Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

although I don't know shit about ebooks I hate it when people are like "I have currently read 23% of Moby Dick" because I guess I hate change or something. I don't know. It all seems so unmagical.

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 was thinking about this too & while i think its a p common comedic trope it does feel like these two are using it in a slightly different way. like ignatius in "confederacy of dunces" is both more obviously grotesque & less seethingly aware of how unattractive he is. or like richard russo often has his character's slack unhandsomness stand in for their general lack of success/alienation from modern capitalism or w/e but its a lot more low-key.

i think i disliked both books in part because of how tedious & theatrical they were about their hero's shortcomings, although it made more sense in "super sad" then w/ milo's myopic whining.

n e way "visit from the goon squad" was p good i thought.

i got about 40 pages into the ask before passing it on to someone else. it's not just that i didn't find anything remotely funny or well written about it (it was sold as both), i actively disliked it.

i thought the ask was really hemmed in by its formal boundaries by the desire to be "funny" and "scathing" & that the dizzy self-conscious idiom he was using made everything really dishonest and terrible

i do think it was well-written though, there were some very clever sentences

maybe the good writing starts where i jumped off but i absolutely agree with your first point from what i read.

Max, some stuff I'm looking forward to:

Philip Roth: Nemesis
The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories: 1000+ pages of 1920s-1940s noir pulp
Antal Szerb: Love in a Bottle -- new translation of short stories from amazing Hungarian writer
Italo Svevo: THe Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl -- novella, from Melville House
Martin McDonagh: A Behanding in Spokane -- new play from 'In Bruges' writer/director
Jen Wang: koko Be Good -- interesting-looking new graphic novel

Max, there's a giant new McSweeneys book coming out. The Instructions by Adam Levin. Don't know if you are aware of it.
I'm gonna wait to check out some reviews before I take on all 1,000 pages of it.

damn cant believe the blurbs that franco's getting... amy hempel? ben marcus??

didn't he go to columbia?

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

Now I wouldn't say I was gross. I'd say I was fat. I wouldn't want you saying it, though. I'd be very offended, personally, if you were to say it to me. I might have to beat you up ... Fat's funny like that. Fat creeps up on you. How's the waistline, pal? Sister, what's the cellulite score? Ah I must kick it, the fat - the snout, the junk, the trash, all these things that have made me gross.

that franzen bird cover looks better irl (or at least the bird's eye is all hologram-y)

didn't he go to columbia?

yup.

Read a fairly mad article about Franco in one of the papers last week. He's enrolled at four different colleges, does art installations, writes short stories, does General Hospital etc. He's also a teetotaler.

I read a headline about Franzen's new book from USA Today on the office building elevator's ad screen this morning. MY mind's made up.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/jonathan-franzen,44716/

hee:

AVC: When Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Solar, was met with some indifference in America, he suggested that we might have become bored with global warming. In Freedom, a book in part about the environment, a character picks up a copy of McEwan’s novel Atonement and “struggled to interest himself in its descriptions of rooms and plantings…” Are McEwan’s comments and your swipe at Atonement purely coincidence?

JF: I hadn’t read that particular quotation of Ian McEwan’s. But he did say that there were no more major novelists in the United States, except for Philip Roth, now that Updike had died and Mailer had died. That certainly did not go down well with those of us who are still producing the work. But no, that was actually purely objective. I believe the character in question has trouble interesting himself in its descriptions of plantings and architecture. [Laughs.] And I’ve known people who have had that very problem with that book.

odd really as Atonement isn't very much about those things, or it's more noticeably about other things

might as well say, struggled to interest himself in its portrait of the tragic carnival of destruction around Dunkirk!

did anyone read josipovici's book, or glance at it even

reviewed by tom mccarthy in the graun i noticed

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/04/gabriel-josipovici-modernism-tom-mccarthy

also, i just read remainder, and huh

what did you think? i didnt enjoy it as much as everyone else it seems

Fun take down of Freedom from the Atlantic, by the infamous B.R. Meyers. Kind of stupid, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Jonathan Franzen’s juvenile prose creates a world in which nothing important can happen.

http://i55.tinypic.com/13yh2tg.jpg

I wonder why they let that dickhead review Freedom in the first place--doesn't seem like his cup of tea.

Elif Batuman on MFAs in the LRB. this one's blowing up the tumblrs.

thx thomp, will read

I just read Mr Peanut (Adam Ross) and am really struggling to decide what I thought of it. Anyone else read it?

just read Skippy Dies, it was entertaining but not sure why it was a booker prize nominee exactly.

I've got C here to read once I read everything else I have to read.

that Elif Batuman article in the LRB is pretty awesome. i don't agree with everything she says but i mostly love the way she says it.

i did like remainder a great deal, by the way. and laughed maybe more than i'd expected to, at stuff like the cappucinos in the airport. but: i'd read that very long zadie smith article on remainder and netherland and so reading the former was a little like following an argument you've already had summarized to you: you appreciate the lucidity and depth of it, but it's not going to come as a surprise.

a lot of the stuff in that batuman article is kind of fallacious, i think, the stuff that's like:

i. the guy in the book says workshop fiction is x, y, and z; also it invented a, b, and c
ii. actually a, b, and c were already around; also x, y, and z are shitty things to be
iii. therefore workshop fiction is awful

which only works if you accept proposition i.

that said it's a good piece. i guess. ehh.

i for some reason had missed the hype over remainder so i came at it without having heard about how good it was or anything and was pretty "blown away"

i realized later that i had read mccarthys book on tintin (which i thought was quite good, especially for a pop-lit-crit book of that kind!) a few years earlier. it made sense--the same um critical concerns show up in each book

man I was getting all excited about the microscripts and so I read the Tanners to sort of get my bearings about this dude and that is just not what I wanna be reading. there are moments of real humor and nicely sketched scenes but the book is basically people making long speeches about opinions they'll no longer hold as soon as they're done expressing them...for 350 pages.

sounds like old ilx

admit that you edited that down from "sounds like aerosmith on the rolling politics thread"

thomp, she's doesn't say x y & z are shitty things to be just that there are many other things to be, i think. i read it quickly so i missed bits and couldn't get my head round other bits but i was impressed by it.

I do like Walser, so I'm still tempted by Microscripts. I just hope it's not one of those books where the story of how the book came to be is more interesting than the book itself.

it's just stories.

Read the Elif piece a couple of days ago: skimming through it again isn't it saying that workshop fiction apes 'a b & c', that were already around, but it has sorta codified them in a way (by dehistoricising and adding ethnicity and guilt, for example) as to place fiction in a vacuum of sorts?

I guess I agree that good writing as in nice sentences, etc. doesn't translate into good books or fiction. Which is quite basic, to me. One hopes Elif is an SF and pulpy noir fan like the rest of us.

read mccarthy's C and eh I don't know. I thought this dude was supposed to be all "postmodern" but this seemed like your basic "dude saunters through various representative historical situations" (I don't really know how to express this but where the time period is exhibited by the main character experimenting with radio, fighting in WWII, going to a seance, being in Egypt as the country gains its independence and the British Empire collapses) novel. I feel like I was missing something big.

Also I haven't read Remainder but everyone says it's funny, and there was like almost no trace of humor in C at all. It was interesting enough that I finished it but overall it left me cold.

I guess I agree that good writing as in nice sentences, etc. doesn't translate into good books or fiction. Which is quite basic, to me. One hopes Elif is an SF and pulpy noir fan like the rest of us.

Couldn't agree more.

I really enjoyed the essay but it did seem very much (as a UK person) diagnosing a foreign malaise with symptoms similar to that which I see in this country. Which is kind of interesting - why it felt so foreign to me I mean. (I guess the 'nice sentences - Which is quite basic' part of your equation, xyzzzz__ - it seemed really obvious, tho I'm a hella genre fan).

xpost congratulations - yeah felt this as well, it felt surprisingly unadventurous, certainly in terms of style, in some ways.

it's weird how now 'contemporary literary fiction' sounds like a kind of fiction on a par with 'genre fiction', so that there's really:

contemporary literary fiction
contemporary genre fiction
actual books

not too far from truth imo

gamaliel, do they not have… creative writing programs in the uk? surely they have loads of books produced in them (if only from us imports).

Plenty of creating writing programmes - the most famous of which is the East Anglia one, started by Malcolm Bradbury. I don't get the impression (although I haven't methodically gone through graduates of the schemes) that the elements of victimhood that Batuman identifies are as prevalent in British creative writing courses, and I would generally say that graduates seem more embedded in literary tradition than the scene that Batuman's describing in the States.

What I would say, tentatively, is that I often get a distinct vibe from cw graduates' books, which although distinct, is a little difficult to describe - something programmatic, too balanced, and well, it often feels too written (tho I'd absolutely be willing to accept this may involve some projection when I find out they're cw graduates), lacking in emotional content perhaps - no, not allowing emotional content to drive the writing.

That probably requires some glossing. Some, to my mind very good, writers are also in many ways very bad writers. You quite often see this in genre (retreading arguments from above): poor or thin characterisation (Ballard, Dick), daft or non-existent plotting (Chandler), insanely bad prose (Lovecraft, Machen). It's not confined to modern genre writing tho - to my mind Dostoevsky is often risible in many aspects of his writing. But that's the point really, I think all of them are good, and in the case of a couple (Dostoevsky very much included) great writers. The imbalances in their work are an expression of their aesthetic, it's what's important in them. The non-characters in Ballard totally feed into his aesthetic, and through the laughably purple prose of Machen you get a driving, all-consuming passion conveyed, gloriously glutting on Romance. Similar arguments can be made for all the writers mentioned. The weaknesses don't matter, in fact, they're their strength.

I guess it's a long-winded way of saying that I like a bit of bad in my writing, and programme writers seem to me to prioritise avoiding bad in their writing, and I think that comes across, and that's where I think there's a crossover between the programme writers of the states (as described in the essay) and the creative writing graduates of Britain. I'm sure there are exceptions, and I'd be quite willing to accept my whole thesis as wrong, as I'm not particular well informed about that sort of writing either side of the Atlantic, but it's the viewpoint I have from this distance.

I read the LRB essay over a steak on my first night in Paris. I've disliked the author's writing before but found this more substantial. But my reaction was the opposite of Jed's: I agreed with much of what was said, but disliked the tone. The older I get, the more I seem to feel that disagreement and critique should be as straight up and straightforward as possible; that a little sarcasm and self-importance goes a long way.

But yes, I did feel some sympathy with the rejection of 'persecution' as (necessary?) basis for writing.

But then again, I thought a lot of what she said was angry, self-propelling rhetoric that could easily be inverted with just as much conviction. So, writers nowadays don't read or make reference to other literature? You can pretty easily imagine a jeremiad saying the opposite - that creative writing is self-referential and too obsessed with literariness, or whatever. The truth, maybe, is more diverse? I guess I don't know enough about 'the program' to know.

Not a great issue of the LRB otherwise.

anyone going to be attempting 'the instructions'

i'm considering trying!

I liked the first sentence when I read it in the bookstore!

Shit, look at the SIZE of it!

i know it's enormous! ive ordered it so there will definitely be an attempt. hate lugging books that big around tho

this is a big fucking book