Authors you will never read

Oh he most certainly does, I just have never seen him referred to as anything other 'that dece British novelist', the subtext being that his writing is quite forgettable.

Is there a name for people like Ian McEwan who write a few good books (First Love, Last Rites; The Cement Garden; In Between the Sheets) then spend many decades churning out vastly inferior work which is for some reason still wildly successful? Last thing of his I read was Saturday, without hyperbole one of the worst novels I've ever read, and certainly the last of his I'll bother with. Will say that his novels often lead to film adaptations which significantly improve on the source material.

IDK, Don DeLillo's work fits that as well, the new millennium was absolutely disastrous for him. Maybe this is the case with most novelists.

Murakami, Franzen, Bolano, Pynchon

Two of these are not like the other two imo!

― imago, Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

None of them are like any of the others.

― Matt DC, Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Don't think the poster was attempting to make a distinction beyond listing a bunch of 'literatute' that was tried and disliked.

Re: Rowling, I quite like high fantasy and am inordinately fond of the genre's classics, but a setting that revolves around posh children at a totally-not-English boarding school is one of the most off-putting premises for a fairy tale that I can imagine. The only fictive boarding schools I have any interest in are more firmly rooted in historical reality, such as the (partial) backdrop to Louis-René des Forêts's semi-autobiographical, fragmentary probes into the nature of memory, mendacity and unavowable childhood trauma in Ostinato. I've always found the very concept of such schools oppressive from the get-go so any bowdlerized take on it, no matter how 'innocent', gets my hackles up.

I guess this is just literature you're talking about? Because I will never read Freud. It just doesn't seem worth the bother in 2020.

― Joey Corona (Euler)

Not gonna fully try to sway you, but some Freud is good and interesting reading, and much better taken when the ideas are not informing treatment.

Is there a name for people like Ian McEwan who write a few good books... then spend many decades churning out vastly inferior work which is for some reason still wildly successful?

Yeah, the name is "white men".

yes, they do always seem to be middle/upper class straight white men.

Agreed, Freud is far more fruitfully read as a philosopher (one who was very much of his time, at that) than as a psychoanalyst.

xp

"The Rowling/Coldplay comparison to me works more in that it's pretty much taken as a given that the sort of person who posts on lit threads on ILX won't be interested in Rowling, much as it's a given that yr average ILM poster will have no time for Coldplay."

I think more people on ILX (lots of books discussion on ILE before ILB) would engage with Rowling and children's books in general (because they read as kid lit while growing up, then there are the films) more than an ILM-er would with Coldplay as ILM is more its own thing -- people had specific histories with indie already so by the time Coldplay comes along ILM is kinda done with it?

xps to pom: I used to read Enid Blyton books about boarding school as a child and love them, but I was bluntly dissuaded from the idea by my dad, whose experience at boarding school was hell. Definitely inculcates with some dodgy ideas.

Reading Molesworth definitely made me want to go boarding school (so I could learn about gerunds!) And is Harry Potter a 'posh child'? I always thought his name was partly an attempt to make the 'wizard school' premise more egalitarian (as it is in Wizard of Earthsea, the most obvious precursor to Potter).

Freud still offers plenty of metaphoric juice and insight, especially when applied to cultural products from the Freudian 20th-century. It's hard to discuss film noir, just for example, without getting Freudian.

Freud -- not that I've read much -- is more of a reader/critic to me.

My overall feeling about McEwan now is ... It's easy to perceive him as an irritating (or even offensive) person, or commentator, or 'personality' ... But ... he's actually often good at writing fiction. So it's OK to read that, in its own right, and see what you feel about it.

Almost exactly the same with Franzen. Very irritating persona; fiction often well done and interesting.

It's absolutely true that writers do off a cliff, and DC is right to point to DeLillo - but FWIW I don't see McEwan as an example of this. Amis much more so!

xps to gyac: your dad is a wise man.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but the fact that a boarding school is called an 'internat' in Romanian (and French) is quite ominous, since it can also function as an adjective (not in French, however) meaning 'hospitalized' (e.g. committed to a psychiatric ward) or simply 'locked up'. I also get the sense that it's a far more common 'educational' arrangement in Britain/ex-British colonies/Commonwealth countries.

Funnily enough I'd even say the same about Zadie Smith. Some good non-fiction, some really bad - enough to put you off her, from a distance.

But the work - On Beauty, NW - can be really serious and ambitious and impressive; it maybe renders the badness of the essays irrelevant. A 'trust the tale not the teller' factor.

... All of this seems a good reason for the occasionally noted strategy of a writer being a recluse and not putting their 'personality' out there at all; just letting any sense of it arise from the fiction.

And is Harry Potter a 'posh child'? I always thought his name was partly an attempt to make the 'wizard school' premise more egalitarian

Such nuances are lost on yours truly, a foreigner.

I very much enjoy A Wizard of Earthsea, by the way. If memory serves, Ged's passage through wizard school is quite brief and very few details are provided about its 'culture'. Le Guin depicts the experience in a more muted and archetypal light, which I prefer.

"Also for real saying you're never going to read JK Rowling or even someone like Ian McEwan is like ostentatiously stating that you've never heard a Coldplay record.

― Matt DC"

statements which probably mean different things in the us than they do in the uk

i still for some reason have never managed the ability to consistently differentiate ian mcewan and iain m. banks

i tried reading banks but i didn't much like his writing style

i've never _knowingly_ heard a coldplay record

"I will probably read Infinite Jest at some point

― flamboyant goon tie included"

fwiw my personal recommendation is not to bother. self-loathing brilliant white guy, you know, i think we've probably had enough exposure to the type. he does a wonderful job of aping insight without ever reaching any actionable conclusions to his self-destructive ruminating... except, i suppose, for one.

Murakami: I'm a fan of the hyper-politicized post-war Japanese lit theatre (Oe, Mishima), and found Murakami's apoliticism unappealing, kind of a Superflat-esque shruglit. That said, I adore David Mitchell's homages to Murakami
Franzen: felt defensive at all times
Bolano: I guess I liked The Savage Detectives but 2666 just left me wanting to stop reading fake-Flaubert and re-read real-Flaubert
Pynchon: idk I just don't like it

Endo was recommended to me over a decade ago, I read "Silence", I hated it, but I still wanna watch the movie adaptation for whatever reason

I'm still gonna read Infinite Jest
And Coldplay rules what are you guys talking about

What is great about Earthsea imo is how "Wizard" is told-slant male-protagonist fantasy fiction but the series shifts tone and focus along with Le Guin's increasing radicalization over the years

Harry Potter is a public schoolboy who lives off a trust fund and is popular because he's good at sport, he marries his high school sweetheart and becomes a cop after dropping out of sixth form.

fwiw my personal recommendation is not to bother. self-loathing brilliant white guy, you know, i think we've probably had enough exposure to the type. he does a wonderful job of aping insight without ever reaching any actionable conclusions to his self-destructive ruminating... except, i suppose, for one.

― Kate (rushomancy), Thursday, 6 August 2020 14:32 (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the absolute fuck is this post

xps to gyac: your dad is a wise man.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but the fact that a boarding school is called an 'internat' in Romanian (and French) is quite ominous, since it can also function as an adjective (not in French, however) meaning 'hospitalized' (e.g. committed to a psychiatric ward) or simply 'locked up'. I also get the sense that it's a far more common 'educational' arrangement in Britain/ex-British colonies/Commonwealth countries.

...any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul destroying.

Heh, I've been meaning to read that one!

Is Murakami apolitical? I haven’t read all his stuff but Wind-Up Bird did definitely write about the Japanese in Manchuria and it didn’t come across as neutral to me. You have to take that in the context of Japanese politicians seeming to constantly play down their history too.

Murakami wrote that book on the Tokyo gas attack. But that was a few years after I read a bunch, enjoyed it ok then stopped.

But if you are coming at him from Mishima and Oe it would be disappointing.

Oh yeah of course, he goes a bit further in his interviews.

fwiw my personal recommendation is not to bother. self-loathing brilliant white guy, you know, i think we've probably had enough exposure to the type. he does a wonderful job of aping insight without ever reaching any actionable conclusions to his self-destructive ruminating... except, i suppose, for one.

― Kate (rushomancy), Thursday, 6 August 2020 14:32 (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the absolute fuck is this post

― imago, Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

A reason to drop DFW was that piece on Federer which is a bit of a horror show. He is the one for the tried it in a lit mag corner.

But I also think the trend for dropping people for being white and male and middle class is good and funny work, and I'm here for it.

I have never read a Murakami novel, despite trying. Gotten about twenty pages in to a few of them and tossed them aside. Don't get the hype— writing seems flat?

Tbh, I've never read a lot of the supposed "greats" of literary fiction in English and don't plan on it. I find too much of it excruciatingly boring, as if many writers are writing novels the way they think they should be written instead of how they want to write them.

(I am speaking, of course, about mostly 20th century greats like Roth, Rushdie, etc)

my issue was with the 'actionable conclusions' and flippant suicide banter tbh

my experience of Murakami is that he has two English translators and I love the one and find the other dull and lacking in character

Yeah, I think I might have had bad luck! But oh well. There are too many books in this world that I am excited to read, and Murakami's don't make the list lol.

Re: DFW, I admire his non-fiction writing, tbh. Loved this essay when it first came out, have no idea whether it holds up: https://genius.com/David-foster-wallace-tense-present-democracy-english-and-the-wars-over-usage-annotated

Re: Stephen King— he's actually quite a good writer. The Shining in particular is an excellent book about alcoholism and cultures of misogyny...I often teach a story of his that was in the New Yorker about 20 years ago, "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away." It remains one of my favorite short stories of the past quarter century, at least.

Coldplay >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> J.K. Rowling

my issue was with the 'actionable conclusions' and flippant suicide banter tbh

― imago, Thursday, 6 August 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Disensitised to suicide banter ever since Hofmann laughed at Zweig's suicide note.

I find too much of it excruciatingly boring, as if many writers are writing novels the way they think they should be written instead of how they want to write them.

This is a fairly common gripe when you tend to favour poetry (or 'the poetic') over teleological narrative structures (we're in the same camp).

Which is perhaps why I'm really obsessed with Brossard right now— never have I read novels that read so much like poetry.

Hofmann on zweig is v good and the sort of thing that if I hadn’t already read some zweig might make him an author I will never read

So yes, agreed.

my issue was with the 'actionable conclusions' and flippant suicide banter tbh

― imago

fwiw "flippancy" wasn't the angle i was coming at it from

my engagement with the works of dfw is an important and deeply personal part of who i am

my post probably didn't make that apparent

But I also think the trend for dropping people for being white and male and middle class is good and funny work, and I'm here for it.

― xyzzzz__

i also don't recommend against dfw on the grounds that he is "white and male and middle class". the parts of his identity that were so destructive, to himself and to others, are not, i would argue, _intrinsic_ to the white, male, middle-class experience. i think it is important to disentangle the abuse paradigm, which was a paradigm that was, uh, _deeply embedded_ in dfw, from cis white maleness is valuable work and work that is worth doing; since those flaws are so abundant in dfw's work, he makes a good vehicle for the interrogation of that paradigm.

xps to table

A paradigmatic moment for me is when the narrator of Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies begins spinning the yarn of a man named Saposcat (etymologically: know-shit, or some such), presumably to alleviate his own boredom, by way of a thinly veiled parody of the 19th century realist novel. As one sentence pointlessly follows the other, it is repeatedly interrupted by the selfsame burst of self-commentary: 'What tedium'.

ty for clarifying rusho

Probably won't read this guy: https://newrepublic.com/article/158761/learned-worst-novelist-english-language

Ya thanks for the clarification, rushomancy. I was gonna post "well, I'm not gonna touch that!" but instead I actually decided not to touch that

I get what you're saying, extremely. This is why I don't fuck with Franzen (or Roth, and Coetzee is kind of a long shot) I think there is a particular position of defensiveness with these guys that doesn't really wash with me. Not that I don't adore the work of many many old white guys, just not this particular approach and I don't really have the faculties to actually nail down why

Or the reviewer (any relation to whiney?).

xp

Which is perhaps why I'm really obsessed with Brossard right now— never have I read novels that read so much like poetry.

― blue light or electric light (the table is the table)

I don't know if you've been discussing this elsewhere, but this intrigued me... do you mean Nicole Brossard (I'm guessing so but there are other authors with the surname)? Just skimming some descriptions of her work and it sounds quite up my street.