Novelists No One Reads Anymore

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.

Somebody told me to read it once, but the author seems weird.

Gore Vidal’s whole American History series is pretty great and catty.

I read several of GV's novels and all of Wolfe's in high school, but have long since forgotten virtually everything (may not be their fault: the drug years appeared soon after). My ruthlessly pruning local library still has those ancient volumes of xpost Look Homeward, Angel and You Can't Go Home Again, so somebody must have read them fairly recently. Will give him and Vidal and Powell more chances. (Thanks for the Powell recs, hadn't heard of those titles.)

In his collection Hugging the Shore, Updike says of xpost DM Thomas,

...he was busy lecturing, translating, and writing poetry before becoming a novelist. It is a happy move: he writes with a poet's care, an academic's knowledgeability, and the originality of a thorough unprofessional. The popular success of The White Hotel could not have been aimed at.

astonishing novel...an elegantly experimental yet quite warm work whose unhyped best-seller status during much of 1981 represented an authentic triumph pf reader discrimination and word of mouth

...there is nothing like the propulsive telescopic action of The White Hotel, where the epistolary prologue yields to the heroine's erotic poem, the poem to its prose retelling, the retelling to Freud's psychoanalysis of the young lady, the analysis to her later history, her history to the historical horror of Babi Yar, and Babi Yar to a miraculous Palestine---at every shift new perspectives opening thrillingly and a superb suspense maintained.

I didn't remember any of that specifically, from the early 80s---to the library now!

When I was a teenager I was sent to a summer school for gifted mutants and D M Thomas was one of the guest speakers. He read an extract from The White Hotel, making a point of stopping just before he got to a rude bit. This really got the audience on his side!

He also had some short stories in the later incarnations of Moorcock and Bailey's New Worlds.

DM Thomas’ poetry is great, any critic of it can kiss my grits

Oh, Updike said it, no wonder.

Heh.

Someone on my twitter feed mentioned Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. I'd never even heard of it so I'm wondering if it fits in this thread.

Not really.

He is extremely well-known, read and talked about all the time, especially on but not restricted to this board, that book in particular.

James Redd OTM !

Yeah, that’s a bit like asking ILM if we’ve heard if Insane Clown Posse.

Hell, I did a reading with Chip just last March! Delightful person.

Dhalgren also Delany's best-selling novel by some distance.

Wondering now whether anagram was trolling.

No I wasn't, I never troll. I was genuinely wondering if he was widely read these days, since I'd never heard of him. But I don't read book threads much and I never read SF, so there we are.

Oh okay, thanks for clarifying.

has anyone ever read Johan Bojer? norwegian novelist, nominated for 5 nobel prizes in literature, never mentioned on ilx. i'm intrigued by his Last of the Vikings and The Emigrants, was curious if anyone knows much about his work

Never read him, I know The Emigrants got turned into a highly regarded film with Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann.

reading a book published in the mid-sixties in the corgi "modern reading" series with a bunch of otherwise mostly big name authors: a novel about a forgotten novelist by the forgotten novelist thomas hinde. never heard him referenced or mentioned in any form before, but he seems to have put out quite a few.