Novelists No One Reads Anymore

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

Dow: yes I broadly think that earlier Amis has more energy and interest than later. MONEY is 11 years after his debut, and is now 38 years old - in that sense it's 'early'. I can't praise any of his 3 longer novels that I've read after it.

Great call on THE WHITE HOTEL - a book that was big and taken seriously and now isn't.

moving away from academia - how about VC Andrews? didn't read it myself but the vibe i got of it was that it was a particular manifestation of child abuse lit, something that fit alongside "satanic ritual abuse" really well. maybe people weren't _quite_ ready to face up to the truth that in america it was _christianity_ that was the main driver of child abuse in those days...

Bruce Chatwin. Huge in the 80s, never hear anything about him these days.

Anne Tyler has books out all the time. i tend to reread old things of hers rather than new ones but it's quite regular.

my mum is currently reading Garp

in a similar vc Andrews vein, what about Dennis Wheatley?

David Foster Wallace... is a writer I have Complicated feelings about. In one sense he's an avatar of Clever White Man literature, people who write about whatever the hell they feel like writing about. it's only white guys who ever get praised enough to start doing that sort of thing.

Well. White _AMABs_. One of the transfem tropes out there is "gifted boy -> burnout trans girl with a praise kink". My past self had a certain... lack of insight about things. The kind of person who would _notice_ that all of their favorite writers were deeply miserable white men who had killed themselves and concluded "Well, that's that, I definitely shouldn't become a writer, I have enough problems with my mental health."

What I see in the writers I loved in my younger days - writers whose writing style is the most like my own - is not just that they tended to be deeply miserable, fucked up people - yes, I do know I'm talking about _writers_ here - but men who were deeply fucked up by _masculinity_ in particular. Often in ways that perpetuate the problem. DFW is widely known and acknowledged as an abuser whose self-loathing only really seemed to perpetuate his abusive behavior patterns. All of his self-hatred about being a tennis child prodigy and wow he brings a tennis player who's a trans woman into the story and it's _the_ stereotype of the trans female athlete, just like 20 years before damn near anyone else (me included) had any idea what "gender dysphoria" actually was.

With DFW I guess what you get back to is something like "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men". The sense I get is that he thought of himself as a "hideous man", like I did, and couldn't figure out how _not_ to be a hideous man. I guess I eventually figured it out but my particular solution probably wouldn't work for most people - and none of the writers I grew up reading lived long enough to be able to have the option I wound up taking.

I don't really think that DFW is a writer who should be Read, but I think the problems he exemplified have become more, rather than less, acute since his untimely passing.

Back in the early '90s my sophomore high school English teacher, who was a Clever White Man who had a second job selling luggage at Sears and spent his spare time trying to sell spec scripts to second-rate three-camera sitcoms, assigned _A Prayer for Owen Meany_ as the summer reading assignment for the honors English class he taught. I never really read Garp, in large part I think because it had a transsexual in it and it was important to me to know as little about transsexuals as possible. (In retrospect I probably would have been fine, since the character in Garp, like most trans characters in fiction of the era, bears no noticeable resemblance to any actual trans person.)

One problem with speculating on who will be unread in the future is there's a temptation to name authors you don't think are very good - yet the literary world is full of rediscoveries of unjustly forgotten authors, so clearly it's not some platonic notion of quality that prevents authors from falling into oblivion in the first place. I guess a good exercise then is "what current authors you admire do you think will be forgotten?".

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).

I am considerably more skeptical of this argument now than I would have been when that essay was published (2007, if I'm correct?). It's immensely freeing on an individual level no doubt, and the fact that canons, no matter how well tuned to preoccupations of race, gender, etc. are always going to be oppressive on some level, makes it tempting to want to ignore them entirely. But We Live In A Society, there is a social dimension to art and the death of the monoculture seems to have resulted not so much in a world where every person has their own highly curated individual tastes but rather a situation where what is left of the "mainstream" feels impoverished. There's never been a greater time to be a specialist, you can get into dadaist poetry or 60's wuxia films or 30's swing and have more information available to you than ever before, but meanwhile those who haven't got those geeky impulses to research and look beyond are now I think much less likely to be exposed to anything that might take them out of their comfort zone. It's kind of like the nostalgia expressed on the Godard thread for TV channels showing foreign arthouse fare, probably the vast majority of ppl who came across these must have found them pointless but for a few people it may have been an entry point to explore these new worlds. So I guess that is where I see the usefulness of a shared canon, of having these works that most people get exposed to in school or whatever. This might also be viewed as a defense of the middlebrow, I guess.

"it's not some platonic notion of quality that prevents authors from falling into oblivion in the first place"

Think I agree with this. It's contingency, happenstance, politics - unsure how much quality has to do with it. Maybe it does, but then, most of us don't agree about questions of quality in the first place. If it was up to me, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW would be forgotten. Other ilxors would have the diametrically opposite view.

>>> I guess a good exercise then is "what current authors you admire do you think will be forgotten?".

Yes - agree - this kind of angle on the question is interesting.

Off the top of my head, Lorrie Moore (whom many of us love) might be a relatively good candidate for this because of her lightness.

David Mitchell - if thinking harshly I can see his work coming to be seen as youthful and brittle, more than dazzling.

I was just thinking of taking another crack at GRAVITY’S RAINBOW – after all, it can’t be as bad as V- but maybe not.

Bruce Chatwin. Huge in the 80s, never hear anything about him these days.

― Zelda Zonk, Sunday, 2 October 2022 bookmarkflaglink

A test for this thread is to get hold of the names, go to a bookshop and see whether they stock a copy.

I would say this is the case for the vast majority of the authors in here, such as Chatwin.

What is this bookshop you speak of?

In a secondhand bookshop yesterday (South London readers: the tiny cheap and chaotic BOOKS on Oglander Rd in SE15) I was inspired by this thread to take a look at a Len Deighton book, “Horse Under Water”.

On the back it had a quote, no context, apparently from LIFE Magazine:

“Next, big soft girls will read Len Deighton aloud in jazz workshops”.

I don’t know what that was supposed to mean or what readers it was meant to attract but it sure as hell worked on me, I bought it for £2.

I like this story and quotation a lot.

I also quite like that shop. We may have discussed it before.

We may well have.

Truth told, the appealing front cover of the book also had a part to play in my decision to purchase:

https://astrofella.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/fab6d-deighton20horse20under20water.jpg