Novelists No One Reads Anymore

Sorry. Do you have a thread of your own you’d like to attend to?

(Thought I might have to help with homework tonight but kid is taking a break)

Again in truth I think this thread has undergone a, maybe inevitable, maybe somewhat productive, mission creep -- from genuinely listing people who are now very obscure (but maybe once weren't), to listing people who were once central and are now, necessarily, past, and recognised as important in an earlier generation but not current.

Anyone studying, say, England in the 1950s is likely to read Sillitoe (I've read SN&SM maybe 3 times, others here may have too - not to mention the LONELINESS book), and also the early Braine and Wain. (Wain btw was quite an interesting critic - a good essay on Orwell for one, as I recall.) I have actually been lining up HURRY ON DOWN and ROOM AT THE TOP to read for months myself.

These authors are not now extensively read as current authors (which they're not), but they are still read and part of the catalogue of cultural and literary history. In sum I don't think they are really good candidates for the thread.

I believe that people do still read Kingsley Amis, though clearly his stock has fallen since say 1995.

Martin Amis is I think a more specific and interesting case - he ought still to be, or could be, central and current in some way, but has faded away from that - as is correctly noted. I think that he made a number of particularly bad calls - the wayward statements on feminism and matrimony around PREGNANT WIDOW an example - in an attempt to maintain public profile. In that, indeed, it is hard to resist the obvious parallel with Morrissey - people vaguely know the controversial opinions, better than they know any of the later work.

MONEY I would say is (naturally?) as good and bad as it ever was. It was outrageous, extreme, nasty, brilliant, central. I still think it's his most impressive feat by far.

Sorry. Do you have a thread of your own you’d like to attend to?

― If The Damned Are United (James Redd and the Blecchs)

That was a compliment.

yeah does anyone still read kingsley amis?

― lambert simnel (doo rag)

*raises hand*

The NYRB rereleased his only good books.

So The Alteration then.

And The Old Devils too, I think.

Sorry Alfred, I was a bit irritable last night for some reason.

pinefox speaks wisdom - honestly for me the mission creep is cool.

I mean, it might well be true that there aren't a lot of people reading (say) Elinor Glyn or John Galsworthy or James Branch Cabell. Fades like those are going to happen.

To me it's WAY more interesting to speculate when people will stop reading more recent authors, even (perhaps especially) ones who are still alive. Because a relatively modern writer going out of style quickly is a more dramatic development than the natural process of forgetting the distant past.

There's a line in my second-favorite novel (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight) about how hyper-modern art sometimes gets dated really fast, and I think it is accurate.

Has anybody here thought much about Douglas Coupland in this century? (pause for show of hands)

There will be a day when Bret Easton Ellis or Kathy Acker become a footnote, interesting only to specialists in a particular zeitgeist. Not sure when that will be, but I'm interested in finding out.

literally 5 minutes ago i was looking at a half-obscured book on my shelf and wondering what it was. it was Generation X.

You forgot #onethread!

Good post from Ye Mad Puffin. It's these specific developments that are intriguing, rather the general fade-out of everything.

In 2005 Coupland was hired (by the Observer Music Monthly as I recall) to interview Morrissey in Rome. He produced a strange text that showed that he hadn't bothered to interview Morrissey, had written up almost nothing Morrissey had said - I'm not certain he'd even met him. People were unimpressed. That's the last distinctive thing I can remember from Coupland.

Ellis and Acker, though, I feel still have kinds of cachet. I believe that people value Acker as some kind of avant-gardist - she had a big LRB retrospective only a few years ago. Ellis seems to have followed a different path - becoming some kind of ... maybe gay libertarian shock jock?

Of the 80s lit brat pack, Tama Janowitz is the one who faded without a revival. (Ellis has a tome coming out January, and even if McInerney is more bon vivant now, I feel like I see/hear Bright Lights, Big City referred to often.

Wasn't there a novel recently told in first person in the voice of Kathy Acker? Crudo, by Olivia Laing iirc.

The shiftcreep was inevitable. The only way the thread could have survived in its original form is if somebody else had actually read, say, Wilfrid Sheed. Either him or some other obscurity was posited who at least turned out to be a folie à deux.

lol, koogs and Eazy. Plate of shrimp, I guess. I think of how prominent Coupland and Janowitz were on my friends' DIY bookshelves circa 1993 and shudder. A few years later the same people were all knee-deep in Infinite Jest.

Maybe the thread needs a "future edition" spinoff. I dunno.

My sideswipe at Elinor Glyn reminds me that I only ever heard of her because of Dorothy Parker's deliciously snarky reviews. Her collected book and theater reviews are a very good source of fodder for this thread.

I know have a couple collections of Woolf's criticism, as well as Eliot's (somewhere, probably in the attic). Negative book reviews from 100-ish years ago will reveal people you've justifiably never heard of. Is that cheating? I dunno.

There was a recent New Yorker piece about Elizabeth Hardwick that was chock-full of extremely precise evaluations of people I had never read, and it made me a bit melancholy.

Feeling this last bit.

I would think twice about a Future Edition thread. The one I started seem to only sow confusion.

I think I said before that it might be more rational to posit that EVERYTHING becomes unread, except a handful of things, lights in a vast darkness, islands on a dark sea.

What are those islands? Things that do remain in print, prominent, or read?

I posit:

1: old canonical stuff, often in translation, like the Odyssey or DON QUIXOTE - things that are presumably cheap to publish and that readers still keep attempting because of an admirable desire to educate themselves.

2: English canonical material within eg: the C19 novel - so the Brontes, Dickens, G Eliot, not to mention Austen, remain always above water whatever else drowns. In modern times this is true of Woolf, Joyce, then Orwell. Meanwhile lots of things around them have wayward, up and down fortunes. Lewis went up as Lawrence fell away - but this surely still didn't mean that Lewis ever became as widely read as Lawrence had been (or even still is).

3: within genre fiction, some things that become canonical and hold their place: Christie, Chandler, Simenon; Asimov, Dick?

4: then you have a world of Current Literary Fiction which is prominent and read. Zadie Smith and J Franzen would be good cases from UK and US. Slightly longer established names hang on: Jonathan Coe, Jeanette Winterson, and yes, McEwan. And this contemporary corpus gets added to - probably especially now by writers of colour.

4a): you could add a sub-category for independent publishers and more experimental writers - ILB favourites like C-L Bennett, who are read by, maybe, passionate subcultures.

5: then add the tendency of publishers, sometimes critics, to go back and reclaim, republish, champion. Penguin making pretty new editions of something, multiple titles by an author, is a good sign. Feminism has broadly been a factor here - so Jean Rhys is more prominently in print than ever before? - perhaps so are Elizabeth Bowen, Djuna Barnes. Yet there must still be people who were contemporaries of theirs who do not get salvaged (yet).

The logic of the premise, justifying that perhaps increasingly predictable perambulation, would be that anything NOT in those categories is no longer read - and in any given case you would be positing a happy exception or surprise.

pinefox

In 2005 Coupland was hired (by the Observer Music Monthly as I recall) to interview Morrissey in Rome. He produced a strange text that showed that he hadn't bothered to interview Morrissey, had written up almost nothing Morrissey had said - I'm not certain he'd even met him

That is so David Foster Wallacesque it almost physically hurts. In retrospect there was a whole genre based around 90s white dudes who - consciously or unconsciously - sought to invent a very specific neo-gonzo aesthetic. "I'm not a real interviewer, I'm just going to submit 5,000 words about how nervous you are about peeing, and how we needed to find a very specific snack." I'm looking at you, Chuck Klosterman, David Sedaris, Joe Queenan.

There is another, demographically related, subgroup of probably genuinely sensitive souls who had a BIT more to say, but who are not without their own flaws. David Shields, Allan Gurganus, Lionel Shriver.

And there is another more elite tier of writers with some pretty solid literary merit who I don't think will vanish quite as easily: Chabon, Franzen, Lethem, Michael Cunningham. But

...but I dunno

The pinefox otm. Part of me wants to attempt to make a case why people should read those Wilfrid Sheed novels and novellas I enjoyed so much as a nipper, in particular The Hack and The Blacking Factory. Seems to me there was some kind of, not to say existential dread or malaise but just some kind of sense of discomfort in his work that spoke to me, but maybe I have misremembered that, you really can’t go home again, maybe there was something offensive or clumsy or wooden I forgot about or overlooked, or maybe the stuff was actually really good but people won’t care, they will say “Why do we need him? We have Walker Percy, we have J.F. Powers” and so ultimately it wouldn’t be worth the tilting at windmills effort.

Your loyalty to your past is laudable, Mr. Redd. But I generally feel there is just way too much culture for any one brain to comprehend. So any particular lacunae (Enid Blyton, or Wilfrid Sheed, or Banana Yoshimoto, or R.F. Delderfield) are forgivable.

I feel the same way about music, FWIW. No, I don't know as much about Wu-Tang Clan as the person sitting next to me at the bar. But she doesn't know as much about Nanci Griffith or Elvis Costello. The person two stools over knows way more about Ultravox than I do, and that's okay.

It's all a vast tapestry.

Crap I think I meant to put George Saunders in the last post but I forget which category.

Carry on, y'all

Here in Canada, Coupland has become the kind of cultural presence who is called upon to make government-sponsored installation art.

Lethem has an essay, 'Rushmore vs Abundance' I think it's called, which well articulates a point that poster Ye Mad Puffin is making.

Roughly he is saying that we should accept the idea that there is a ton of culture, beyond our ken, and be happy with this abundance and diversity, rather than bothering trying to delimit the canon (which would be the 'Mount Rushmore' of literature).

A good moment is where he says that we have an anxiety that we're missing something, which we shouldn't bother having - '(trust me, we're missing something)'.

re Ye Mad Puffin's comments again, and re the thread, it would actually be good if we could plot Wallace on it -- ie: that there was a peak of his fandom, which is now declining for various reasons, as we are supposing it has done for M Amis.

Unsure about this, though, especially as academic work on him seems almost as thick as ever.

I have had some nice moments with Wallace - Girl With Curious Hair has some undeniable gems, for example.

But I think it would be fine for our cultural health if he eventually went the way of Updike, Mailer, Cheever, etc.

Cheever, I think, has survived, partly because he's waaaayyy weirder than Updike; he's in the same league as the Latin American fablelists.

Well I recently re-read "The Enormous Radio" and right away he's sneering at his characters---this thirtysomething couple hasn't made it to Westchester yet, but if and when they do, Cheever will be waiting (as in "The Swimmer" etc. etc.) Yes, he's got an imagination, but the critique of plastic suburban New Yorker readers, literary default of his era has an edge of personal hostility (he was one of the downwardly mobile Cheevers, not like the ones who started contacting him only when he had a lot of New Yorker stories to show for himself), which can add electricity to the distinctive imaginative momentum, but also can be off-putting and/or encourage me to squint a little harder at the dazzle or just get plain predictable: you get to know when he's going to stick pins in a character or get boozy-sentimental.
Having said that, now I want to dig up my copy of The Stories of, first published in late 70s (I have the doorstop paperback with bright red cover), which was a trip then, pulling in a lot of stuff us youngsters had never seen, seemed startling to some older reviewers and profs also)---and his novels!!

That's an early story, though. Tonally they change after The Housebreaker of Shady Hill.

Even in that collection with "The Enormous Radio" there's "O City of Broken Dreams," this lyrical account of a family of naifs in Manhattan agog in the Automat.

True, and I was about to admit that, although this was among shallowest among the (New Yorker anthologized) ones I just read---though in part because "these are shallow people dammit," young JC would be likely to remind me---it's got more grabby momentum than any of the others.

(others were by: Elizabeth Taylor, Jessamyn West, VS Pritchett, Nabokov, Shirley Jackson---from The 40s--The Story of a Decade--New Yorker nonfiction, poetry, fiction---which I'll prob say something about on WAYR?; it's v. worth checking out, for the most part.)

Naifs in Manhattan is my next band name; our debut album will be called Agog in the Automat

(xpost Well, Irwin Shaw's story, about PTSD x antisemitism in WWII, was also a grabber, but was longer and took hold more slowly, not like Cheever's)

Agog and Magog In The Automat

Yes I'm going to get back to reading him---these things come around, as I noticed working in a bookstore and a CD store in the 90s---oh good call imagewise on Amis and Morrisey, pinefox---I have the impression from a couple of overviews that Amis is better the further back you go---any truth to that?

George Saunders

I'm betting he will be regarded thirty years from now the way Donald Barthelme is today.

The only M. Amis book I can stand is his memoir.

Experience?

Yep. The latest one, another memoir, has decent bits about writing around yet more tedious valentines to Hitch.

Here's one for the thread: The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas. It was very present on the literary landscape in the '80s, always saw it at bookstores and on friends' parents' bookshelves. I eventually read it, I liked it, but that was 30 years ago so who knows what I'd think now. Anyway, it was his only popular book and I feel like it's just totally disappeared.

John Barth is well on his way to this thread, smiling self-contentedly all the way. Early this year I read Lost in the Funhouse and Where Three Roads Meet, but that won't stop it.

B-b-but what about the upcoming Dalkey Arcjive Essentials edition of The Sot-Weed Factor?

Dalkey Archive of course, although now I kind of want to reuse Arcjive.

I read The White Hotel in the 80s: don't remember specifics, but it seemed refreshing.

George Saunders

I'm betting he will be regarded thirty years from now the way Donald Barthelme is today.

jane smiley

will anyone read murakami in 10 years?

John Irving

Anne Tyler, although ledge was reading something recently.

will anyone read murakami in 10 years?

― ꙮ (map), Saturday, October 1, 2022

I think so. Two of the most loved and acclaimed films of the last few years - Drive My Car and Burning - are based on his short stories, and they are destined to be remembered