When an author's work slowly declines in quality

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Prompted by comments on the Jonathan Coe thread.

Why is this? Of course, there could be all sorts of reasons. Is it a seductive, auteurist fallacy anyway to assume that the same bunch of cells should be able to produce two interesting works just because they have produced one? Or is the problem often that the audience just doesn't get it?

I guess there's no reason not to broaden the question to musicians and visual artists as well, but maybe the issues are slightly different.

― Alba (Alba), Saturday, 4 September 2004 12:45 (twenty years ago)

Possibly because what was once new and striking seems overfamiliar now. (See: all my posts.)

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Saturday, 4 September 2004 12:48 (twenty years ago)

Ned Raggett's ILX posts -- a stunning tour de force.

― New York Review of Books (Leee), Sunday, 5 September 2004 05:25 (twenty years ago)

Maybe it's a stupid question.

― Alba (Alba), Monday, 6 September 2004 07:31 (twenty years ago)

If an artist I like's work starts declining I sell it all.

― Andrew Blood Thames (Andrew Thames), Monday, 6 September 2004 07:32 (twenty years ago)

At the beginning both ideas, and the reactions to them, are new. After a while, neither are. I have a feeling it might be as simple as that.

― Markelby (Mark C), Monday, 6 September 2004 10:25 (twenty years ago)

In that case, would someone who came fresh to the author's work be just as well reading one of the later works as one of the early ones?

― Alba (Alba), Monday, 6 September 2004 10:29 (twenty years ago)

But don't you think that a lot of authors have the problem with First Album Syndrome, where a distillation of the previous 25 years of pain, love, misery, frustration is squeezed into one work bursting with fresh, original, personal power, leaving the author an empty vessel with no inspiration to shoehorn into his later works?

― Markelby (Mark C), Monday, 6 September 2004 10:32 (twenty years ago)

Well yes, sometimes. Maybe we need to be quoting some examples to get this going.

― Alba (Alba), Monday, 6 September 2004 10:34 (twenty years ago)

Joseph Heller to thread, please.

― Girolamo Savonarola, Monday, 6 September 2004 10:43 (twenty years ago)

Joseph Heller does not fit in this catagory.

There was nothing slow about his decline. Two good books and then, pershooey!

― Pete (Pete), Monday, 6 September 2004 11:37 (twenty years ago)

Actually, I was responding to the First Album Syndrome.

― Girolamo Savonarola, Monday, 6 September 2004 11:57 (twenty years ago)

two years pass...

Say, does anybody know anything about the latest Orson Scott Card book?

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/0765316110.01._AA240_SCLZZZZZZZ_V45129658_.jpg

I wanna know if he's gone as completely loopy/round-the-bend as some of the reviews suggest, incl. this one:

From Publishers Weekly

Right-wing rhetoric trumps the logic of story and character in this near-future political thriller about a red-state vs. blue-state American civil war, an implausibly plotted departure from Card's bestselling science fiction (Ender's Game, etc.). When the president and vice-president are killed by domestic terrorists (of unknown political identity), a radical leftist army calling itself the Progressive Restoration takes over New York City and declares itself the rightful government of the United States. Other blue states officially recognize the legitimacy of the group, thus starting a second civil war. Card's heroic red-state protagonists, Maj. Reuben "Rube" Malek and Capt. Bartholomew "Cole" Coleman, draw on their Special Ops training to take down the extremist leftists and restore peace to the nation. The action is overshadowed by the novel's polemical message, which Card tops off with an afterword decrying his own politically-motivated exclusion from various conventions and campuses, the "national media elite" and the divisive excesses of both the right and the left.

and if it's as funny and strawman-intensive as Michael Crichton naming his violent eco-terrorist Nick Drake

― kingfishy (kingfish 2.0), Monday, 5 February 2007 22:51 (eighteen years ago)

I wanna know if he's gone as completely loopy/round-the-bend as some of the reviews suggest, incl. this one:

There's a lot of evidence that Card has always been loopy though and that his semi-recent sci-fi Dennis Miller extremism isn't anything new. Maybe it's a lifetime of imagining anti-Mormon extremists under his bed. I don't know...

John Kessel's essay on Ender's Game scrapes away at Card's personality much better than I can.

― Elvis Telecom (Chris Barrus), Monday, 5 February 2007 23:22 (eighteen years ago)

Also, check out "Orson Scott Card Has Always Been an Asshat"

― Elvis Telecom (Chris Barrus), Monday, 5 February 2007 23:29 (eighteen years ago)

Also: http://www.beliefnet.com/story/167/story_16700_1.html

― Elvis Telecom (Chris Barrus), Monday, 5 February 2007 23:34 (eighteen years ago)

oh most of that all i had an idea about, but shit like this:

As a religion, the Force is just the sort of thing you'd expect a liberal-minded teenage kid to invent. There's no God and there are no rules other than a vague insistence on unselfishness and oath-keeping. Power comes from the sum of all life in the universe, and it is manichaean, not Christian - evil is simply another way of using the Force. Only not as nice.

Takes real effort to demonstrate how much of a clueless fuck you are in several hundred words.

― kingfishy (kingfish 2.0), Monday, 5 February 2007 23:40 (eighteen years ago)

It's a pity because I remember him as the guy saying it was his experience as a missionary in Brazil that led him to question unrestrained capitalism. Now he sounds like the guy looking for the gun to shoot someone asking that question.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, 5 February 2007 23:42 (eighteen years ago)

the only part of Ender's Game that I remember is that kid who sits around with holographic balls bouncing around in his lap. wtf?

― Curt1s St3ph3ns, Monday, 5 February 2007 23:46 (eighteen years ago)

Card's always been horrible.

I can think of more fiction authors that improve with age than musicians.

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, 5 February 2007 23:51 (eighteen years ago)

wasn't there also a recent essay/article by Card defending "Intelligent Design"?

― latebloomer (latebloomer), Tuesday, 6 February 2007 00:00 (eighteen years ago)

plenty, actually. PZ Myers writes about them constantly.

― kingfishy (kingfish 2.0), Tuesday, 6 February 2007 00:03 (eighteen years ago)

here ya go

― kingfishy (kingfish 2.0), Tuesday, 6 February 2007 00:23 (eighteen years ago)

When do we talk about Paul Auster?

― Eazy (Eazy), Tuesday, 6 February 2007 00:27 (eighteen years ago)

wtf is up with this?

I've seen Elaine's notes and heard Card on the phone, and there is no doubt in my mind that the Hitler Hypothesis is correct; it is simply impossible that Ender's Game and Speaker were written by someone who did not have a very detailed knowledge of Adolph Hitler's life.

― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Tuesday, 6 February 2007 10:21 (eighteen years ago)

Right, non-devotion to Jedi = 'clueless fuck'! What's the average age on this board, 11?

― Bluto (Mr Happy), Tuesday, 6 February 2007 12:15 (eighteen years ago)

14, duh.

― kingfishy (kingfish 2.0), Tuesday, 6 February 2007 16:20 (eighteen years ago)

Someone else plz tell me they've read OSC's Lost Boys. Mormon bishop's wife gets creeped out by 45 of "Every Breath You Take" left at her door, including pages-long description of the song. Bishop designed Lode Runner Atari game, in which his son gets trapped. It's really incomparable and vexing. It makes me think he was always NUTS.

― Abbott (Abbott), Tuesday, 6 February 2007 21:18 (eighteen years ago)

I feel that it is perhaps degrading to this thread's original intent to talk about such a lowlife dipshit as OSC on it

― TOMBO7 (TOMBOT), Tuesday, 6 February 2007 21:45 (eighteen years ago)

we are discussing "slowly declines in quality," not "turns out to be a horrible shitbag when you grow up"

― TOMBO7 (TOMBOT), Tuesday, 6 February 2007 21:45 (eighteen years ago)

TOMBOT OTM

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 6 February 2007 21:56 (eighteen years ago)

I mean OSC was never good, its not like he's got the career arc of Thomas Pynchon or anything.

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 6 February 2007 21:57 (eighteen years ago)

When I read the thread title the first name I thought of was Samuel Delany.

― Tuesdays With Morimoto (Rock Hardy), Tuesday, 6 February 2007 22:01 (eighteen years ago)

I couldn't find an OSC/non-ILB-sci-fi thread :(

― kingfishy (kingfish 2.0), Tuesday, 6 February 2007 22:07 (eighteen years ago)

lots of sci-fi guys fit the bill, sadly. KW Jeter springs to mind (his mentor, on the other hand, kept getting better and better right up until his death)

― Shakey Mo Collier (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, 6 February 2007 22:08 (eighteen years ago)

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