essays bemoaning the sad state of contemporary american fiction

http://motherjones.com/media/2010/01/death-of-literary-fiction-magazines-journals

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/books/review/Roiphe-t.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/myers

i feel like there are a dozen more of these essays, which always sound the same and have the same culprits and tend to just be long complaints that ernest hemingway isnt writing books anymore

^^^ not exactly a refutation.

max are you saying that if a bunch of people are complaining about something there must not be anything wrong

nope

im not really from the school of thought where there are things "wrong" with "the state of fiction" though

that seems to be an ilx way-of-thinking, an im sympathetic to a point. it's easy to write an article saying "once upon a time we had saul bellow/antonioni/the beatles and now we have dan brown/mcg/vampire weekend": it isn't to compare like with like, or what have you. but, despite this ease, sometimes it is possible to say, "this state of affairs is worse than that." or, "this feted novelist is not as good as the feted novelists of yore."

i like the end of everything essays. people have been bemoaning the state of everything since the dawn of everything.

yeah, it encourages me to hope that we may actually be in END TIMES, which seems like something you don't wanna miss tbh.

ps i bet the essays at the dawn of time were much better

who are the current american 'feted novelists' anyway

mccarthy is probably the only one i've actually read

is poetry as good as it ever was? or the hollywood musical? some forms do kind of wither away into half-life, and there's no reason why the american novel shouldn't.

xpost

that seems to be an ilx way-of-thinking, an im sympathetic to a point. it's easy to write an article saying "once upon a time we had saul bellow/antonioni/the beatles and now we have dan brown/mcg/vampire weekend": it isn't to compare like with like, or what have you. but, despite this ease, sometimes it is possible to say, "this state of affairs is worse than that." or, "this feted novelist is not as good as the feted novelists of yore."

― free the charmless but occasionally brilliant Dom Passantino (history mayne), Friday, January 22, 2010 8:48 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

eh. im fine with making value judgements up to a point but comparing this decade to that decade or the late 20th century to the early 20th century--i guess it could be a fun academic exercise but im not really sure what the point would be, or what wed get out of it.

and in any event theres still a big leap from "modern novelists are not as good as the novelists i read when i was young" to "there is something deeply wrong with the state of fiction"

only one of these essays actually bemoans the sad state of american fiction though. the manifesto one. the college journal editor's worrying about the financial state of college journals isn't really as interesting. budget cuts. get in line, dude. and the one by roiphe where she longs for the days of updike sex scene *shudder* is something else again (okay, i just skimmed that one).

mccarthy as in cormac? i don't think he's 'current' really. his rep-maker was 25 years ago at this point

poetry is a much bigger category than 'american fiction', the hollywood musical a much smaller one ('the post-wwi realist novel' or something).

./..xposts.

i think the mother jones article is bemoaning the sad state of american fiction--he keeps saying things like "save american literature"

maybe i should actually try and read these properly but you know

In the midst of a war on two fronts, there has been hardly a ripple in American fiction. With the exception of a few execrable screeds—like Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint (which revealed just how completely postmodernism has painted itself into a corner)—novelists and story writers alike have largely ignored the wars. Even our poets, the supposed deliverers of "news that stays news," have been comparatively mum; Brian Turner is the only major poet to yet emerge from Iraq.

i mean, when did you guys start sending poets to iraq? i know poetry's 'not as good as it ever was' but that's still kind of harsh

eh. im fine with making value judgements up to a point but comparing this decade to that decade or the late 20th century to the early 20th century--i guess it could be a fun academic exercise but im not really sure what the point would be, or what wed get out of it.

well... some people are into that kind of thing, it seems a pretty normal thing to do. when we value a thing, we are (aren't we?) implicitly comparing it with other things of its kind. and the same if we think it's lacking.

anyway, this exercise might tell us Other Things about Our Society.

are broadsheet trend pieces what they were in the late 1990s? there's a whole article in that.

and in any event theres still a big leap from "modern novelists are not as good as the novelists i read when i was young" to "there is something deeply wrong with the state of fiction"

idk if that's a big leap!

and someone should give that college journal editor the numbers on journals, magazines, books published in just this country alone every year. not to mention what gets published (or self-published) on the web. it's an avalanche. i feel bad for the trees out there. not american fiction.

www.lukeford.net/Images/photos3/tomwolfe.pdf

(^That's Tom Wolfe's "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast" manifesto in Harper's from 1989, complaining that no one writes novels like Sinclair Lewis anymore.)

im not really from the school of thought where there are things "wrong" with "the state of fiction" though

you don't think some eras of fiction have had more interesting writers than others, and that it might be interesting to see whether what makes some periods produce more great fiction than others?

(but he takes on the "death of the novel" thesis, or a marxist version thereof, too.)

xp

sorry i should be clear by "comparing era XX to era YY" i dont really mean in that, you know, "in era XX they talked about class like THIS in era YY they talked about class like THAT" kind of survey, i mean specifically inna "in era XX, fiction was fresh and creative and confronted the world but in era YY it has disappeared into a black hole of postmodernism."

and yeah you wont find me disputing that its normal! or maybe even instructive, in certain ways! its also kind of annoying, not in a major, butthurt way, just in the way where you get annoyed at any kind of polemic.

James Wood's "hysterical realism" essay:
http://www.powells.com/review/2001_08_30.html

you don't think some eras of fiction have had more interesting writers than others, and that it might be interesting to see whether what makes some periods produce more great fiction than others?

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Friday, January 22, 2010 9:14 AM (52 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that might be interesting, if the person doing that investigation was a really terrific critic and writer (and frankly even then it wouldnt really be my cup of tea; im pretty uncomfortable with that ("the era produced more great fiction") kind of value judgment, but id never prevent someone else from making it); unfortunately, none of the essays i posted are interested at all in the "what makes" part of the equation beyond gems like "everyone is taught they are a precious snowflake"--in fact theyre barely interested in the idea of some eras having "more interesting writers" either. these arent academic studies; theyre broadsides, and poorly-thought-out broadsides at that.

btw thank you jaymc, i actually started this thread to get more examples, but the discussion is nice too

I should say that I'm disagreeing w/you max partly because I enjoy sparring w/you - I don't dig any pinin'-for-the-days style, either. but I do think that something happened in fiction post-Hemingway, some concession about who a writer is actually writing to/for, that affected fiction deeply and did result in a writers whose ambitions are narrower & more modest than people writing novels from roughly Eliot down through the 40s/50s

xxxxxxxp

i tend to think of 'contemporary' as 'the author's still breathing', rightly or wrongly

"result in a lot of writers, arguably whole generations of them" I guess I mean

http://ilmestieredileggere.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/harold_bloom_1175088470032881.jpg

i will unequivocally say i hate this shit, 99.99 percent of the time it's some myopic BOXCAR! b.s.

im pretty uncomfortable with that ("the era produced more great fiction") kind of value judgment,

ah, i enjoy 'em, don't always agree. better those than the blandly consensual.

i saw an attempted debunk of it which was about edmund wilson, saying -- well, he wasn't always 100% about everything and sometimes recycled journalism in his books! and tbqh it was the *everything is ok, nothing really changes* guy who sounded butthurt. i haven't read that much wilson as a proportion of his work (which was copious), but, you know, he was exceptional, without rivals today (sor far as i can tell -- he had better books to work with perhaps) and why not admit it?

xpost

bloom is a kind of ironic example of this -- big complainer, but really part of the problem, again nowhere near wilson's level.

Well, you can't separate the climate of the times from Wilson's achievement. American and English fiction tolerated Men of Letters. The only one I can think of now is James Wood.

I usually like Roiphe's crit but having just read Roth's The Dying Animal I really don't mind that the current crop of writers choose to keep their dicks in their pants.

In Wilson's time you had: Alfred Kazin, Trilling, Cyril Connolly, F.R. Leavis, etc.

do you all really think it's possible to provide any kind of meaningful historical/social/generational context for trends in art from a contemporary perspective? like can someone really effectively compare "the state of contemporary american fiction" to other eras of fiction while the current era is still ongoing?

^ like this tends to lead to people writing as if they're outside of or above the context and reporting objectively but really they're deeply involved in the whole thing and have a skewed perspective maybe?

do you all really think it's possible to provide any kind of meaningful historical/social/generational context for trends in art from a contemporary perspective? like can someone really effectively compare "the state of contemporary american fiction" to other eras of fiction while the current era is still ongoing?

to an extent, yes

good answer

I should say that I'm disagreeing w/you max partly because I enjoy sparring w/you - I don't dig any pinin'-for-the-days style, either. but I do think that something happened in fiction post-Hemingway, some concession about who a writer is actually writing to/for, that affected fiction deeply and did result in a writers whose ambitions are narrower & more modest than people writing novels from roughly Eliot down through the 40s/50s

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Friday, January 22, 2010 9:23 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

really? i think (obviously, and necessarily) that we as a culture/society/whatever have undergone some degree of shift in the way we think of "writing" broadly and "fiction" more specifically--but if anything id argue that ambitions have become wider & larger in many cases!

"narrower" = "assumes more limited reach" is what I mean

Well, you can't separate the climate of the times from Wilson's achievement. American and English fiction tolerated Men of Letters. The only one I can think of now is James Wood.

― Blue Fucks Like Ben Nelson (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, January 22, 2010 2:31 PM (47 seconds ago) Bookmark

well, this was it. the author (stefan collini, it was in the lrb), wanted really badly to debunk the "man of letters" mythology. once we had independent men of letters, now we have academics and hacks. he wanted to debunk that, and oh hey he's an academic. james wood is not an "academic" insofar as he can write for "the general reader", but i would say he lacks the range of wilson. the idea of him doing a "finland station" or its modern equivalent is improbable.

In Wilson's time you had: Alfred Kazin, Trilling, Cyril Connolly, F.R. Leavis, etc.

― Blue Fucks Like Ben Nelson (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, January 22, 2010 2:32 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

well -- exactly.

n e way, i fs w this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97aug/academy.htm

do you all really think it's possible to provide any kind of meaningful historical/social/generational context for trends in art from a contemporary perspective? like can someone really effectively compare "the state of contemporary american fiction" to other eras of fiction while the current era is still ongoing?

― congratulations (n/a), Friday, January 22, 2010 2:32 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^ like this tends to lead to people writing as if they're outside of or above the context and reporting objectively but really they're deeply involved in the whole thing and have a skewed perspective maybe?

― congratulations (n/a), Friday, January 22, 2010 2:33 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

not very different from writing any other kind of history -- of course they have a perspective. that's partly what we're judging, and none of us are outside it either.

ah, i enjoy 'em, don't always agree. better those than the blandly consensual.

i saw an attempted debunk of it which was about edmund wilson, saying -- well, he wasn't always 100% about everything and sometimes recycled journalism in his books! and tbqh it was the *everything is ok, nothing really changes* guy who sounded butthurt. i haven't read that much wilson as a proportion of his work (which was copious), but, you know, he was exceptional, without rivals today (sor far as i can tell -- he had better books to work with perhaps) and why not admit it?

xpost

bloom is a kind of ironic example of this -- big complainer, but really part of the problem, again nowhere near wilson's level.

― free the charmless but occasionally brilliant Dom Passantino (history mayne), Friday, January 22, 2010 9:29 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well maybe i need to separate out two complaints here:

1) as an agnostic on the question of value judgment across eras, i cant really get on board with something being "wrong" with "the state of american fiction"

2) the quality of writing and criticism in most of this type of essay is shitty

the first complaint isnt really something that bugs me: show me a well-written essay of that form and i might disagree with it but i wouldnt complain of its existence.

the second one is what really gets my goat--the quality of critical reading in the katie roiphe or b.r. myers essays, or the knowledge of "postmodernism" in that mother jones piece--theyre all terrible.

i mean i dont love james wood by any means but his essay on "hysterical realism" is a thousand times more palatable to me because its a thousand times more considered and intelligent

Gore Vidal (who may count as a Man of Letters) wrote several essays asserting American literature's primacy in the years after WWII. He theorizes that the sudden democratization of higher education created a new hungry audience for A Streetcar Named Desire, Hemingway, Mailer, and, er, Vidal; but once modern academe took form literature retreated to the position it's traditionally held: a niche.

xpost

whether you agree with 1 or not is almost a myers-briggs question

GRISHAM

crichton, king, we could go on

Atwood's robot hand!

... that article also describes dave eggers as "one of the most exciting talents of the new generation"

i don't think i've ever read anything any good on modern american fiction in the guardian tbh

these writers don't really fall into the category the writer of the article is talking about, "great american literature" or whatever. i should amend my statement i guess: which American writers besides Mailer, working in the same area (i.e. not paperback airport fiction) were "publicity conscious"

GORE VIDAL

It amazes me that his historical novels actually topped the bestseller lists.

i mean i'm not being obtuse about paperback fiction, i just don't think it falls under this article's area. whatever, it's a stupid article anyway

so we have Vidal and Mailer.

is Hemingway dead?

Tom Wolfe.

capoteeeeeeeee.

tom wolfe is a good one

hemingway died in 1952 or whenever the old man and his sea came out

A digression, but this reminds me that George Saunders is basically the most charming author I've ever seen on TV.
Well, him and David McCullough, but he does pop history.

Saunders is rad

Jonathan Franzen.

ha, nice try

i WISH george saunders was a staple of our televisual landscape

publicity self conscious maybe

dave eggers

Pynchon (reverse psychology)

David Foster Wallace (he died, publicity)

The review of Elif Batuman's book is up on the NY Times website:

"Tolstoy & Co. as Objects of Obsession"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/books/17book.html

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/02/14/the_possessed/

http://nymag.com/arts/books/reviews/63773/

hmmm maybe i should check it out @ the library and just skip/ignore the grad school parts

Jane Tompkins would be proud.

of what?

Of academics getting personal. (Cf. "Me and My Shadow")

I thought we were doing that in the teachers vs students thread.

"After 200 pages of Shields’s sly obituary for narrative fiction, I began to wonder if the doom of the novel in the eyes of the beholder? It might be that some writers, growing older, find it difficult to continue the frankly labor-intensive carpentry needed to build a piece of narrative fiction, to do the intense and sustained work that goes into making something that is original, nor do they care to risk the self-exposure that comes with presenting a work of art that is not an ironicized grab-bag of things they have read, seen, and overheard. Proclaiming the death of narrative is not for young writers – it is for the aging, who might be tempted to confuse their own waning powers with literature itself coming to an end."

http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2010/01/from_hunger.html

Saw the Elif Batuman book at Barnes & Noble the other day. She's not doing a good job of making me want to read it if the cover is designed by fucking ROZ CHAST.

y u no like cuet ruskies

http://www.elifbatuman.com/Books/Images/ThePossessed.jpg

the book's gotten great reviews! (she probably had nothing to do with the cover, either.)

I know, I just hate Roz Chast.

really? like hate? huh. she seems like she'd be right up the Ol' Jaymc alley. guess not. i think she's pretty okay.

"pretty okay" = damning w/faint praise

Seriously, though, why does anyone like Roz Chast? She's like the Bobo version of Cathy Guisewite.
― jaymc (jaymc), Tuesday, December 6, 2005 11:12 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

cover suggests to me a kind of whimsical shaggy-dog humor that doesn't mesh with reviews of the book IIRC (it's kinda serious, right?)

jaymc otm but then again I hate robt crumb too (ducks)

i think parts are funny, from what i hear tell

hypocrite that I am either chast or crumb can design my next book cover

i like roz chast!

Just finished it, and it's not all that "kinda serious" -- I mean, it's basically a collection of charming anecdotes from a long period of studying literature. I get the feeling someone could probably enjoy it without caring much about the details of the lit stuff, the same way I could enjoy anecdotes about studying math without entirely following the math. The one negative thing I'd say about it is that eventually you get the feel for the charming-anecdote style, and it's sort of an episodic collection, so at some point you might find yourself in a hurry to wind things up. (And it's not like there's any huge tying-everything-together at the close, either.) It might actually be better read in individual chunks? Someone's taken the longest narrative thing in there, chopped in into sections, and placed those sections between the others, so as to create some kind of thread going through the whole, but that can only accomplish so much.

OK so the cover fits, then. I thought it was more like dissertation out-takes.

Oh and it's really funny in spots. I suppose a kind of funny some here might find precious, or whatever, but funny/charming. Almost quotably so. And there's some early stuff involving Isaac Babel's relatives at a Babel conference that is ... really something. Like I said, doesn't require any knowledge of Russian lit (I know next to nothing about Russian lit), but it's surely a whole lot more likable if you're interested in lit in general, or lit-like ways of talking about stuff.

xpost - Yeah, not dissertation out-takes -- more like how you'd explain some of the experience to ... your friend who was an English-major undergrad, I guess? It wasn't until I started reading it that I saw the marketing cleverness they've managed here, of getting a book that reads like any conversational, observational memoir about an experience, except in this case it involves Russian and Uzbek literature, so the experience itself is a little more ... literary.

I mean, the longest thread in there is an even split between "here is some funny stuff that happened to me and my boyfriend over a summer in Samarkand" and "here is what I learned about old Uzbek poetry while I was there."

Roz Chast isn't as funny as she used to be but man there was a window there where she made me laugh really hard all the time

"planet of the guys" all-time one-paneler