Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

quick show of hands: who's going to read the new jonathan franzen?

hand up

hand up (in paperback)

i just noticed it comes out three weeks later in england! cockgoblins

hand up
the uk cover's also kind of a monstrosity

http://nozama.typepad.com/.a/6a00e54ed05fc288330133f294f045970b-600wi

i p much always prefer us covers to uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/aug/23/jonathan-franzen-freedom

oh god

i predict this novel will be 'sort of alright'

also, i wouldn't want to judge between those two covers without seeing physical versions - i think the drop-shadows on the uk one might be better, and the colour tone on the us one less obnoxious, in person. BUT OH, WHAT IS THE SYMBOLISM OF THE BIRD

hang on which cover is which? one on the left with the bird is by far the most dreadful.

i just realised i have them the wrong way round, i thought the one with the bird was the uk one? but i guess it's the us one since it says 'A NOVEL'

yessssss

neither of them are above kindergarten level really. uk one is portentous-by-numbers (pretty low numbers at that) but the us one is just 'clip art photoshop filter will this do'?

otm. why could they not have got better designers? i guess it's obv gonna sell so no one cares but still

guys apparently one of the subplots of this novel is about the quest to save a lesser spotted warbler or something, that is why there are birds on the cover

Still, that is a very weak cover.

Also, my hand is way up. I'm on the request list at the library, but according to the online catalogue they haven't even ordered it yet.

i just pre-ordered it, but i am hell of sick of the discussion surrounding it already

yeah that's true. also, so much of the discussion making it sound like no good books have come out since the corrections

doubt the insta-reviewers have like, read it, tbh

it's mainly how for most of the last ten years if he was mentioned it was 'ha ha that goofy self-obsessed jonathan franzen, and those overeducated white male novelists and their overeducated white male preoccupations' - which is totally correct, nb - and once there's a new book and the marketplace steps in this viewpoint is nowheeeeeeeeere

xpost i definitely plan to review it without reading it

it's mainly how for most of the last ten years if he was mentioned it was 'ha ha that goofy self-obsessed jonathan franzen, and those overeducated white male novelists and their overeducated white male preoccupations' - which is totally correct, nb

i dunno if either of these things are true? i mean obviously one shouldn't be too educated or white, and the best people to say so are... literary critics? academics? bloggers? but ppl were saying franzen was a good element iirc.

yeah, i think a part of my issue is my bias in terms of the media outlets i choose to expose myself to

like maybe the default broadsheet opinion on franzen would have been a lot closer to his current position over the entire period '01-'10, i just wouldn't encounter it because without the new book he hasn't been so publicly visible in terms of these things. whereas in terms of lit crit and lit blogs and nerds on message boards and er talking to people who read these things in real life the default opinion on him is a little more context-aware.

conversely, i probably need more exposure to sophisticated 'omg this writer is white and well-educated he probably sucks and gets all his college friends to write nice things about him' type blogs

I hate spoilers, so I've managed to avoid reading any of the reviews in full. I read the first paragraph of the NYT one and that will do until after I'm finished it.

Super Sad True Love Story remains mostly unread :-/

there's a new book and the marketplace steps in this viewpoint is nowheeeeeeeeere

― thomp, Thursday, 26 August 2010 16:18 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it's somewhere - http://www.theawl.com/2010/08/behind-the-franzenfreude

But really, we're still doing the thing where we elevate a fiction-writing white men as the Greatest Thing In American Writing Today?

yeah ima stop reading when it gets this sassy

curse those white men though, curse them!

the author of that just started following my tumblr after a post of mine kvetching about franzen got reblogged ... she's pretty smart & a good writer, i think

the awl needs subeditors tho. "a fiction writing white men"?

it stops being sassy and becomes earnest, but it's all kind of ehh to me. if one aspires to writing novels it's probably more interesting.

Even the Brits agree that Franzen has tapped into some kind of shared experience psyche: the Guardian called The Corrections "a report from the frontline of American culture."

It seems a fair question, in that context, to ask: "What's this 'we,' white man?"

well the guardian is being glib, but doesn't this suggest that franzen does address people outside brooklyn? she doesn't say whether the guardian writer is white/a man/_______, and perhaps said writer isn't any of those things. if there isn't a 'shared experience psyche' (great phrase huh) i guess literature is p much fucked.

What collective American experience do these critics envision Franzen as describing? I have a suspicion they simply imagine their own white, male, middle class experiences as the "American experience," because it's always been presented that way to them, not least in the novels of Updike and Mailer and sometimes Roth that they so often list as favorites.

and this is kind of hmmmmmm too -- critics, ime anyway, talk about roth in terms of jewishness a whole lot of the time, not of 'universal' american experience. not, and this is the point with all of them surely, that he is defined by his jewishness.

I really liked Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart and The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, they're probably the two best new books I've read this year, but it feels like there's a trend of these like literary novels that humorously treat their heroes as grotesques, like constantly talking about how gross they look and how fat they are and how people don't like them very much. I don't know, I guess maybe it's not a "trend" since I can't think of any other examples but Shteyngart and Lipsyte in particular are very similar in doing this, across all of their books that I've read. It's interesting.

I'll probably read the new Franzen eventually but I'm not like superpumped about it or anything.

and yeah I guess is actually more of a long literary tradition than a recent trend, so nevermind. I just want to talk about those books. They both ended up affecting me more than I expected.

yeah super sad love story was pretty great, + i like that thing w/ how gross the heroes are but i kinda hope that shteyngart doesnt do it again w/ his next book, i had read absurdistan only a month or so ago + it's the same thing

Key transition between paragraphs 9 and 10:

So when you are a lady writer, or an African American writer (sometimes you are both, whee!) and you write something, and it is met with silence by those you see yourself as writing to, or, perhaps worse, a shrug or faint praise, well, that does seem to undermine your project. It makes you feel like your voice is worth less than someone else's. It makes you wonder if you should bother to keep speaking at all.

Your writing doesn't get the reaction you think it deserves, and as a result you feel less confident.

And the silencing and devaluing of those voices has consequences, particularly when it tends to happen disproportionately to certain populations.

Those feelings aren't your responsibility now. They are symptoms of external agency. Your voice is being silenced and devalued. It's being done to you.

Another move I don't follow:

Isn't it fair for her to ask critics to value for something that speaks more closely to her actual life?

No cheap shots about grammar from me. But this writer has already dismissed (accurately, I think) not only the gatekeeping role of traditional publishing but the "mere ego stroke of getting praise in a good review." From that stance, why should she plead for critics to value anything at all? I don't think she or anyone can maintain that critics are keeping gates between readers and writers when the gates have dissolved in the internet cloud.

Franzen doesn't live in Brooklyn.

I think these complaints are so daft, pointless, self-serving and time-wasting!

So I hope I agree with you alimosina!

I'm going to read this, but it looks like I'm going to have to wait for a new edition because those covers are horrible.

i have no idea how you can spend the best part of a decade on a book then accept that cover (the US one, the UK one is bad but not offensive) just... i mean, it's totally baffling. so awful.

I'm looking forward to the book though, I have it pre-ordered. Pretty sure it will be great.

hello book friends--i am working on a fall books preview (geared toward an american audience); is there anything coming out in sept/oct/nov/dec that you are particularly looking forward to?

who claimed he lives in brooklyn?

also there's nothing i am looking forward to not covered in the books preview at the start of the thread /: mainly twain's autobio and the pale king, i guess

also, that stating that the literary efforts of women and of people of colour are occluded by the auto-lionising treatment given to white dudes is "daft, pointless, self-serving and time-wasting" without bothering to engage with the particular complaint is pretty abhorrent. just saying.

yeah i dont know that i "get" the virulent response to that awl article, even if i dont agree with it 100%

the pale king <--- otm x 10,000

max, i'm guessing you've already been through conversational reading's 'interesting new books 2010' list? doesn't entirely overlap w the list at the the start of the thread.

(the things i've been looking forward to are i think already out in the us - the lydia davis short story collection, mo yan's life and death are wearing me out)

pale king doesn't come out until next spring

here's a "pro tip" for you guys: if you buy a hardcover book, you can "take off" the offensive paper cover and discard it/defecate in it/blog about it

yes i have c sharp though thanks for linking! i am sort of wondering if theres anything special to ilxors hearts that they are v excited for, because my personal anticipations are pretty basic and in-line w/ the lists that are out there

excited about the lydia davis translation of madame bovary