the thing in literature

Also I would like to know the answer to the real question, so feel free to answer than and not derail the thread.

Does anyone else think DFW is absolutely the most plodding, dull and uninspired stylist evah? He's ok at nonfiction, but jesus... BIWHM and what little I got through in IJ made me think he was autistic to the point of near-institutionalization.

So what don't you like about JC? And tell me about David Mitchell...?

DM=the author of 'Ghostwritten' and 'no.9Dream'. He's still a bit derivative (but derivative of interesting influences, ie Calvino, Murakami, Auster), but he is - by a long way, I think - the most intersting Eng. novelist under 40.

Oh, I've heard of those DM titles, haven't read anything...Anyway, I think Murakami & Auster are pretty much lite-lit themselves, but Murakami's current short story collection is pretty ok...

By the way, I'm using this thread just as a means to talk about current literature, not to make any claims toward it-thingness...

Lynne Tillman's collection of stories, This is Not It is pretty good...

And maybe Gareth will come to thread to talk about Nicola Barker...?

I guess people are looking to see how/if success will change the Franze, I feel that people were upset with his recent bk of essays -- How to Be Alone --bc it didn't really address this...

Some people in some circles are avidly awaiting the debut novel of Nell Freudenburg (sp?) when it comes out it will most likely be shoved down everyone's throats in the most tasteful manner conceivable...

Oh, I just saw Toby's message, actually both those novels were fairly poorly received in the press anyway, I'm not sure how they're doing among the 'real' readers, I read the Tartt and I thought it was awful...

And Jeffrey Eugenides long-awaited follow up to Virgin Suicides is also scagworthy...

I guess I'm just wondering what happened to the state of opinion ca 5 years ago that was heavily in favor of the sorts of things I mentioned above. it seems to have evaporated.

And to the DFW doubters/haters here: seek out his newish story "Good Old Neon" (published in the Conjunctions lit journal and recently in the new O Henry Awards book) and see if that doesn't wipe away the suspicion re his recent stuff. Or for that matter the "Mr. Squishy'" one he wrote as Elizabeth Klemm in McSweeney's # 5.

And Wallace's 'Brief Interviews' collection came out in '99, so he's not exactly lazing about. Curious to hear what you think of Neon: it's dizzingly self-conscious (not about writing but about self-consciousness), but it's one of those stories that hit on big stuff and burn off the page like nobody else's I can think of.

I like Lynne Tillman, she gets at the essential truths of the human experience, hahaha, no really she is good!

[Returning warily, ever warily, to the Neon one...]

(hmmmn . . . "derivative of interesting influences" is v.v.true re : DM (which is why I've enjoyed him immensely, but never thought of him as anything other than enjoyable (haha bcz great leaps forward should required waders) - however I haven't been following EngLit))

ps josh can you talk about contemporary russian lit which isn't pelevin/etc? (haha c'mon, LIMONOV!)

It's not unheard of for novelists to toil away in relative silence for 10 years on a novel, is it? I don't know if this is what DFW's doing, but it wouldn't be too unusual, would it? Let's face it, it takes longer to write a novel than it does to make a movie or a record.

NaNoWriMo specifically is dedicated to disproving this proposition. Okay, so it's more a novella at heart...

I think there's something quite wrong with wedging Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace together. I mean this because I was dearly hoping White Teeth might lead into an actual New Thing in lit. It was the first thing I'd read in a long time that took such a sense of pleasure in the act of storytelling; it read like Dickens, so far as I was concerned; or rather, it read like a happy kid doing Dickens, taking pleasure less in the story/characters/dialogue than in the process of writing them out, building them up. (It read like fiction might be what I'm saying.)

I was hoping for a groundswell of this sort of thing -- blow away the stilted cleverness of certain McSweeneyites and their even worse bids at weightiness and take us back to the simple fact of young people having fun painting odd funny pictures of what life is actually like. But it looks as if Zadie wants to hop straight ahead to being Serious and Meaningful and Too Be Reckoned With, and I'm not up-to-speed enough to know what else could fill this gap. Mary? Anything? (I've gotten a bit of this vibe out of Antrim, too, but White Teeth seems the flagship -- it was like the best-ever "I've been working on a novel" that a friend in an undergrad writing course would hand you.)

This is the most un-Nabisco-like sentence I have evah read!

Hey, I'm trying! In my own way. ;-)

is it worth my time?

I'm sure I'm not the first to suggest this, but have you tried the Harry Potter books?

(NB: I have not read nearly enough lately for anyone to take this argument seriously -- I'm just hoping this complain will make everyone say "what about so-and-so" so I can read so-and-so. So!)

G: everyone seems to love Cavalier and Clay. It fits into this thing I'm asking for above, actually -- and yet I really, really hated it.

Andrew: sure, I read the Potter books. That's not entirely what I mean, though -- what I was hoping would happen was a momentary relaxation of the current modes of "serious" literature, a little moment where things went a bit less calculated and careerist and people seemed to be just spilling joyously about Right Now.

Did anyone read Mark Costello's 'Big If'? I didn't like it much, but that's a recent one lots of people dug that hasn't been mentioned here.

It is difficult to see major trends right now in quality literature. I think, even though the McSweeney's thing became so tiresome (and still, every fifth cover letter we get for a novel says, "author was published in McSweeney's," "in the vein of "McSweeney's," etc.), it seemed hopeful for a while, starting maybe two or three years ago, that novels by lesser-known authors who were experimenting with literature might become more visible to the general public.

Now, with war, economy, etc. to worry about, I think most readers are looking for even more escapism in their fiction than usual. Thus, you have trends toward things that are very easy to read and often from a child's or young adult's point of view (a la THE LOVELY BONES), presumably because this makes people feel more hopeful. The other major trend I see is toward long (perhaps even near-epic), often historical, extremely plot-based books, which allow people to get easily absorbed. Sadly, you have far fewer book buyers these days who are purchasing literature just because it is interesting or different.

Then again, you have FAR fewer book buyers these days in general, which could be why it's more difficult to see the trends (the difference between book units sold this month last year and this month this year, for example, is disturbingly large).

Publishers are also dealing with budget cuts, so the chances of them taking on new and interesting authors are slimmer than ever.

The Zadie Smith thing is too bad...if her second novel had been more in the vein of WHITE TEETH, I bet people would've gone nuts over it right now.

And I'd like to predict that the Nell Freudenberger (or whatever her name is) will be a major disappointment. It's gotten way too much hype. And she got way too much money (her advance was many hundreds of thousands of dollars, based on ONE story in the New Yorker) to ever live up to it. (note--that's the #1 best way to get a book published--get one short story in the NEw Yorker fiction issue)

And I liked Kavalier & Clay very much. It's not an amazing work of literature, or anything, but it's fun and absorbing.

I think I've gone on for long enough, don't you?

(But there is a connection between all those writers I like: comic novelists ... I just read 'The Reader,' the first non-comic book I've read for ages, and thought it was really good. I'm joining the book club.)

Maryann -- I would be intrersted to read Houellebecq's poetry, have you read any? Well, someone translated for me some of the stuff he did with Bertrand B., and it was good -- but it would be nice to get an English lang. collection of poems from him...Perhaps we should follow Michel and be the new neo-atomized/ Baudelerian refuse??

Actually, I'm not so bothered that I'm not so excited by any new stuff, more time to read classic stuff, for instance, next I will read Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness which our friend Stephen Morrissey referenced at his last show...

"A 1920s classic of lesbian fiction," or, in the ILE world, all roads lead back to "and then they all lezzed it up!"

(I realize I have put that contentiously, but I'm tired.)

Back to Jonathan Coe for a second: what is it about him that makes me feel like he should be a good writer, even though he's not, not at all? (I'm starting to think that Hornby comparisons basically mean "he/she writes movie scripts in prose form instead of books," as this is dead-on for both of them and everyone else it gets said of: this is sort of what I mean about the self-consciousness of rival narrative forms, just like painting was ridiculously thrown by photography.)

I must read Houellebecq, but I am frightened, as I typically hate personality-driven writers where I find the "personality" distasteful -- my mental image is of Louis-Ferdinand Celine with more fucking and less historical remove, which is just I dunno: Mary, please tell me why I should go ahead with this (keeping in mind that if I read and dislike it I can diminish your supply of the university-press paperbacks that I think we all know are the life-blood of the VLS.) (Saddest joke I've ever made.)

Also: has anyone read Life of Pi, or am I forced to rely on the NYTBR here?

I try to avoid books with 'pi' in the title as a rule.

nb 'pie' is ok

You really should read Bakhtin on the novel to get a fuller sense, because in some ways this is part of what he argues. It is an incorporative form, in dialogue with and flight from itself.

The best argument against a normative "novel" prelapsarian form is that the earliest novels by common defintion were as narratively fucked-up and authorial-voice-questioning as any today in some ways. Especially especially Tristam Shandy.

I guess Dickens established the "prototypical" novel as much as anyone though. On the other hand, I think he blows chunks. Like big chunks. And there's probably a case to be made for all the strikingly original things he did, but he bores me shitless too much for me to notice them.

Oddly enough I have virtually no appreciation for the "genre" novel these days, though I obv. groove on both film and music of that sort. Similarly "genre" poetry.

I suspect that this is because novels/poetry have been so thoroughly displaced from their cultural position that film/music do the things that used to be interesting about them. Only when novels do things that film/music really can't can they make any case for their continued existance.

Also agree abt Saunders, who still seems to me to be the most 'promising' writer of the whole post-Barthelme 'school'.

I dunno, it just sorta struck me right now that the last thing I'd want to do now that I'm actually getting comfortable with the idea of writing extended manuscripts is want to go back and read more theory. Seems counterintuitive.

I was a bit hard on Coe early on this thread. I think he's a much better writer than Hornby, for the record (The Pinefox is a big fan of 'What a carve up!' too)... but I don't think an epic trilogy about public schools in the 1970s is possibly the best use of his talent.

(Also it's not the life of ð, it's the life of a person named Pi, which for all I know might well be pronounced like the fluid: does that make the title okay? There's a tiger in it.)

novels/poetry have been so thoroughly displaced from their cultural position that film/music do the things that used to be interesting about them. Only when novels do things that film/music really can't can they make any case for their continued existance.

just wanted to chime in that these two comments from nabisco & sterling are k-classic, and that they sort of sum up my whole reason for reading fiction/demi-fiction: to find oddities and back alleys and fortean anomalies which interrupt the constant buzzy background hum (which I also love) and introduce hiccups and silences into the conversation. sour grapes on a thread like this, i know, but i'm still entertained that these were cast as 'thingness' or reasons for a lack of 'thingness'.

Hmm, Maryann and I has this issue out over on the What are you reading when not on ILE thread...My original thoughts were that his press personality was a sort of facade, but now I am not so sure...what other writers do you consider 'personality driven'? I guess right now Rushdie seems to be, but in a sad way...

"-- my mental image is of Louis-Ferdinand Celine with more fucking and less historical remove"

And this is a bad thing?

"Mary, please tell me why I should go ahead with this"

Oh, I'm not really Houellebecq's ILE rep, though I sometimes pretend to be. I'm sure there are others who could offer better insight...But, for me, I like his style, his insights, le depressisme or whatever...Less so do I like the brutal sexual exploits that come to the fore in Elementary Particles. I prefer something like Sade, which has more humor. I would start out with Whatever, which has many Britishisms which may be off-putting, blimey!, it's short and quick, you can read it in a day or two. I f you like that go on to Elementary Particles, and if it turns out you like Houellebecq, you and I can party like it's 1999 the next time you're in town! Maryann to thread!

Can someone tell me about Saunders?

Here's his self-empowerment guru making a speech:

Now, if someone came up and crapped in your nice warm oatmeal, what would you say? Would you say: "Wow, super, thanks, please continue crapping in my oatmeal"? Am I being silly? I'm being a little silly. But guess what, in real life people come up and crap in your oatmeal all the time -— friends, co-workers, loved ones, even your kids, especially your kids! -— and that's exactly what you do. You say, "Thanks so much!" You say, "Crap away!" You say, and here my metaphor breaks down a bit, "Is there some way I can help you crap in my oatmeal?"

And here's a middle-aged man suddenly deconstructing his own mental fantasy of an affair with a random pregnant woman walking down the street:

It was sort of a pain living with Ma. But Miss Hacienda had better be prepared to tolerate Ma, who was actually pretty good company when she stayed on her meds, and so what if she was nearly eighty and went around the house flossing in her bra? It was her damn house. He'd better never hear Miss Hacienda say a word against Ma, who'd paid his way through barber college, like for example asking why Ma had thick sprays of gray hair growing out of her ears, because that would kill Ma, who was always reminding the gas man she'd been a dish in high school. How would Miss Hacienda like it if after a lifetime of hard work she got wrinkled and forgetful and some knocked-up slot dressed like a Mexican cowgirl moved in and started complaining about her ear hair? Who did Miss Hacienda think she was, the Queen of Sheba? She could go into labor in the damn Episcopal church for all he cared, he'd keep wanking it in the pantry on the little milking stool for the rest of his life before he'd let Ma be hurt, and that was final.

I am going to read Houllebecq, then. I am still trying to decide how to reconcile this Burgulat theory with April March. (I love April March, but.)

Sterling - Dickens is very funny, also he copied Shsp mainly (simple pattern of tragic scene/funny scene as he points out himself in I think Oliver Twist, that's the only reason I noticed) and apparently ripped off everyone else bigtime I guess Walter Scott etc as everyone did at that time tho I haven't read Scott. Don't expect originality from Dickens just humour, that's where he's serious, not in the melodrama.

Ned - I know Dostoevsky was pretty engaged with the theory of the time - wrote about Poe and the uncanny, it's easy to spot certain things in his work once you've read his 'reviews' -, I know the Russian and French novelists wrote loads of articles contesting various theories of the novel, mainly in the form of reviews - but did English novelists? I know what you mean, it feels really difficult to do 'theory' and feel comfortable with what you're doing yourself, but is this just specific to our (American-English) culture?

ok, i'm going to have to read the whole thing later on, cuz this is a listening rather than a talking thread for me. all my choices (houellebecq, barker, antrim, pelevin, sinclair) don't feel hugely recent.

i've skim read the thread, and see mentions of coe and smith from the americans, i'd agree with pinefox and suzy, over here i'd think those are kind of blah whatever.

burgalat is best with lemercier!

Oh, agreed! Though he is also quite good on his own (TSOM, well I know you're not so into it...) Hello Gareth, did someone here mention your name? Maybe you were too busy enjoying Britainsburg to hear the call to arms...?

The Rotters' Club is OK, I'll be interested enough to read the sequel, but a more apt comparison is with JK Rowling rather than Nick Hornby, who I think is underrated here. I can't wait for the new Smith and Tartt novels to make their way to paperback, their firsts were both classics, and please don't be put off by Franzen hype, The Corrections is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

Mike's point is a good antidote to the next big thing aspect of the publishing industry, though. I guess I wonder whether we are likely to see in our lifetimes a change on the level of modernism. I'm a bit disappointed that there doesn't seem to have been more youthful high spirits, more 'we are living at the dawn of a new century!' bidniz from new writers, like there seems to have been at the beginning of the 20th C. I'm finding it a bit difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the new Tartt or Franzen being sold on the basis that "they are writing CLASSIC NOVELS just like what they usedta!"

I guess the answer there would be, what exactly is there new to do, or how is it being done? That may sound gauche, but sometimes I have to wonder, and I especially think that you can't force a sense of what is new anyway, it just has to happen. Also, considering what has happened in terms of 'storytelling'/fictive creation between then and now if you consider the impact of Hollywood and its stories being the ones more well known -- even if and especially when sourced from a novel or story -- then the 'new thing' in writing isn't going to be anywhere near as monumental in a wider sense (nice though that would be!).

So far this new century has seemed like the end of the old one with more threats of war. Um, joy?

(serious qn, btw. i liked the latter but haven't read the former yet)

Each book I've read is different Ned; "somewhere between Lautreamont and Flann O'Brien" wouldn't be totally inaccurate, tho it's a bit lame. Reader's Block is my favorite so far.

Somebody is living in the Louvre, certain of the messages would say. Or in the National Gallery.

Naturally they could only say that when I was in Paris or in London. Somebody is living in the Metropolitan Museum, being what they would say when I was still in New York.

Nobody came, of course. Eventually I stopped leaving the messages.

To tell the truth, perhaps I left only three or four messages all together.

I have no idea how long ago it was when I was doing that. If I were forced to guess, I believe I would guess ten years.

Possibly it was several years longer ago than that, however.

And of course I was quite out of my mine for a certain period too, back then.

I do not know for how long a period, but for a certain period.

Time out of mind. Which is a phrase I suspect I may have never properly
understood, now that I happen to use it.

Time out of mind meaning mad, or time out of mind meaning simply forgotten?

But in either case there was little question about that madness. As when I drove that time to that obscure corner of Turkey, for instance, to visit at the site of ancient Troy.

And for some reason wished especially to look at the river there, that I had read about as well, flowing past the citadel to the sea.

I have forgotten the name of the river, which was actually a muddy stream.

And at any rate I do not mean to the sea, but to the Dardanelles, which used to be called the Hellespont.

The name of Troy had been changed too, naturally. Hisarlik, being what it was changed to.

yes. absolutely. 100%.

apparently i am the only one tho.

also THANK YOU JED i am going to print that it. i was george saunders led me here.