Rolling Contemporary Literary Fiction

so i couldnt make it past page 58 of 'the art of fielding' w/o continuously cringing

oh what was up with this? i'm still in the buying-the-hype phase so you could save me some time if you named some specific unappealing trait

ha i just started art of fielding last night and was enjoying until it switched perspective from the baseball player to the college president and his estranged daughter. seems to have turned into rote franzenesque "strained family relationships" contemporary lit. haven't decided if i'm going to keep up with it or not.

feel like no one's writing good weird books anymore.

feel like no one's writing good weird books anymore

like what kinda thing? just curious. bc maybe the genre of like rolling literary fiction isn't the place to find it. i think 'busy monsters' is meant to be kinda strange at this end of the spectrum.

i just feel like all the big contemp lit over the past year or two has just been franzen rip-off stuff about estranged families and bad relationships. no one's writing novels about the world or the mind or ideas, or at least no one who's getting any press. if i'm missing it on stuff, please let me know.

i get that a lot of people like books about relationships and emotions, but i like good stories and stuff that makes me think. the current contemporary literary world feels very unambitious to me, content to explore these family/marriage dynamics and not go any bigger.

Have you read Gilead or Home? The religious debates in these novels undergirding the family drama are powerful.

i don't know what those are

by Marilynne Robinson? She won the Pulitzer for Gilead.

I recommend'em. It's not often we see real arguments in American fiction, like you point out.

Housekeeping ftw

A good novel. I prefer the movie though.

idk the movie

It's never been released on DVD unfortunately. Written and directed by Bill Forsyth (Local Hero), starring Christine Lahti.

heh, did this thread get created because shakey mo was saying the thing that nick is saying? obviously in way more offensive and weird terms but

neway n/a i just read c by tom mccarthy (booker prize nominee!) and it is allll about ideas baby

i read c and was kind of disappointed tbh, though it was definitely more ambitious/closer to what i'm looking for. there were definitely lots of ideas there but they didn't really cohere into anything for me. maybe i'm just not smart enough for it, i was reading the tom mccarthy thread and was just like ?

sorry if i'm coming off as complainy, i feel like i've read some good stuff lately but most of it was nonfiction. i did enjoy the sisters brothers by patrick macmanus - it was obviously kind of pynchon lite and also not particularly ambitious but it was fun and interesting.

Thought about trying to read 'c', but when I saw that n/a didn't like it, I figured I was off the hook. Seriously. Well, that and some article somebody linked to that the author wrote. I have read The C Programming Language by Kernighan and RItchie, which is a stone cold classic.

Preferred the movie version of Housekeeping as well.

i'd seen the title 'the art of fielding' but i'd assumed it was about, you know, henry fielding

let me guess, you are not american

ITS JUST GLORIFIED FUCKING ROUNDERS FOR FUCKS SAKE THAT IS NO KIND OF A GAME FOR GROWN MEN

i mean

haw

Heh I had assumed it was about cricket. I wouldn't pick up any of the three Fielding books I have so far imagined.

n/a do you read any genre fiction or fiction in translation? those tend to be the places i look for books abt 'ideas' and/or books that are telling interesting stories and just generally 'good weird books'.

i think there are ambitious and thoughtful books in english too but even then a lot of them are kinda 'about families' (cf. the privileges)

i don't really think these books don't exist, they just don't seem to get huge press and so i'm not always aware of them. i don't read a lot of translated fiction, though i read a lot of the bolano stuff, and in genre fiction i have some mystery and sci fi authors i keep track of. you're probably right that i should follow sci fi more specifically since it's designed more for exploring ideas and weirdness, i just have issues with some of the tropes of sci fi.

fwiw something ive been thinking its that it can be really hard to see the unheralded gems and worthwhile oddities of yr own time sorta by definition. and yeah part of that is that like the times book review and middlebrow lit mags and stuff are p focused on respectable, 'safe' authors like franzen or egan or even mccarthy who are generally operating w/in well-defined boundaries.

its obv not impossible, but compared to music or film finding weird, good novels just seems more difficult imo and like the whole 'alternate cannon' nyrb 'lost classics' type of thing seems to require a bit of distance and settling of the waters in order to happen? idk

i think you are right and i think that's also something we got into on the y kant shakey mo read thread

the real problem is that yr talking about a clutch of artists who were *already vetted* by the lit establishment before any of us on this thread were reading grownup novels. so when you talk about "places to start" and worrying about "hating them," yr essentially complaining about not wanting to do yr own work. i am sure there were people plowing through the grove and olympia backlists back then because they were turned onto one of the heavy-hitters and had to slog through a bunch of late-modernist/early-postmodernist garbage to find them gems.

― strongohulkingtonsghost, Friday, June 25, 2010

not that i blame anyone for "not wanting to do their own work" because obviously reading an unknown, hard, dense, new novel takes a lot more time/effort than spinning an unknown, hard, dense, new album.

hey which thread is that? it's come up before, & doesn't list when i search 'shakey'. just i am drawn if it's a thread about why someone can't finish a book/has reading issues.

xxp re: 'y kant shakey read'

it's hidden under this p. hilarious deadpan title

new novels and why they suck and whatever

ohhhh wait i got it, new novels & why they suck
xp ha thank you

n/a have you read correction by thomas bernhard I will rec that book until I die read that ok

there is a guy writing for film comment atm agitating for greater reevaluation & investigation of potentially anonymous work in cinema - says a lot of the 'spadework' of canon formation needs to be done because it was sort of hasty & succinct.

I like sad germans mostly

― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Friday, June 25, 2010 11:35 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

There is a post on m. john harrison's blog where he says that Literary Fiction is ultimately another genre with the same problems of repetitiveness, formulas, uninspired writing,etc. as any genre, but it gets a pass from most people because it is Literature Therefore Not A Genre. Which is basically what Lamp and some others said upthread.

it's a common lament of genre fiction writers! i'm not sure i trust it

the submerged and necessary counterpart to that argument is that it then follows that saying 'this novel about an academic couple divorcing is short on big ideas' is just as point-missing a criticism as 'this trilogy about the colonisation of jupiter is missing any in depth characterisation e.g. of an academic couple getting a divorce'

I just read this which I enjoyed - it's just an afternoon's reading really, I did sort of lose the thread but that was more my fault than the book's (I read the first half on a flight, then didn't get back to it until two days later and because it's a single continuous narrative that can be read in a sitting it kinda demands that). It is very very much a novel about the mind and a single idea within a single mind being pursued and exposed, and it manages to cover several moods within a short space pretty remarkably.

but you did specify "in English" - I think 60+% of my reading is stuff in translation, English isn't popping as hard as for example Spanish right now imo.

Usually I don't trust it, thomp, but mjh can walk the walk, and I don't think he would fall into the trap of either of those two approaches.

Actually in the current Harper's one of the BK Jonathans- Lethem, of course- ruefully regrets deserting his genre-writing buddies and going mainstream. He misses those guys and their intelligent, informed conversations but realizes you can't go home again and ultimately wishes his sci-fi buddies could be a little less nerdy about being excluded from the big kids's table and his Literary friends could lighten up and learn what a slide rule is for, or something like that.

it must have been so hard for jonathan, getting paid to think about that

I wish Lethem would go back to writing genre stuff

did anyone read his monograph on 'they live!' yet

dammit, had to google to be sure

When I want to find about about new novels not in the NYTBR vein I read the reviews in the back of Review of Contemporary Fiction, the journal from Dalkey Archive.

feels like there hasn't been any literary fiction i've been interested in reading in a loooong time. what have i missed?

its 5 years old now, but i just finished "the gathering" by anne enright and i loved it

what's good

and recent

also, does anyone have a list of shit that's coming out soon?