Novelists No One Reads Anymore

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.

Ha, me too.

Wow---one of her novels and a book of poetry are finally available again, but she did her born again best:

The Writer Who Burned Her Own Books
Rosemary Tonks achieved success among the bohemian literati of Swinging London—then spent the rest of her life destroying the evidence of her career.

Bedouin of the London Evening (Bloodaxe) is really good – I need to dig it out again.

Tonks has been fashionable for a couple of years now, Stewart Lee is a big fan.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._E._Coppard

short stories rather than novels, and an rfi more than a nomination

xp Tonks did her best to make sure she was no longer read.
re cyclic rediscoveries, as veteran bookstore staffer Ward Fowler mentioned upthread, I sometimes wonder about Dawn Powell. I got an omnibus trade paperback from QPB back in the late 80s, immediate take was of hard sell "Isn't I funny!" Set it aside---since then she's gotten at least on Library of America omnibus. Also somewhere in there, read good, thoughtful words about her from Gore Vidal and others---is she good, far enough beyond archness to enjoy if you don't care for that kind of tone (which I may have been v. wrong about in the long run)?

at least one Library of American omnibus (& think there was more than one QPB collection).

Alfred is reading Dawn Powell all the time!

Funny you should mention Gore Vidal— I don’t think I know a single person under 40 who has ever read anything by him.

Myself included— I look at the size of most of his books and think to myself, “I would rather not.”

Once again I summon Alfred to this thread.

A Time to Be Born is arch in places but I need "arch" in a postwar lit environment dominated by Norman Mailer types.

I'm not surprised Vidal's not known: his reputation died when he stopped appearing on talk shows. But Lincoln has its ILB/ILX cult, deservedly. He's not at all a dull historical novelist.

burr is great (but i am over 40)

have managed so far to remain under 40 and i've distributed a lot of copies of burr the last few years but idk if they're read

Thirding Burr, especially when Jefferson appears.

Saw a copy of Look Homeward, Angel in a charity shop today and instantly thought that Thomas Wolfe wld be a gd candidate for this thread.

Oftentimes reading this thread, I come to the conclusion that my own tastes are much more provincial and specific. The idea of reading a novel about Lincoln or Burr bores me to tears, don’t really understand why anyone would subject themselves to it.

Not meant ti be knock in anyone except myself fwiw

Having read at least six Dawn Powell novels I can see why Gore Vidal sought to save her from the vortex of obscurity. She deserves to find her readers, but their number will never be very large. In addition to A Time to Be Born which Alfred always mentions as his favorite, I'd recommend The Locusts Have No King, which is both satiric and rueful on the subject of New York newcomers striving to find their level and flailing about.

Has anyone ever read the similarly titled The Roaches Have No King? The author is…Daniel Evan Weiss.