Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

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

The Ask had more lol lines than any book I've read this year. Really not much more than that, but a hoot nonetheless.

excited about the lydia davis translation of madame bovary

― Mr. Que

i am now also excited about this idea

Anyone read Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad yet?

Good stuff.

Yeah, I enjoyed it too. I think any of the chapters expanded into its novel would be kind of insufferable but the format helps move things along before things get too morose or the characters wear out their welcome.

The Ask had more lol lines than any book I've read this year. Really not much more than that, but a hoot nonetheless.

― Gucci Mane hermeneuticist (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, August 31, 2010 10:20 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I'd say it's a little more than that, I thought it successfully built up some pathos by the end and I was more emotionally affected by it than I expected.

anyone heading out to pick up Freedom today?

the Franzen frenzy is a little weird to me. I liked The Corrections but that's pretty much his only book that anybody cares about so when did this turn into such a big deal? Is it just because it's been so long since the last one?

that and it's gotten stellar reviews

oh

I get people getting excited about a book that will probably be good, but like the cover of TIME magazine seems kind of unnecessary

I liked The Corrections but that's pretty much his only book that anybody cares about so when did this turn into such a big deal? Is it just because it's been so long since the last one?

all it takes is one of your novels to turn into a modern classic for the hype for the followup to be deafening

joke is on TIME magazine, no one reads books, or magazines

yeah and the article seemed 100% insane, from what i read online

all it takes is one of your novels to turn into a modern classic for the hype for the followup to be deafening

― markers, Tuesday, August 31, 2010 11:42 AM (28 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

and this is how David Mitchell was named People's Sexiest Man of the Year

it seems weird to me too, and it makes me a little sad because i'm expecting it to be a solid book that doesn't justify the hype/backlash.

apparently there's a translation of some bolano short stories coming out today as well?

xp

I wonder how many copies it'll end up selling -- I have no idea how well "blockbuster" literary novels tend to do

quick google suggests his last novel did over a million in hard cover

also one of the ten best sellers of '01, up there with the stephen kings and john grishams, sales-wise. i have no idea how you'd look at the long-tail sales for it, though.

yeah, a million plus is probably a really good & rare number for literary fiction to pull off

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/books/review/Burn-t.html

came out in the late spring but still looks rad