Novelists No One Reads Anymore

There’s a sub-group of novelists who were sort of big deals because they were related to famous authors:

Julian Hawthorne
Constance Fenimore Woolson
Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie

They're the literary equivalent of James Taylor's siblings.

Someone who knows more of the English Canadian literary canon could probably come up with a bunch of names that were considered important in their times. Brian Fawcett was a writer (and quasi-novelist) who died earlier this year; celebrated in the 80s as Canada's foremost post-modernist, but there's only one, non-circulating copy of Cambodia : a book for people who find television too slow now in the Toronto library system.

So I said later for this thread and went striding the stacks of my local library this afternoon, and for the first time spied a novel by xpost Margaret Oliphant, Miss Marjoribanks, another xpost Penguin Classic. The back of it referred to Q.D. Leavis (this phrase is the only direction quotation): heroine is a "missing link" between Austen's Emma and Eliot's Dorothea, and Leavis likes her better. Well I glanced through long tunneling sentences in tiny type: Miss M is not the heroine (whom she tells to drop by tomorrow only if she can "pick up someone amusing"), seems to be queen bee or enforcer of high-ish society types I got sick of in Proust, but maybe I'll read it some more, having liked the few anthologized stories I've come across (though she may be one of those great or good short story writers who suck at novels, as mentioned by Alfred).

direct quotation

Does anyone read Norman Mailer any more?

oh that brian fawcett book is great. i never read or even saw any other books by him or talked to anyone else who'd read it (far as i can remember) so i guess he might be a writer nobody reads any more

or maybe never did, i dunno

Mailer's Armies of the Night still speaks to ongoing frustrations: levitate the Pentagon? Sure, why the fuck not, let's go, Fugs. "Out Demons Out."

(Come to think of it, the Fugs took their name from the published compromise for a term v. frequently used in Mailer's '40s war novel, The Naked and the Dead.)

Kurt Vonnegut, Hermann Hesse, Robert Heinlein and Richard Brautigan were really popular with high school and college students in the 70s

Does anyone read Norman Mailer any more?

Thought of him earlier and assume that people still read him, but a time-traveler from the 70s might be surprised that he isn’t taught.

He showed occasional flashes of brilliance, but most of his books seemed to be attempts to follow and one-up other (better) writers (Hemingway, Capote, Hunter Thompson).

Mailer's Harlot's Ghost is great fun, especially if you think Oliver Stone's JFK is fun.

i hope to god no one reads edward abbey anymore

xp To be fair, I never read Harlot's Ghost. I kind of gave up after Tough Guys Don't Dance.

Armies of the Night, dammit! Also, his play, The Deer Park, had some of the best lines and some of the worst lines ever, for good characters---I still daydream about going back to college time and directing it---

oh that brian fawcett book is great. i never read or even saw any other books by him or talked to anyone else who'd read it (far as i can remember) so i guess he might be a writer nobody reads any more

or maybe never did, i dunno

Cambodia was publicized enough that I read it in high school, as a teenager who wasn't really tied into the literary scene.

He's having two books published posthumously, though, so presumably somebody is (or will be) reading.

xpost But if I did go back then and put it on, he might show up unannounced, as other playwrights did, and not like that I cut lines---I mean, he was pretty small, but so was Polanski in Chinatown (ouuuch)

xp Yeah, I read Armies of the Night in, I think it was grad school, although it may have been undergrad. In any event, it was good, but as a piece of political gonzo journalism it didn't hold a candle to something like Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

He also wrote a good one about that campaign, St. George and the Godfather. It was just whatever happened, don't think he was trying to beat Thompson at his own game.
Lines cut/me cut cont.:
And he did land in Bellevue after stabbing his wife, so might still be carrying a knife like Polanski's character: "Hey kitty-kat."

People seem to like Mailer’s Apollo book, Of a Fire on the Moon, in which he refers to himself appropriately as Aquarius. Not a novel though.

I remember reading somewhere that John Barth is an author who was once in many syllabi but is rarely taught any more. I read "Lost in the Funhouse" in a textbook released in the mid 90s (and I dug it).

Wouldn't it actually be rational to assume that most novelists are no longer read, and the ones who are extensively read are exceptional?

I agree that Mailer, Vonnegut, Brautigan are less read than they were, when they were cult heroes of a generation or two. But are the other novelists of their era still read, by this thread's standards? Maybe it's really only a small sample who stay afloat. Say: Pynchon, Barthelme, Didion, Updike, Bellow ... And then dozens of names now more obscure than Mailer, Brautigan et al.

Vonnegut was still a huge name for teens getting into literature when I was one in the early 00's, at a point where Mailer already felt like a bit of a relic.

probably nobody still reading j.b. priestley? 

Saw a National Theatre production of An Inspector Calls a few years ago, I think he's also taught a lot?

Is Kerouac too toxic masculine now? Bukowski?

These live on as avatars of toxic masculinity for ppl to make angry TikToks about. They probably read them enough to find some cringey passages to include.

(maybe the latter has been since he was obliquely zinged in The Third Man)

I wouldn't call it a diss! Our cowboy novelist is surely sympathetic and the highbrow assembly portrayed as pseuds.

Was thinking about Louis Auchincloss, but a glance through archives seems to indicate he has yet to by the wayside.

Barth, Barthelme, Gaddis, and Gass were pretty big in the 90s. I still read that sort of thing from time to time.

That said, I find it refreshing to have whole years go by without even having to think about John Updike.

Some quality Updike hating here

Worst sex writing ever.

Yeah, that's the stuff, JR+tB. Feel the hatred rising within you. Let it flow.

I fully admit I admired JHU's prose style (and even light verse) when I was a teenager. Dude was silver-tongued at his best. But taking even a cursory look at the politics, the sexism, the crude self-absorption, the waspy angst... cured me really fast.

There are some really lovely sentences in Updike. But I can't wait for him to be as justifiably forgotten as, I dunno, Hesiod.

E.R. Eddison, Tolkien-contemporary, author of The Worm Oroboros (which was apparently the main point of comparison for LOTR when it came out) and the really peculiar Zimiamvian Trilogy. I've picked up a few of these as second-hand paperbacks over the years and it's hard to imagine them finding a contemporary audience, that and the fact Eddison had a relatively small body of work I think means he's unlikely to experience a revival anytime soon

I agree that Mailer, Vonnegut, Brautigan are less read than they were, when they were cult heroes of a generation or two. But are the other novelists of their era still read, by this thread's standards? Maybe it's really only a small sample who stay afloat. Say: Pynchon, Barthelme, Didion, Updike, Bellow ... And then dozens of names now more obscure than Mailer, Brautigan et al.

― the pinefox

i'll always remember vonnegut for what he said about semicolons. what the fuck, kurt? the only way you can think of to express your exaggerated and irrational grammatical prejudices is to fucking dump on trans people too?

huh? wha'd he say?

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. The first rule: do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”

I do think that if he were still alive (and ancient) he would be embarrassed about that and apologise, he wasn't ever a Norman Mailer type about these things

Let's not be too hard on Mailer. Who among us hasn't stabbed his wife?

i use semicolons all the time

so it goes

who among us hasn't killed their wives with their semicolon use?

fine as long as you don't stab your wife in the semicolon with a pen knife

William S. Burroughs to thread

More of a full stop in his case.

Let's not be too hard on Mailer. Who among us hasn't stabbed his wife?

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux)

i never stabbed norman mailer's wife

fun fact, this is the only grammatically correct way i can construe that particular sentence

one of the books i'm reading is a book called "semicolon" about how grammarians done the semicolon dirty

i think what shocks me most about vonnegut's comment is how utterly _out of character_ for him it is. he was a humanist, not a cruel man. very strongly empathetic. it says a _lot_ about how fucked up the world was for trans people that someone like kurt vonnegut would consider _saying_ something like that, let alone believe it to be clever enough to publish. not only is it not clever, it doesn't even make any sense! the idea of a "transvestite" is sort of rooted in binary ideas of gender. to label someone or something an intersex transvestite is nothing short of incoherent.

Not to defend it but thats literally the joke?

Like he’s using an apparently self-contradicting term (person of both sexes who dresses as the opposite sex) to convey the (to him) meaninglessness of the semicolon

fun fact, this is the only grammatically correct way i can construe that particular sentence

Who among us has not stabbed his, her or their spouse, registered domestic partner, significant other, life partner, boyfriend or girlfriend (as applicable)?

Who among us has been at a wedding with Norman Mailer's son at which he made a toast in which he told the newlyweds "I have two words for you: couple's therapy"?

*Raises hand*

E.R. Eddison, Tolkien-contemporary, author of The Worm Oroboros (which was apparently the main point of comparison for LOTR when it came out) and the really peculiar Zimiamvian Trilogy. I've picked up a few of these as second-hand paperbacks over the years and it's hard to imagine them finding a contemporary audience, that and the fact Eddison had a relatively small body of work I think means he's unlikely to experience a revival anytime soon

Worm is such a wonderful and weird book -- I've been hunting down the Zimiamvian Trilogy in paperback and I think I have all 3 volumes around here somewhere now, I keep meaning to get to it. There's something so pre-modern about Worm in the way the plot just wanders here and there.

Umberto Eco seems like one who had bestseller novels that were intellectual and thoroughly researched but didn't make it into the classroom to endure.

worm is available on project Gutenberg fwiw (but only that by him)

Is Gore Vidal much read? He enjoyed a renaissnce during the Iraq War. But since his death -- nope.

Isn't Zachary Quinto playing him on stage right now?