Novelists No One Reads Anymore

well, what do you expect with a middle name like Mentor

― “uhh”—like, this is an insane oatmeal raisin cookie “uhh” (President Keyes)

but was it pronounced "menner" like the Ohio town

that book by Anthony Trollope's mom

DON'T SLEEP ON THIS ONE, people, it rules

Agreed. In elementary school we read an illustrated abridged Tom Sawyer, which, correct me if I'm wrong, is not as fraught as HF.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

Right, Tom Sawyer is a fun all-ages adventure story, and then people kept bugging Twain to do a sequel and he's like "OK, fuck it, you know what I'm gonna go Darker and Grittier".

(He did so some stuff like Tom Sawyer, Detective later on, maybe vs. one of his bad business adventures)
Continuing the threadcreep, re novelists we'd like to see more of:
Before I got off the Anne Tyler bus somewhere in The Accidental Tourist, gave her points for giving the Tourist an ideal longread travelling companion, which could even or especially be read satisfyingly at random: the massive novel Miss Mackintosh, My Darling, by Marguerite Young---wiki sez:

As she worked on The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler cured spells of writer's block by reading pages from Miss MacIntosh at random. "Whatever page I turned to, it seemed, a glorious wealth of words swooped out at me."[12] Tyler made Young's novel a traveling companion for her main character Macon Leary. A hardcover edition of the book was used as a prop in William Hurt's suitcase in the film adaptation.

In her zeal to demonstrate that nothing lives except in the imagination, Miss Young, with superb virtuosity, may have written a novel that in the profoundest sense does not exist.

— Melvin Maddocks, Christian Science Monitor, 9/16/1965

Isn’t Dalkey Archive republishing that?

According to Amazon the Dalkey Archive reissue "will be released on June 6, 2023."

Yes. But this fact was already mentioned on this borad at least once recently.

I saw your question mark and jumped to a conclusion.

Not sure why I put the question mark or worded it that way. Maybe because I wasn’t sure whether it had come out or not. Believe it’s one of those new Dalkey Archive Essentials.

As far Anne Tyler, I remember really liking Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant at the time and also reading a few others but then felt a sense of saturation or diminishing returns or paradigm shift in the Zeitgeist or what have you and so stopped reading.

Dinnerseemed like a creative peak, then Accidental got too cuet---but I loved A Slipping Down Life, which seemed to incl. a parody of early Michael Stipe lyrics (boondocks zen sequitur indie rock), but then I realized it was published in 1970---also enjoyed Searching For Caleb(1975). Some of the other early 70s novels looked good, maybe should get back to those.

I haven't rereading but remember Breathing Lessons being great, and Morgan's Passing pretty good

I really dug the family dynamics aspect way back when, but feel like there is an intentional artless to the writing that I don’t know if I could stand anymore at this remove.

Morgan's Passing is yet another relatively early novel I remember being favorably mentioned. But maybe she's just written too many for her approach, the reader's pattern recognition acceptance level, something:

If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
The Tin Can Tree (1965)
A Slipping-Down Life (1970)
The Clock Winder (1972)
Celestial Navigation (1974)
Searching for Caleb (1975)
Earthly Possessions (1977)
Morgan's Passing (1980)
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Breathing Lessons (1988)
Saint Maybe (1991)
Ladder of Years (1995)
A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Digging to America (2006)
Noah's Compass (2009)
The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)
Vinegar Girl (2016)[47]
Clock Dance (2018)
Redhead by the Side of the Road (2020)
French Braid (2022)

That seems like hella fan service.

Reviews of earlier work, as quoted on her wiki, are grrrreat! Although later:

Reviewing The Patchwork Planet, Kakutani states: "Ms. Tyler's earlier characters tended to be situated within a thick matrix of finely nuanced familial relationships that helped define both their dreams and their limitations; the people in this novel, in contrast, seem much more like lone wolves, pulled this way and that by the author's puppet strings ... Ms. Tyler's famous ability to limn the daily minutiae of life also feels weary and formulaic this time around ... As for the little details Ms. Tyler sprinkles over her story ... they, too, have a paint-by-numbers touch. They add up to a patchwork novel that feels hokey, mechanical ... and yes, too cute.[46]

Having recently watched both The Friends of Eddie Coyle and Killing Them Softly, I wonder if anyone is reading George V. Higgins (other than to mine him for dialogue-heavy screenplays)?

I tried Eddie Coyle once, based on a friend’s recommendation, but couldn’t really get into it.

But really came to post
Mordecai Richler

Also, I popped in a modern art museum today and one of the installments featured a plexiglass box full of James Michener paperbacks.

was going to give george v higgins a reread actually. my recollection of impostors, outlaws, and the kennedy novels is that they are exceptionally well written, not just the dialogue, which is about as good as dialogue gets (spare, witty, sharp, advances matters without being information delivery), but the depiction of material culture, legal and financial matters, and dense, psychologically astute plots.

he rated v highly for me when i read him in my late teens.

Co-sign on that, Fizzles. GVH's non-fiction book on writing also v good.

Even at the time, Higgins used to complain about being pigeonholed as a crime writer AND about his relative lack of commercial success compared to ppl like Grisham or Scott Turow. But some of his early novels, in particular, are as hardboiled as they come while approaching a level of abstraction that doesn't scream bestsellerdom to me.

Legal textbooks were always a horror to be avoided when I worked in a secondhand bookshop, because they date so rapidly. I wonder if the same is true for legal thrillers.

Maybe think of them as historicals? Thanks guys, will check him

I think the Marguerite Young books I might start with are Harp Song For A Radical and Inviting The Muses:

Young's next project was to be a biography of Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley,[4][5][7] the creator of Little Orphant Annie. Her experiences in joining the protests against the Vietnam War made her turn her focus to Riley's friendship with Eugene V. Debs.[3] The digression was to occupy the rest of her life, becoming an ambitious biography of Debs, the union organizer who evolved into the first Socialist candidate for President of the United States (1904, 1908, 1912, 1920). She projected a three-volume epic history of the people, through Debs's battles for workers rights and the development of the Locomotive Firemen's workers union.[1] Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs remained unfinished at the time of her death.[5]

Part I, “Prelude in a Golden Key,” portrays Swiss agnostic Wilhelm Weitling’s cross-country tour of the pioneer utopian communities built during the settlement of the western United States. He visits the Mormon communities in Nauvoo, Missouri and Salt Lake City, Utah; the Shakers; the Amish communities in Pennsylvania; the Oneida community; the Icarians; the Rappites, and many other settlements in the wilderness. Through this perspective Young establishes that this nation was founded and settled on the principles of communal ownership and mutual assistance. In Part II of Harp Song for a Radical, Young establishes that Eugene Debs was the catalyst through which these principles became the basic tenets of the labor movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

During Marguerite Young's final illness, her unfinished manuscript was compiled by Marilyn Hamilton and Suzanne Oboler and was then submitted to her publisher. After her death, the manuscript was edited by Charles Ruas to include Young's survey of utopian communities as well as her portraits of major historical figures encountered by Debs in his struggles as a labor organizer: the portraits of Mary Todd Lincoln, James Whitcomb Riley, Joe Hill, Sojourner Truth, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith and Susan B. Anthony. This edited version of Harp Song for a Radical was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1999.

Also in her last illness, Marguerite Young returned to writing poetry. Inviting the Muses, a collection of her stories, essays, and reviews, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1994.

Mickey Spillane used to be the king of crime fiction. According his wikipedia article "more than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally", but I don't see many of them on the shelves in bookshops. Are many of his titles still in print and do crime fiction readers still read him?

I'd imagine that even within the territory of vintage noir fiction Spillane's incessant bigotry and law & order fascism have made him somewhat difficult for modern audiences to take. He's also kind of a Michael Bay, OTT take on the genre that I think ppl can't really get with.

Spillane's popularity partly a result of him 'getting away' with more salacious material than was permitted in films or TV at the time. Once that was no longer the case, the actual quality of the writing wasn't good enough to last in the way that Chandler, Hammett, Cain etc have lasted.

I read Friends of Eddie Coyle because Elmore Leonard would often mention it in interviews as a perfect crime novel.

Think they've now run out of unfinished novels and outlines, but Max Allan Collins has been completing and releasing Mike Hammer books for years now, with Spillane's blessing.

So the ilx hivemind reports that Spillane may have a small remnant of his former readership, but it is fast disappearing and if he has a chance of being read twenty years from now it might be down to just Friends of Eddie Coyle.

Don't see the connection between Spillane and Friends of Eddie Coyle.

Was either a typo or a joke maybe

I see now that the Eddie Coyle remark was harking back to GV Higgins and I was confused by that because I've not read either Higgins or Spillane, as befits a thread about authors no one reads.

You seem to be taking the Non-Self thing pretty literally.

talk about spillane made me realise that no one has mentioned Sapper here. an extremely good example. i can’t imagine very many of any people choosing to pick up a Sapper book these days.

in general the railway thriller and its sequel the spy thriller would have to be v lucky to have any sort of lifespan beyond their immediate context. anthony price was another name i thought of this morning in that regard (though it’s still possible to buy his books, some of them formally quite surprising iirc). also thought about dick francis in this regard but he’s probably still fairly well read i imagine, and not just in the horsey set.

You seem to be taking the Non-Self thing pretty literally.

Could be a side effect of all the killfiles.

I read a Bulldog Drummond once. It was good fun though obviously politically indefensible - though I will say it was interesting as a person of German origin reading something that so explicitly sees Germans as Evil, gave me a "oh so this is how it must feel for marginalized people all the time reading fiction" moment.

John Buchan seems to be the one to have survived from that early spy thriller era, gets republished by Penguin a lot I feel.

Basically I think that if it's classic genre fiction, and doubly so if it's British, it'll be in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics and some saddos like myself will have tracked it down as a result.

"sapper" <-- call him by his name, he earned his quotemarks (gassed in ww1 and died young as a result)

based on wikipedia (the root of all sublte biography) he seems like a p terrible person lol

wasn’t “sapper” multiple people? but yes, misogyny, racism, and violent suppressed sadi-masochism.

bulldog drummond too, yes.

lol had forgotten bulldog drummond *was* a sapper hero fffs.

dunno why i thought sapper was multiple people. who am i thinking of?

Several people

omg haven’t done such a huge public eye roll in ages.

Sappho and her seven eight nine sisters, maybe?

O. Henry

Did he even write any novels?

Seems like the breeezy, easily anthologized short story writers will always have a life of some sort.

If I had to teach a literature class tomorrow (fortunately I do not have to), I betcha I would fall back on a lot of 20th century stuff like O. Henry, Vonnegut, LeGuin, Barthelme, Coover, Oates.

Ah I didn't think about the novelist designation

Grainy obit photo of Conrad Knicerbocker just popped up on my screen and I almost gasped. Previous CK mention here