Novelists No One Reads Anymore

he took what he needed

I HAVE WRITTEN A BOOK, MYSELF, I AM A WRITER, I HAVE WRITTEN A BOOK AND IT’S CALLED— “‘HE GOT WHAT HE WANTED BUT HE LOST WHAT HE HAD’! THAT’S IT! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!

Borges also greatly admired Shaw, who wasn't a Romantic. (And Chesterton who might have a better claim to be in some degree mystical or mysterious.)

I also like any old anglo crap, I should say.

oh yeah I'm continually threatening to get back into Trollope don't get me wrong

i read half asleep in frog pajamas by tom robbins but i don't remember anything about it other than coming away with the idea that the dude was a real fucking goofball

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes to thread!

It's about time I read another long Trollope.

Are Tom McGuane's novels good?

I've read three of McGuane's books and saw the film he directed of one of them, 92 in the Shade. I found The Bushwhacked Piano very funny in an absurdist way, but Something To Be Desired from 1984 was a lot more sentimental and conventional.
I haven't read his debut novel The Sporting Club, but the film adaptation is my pick for worst movie ever made.

Kathy Lette

John Gardner. Has anyone read him?

imo the midnight folk >>> the box of delights

i loooooved the former as a kid and ripped off some of the names of kay's stuffed animals for my own (viz i had a stuffed donkey called robin pointnose). the idea that they have always been kay's guardians and soldiery is a nice idea, like he'd kind of grown out of this and they had become disheartened and sloppy then a peril fully arose and everyone teams up and tools up and rises to the occasion

as i recall i found the narrative confusing bcz there's a massive (treasure-related) flashback for the story that a very old bedridden lady tells abt a sequence of father-son-grandson ne'er'do'wells who all have the same name (abner brown), which in tone feels like a different book tbh (which fair enough in context but it threw me as a very skippy kid reader)

i particularly liked the section where he hides in a witch's cupboard -- it has a good LIST of magical items, inc. both seven-league boots and also 49-league boots (which are twitching and have to be nailed down they're so powerful)

also in the house we always stayed in on our summer holidays someone had carefully written out by hand masefield's sea fever and put it up on the wall with presed wild flower and a v ancient b/w photo of some retired old sailor looking out to sea with a telescope (i believe named captain kettle):

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

i also very much liked these lines as a child (not a novel tho). somewhere packed up among my books is his actual adult adventure novel ODTAA (stands for one damn thing after another, good title imo) but i haven't read it

this is a scene from the flashback section (which is fairly treasure island-y i guess) as found in my puffin books edn; illustrator is rowland hilder

https://thecityoflostbooks.glasgow.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/hilder4-768x582.jpg

John Gardner. Has anyone read him?

Even when everybody I knew was reading Gardner's instructional books on writing (which are great!) nobody read the novels, and people commented on how weird it was that his writing advice was so spot-on when his books themselves were not so great.

them wot can't do, etc etc

https://archive.nytimes.com/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/john-gardner-pugilist-at-rest/

^read the comments too!

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
I left my pants and socks there, I wonder if they're dry?

lol spike, he was exactly the age -- and temperament -- to get aggressively bored b yit, by the time i encountered it it was a fragile fragment of a lost world

Good memories Mark S - sounds like I should try to read this Masefield book also.

Very interesting comments on Gardner. In the PARIS REVIEW interview he seems full of himself and certainly sure that his opinions count for a lot.

Now that we’ve established that, we’re left with the task of finding out whether any of his own novels are still read and are any good or not.

Here is the first page of the action of October Light. I don’t know if I shall read further. /pvmic

[The Patriot’s Rage, and the Old Woman’s Finding of the Trashy Book by the Bedside

“Corruption? I’ll tell you about corruption, sonny!” The old man glared into the flames in the fireplace and trembled all over, biting so hard on the stem of his pipe that it crackled once, sharply, like the fireplace logs. You could tell by the way he held up the stem and looked at it, it would never be the same. The house was half dark. He never used lights, partly from poverty, partly from a deep-down miserliness. Like all his neighbors on Prospect Mountain—like all his neighbors from the Massachusetts line clear to Canada, come to that—he was, even at his most generous, frugal. There was little in this world he considered worth buying. That was one reason that in the darkness behind him the television gaped like a black place where once a front tooth had hung. He’d taken the twelve gauge shotgun to it, three weeks ago now, for its endless, simpering advertising and, worse yet, its monstrously obscene games of greed, the filth of hell made visible in the world: screaming women, ravenous for refrigerators, automobiles, mink coats, ostrich-feather hats; leering glittering-toothed monsters of ceremonies—for all their pretty smiles, they were vipers upon the earth, those panderers to lust, and their programs were blasphemy and high treason. He couldn’t say much better for the endless, simpering dramas they put on, now indecent, now violent, but in any case an outrage against sense. So he’d loaded the shotgun while the old woman, his sister, sat stupidly grinning into the

I’ve not read him except the odd interview & essay (where yeah he comes across v pompous with his moral fiction steez) but Grendel is def still read inc maybe by me one day cause it looks good

Yeah, Grendel seems to be the one to read.

I actually picked up a copy of October light but it’s quite fat so I’ll see how I get on with the slimmer ones before I decide whether to read. From that milieu of less-read-anymore Americans of then I’ve read about half a dozen by Robert coover & am maybe 60/40 like/don’t like and still would struggle to answer the question “good or not iyo”

Grendel is part of Gollancz’s Fantasy Masterwork series. I don’t imagine Gardner would’ve been too chuffed to be remembered now as primarily an author of fantasy. Apparently Gardner mentions Howard the Duck (the Steve Gerber comic) somewhere in On Moral Fiction, which Gerber took as a big validation from a high tone lit critic.

I'm pretty sure I read Mickelsson's Ghosts back in the day. It obviously wasn't very memorable.

I used to use his book The Art of Fiction in the creative writing class I taught. My students were usually skeptical.

oh Grendel is great, i've read it

i got mixed up with the John Gardner who did James Bond books after Fleming died

yes, very much like Grendel. have a copy of The Sunlight Dialogues I hope to get to at some point.

Will have to check those two and his instructional books. In the late 70s, I went to a reading. He was already onstage as we filed in, with a motorcycle-booted ankle resting on worn denim knee, studying us (yes, boot, knee, and he were studying. He was wearing a long, loose white linen top with a design on the chest: a singlet, is that what you call it? He was short, even sitting down With long white-blondish hair, like singer-songwriter Paul Williams, also a short Rick Wakeman. but with round wire-framed Lennon glasses, so more like Williams.
I don't remember what he was talking about when a man stood up in the audience, stalked to the center aisle, identified himself as Richard Ivo Schneider, and rebuked Garnder for (as RIS put it) saying somewhere that medieval aristocrats read lives of the saints for entertainment. Gardner replied in a low-key, laidback way, then muttered something more as Schneider was returning to his seat. S. wheeled around and shouted, "You should go to Europe and visit the reliquaries of the saints!" (point being, I take it, that they wouldn't be still be available if somebody with money and position hadn't taken them seriously enough). Gardner: "Thank you, I've done that."
he then read his short story, "The Temptation of St. Ivo," which reminded me of "All Along The Watchtower," until the bad guys suddenly vanished, like a figment of a fancy paranoiac's imagination.

!

He was visiting from York?

Anyway, awesome story.

I've read three of McGuane's books and saw the film he directed of one of them, 92 in the Shade. I found The Bushwhacked Piano very funny in an absurdist way, but Something To Be Desired from 1984 was a lot more sentimental and conventional.

I’ve only read The Bushwhacked Piano. For the first 2/3 it felt like it could be The Great American Comic Novel (I have no idea what is the Great American Comic Novel). There is one exchange in particular involving the name of a bat (the animal) that is one of the funniest pieces of writing I’ve read. Unfortunately, the last 1/3 has to make the big statement about How We Live Today in America, which mainly means unfunny gross-out humor, death, heartbreak, and general misery. The sexist streak that stays mostly hidden throughout also surfaces: both hero and heroine are likeable, exasperating flakes, but by the end he’s become a semi-tragic mythical figure, while she betrays him and reverts back to being a privileged trust fund baby. The prose is great throughout.

I also rather like The Missouri Breaks which he scripted, though it's deservers it bad reputation in many ways.

Grendel seemed to be everywhere in the 90s: on high school syllabuses, in bookstores used and new. I had the impression that it was considered an important book, a modern classic, so it was surprising later on when I learned how low the critical reputation of John Gardner was, or at least had become since then.

I think it’s close to a masterpiece. I have not read it in probably 30+years, but there are lines, images that still rattle around inside my brain. If I hesitate to call it a flat-out masterpiece, it’s because it’s so grueling and bleak (despite plenty of comic bits) that I have never felt like going back to it. One of the all-time great closing sentences too.

My cousin's AP lit class back in high school read Grendel, and one of her friends accidentally left her copy on top of her car and then ran over it. She came to class the next day, brandished the ruined book at everyone, and said, "Poor Grendel's had an accident. So may you all."

I have Thomas McGuane's fishing book somewhere, *The Longest Silence*. Another impulse buy, presumably.

These are fine responses on John Gardner.

Poster Dow's description somewhat chimes with the description of him by the PARIS REVIEW - long white hair. And he perished in a motorcycle accident.

James Redd, OCTOBER LIGHT does not sound good.

I have totally the opposite of received opinion on John Gardner!

Even when everybody I knew was reading Gardner's instructional books on writing (which are great!) nobody read the novels, and people commented on how weird it was that his writing advice was so spot-on when his books themselves were not so great.

Personally I found his instructional books tendentious and wrong. Like, DEEPLY wrong. Very anti-playfulness, anti-narration. Anti-modernist, anti-postmodernist.

In the 90s I loved both High Modernist shenanigans, fine writing, and madcap metafictional experiments. Gardner's opposition to narratological playfulness - winking Nabokovian trickery, etc. - made him feel like the anti-fun police (along with the equally buzzkilling Strunk and White).

I found Gardner's actual fiction to be quite serviceable and well-done. Way more readable than the scolding tone of his books on writing.

Unfortunately, the last 1/3 has to make the big statement about How We Live Today in America, which mainly means unfunny gross-out humor, death, heartbreak, and general misery.

92 In the Shade, his next book, has a lot more of this throughout.

instructional books on writing tend very heavily to proffer advice for would-be writers who have no passion for writing, but rather a kind of dogged persistence, which means they appeal to a very broad audience that takes in most people who imagine they might be writers or who simply are required by their job or other circumstances to write things more complex than shopping lists.

J P Dunleavy...?

Seems about right.

Personally I found his instructional books tendentious and wrong. Like, DEEPLY wrong. Very anti-playfulness, anti-narration. Anti-modernist, anti-postmodernist.

I think they are intended mostly for fledgling writers, who by and large are very ill advised to jump into the pool of postmodernism without developing some ability with the basics of storytelling.

From WaPo (gift link) https://wapo.st/3hIgSgv

“Nobody reads Zane Grey.”

Emma Tennant. I picked up an omnibus of her novels as I was intrigued by the premise (reworkings of classic literature from a feminist perspective), was surprised to discover how prolific she was over multiple genres and had only died in 2017, but seemed to've fallen out of fashion long before that. She was well known enough at one point to have one of her books turned into a film for Channel 4 (The Bad Sister, 1983) but that one seems to've vanished into a lost media hole.

Does anyone still read Leon Garfield? He was a massive school library mainstay when I was a kid but seems to've vanished from popular consciousness following his death in the nineties. I think the only one I ever read at the time was The Ghost Downstairs, but the pseudo-Dickensian strangeness of it really stuck with me.

I do think I remember Garfield as a children's TV source 40 years ago.

Emma Tennant's TWO WOMEN OF LONDON (1989?) is of interest, especially for its sense of London changing in the 1980s.

She had an interesting career eg: involved with SF magazines in the 1970s as I recall.

I do think I remember Garfield as a children's TV source 40 years ago.