, though i think that was 98 or 99.

steve erickson, lamp you read him? seems like he might fit into your category

i've never actually read the "famous" baker books though. like vox.

I had Donald Antrim's father Harry as a teacher in grad school (he was one of FIU's founders) -- one of the few gentlemen I've met.

i don't think alice munro belongs here either. but i will use any excuse to talk about her.

Richard Ford's The Sportswriter was published in '95 but is still suffused with that getting-over-the-sixties trope of the seventies and eighties.

Pretty sure The Sportswriter *was* an 80s novel!

vox is pretty blah, i'm kinda blah on baker. i read the mezzanine for the first time pretty recently, kinda not very good. remember zero about the fermata.

yeah alice is perfect. even her so so stuff just kills.

anyone like Jernigan by David Gates? that was 91, probably read it more towards the end of the 90s. one of those downward spiral of a fuck-up novels. speaking of which, i associate the early 90s with Russell Banks even tho Continental Drift and Affliction were written a few years earlier.

oh man i have only read one r. banks, the bus one. i couldn't stand it.

sweet hereafter? didn't read that one

i tried really hard to get into richard powers but i just couldn't do it. serious brainiac a la pynchon. operation wandering soul is pretty much textbook 90's endtimes for america where are we going and where have we been clorox commercials around every bend please lord save us wait we aren't good enough to be saved kinda deal.

oh man richard powers. i could *never* get into that guy.

Pretty sure The Sportswriter *was* an 80s novel!

I meant Independence Day.

I was working in a bookstore then too and I read some of that stuff: Garden State I loved because it was the first novel I ever read about New Jersey and it had indie rock references. Virgin Suicides, shit, we used to recite entire passages of that to each other at work. Does Mysteries of Pittsburgh fit in here? Lives of the Monster Dogs is just...bizarre??? I never understood why/that it was "a thing"!!

Loooool at "Franzy Pants".

i read trailerpark by russell banks and thought i really liked it until i realized that it might as well be filed under fantasy/science fiction cuz its so friggin' implausible. maybe if stephen king had written it this wouldn't have bothered me so much.

richard ford is way too much of an asshole in real life for me to read him

He published a collection of novellas in the nineties -- I liked it. Nothing else has stood out, although I used to teach "Rock Springs" my first couple years.

updike loved richard powers, no? i remember him raving about him more than once.

I also vaguely remember some novel about a guy who lost all his teeth by diving head-first out of a window at a party, and couldn't afford to have them replaced by a reputable doctor so he went to Mexico and got them done cheap, but shoddy, and after that he couldn't go in airplanes because of the air pockets. Yes, I only remember plot points, not names or styles or anything.

where does Coupland fit here? obv he has bunch of 90s tics but he doesn't seem to fit into the camps proposed by Lamp. i guess the "preoccupation with mass culture" bit.

no desire to read him again tbh.

did we mention T. Coraghessan Boyle?

I also vaguely remember some novel about a guy who lost all his teeth by diving head-first out of a window at a party, and couldn't afford to have them replaced by a reputable doctor so he went to Mexico and got them done cheap, but shoddy, and after that he couldn't go in airplanes because of the air pockets. Yes, I only remember plot points, not names or styles or anything.

pretty sure this book is called "the Bible"

i was all ready to love richard russo in the 90s - cuz my realism streak is a mile wide and i really liked mohawk and the risk pool - but then his books all became casting calls. i couldn't read them without thinking about who they were gonna get for the movie. and then i stopped reading them. this happened with me and my beloved richard price too. the movie-ness of his stuff started to bug me. even though he can still write and everything. (and people still tell me i should read that last one but i never want to.)

where does Coupland fit here?

i actually think of the publication of 'generation x' as heralding the end of this moment, or maybe just the solidification of a new dominant school/theme/style

i mean its interesting because '27th city' has some vague pynchonian elements, theres a weirdness to it that his later big novels lack that seems p imitative in hindsight to me

richard powers is garbage imo, i also think he belongs w/coupland as sorta post-93 anxieties (lol technology, 'information')

steve erickson, lamp you read him? seems like he might fit into your category

― Mr. Que, Friday, November 11, 2011 9:22 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark

william t vollman? he seems a p marginal figure here in the uk, is he a big deal in the us?

Norman Rush fit somewhere? Mating is spot-on for the time period.

I was reading and loving Steve Erickson, Lorrie Moore, Nicholson Baker, DeLillo at the time. Read and hated Brett Easton Ellis. Was aware of the burgeoning cults of William T Vollmann and Harold Brodkey. Quite liked Donna Tartt.

The Secret History! I haven't thought of that one in ages.

steve erickson, lamp you read him? seems like he might fit into your category

i have but not in a long time and tbh i now associate him with the v v similarly named fantasy author (with an n, no c)

Was studying at Reed, pretty much living in Powell's bookstore, hitching up and down to California in 90-91 so Vineland seems to sum up that time for me - the reckoning with the 60s, a belated disgust at the 80s and the ongoing fiasco of Bush I/Iraq I.

Stevie, is there STILL a Brodkey cult? just the other week i saw a hardback uk first edition of the runaway soul for sale at a pound in the junkroom of a local 2nd hand bookship and thought that that was a very melancholy object/reminder of the way reputations rise and fall. brodkey's story - grand lifework's revealed, finally, as a bit of a dud - seems so much more fascinating than his actual work (which, the little i've dabbled w/, struck me as fairly trad beautifully polished old school new yorker/'high' style modern narrative lit - am i missing something?) who would you say is brodkey-esque?)

i loved stories in an almost classical mode when i read it way back when. pretty goddamn proustian for an american. they must love HIM in france, right? maybe edmund white is a bit brodkey-esque. they do love him in france, that much i know.

with brodkey pretty sure you just need first love and other sorrows and stories in an almost classical mode. then you are done.

xposts

I guess not. But at the time it seemed like he was going to be a big deal? I never finished The Runaway Soul.

brodkey not read much now kinda like thomas wolfe not read much now. who wrote a book in the 90's that is still hotter than a firecracker? maybe american psycho is the the great american novel of the 90's after all.

i still haven't read american psycho.

I got to Brodkey upon reading Edmund White's memoir City Boy last year (and he's cited, rather contemptuously, by James Wolcott in HIS new memoir). First Love, Stories...they're pretty good, the best punctuated by odd rhythms. But I don't know if he'll last, so to speak.

Stories has some super intense moments that seemingly go on forever and that can be quite hypnotic and they can make you forget where you are. so don't read while walking.

i can't read vollmann to save my life either. zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.... but people who love him love him and they probably all love pynchon too. i don't.

yeah i could not get into you bright and risen angels at all

vollmann like some inscrutable indie rock band that puts out 20 albums and people rave about them and when i listen my mind wanders and i want to hear something else. like polvo or tortoise.

yup. i'm on his team, though.

i liked pynchon ok when i read him, but gaddis stole my heart when he finally clicked with me. i think if i revisited pynchon i would be shrugging a lot.

post-rock lit.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/jan/11/edmund-white-city-boy

One of the finest, and most poignant, passages about the vagaries of literary fame concerns a writer that almost no one will now remember: the New Yorker writer Harold Brodkey. For a generation, by means of brilliant self-promotion, the advocacy of some powerful local editors and sheer will, Brodkey contrived to present (dare I say, market) himself as an unrecognised genius at work on an unfinished masterpiece – a kind of Manhattan Proust. Tantalising extracts of his magnum opus would appear as short stories in the New Yorker and, whenever there was a new Brodkey extract, everyone would nod wisely and declare that here – yes, indeed! – was something out of the ordinary; something that, in the fullness of time, would reshape the course of American letters.

I well remember how the contract for this unpublished work of genius was traded among the major US publishers like a down-payment on an automatic rendezvous with posterity. According to White, Robert ("Bob") Gottlieb was persuaded to put down $1m for the rights, sight unseen. (From what I know of Gottlieb, a shrewd operator with excellent judgment and a sharp eye for phonies, this is unlikely, but let that pass…) When Brodkey's great novel, The Runaway Soul, was finally published on both sides of the Atlantic by credulous publishers who had fallen for the hype, it was swiftly exposed for what it was: an over-inflated dud.

Maybe Wild Darkness might be ok though, Manhattan Proust might be hard to resist.

people REMEMBER brodkey for heavens sake. and honestly those first two collections are worth reading. a very writer for other writers type of writer. if you like reaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllyyyyy long sentences and obsessional detail you would dig them.

but yeah runaway soul is for people who like to hurt themselves.

actually the sentences in the first collection aren't as long. i don't think. its been a while.

I like reaaaaaa lonnnnggg blah blah, sure I see this guy in 2nd hand bookshops all the time so I'll have a look.

here is where i recommend mating by norman rush without even checking the thread

woof beat me

not sure if it fits the specs in your op, Lamp, except for dense prose, depending on what you mean by that.

do people still read robert stone. started in the 60's, but got more buzz in the 90's. like cormac. outerbridge reach was on everyone's lips! i liked a flag for sunrise and that book had that jaded delillo shadowy thing going on in a big way.

actually the sentences in the first collection aren't as long. i don't think. its been a while.

They are very different collections. The second one is a damn grad bag of stuff.

yeah the second one is chunks of novel or whatever. but its still impressive. or was to me when i read it.

haha scott for god's sakes don't mention robert stone when horseshoe's around.

(i still like him, fwiw.)

listen he's a very good writer and i'm a shrew

oh, stop.

you know what it is, robert stone seemed so important to people during that culture war moment in the 90s. i took a class with this guy who always acted really put-upon that he had to read books by women of color and was really anxious that the books we were reading weren't Great. his favorite contemporary writer was robert stone, so i always felt like, fuck you and fuck your precious robert stone, too. that is a little embarrassing to admit.

stuff like this was why I spent the early 90s reading George Eliot & Herman Melville

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Friday, November 11, 2011 2:00 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Can we all just take a moment to appreciate this post

in re vollman europe central is worth reading, not perfect (he seems completely tone-deaf regarding sex to me which is weird because he has this rep for writing a lot about sex I guess?) but a good storyteller for sure. although also clearly so deeply in debt to russians who do it better than him that you sorta wonder what the point is. still I have plans to read several more of his, he seems like a Major Figure of the present even if he gets there partly just by writing so much.

(I seriously think that generally speaking literature originally written in English has pretty much not been where it's at for a long time...in Spanish alone you can rack up a decent list of recent grand masters who'll run the table against the best the U.S./Canada/England have to offer post-60s imo)

no

Having just finished a spectacular 600-pg Anthony Burgess novel, I'm inclined to agree.

but only b/c it's Friday night and I've had wine.

the phrase 'grand masters' as aero is using is making me incredibly angry for some reason lol @ me

It's true though that my favorite living writers are straight-up "realists" like Munro, William Trevor, and Hollinghurst.

he seems like a Major Figure of the present even if he gets there partly just by writing so much

well europe central is the only major work of fiction he's even published in the last ten years

otoh he published several lifetimes' worth in the '90s so

i feel like all of my Favorite Living Writers (at least among native english speakers) have seriously gone off the boil in the last ten years

that means it is your turn!

watch out franzen, there's a new misanthropic middle class white sheriff in town

(lol sorry that makes it seem like i once considered j-franz one of my Favorite Living Writers)

i feel like all of my Favorite Living Writers (at least among native english speakers) have seriously gone off the boil in the last ten years

dude subscribe to open letter & archipelago & buy that yearly year's best european fiction thing from Dalkey, come on over to the fucked up & awesome side of reading almost exclusively literature in translation

i really liked sterling's review of vollmann's 7-volume violene thing. even though there is no way in hell i would ever read it:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2003-12-09/books/ultra-violence/

violence

"rising up and rising down" certainly is...something.

too bad we can't get vollmann's take on the joe paterno thread

mostly it made me want to read more s. clover book reviews.

i still have never read any franzen. i've looked inside his books, but....eh, i don't think they are my kinda thing.

i can't say i'm a big moody/lethem guy either. there's something missing from them...

i just don't believe them or something. or believe in them.

i think its the indie rock thing again...

sorry for "grand masters" by the way Lamp I didn't know what else to say to mean "writers who actually kick as as vs. writers who're hot who'll be completely consigned to oblivion shortly and never spoken of by any future readers"

richard fuckin ford, fifty years from now exactly nobody remembers richard ford, like not even his children

moody is not very good. i have still never read lethem.

franzen is fine imo, but he is no strongo.

VOLLMANN

Anyway, so when I was in Thailand, I went to a town in the south and bought a young girl for the night. This awful brothel -- one of these places hidden behind a flowershop with all these tunnels and locked doors and stuff -- was like a prison. I tried to help a couple of the girls but you just can’t get them out. I tried and I couldn’t. I made the mistake of going to the police, trying to have the police get them out. All that did was nearly get them arrested and put in jail, because the police are paid off. I managed to get the raid called off by taking all the cops out to dinner and buying them Johnnie Walker. I bought this fourteen-year-old girl and got her in a truck and drove like hell to Bangkok. I was with this other girl at the time, Yhone-Yhone, a street prostitute, a very happy one. She was my interpreter. She put the fourteen-year-old girl at ease and got her to trust me. We got her set up at a school run by a relative of the king of Thailand. I went up north, met her father, gave him some money, and got a receipt for his daughter. He didn’t know she’d been sold to a brothel. When I met him and told him he said, Oh. I didn’t know that, but, well, whatever she wants. He’s not a bad guy, just a total loser. He’s a former Chiang Kai-shek soldier. They’re all squatters there in Thailand. They can’t read or write. He lives on dried dogs and dried snakes.

INTERVIEWER

You own his daughter?

VOLLMANN

That’s right. I own her. She doesn’t particularly like me, but she was really happy to be out of that place.

^^ this fuckin' guy.

richard ford will be the john marquand of his day! although some people actually remember mr. moto.

the c.p. snow of his day?

who cares who will be remembered? it stresses me out to approach reading that way.

yeah i don't get vollmann. the joyless sex tourism thing is not where i want to be, thanks.

oh i don't really care. i just see books by old best-selling writers all the time and you realize thst hardly anyone remembers their names.

that was directed at aero, not you!

shit there are writers who are still "names" who aren't read now. who stumps for big norm mailer at this point?

john marquand sold a ton more books than richard ford too. they are quite different.

i do tbh

xp

or burroughs! poor ol' burroughs.

i think some people must still like norman mailer, right? there have to be.

people still like vonnegut a ton. he's like mark twain or something by now.

i love mailer, for real

they stopped making the drugs that made burroughs enjoyable. quaaludes. stuff like that.

the only mailers i've read have been a couple of the non-fic ones. i still want to read the c.i.a. novel because i'm vaguely obsessed with that shit.

oh i've only read the nonfiction mailers, too. he's great!

but then i think to myself i've never actually read a john le carre novel and i figure i'd get more jollies out of that

and people just stopped reading kerouac and went straight to bukowski. cut out the middle man. bukowski ended up being the king of the beats.

read some eric ambler, strongo!

and simenon. and greene. you'll be all set.

read brighton rock by graham greene and you'll be like shit why would i even bother with....uh, someone who writes now.

he was nuts.

oh i love greene. us catholics have to stick together.

sorry for "grand masters" by the way Lamp I didn't know what else to say to mean "writers who actually kick as as vs. writers who're hot who'll be completely consigned to oblivion shortly and never spoken of by any future readers"

i really hate the whole 'these are the books that matter, and these are the ones that dont, and im only going to engage with the former' attitude. contemp judgments are so suspect anyway i mean if you like spanish lit that much ok cool theres lots of good books but even not good books are impt to think abt imo

anyway the whole thing came abt because ive been thinking abt the cycle of influence btw genre and literary fiction over the last 50+ years or so, and how each borrows from the other in search of 'credibility' and ppl already get out of discussing/thinking abt genre fiction because 'its not important/serious' enough and i just hate the crabbed and hateful scale thats used to weigh these things...

Brits are so good about writing "minor novels" -- brief, incisive little books. Only Roth is attempting something similar.

I confess I'd be perfectly happy if more novelists emulated Waugh, K. Amis, Spark, Powell, and Joyce Cary.

more pym for me.

i kinda have 80-year old dowager tastes though.

minus the agatha christie novels.

you're the only other elizabeth taylor fan on here, aren't you, alfred?

one thing i think lamp's right about (getting this thread back on track) is that in the late '80/early '90s you had a lot more youngish literary writers openly playing with the fantastical (not so much "genre" elements, though drawing from them), like over-amped magical realism or something. boyle, erickson, jonathan carroll, wallace circa "broom," totally forgotten books like stephen wright's "going native," etc etc. that might have been a reaction to the minimalist stuff but it also felt...different from the '60s and '70s metafiction stuff. again, pynchon is probably the elephant in the room here. ("vineland" seems like a simultaneously over-eager and cranky parody of this type of book.) all of that seemed to get shunted aside once the moody/eugenedies/mcsweeneys thing got enshrined as the young lit movement of the decade.

you start with touch & go and sst (over-amped magical realism) and you end up with thrill jockey and kranky (mcsweeneys).

actually lamp if you haven't read it, "going native" is kind of the apogee of this...trend? vibe? "and using the 'shock of violence' as a formal play. but also the prose, this idea of 'denseness' that seems impt."

i used apogee wrong there but you get what i mean

David Mitchell too.

honestly, nowadays, you are lucky if you get 5 minutes let alone the full 15. if you are a writer. unless you write about zombies.

but Mitchell has more realist in him than he suspects.

The nadir of this library-research assistant approach to foreign lands and exotica is Michael Chabon.

you start with touch & go and sst (over-amped magical realism) and you end up with thrill jockey and kranky (mcsweeneys).

― scott seward, Friday, November 11, 2011 11:08 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Loll

wait, i forgot my fave re: denseness that seems important, shock of violence: scott bradfield! joy williams and him were like my king and queen.

madison smartt bell fits the 90's narrative too.

resuscitation of a hanged man by denis johnson is right in the pocket too. violence, fucking with genre, world-weary, a tough guys don't dance for the clinton years.

not to mention jesus' son which came out right after it. a grove press paperback for the lewinsky generation.

i have not 'going native' but will pick up a copy

yeah i was going to mention 'fiskadoro' but i fell outside the really specific timeframe i was thinking abt. like i dont doubt theres lots of similar themed books but i was sorta curious abt how much these books reflected a kind of 80s hangover, uncertainty at the pyrrhic victory of the_west or w/e

not so much "genre" elements, though drawing from them

yeah, i may be overselling this in part because its what i care abt the most but the traces are very distanced. in part i think my thesis is that these writers are bringing out some of the attitudes/scenarios/imagery from genres that they may have been more invested in as children - the hardboiled and the adventurous - w/o really using specific tropes or ideas. and then in turn you get like new young fantasy and sff writers picking up on the themes in mention in my op and also trying on some of the formal/stylistic tics these writers were using

scott bradfield and joy williams both went nuts by the way. in a good way. they were, style-wise, ahead of the curve, and then they both became more ardently furious and also fiery environmentalists and now i think they just want bears to be here. or pumas, maybe. they are inspirational to me. i still need to read his last book. here's a bookforum review:

Scott Bradfield writes about America like the part-time expat he is. Living half in London, half in the United States, Bradfield keeps a wary distance from his homeland, employing his outcast narrators to do his dirty work: sneaking into suburban neighborhoods and peering into bedroom windows just to reaffirm that a home is nothing but nails and wood. It makes for a creepy reading experience.

His first novel, The History of Luminous Motion (1989), chronicled life on the road as observed through the untamed imagination of an adolescent boy, wandering with his mother through a series of collapsing interpersonal relationships. A sparkling prose belied the grim circumstances.

More than twenty years later, Bradfield's fifth novel, The People Who Watched Her Pass By, is a yet bleaker, less luminous take on itinerancy in contemporary America. Bradfield's landscape is one of sheds, basements, and the ephemeral habits of the homeless: gas stations, diners, towns along freeways. The protagonist is the three-year-old Salome (Sal for short), alone and unable to fend for herself as she is abducted from her family, abandoned, abused, and passed from one adult to another, each one beset by neuroses, each unable to give a small girl the selfless love she needs. Sal spends her time with "Daddy," her innocuous abductor, as well as a depressed landlord, a Laundromat proprietor, a psychiatrist, and a pedophile known as Grandma, whose eyes Sal describes as looking "as if someone had inserted a flashlight through cloth flaps in the back of her head."

Bradfield maintains a tone that is drama-free, even clinical. "They didn't just show you their tears," he writes of Sal's many temporary parents (some legal, some not), "they spilled them all over you, wiping their snotty faces on your clean pink dress. Wrapping you up in their moisture as if they could take you into themselves, into that special place where they were looking forward to you going away."

Sal lumps people together in this "they" way, applying broad strokes to the pariahs around her. She empathizes only with a pat on the back, never a full-body hug, and she becomes sealed off from these monsters, developing a "secret taste for herself." It's probably the right attitude for a child raised by human wolves, and Bradfield evokes her state of mind with cold, precise prose, so we, too, feel nothing for her depraved minders.

Like his farce What's Wrong with America (1994), in which a woman kills her husband so she can be free to watch daytime TV, The People Who Watched Her Pass By is uninterested in superficial compassion. To follow Sal on her wanderings is to drive straight into the Zen void at the heart of the classic road novel. "The future keeps getting smaller every day," Bradfield writes. "And it's taking us with it." Who wants to come along?

There's someone that I always mistake for being W Gaddis, btw, another novel about a white academic man having a midlife crisis/thinking with his (declining) libido, wrote a book that is called The...Something-ist? Not The Intuitionist. It has a scene in which he believes himself to be floating around with some young nubile waitress from the diner where he goes to eat w his academic colleagues...WHAT is it called??

― It means why you gotta be a montague? (Laurel), Friday, November 11, 2011 3:02 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Haha, one of the very first conversations I ever had with Nabisco, like back in 2001-02, was when I ran into him at a coffee shop and he was enthusing about Donald Antrim, possibly this novel.

you're the only other elizabeth taylor fan on here, aren't you, alfred?

Me too! Me too! She's fucking AWESOME.

Never got Rick Moody, and I really wanted to after kind of loving movie of The Ice Storm.

Never read Franzen, but part of it is curmudgeonly reaction to the hype.

Pleased by how much my tastes match Scott's, actually.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41FXD95WMRL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41FXD95WMRL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

is my favourite novel of the early 1990s

(I seriously think that generally speaking literature originally written in English has pretty much not been where it's at for a long time...in Spanish alone you can rack up a decent list of recent grand masters who'll run the table against the best the U.S./Canada/England have to offer post-60s imo)

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Saturday, 12 November 2011 02:45 (8 hours ago)

why put this in brackets when its true..

cause it's kinda off topic. and yeah like...when Lamp says he hates that "only the best will do" attitude, it's not really like that, that's not actually what I mean, so I'm not explaining myself well there. the life of letters relies in large part on minor writers, hell yes to minor writers! but like the short story workshop shit that the U.S. has been CHURNING out for fuckin' ever now, the sort of Dull Realism About Adult Shit stuff...it's not just that the writers won't be celebrated later, because who cares. It's just like...listening to a guy play scales is more interesting. It's totally forgettable while you're reading it. I woke up remembering the time I tried to read an Andre Dubus collection, God almighty. Gimme the ingredients panel off some pasta over that.

I thought Lamp was a she?

man, i sleep through the best book threads

i think richard powers is way more "this" than "coupland gen x." he was the first guy i thought of!

i feel like '(Telling Cruxes In The Lives Of) Dull Realist Adult Shit' isn't really a dominant style anymore? i could be totally wrong there, though; maybe it exists and continues to be massive and i just am not in a position to notice it. (like 'hey, soul sister'.)

i think this thread's moment kind of does exist and it'd be nice if someone would come up with a name for it

kind of wonder if all that deeply naff 90s 'hypertext' stuff could be made to connect to it, maybe

i think this is basically a list of "stuff my dad started but never finished when i was like five or six"

of all the people i have not read richard powers is the one i have least idea what is actually inside his books

a lot of these books hold a weird totemic power for me b/c my parents read them at an impressionable moment in my life, when i couldnt imagine reading these books and didnt at all understand what they were supposedly about

hes like a nerdier pynchon who cant style a sentence nearly as well?

Max, you're amazing, that's exactly it, but it wasn't my parents, it was all my 5 years older friends who went to grad school for anything (mostly lit or philosophy tbh).

one person's dull realism is another person's interestingly dedicated and detailed exploration of life as we might know it

cause it's kinda off topic. and yeah like...when Lamp says he hates that "only the best will do" attitude, it's not really like that, that's not actually what I mean, so I'm not explaining myself well there. the life of letters relies in large part on minor writers, hell yes to minor writers! but like the short story workshop shit that the U.S. has been CHURNING out for fuckin' ever now, the sort of Dull Realism About Adult Shit stuff...it's not just that the writers won't be celebrated later, because who cares. It's just like...listening to a guy play scales is more interesting. It's totally forgettable while you're reading it. I woke up remembering the time I tried to read an Andre Dubus collection, God almighty. Gimme the ingredients panel off some pasta over that.

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Saturday, November 12, 2011 7:56 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol do u really think all American literary fiction fits into yr dull realism abt adult shit basket

Also lamps objection to yr continentalism was really not in defense of 'minor writers'

i think aero has classicist tendencies? which is fair enough, to be honest. i don't know

like i think the literature of whatever culture you happen to inhabit is by definition worth keeping up with. even if it's uniformly terrible! though i think in effect that has yet to happen anywhere ever. but it's a corollary of the belief in 'great writing' that there will be periods where none of it is happening. ("Your eyen two wol sleye me sodenly / I may the beauté of hem nat susteyne. // And for 180 years almost nothing." -- this parenthesis brought to you by the fact that i'm meant to be reading the cantos this weekend but i am hungover and reading richard morgan instead.)

but i would note the thread doesn't start with 'hey, that early 90s moment, that was an awesome moment.'

uh anyway I've read a lot of these dudes, the 90s was def when I read by far the most books, before the Internet got real good, as far as greater literary trends there was some feeling of moving past adult realism abt dull shit and into some more global understanding, recall dellio crtisizing books abt people sitting around tables, idk technology consumerism the crazed media saturated landscape and how it makes u feel lonely, tbh I'm having trouble remembering, obvs those themes have been explored before, I think maybe there was a sort of detached contemplative tone that was p common, watching the swirling madness from a still perspective

feel like I'm talking abt some horrible edgy band from the 80s lol - anyway I ride for this era even of I don't remember it that good

smh @ aerosmith itt btw

this time period is when paul auster started to suck. and when delillo stopped being funny. and i havent read vineland but my understanding is that its not pynchons best? imo he recovered cuz i love mason & dixon. but maybe this is the moment where "postmodernism" as a school got crappy

donald barthelme dies as the whole thing goes to hell

*and the whole thing

The year postmodernism broke

this time period is when paul auster started to suck.

― max, Saturday, November 12, 2011 10:38 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yeah leviathan and everything before is great then mr vertigo and everything after sux, wonder what singular life changing event happened to this dude in 1993

then everything got really precious. as if auster wasn't precious enough. jonathan safron seagull and all that stuff. weightiness was not in vogue. getting on oprah more in vogue. except for that one guy. cormac starts writing about zombies. where will it end...

can't bring myself to read that 4 million page john sayles book. love you, john!

john sayles and mcsweeneys! oh god the horror....

safran foer is pretty weighty! i mean, he wants to be, at least. his first book is about the holocaust!

& i dont know that "getting on oprah" was in vogue w/ authors per se. def w/ the publishing industry. but wasnt she mostly choosing like steinbeck and faulkner books?

feel like that points out one of the difficulties of teasing out literary trends, like I'm as much rmde @ franzen/letham as the next guy but there are still lots others people doing all diff left field shit all the time aren't here, I'm just assuming I don't really read books anymore

safran foer is pretty weighty! i mean, he wants to be, at least. his first book is about the holocaust!

― max, Saturday, November 12, 2011 11:00 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Half of which is hilarious jokes abt accents!

sure but for all the 'preciousness' in JSF or dave eggers or whatever theres still a very ~literary~ "weightiness"

like "weightiness" was still in vogue--i dont think "weightiness" will ever go out of vogue for young white men writing and publishing bookz--its just a precious weightiness

There's a feeling that these dudes are kind of lightweight people is what is comes down to imho

a feeling on ilx, sure

I am unable to distugish between Ilx and not Ilx

Someone write a book abt it

In the early 90s

i mean i think JSFs weightiness is unearned, though i did laugh at the accent jokes in whatever that book was called. im just saying no one was reading/signing him/publishing his books because he was light and funny and precious. same w/ eggers. a heartbreaking work of staggering genius doesnt get published or reviewed if its just a bunch of (super light) humorous essays.

I will tentatively agree w/that

arguably the whole thing about the preciousness of guys like JSF and eggers is that its used to talk about seriously weighty things--its a weird stunted-emotional-development thing i guess. like remember that NYer story where JSF came up with all these cutesy punctuation marks that meant like "the silence on the phone after you tell me you have cancer"

Can I make an over reaching dorm room style argument here inspired by thinking abt the literary postmodernism of the 1990s and it's concern w/the islolating effects of the media/consumer futurescape - very well - feel like understanding of emerging cultural realities are first grasped by visual artists, then musicians, then novelists, then they become common knowledge and therefor uninteresting

all i know is that "media theorist" philosphe types are always like 10-15 years late

when i used to read the believer regularly i was always kind of amazed by all the small press stuff they would review and i'd never heard of any of it! books and authors and publishers. any of it. and the books they reviewed definitely looked interesting. i was gonna keep a list of them, but, you know, i get busy watching t.v.

but, anyway, there is definitely, and obviously, a LOT going on "underground" that i don't know about. here. in the states. and i guess i just have to live long enough to have people tell me about some of the great under-the-radar writers of the 90's/00's/etc. i thought the believer was actually pretty good at this. writing about old writers that had been forgotten and tipping people off to new stuff that doesn't get covered in mainstream press. so, i'm not totally anti-mcsweeneys. maybe that was my point.

james wood's takedown of richard powers has made me doubt him, sadly. i got really into the gold bug variations when i read it, though.

i was gonna keep a list of them, but, you know, i get busy watching t.v.

on my epitaph, basically

this thread has succeeded in making me mad at both aero's and ice cr?m's characterizations of literature, even though they are directly opposed.

anyone like Jernigan by David Gates? that was 91, probably read it more towards the end of the 90s. one of those downward spiral of a fuck-up novels.

― buzza, Friday, November 11, 2011 4:25 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^theres a line in jernigan thats something abt his recognition that he now has a gun in the same work pants he wore 2 the office that morning that i think abt a lot

this thread has succeeded in making me mad at both aero's and ice cr?m's characterizations of literature, even though they are directly opposed.

― horseshoe, Saturday, November 12, 2011 12:41 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Lol

Solitary posts that effortlessly summarize etc

i liked your posts until you got to "dull adult realism"! this dull adult h8s u.

andre dubus is pretty bad tho

but but dull adult realism was johns phraseology, I was merely wielding it in a post ironic fashion!

oh wait i'm confused

sorry jho!

no wait i still h8 u

Lol

i should just post "in conclusion, i'm mad" and then stop posting in book threads.

I'm going to start discussing Edith Wharton novels instead.

i have thought on it and i think Mating doesn't fit Lamps' op, not even the dense prose part, if that means tough guy hardboiledness? the prose is expansive and academic. in that way i guess it's not dissimilar to Powers.

that makes Mating sound dull, but it is gr8 fyi.

i was all ready to love richard russo in the 90s - cuz my realism streak is a mile wide and i really liked mohawk and the risk pool - but then his books all became casting calls. i couldn't read them without thinking about who they were gonna get for the movie. and then i stopped reading them. this happened with me and my beloved richard price too. the movie-ness of his stuff started to bug me. even though he can still write and everything. (and people still tell me i should read that last one but i never want to.)

― scott seward, Friday, November 11, 2011 4:36 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i think the last really good russo book is straight man. empire falls is like medium-good, but it does read like a casting call. but maybe you don't even like nobody's fool + straight man, in which case i h8 u, too.

robert stone is a good one for your op specifications, i think.

russell banks is terrible, oh man; he was recommended to me in the same breath as robert stone as serious white men who counted and even though i hate what stone represents to some people, at least he can write!

haha yeah russell banks is not good. i'm vaguely interested in the new one (about a sex offender homeless shantytown) in a trainwreck kinda way.

lol do u really think all American literary fiction fits into yr dull realism abt adult shit basket

no but the shit Lamp's talking about does? like I can get down with Gary Lutz, fun to read, doesn't take 600 pages to demonstrate that he copped a BA at some point

I agree with horseshoe about realism (as I said)

i liked straight man okay. thst chabon book is better though. shit, did i even read the chabon book? i liked the movie anyway. and i think i actually liked the movie of nobodys fool better than the book. the risk pool is REALLY good though. and mohawk is too. i read empire falls but my eyes glazed over and i spent the whole book casting it. i think actually started a thread about that. books as film treatments. after reading a tom perrotta book.

i haven't read wonder boys, though i like the movie a lot. still, i refuse to believe it's better than straight man, which i have read about 90 times.

the wonder boys movie is better than the book (whatever that means)

the nobodys fool movie is close but i think the books still better

I have seen the wonder boys movie again and again and again, an improbable number of times
and if it came on TV now I would probably want to watch it yet again

pinefox otm

yeah it is a kind of "comfort movie" for me

first saw it on flight to NYC, new year's day 2001, then I think again on the flight back! (but wasn't fully paying attention either time)

the future is safe, apparently:

Are there two other siblings in the midst of such a wildly imaginative run as Maile and Colin Meloy? Maile Meloy is one of the most acclaimed writers of her generation, a terrific storyteller with boundless range, nary a word out of place, and a genius eye for the smallest details. Colin Meloy fronts the Decemberists, the arty Portland, Ore., alt-rock collective whose catalog includes wild concept albums, 18-minute songs based on Irish myths, sea shanties and perfect, concise pop songs. Oh, and he piloted the band to the top of the Billboard album charts this year with “The King Is Dead.”

Now both Meloys have new young-adult novels in stores. Colin’s adventure-fantasy, “Wildwood,” is a collaboration with his wife, illustrator Carson Ellis, and the first of a planned trilogy. As the New York Times notes, it “brims with grimly comic violence. Coyotes dressed in Napoleonic uniforms train musket, cannon and bayonet on woodland bandits, talking birds and an industrious rat named Septimus.” Maile, meanwhile, steps away from her realist adult fiction with a fantasy of her own, “The Apothecary,” brimming with teenage spies, Cold War fears, magical elixirs and thrilling first kisses.

*furiously reads european fiction*

it seems 2012 will be another year of me trying not to let colin meloy's success embitter & depress me

this will ruin me in the eyes of steven tyler but i thought maile meloy's strange pair of alternate reality novels were really good and interesting! they were occasionally staid and lifeless but overall i thought it was p neat experiment that really managed to enrich the writing with a sense of purpose and mystery. her short stories are kind of workshop-y (in the burt_stanton sense) tho

i... im kinda shocked that anyone wld consider delillo and millhauser to be 'dull adult realism'!!

naw man I didn't read 'em and if they were good I wouldn't be surprised, I just dislike his music & am jealous of his money, if he writes well then more power to him

dull realistic airborne toxic event

It's the dismemberers sister lamp is repping for fwiw

young adult novels are where the $$$ is at

young adult novels are where the $$$ is at

this could not be truer

Kids these days

i dislike his music too but dude is $mart

i will admit the idea of colin meloy's children book fills me w/derision, like it will just be the worst thing ever

^^^

tho i gotta say the eschaton video was kinda rad

He wrote a dull 33 1/3 on the Mats' Let it Be.

i will admit the idea of colin meloy's children book fills me w/derision, like it will just be the worst thing ever

― we were cool once (Lamp), Saturday, November 12, 2011 4:38 PM (26 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

But its got a furious cat named 'fanglypusithic' in it

fuck u icey for making me google fanglypusithic

Man at least u learned something

thank u for teaching me

the eschaton video was just another milestone in my long estrangement from the 'cultural elite' (*types emoticon for choosing wry self-mocking in the face of utter despair*)

total challop but despite being superficially more welcoming and admiring the mcsweeney's/internet sitcom/dull unadult take on appropriating 'genre' is so much worse than the writers in my op

Here is yr decemberists fan club badge now que

dude areosmith yuou caan take pride in fact that nobody nohow will ever compare you 2 a tweeeeeeee muthrfkr like that dude. chin up, bright eyes.

fuck where is bright eyes dude's kid's book????? gotta be coming soon.

Man he LIVED IT *rides away of adult sized tricycle*

*pins decemberists badge onto chest, hurls himself over cliff*

*Plays mournful flugelhorn*

*comes back from the dead, writes horrible YA book about the afterlife**

man i wld def read the hell out of connor ohbz bukowski-aping novel abt the emptiness of loft parties and banging goodlooking hunter college chix and mid aughts brooklyn, it killed the artist in him man

hell when you put it that way i'd read it too.

Once I went to a party at a yoga studio and bro eyes bro was there true story

I will say some of the novels mcsweeneys put out are good. that 1st john brandon. the yannick murphy. what is the what was fab. the convalescent was pretty bad tho. oh and "i" by stephen dixon.

every generation gets the ethan hawkes that it deserves.

Lmao

theoretically i would read anything by anyone! like i would read a novel about something rad by mr. decemberists, but some YA novel about talking birds wearing military medals, uh, no.

i read ethan's first sentence of his first book, it was pretty yuck as i recall

i feel really comfortable writing off anything that approves of ruffles and superfluous es on the ends of words

Ruffleses

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzItX3UmduQ

ethane is one of the very few actors I know of that writes books on a daily basis other than william shatner.
hoppers001 2 years ago

How long before ryan goslings novel is out btw

this is way better though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQMNcR6JCtA

i started a new thread for this impt topic btw

Lol all this Ethan hawkeing has borne two new threads

I kind of skimmed this thread and didn't learn anything

^solitary posts that &c &c