Which classic author do you dislike the most?

Or, to the contrary, which one do you like the least. Define "classic author" however you want.

More interested in hearing about writers who you have a personal "issue" with than writers who you think are unimpressive or overrated.

sorry, not "to the contrary". should have said "alternatively". was leaving a door open for boring people who like every famous author.

I feel like this is always going to be Woolf for me, and I feel like that kind of makes me a dick.

cf ILX passim

It's not so much that I dislike Faulkner as that I can never get far enough into his books to see anything I like. I bounce off his prose within a few paragraphs.

have you read Absalom! Absalom!?

disclosure: i like faulkner, but that one is the only one i experienced as absorptive.

I used to agree w/ you about Woolf, thomp, but I came around via Dalloway. I think Joseph Conrad and Henry James are possibly the worst.

there's a set of writers who are usually roped into the literary canon who i don't rate as writers but

For amusement he tried by looking ahead to decide whether the muddy object he saw lying on the water’s edge was a log of wood or an alligator. Only very soon he had to give that up. No fun in it. Always alligator.

Heart of Darkness? That sentence is the lone log of wood in the whole dang novel. Just can't make myself try again.

I haven't read Absalom! Absalom!, for the simple reason that I've never managed to read more than a few pages of Faulkner and Absalom! Absalom! is much longer than that. I am neither proud of, nor ashamed of this fact. It is simply the truth.

two authors i've grappled with and ultimately come down, i think, against are dostoevsky and david foster wallace. they are both crude moralists in disguise. i also detect a streak of misanthropy in their work that they paper over with bromides about universal sympathy etc, which i find really off putting. maybe i should read infinite jest first, but in oblivion and brief interviews with hideous men, the characters aren't people so much as examples of social rot or the hideousness of existence. i have more time for the essays.

david foster wallace indeed sucks but i don't think any grownups actually consider him "classic"

i dont rate dostoevsky over tolstoy et al but i think that conflict between what he seems to to think he's doing vs the moralism is a big part of the attraction. he's a fundamentalist and probably not a great dinner companion but there's a vividness to what he's doing that puts him in that rare class of writers who are something like a visceral experience.

sorry, the conflict being what he seems to think he's doing (the moralism) vs what reading his novels actually feels like.

i mean, i know you didn't mean to class him with DFW but....just that comparison shows what leagues he's operating in.

I have only read Pamela but I feel like that alone is enough to say RICHARDSON. I can't even imagine the discipline of the modern day reader who successfully finishes Clarissa. Or even starts it.

infinite jest has a lot more humanity than anything i've read among wallace's short stories fwiw

I personally have not made it through any Hawthorne other than "The Minister's Black Veil." but im still willing to blame myself at this point.

as i lay dying

dandelion wine

sun also rises

cannery row

umm I dunno I am having high school flashbacks and forgot this is author not book

authors: jane smiley and um have to leave for class now

henry james. tried a bunch of different stuff and could never break through.

also the quentin chapter of sound and the fury is probably my favorite passage in any book but ive never made much progress in any other faulkner

i dont rate dostoevsky over tolstoy et al but i think that conflict between what he seems to to think he's doing vs the moralism is a big part of the attraction. he's a fundamentalist and probably not a great dinner companion but there's a vividness to what he's doing that puts him in that rare class of writers who are something like a visceral experience.

― ryan, Sunday, November 16, 2014 8:24 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this works as a description of gogol for me. dostoevsky doesn't really transcend the pedantry to me. he's "visceral," and memorable, but i think that this stuff is successfully mobilized in the service of his agenda, and not a separate element. i wouldn't, like nabokov, claim he isn't a special author. but i dislike his books.

oh boy, two henry james mentions before alfred even opens the thread

quincie, the sun also rises is one of my favorite novels. brett's entrance ("oh darling, i've been so miserable") bill's whole laconic steez ("must be swell being a steer")...there's just so much there. haven't read much other hemingway, though

^^^ would fistfight all these Woolf haters

off the top of my head, I don't think I hate any classic authors--my reverence for literature is just too great, I can find something to value in almost any book, even if it's just "this was important for a certain class of people at a certain historical moment"

... with that said, the Beats have a lot to answer for

I tried and failed to get into several DH Lawrence novels. That's probably the only 'classic' writer that I've really made a honest effort to read more than one of their books, and it was just like a brick wall of boredom.

I should clarify that I have tried&failed to read LOADS of classic books, but never so many by the same person. Apparently if I don't like one of your books, I'm not going to try another.

oh dang, DH Lawrence is a good one

What's that book about that, Out of Sheer Rage?

henry james ruined books

Dickens
Vonnegut
Updike

i like henry james. cuz he's so fucked up. i dunno, you either follow him down his strange path or you drown. it's completely understandable that people would avoid him though. he can be really hard to enjoy. and books are fun to enjoy. but the bizarre sentences intrigue me.

it's possible i have a hard time with nabokov for the same reasons that james haterz hate james. i drift when i read him. i re-read the same sentences 20 times. lack of enjoyment. i like some of the early books though. i kinda hate Scrabble though. and word games in general.

but for me the big one is pynchon. just have 0% tolerance for some reason. like having to read a zappa record i don't like. smart dude. no doubt. but not funny to me and not compelling enough for me to put in the effort. and i can just read roth or elkin or bellow instead cuz they were just as smart and way funnier. (pynchon humor reminds me of male nerd sci-fi writer humor, but i can take the sci-fi groaners. they are more endearing to me? i dunno.)

i can't read DFW fiction at all. i liked a couple of the essays. i can't read a lot of those guys though. that whole crowd. they bore the hell out of me. so did soundgarden and pearl jam. i don't know WHO people will be reading from that time period in a hundred years. a total mystery to me. late 80's to early Y2K american writers. i doubt it will be lethem and franzen though.

and, yeah, the beats...you would have to pay me to read them. i tried in high school and even then it was such a chore. genet too. zzzzzzz............i love grove press, but how many unread genet and rechy books have i bought over the years? the covers are so nice though....

i wanna read more trollope and hardy. if i can ever stop reading crime and sci-fi paperbacks.

dickens is fun!

oh yeah updike. can't read him either. so tedious. richard ford is truly the son of updike. both make me zzzzzzzzzzz............

nobody reads mailer anymore. will be totally forgotten in 5 or 10 more years.

'the essays are okay and i haven't read infinite jest' isn't really being 'against' dfw, imo. disclosure: i haven't read infinite jest either.

man I've tried with Dickens.

I don't much like Nabokov. It's not his fault though that he's often cited by people who think his bejeweled prose is the gold standard for novelists.

xp i should have said that some of the essays are OK. the one about dostoevsky where he talks about how in 21st century we need novelists to stop playing verbal games and teach us How To Live seemed hostile to the idea of art as i understand it and i despise that point of view. also the one about how we need to reject irony, which he thinks television invented, is pretty dreadful.

i sort of like that kenyon speech though, even though it puts forth some of the same ideas. probably because universal compassion is something i like, i just don't think that literature should be held responsible for shaping the culture in that direction

Kerouac def on my ugh list.

aw i love nabokov's prose. his love of the english language is so fervid

I've gotten in discussions where people say, "You love Cheever but not Updike?! Why?" All I cay say is, "Cheever was weird, Updike was prolific."

sadly nabokov does hate orwell, one of my other favorite writers, though. which totally makes sense, since nabokov was so against literature "meaning" anything (or at least readers reading with that purpose in mind) while for orwell his writing -- and, he'd argue, all writing -- was nothing if not overtly political

i always found dostoevsky HIGHLY entertaining. you know, like a page-turner. very exciting to me when i was younger. but i haven't read him in years.

in general, i find all the great russians pretty great.

More people need to read Turgenev! He always gets shut out.

alfred knows how i feel about "first love"

xp oh i don't deny dostoevsky's exciting to read, scott. but there's something rotten at the center of it. his books leave me feeling bad.

gogol, tolstoy, and chekhov are three of my all time favorites. pushkin too -- i don't buy that he is untranslatable. dostoevsky is the only russian author i dislike.

really, all the turgenev i've read has been outstanding. even the comparatively minor on the eve is pretty devastating

Haven't read that, but enjoyed Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt. Jennie is a Carrie who stays in Chicago, as a strata of society gets real or more respectable. Some might find it way too slow, but to me there was deep focus and astute tracking, both undisturbed by editorial outbursts (Dreiser was a newspaper man for sure).

I can get into Edith Wharton's society scenes, no problem. I don't know what accounts for the difference between how I respond to her and how I respond to James. Some difference in instinctual attunement.

They don't have much in common though other than writing about rich people. Wharton is more sociological and more attuned to things (upholstery, architecture, dresses) than James; always with Wharton there's the paradox of men and women trying to realize themselves in a society with strict rules that they themselves wrote and by which they'd judge others. In James by contrast the problem is cruelty, and his characters' responses to it.

I love Wharton, by the way. For The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country, sure, but also for her short stories and novellas, which are too often under-anthologized. I should also point out that Wharton could slip into a triteness of expression and banality that James was incapable of. She was a best seller through the end of her life, probably created the market for women's fiction in the early twentieth century, so those later novels, all of which I've tried reading, feel desperate.

btw the novel James most loved – and he was incapable of praising contemporaries – was The Reef, a variation on The Golden Bowl.

Golden Bowl might be one for retirement

haha, loved it in college.

story of my life: "The Beast in the Jungle."

yeah the last paragraph of that story is a knife in the spine.

wow that sounds great, what's a good collection of James' short stories/novellas?

oh they're probably all public domain anyway, never mind

"The Beast in the Jungle" is in just about every collection.

The Aspern Papers and The American both conceal a pretty good knifing in their last paras, but yeah The Beast stabs sharpest and deepest.

In my graduate years I wrote a long paper using reader response crit on a queer reading of "The Jolly Corner." James scholar live for this stuff.

love Henry James. at least from what i read (Portrait and Ambassadors)

i need more trollope in my life. also, if henry james makes you sad, read some e.f. benson. he'll cheer you up! he's great for high society AND ghost stories.

Benson lived in James' house in Rye after HJ died!

This thread has lots of good stuff in it, good job ILB.

congratulations threadstarter

Turned out much better than could have been expected, given the shaky premise

to come back to an author i discussed earlier, did you know that david foster wallace voted for reagan twice?

pretty sure he's not the only one

from the hudson review

Though born to a liberal academic family, occupied in a traditionally liberal line of work, and outspokenly critical of the second Bush presidency, Wallace was drawn to conservatism. In his recent biography of Wallace,[6] D. T. Max reveals that Wallace voted for Ronald Reagan and supported Ross Perot in 1992. Max has suggested in interviews that these stances were motivated in part by contrarianism, but Wallace’s essays evince a real interest in some of conservatism’s central principles, particularly its valorization of individual choice.

i guess in his 20s he didn't understand that "individual choice" was just a buzzword for market deregulation. seems like a pretty shallow thinker to me

these stances were motivated in part by contrarianism

as a fervent h.w. supporter at the age of 5 i can confirm this is a powerful force for kids born into a liberal family

a chicken in every pot

partly agree w treeship that dfw's political thinking was... well there just wasn't very much of it. in IJ and some of the essays (tv, cruise ship) his diagnosis of america is that its people have disappeared into the womblike isolation of addictive self-gratification and that this destroys compassion and community and civicmindedness. this is sufficiently abstract moralism that it can and is appealed to by the entire spectrum: for a reaganite this isolation is a moral failing resulting from the destruction done by the 60s to the values of our fathers; to me it is the consequence of a psychopathic economic ideology installed by the reaganites (and predecessors) themselves. dfw never went deep enough into the causes of the malaise to place himself politically; maybe this was on purpose; maybe he just wasn't a political thinker. that his criticisms of america can fit as neatly in elizabeth warren's mouth as reagan's means they're either total bullshit or deeply true. it also means tho that there is never any sense of history, of what happened to us, if something did (hi joseph heller) thus no ideas about how it might unhappen.

(except, ykno, love one another, a futile injunction towards something that seems completely out of reach but is also so obv the only answer that better thinkers than dfw are reduced to it too. like the magfields say, they keep it on a higher shelf.)

can we return to your supporting Poppy

we watched the returns in a hotel room and i was FURIOUS when clinton won

my dad took me into the booth w him when he voted and let me pull the lever and maintains to this day that I "voted for clinton" but i did not, i was dragooned by liberal fascists.

http://www.algemeiner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/George-H-W-Bush.jpg

thread drift alert

Not really. Henry James thought Teddy Roosevelt "the monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding noise."

great posts from dlh

(except, ykno, love one another, a futile injunction towards something that seems completely out of reach but is also so obv the only answer that better thinkers than dfw are reduced to it too.

yeah agree that this is something that can flip over into profundity or banality--and perhaps the difference only being the extent to which "love" is seen as something radical, even disorienting, or something comforting and placating. Love as sentiment (or sentimentality) vs love as infinite ethical duty etc.

guess what I'm trying to say--and just short of a defense of dfw moral banality since I haven't spent much time with his stuff--is that you run a risk writing that sort of thing which is unavoidable.

DFW says some pretty negative things about reagan in that mccain essay, i think. i haven't read that piece in a while but it seemed pretty sharp to me, especially from a guy who hadn't written much about politics in the past. i suspect he just didn't think about politics that hard for most of his early life. tbh i can relate since i was a pretty apolitical republican-supporter until my last year of high school.

i don't think i even care what any living american writer thinks about politics. if you live here you are no doubt lovin' the hot cronut action and streaming good wife and your writing probably reflects that. safe. homely. obsessed with self. americans just don't do indignation well at this late date. no matter who they voted for.

okay fine dfw no longer living. but still...

it's the turkey hangover talking...pay no attention to me...

streaming good wife!

>>> lovin' the hot cronut action and streaming good wife

??

topical cultural references used as shorthand. only works if you know the referents.

oh j.d. i forgot all abt that mccain essay! should reread altho i remember the gist of it being "mccain could be real. could he be real? would you believe him if he was real? would you believe me if i said he was real? can anyone believe anyone who says anyone is real in a world with tv commercials?" which is a line of questioning i am reasonably sympathetic to but not exactly down in the political nitty-gritty. (this circular handwringing also appears in "octet", where it's about what ryan was saying: the risk the writer runs. he's always worried you're not gonna take him and dostoevsky seriously because of tv.)

should mention that IJ makes a pretty clear monster out of Corporate America: the sponsored years, the moronic president (v cartoon-reagan actually), the gladiatorial football. it also makes efforts to go beyond affluent ennui+despair (prisoners of their desires) and into the realm of the actually exploited (prisoners of other people's--altho hal and the tennis kids are arguably this), but these sections and their narrative voices (black girl, nadsat-ish prostitute, injured workman in email forward) seem pretty generally regarded as the worst parts of the book. better is the ensemble at the halfway house.

sry to make this a dfw thread carry on.

(o treesh i think mentioned his distaste for oblivion, which i get: his best-crafted stories, the ones where he's most in control of his style, but also the work of a v sick person in a way you can rly feel and maybe does not reveal life so much as sickness.)

(tbf it is called oblivion.)

http://hex19.com/storage/article-images/skyrim_oblivion_speechcraft.png

David Foster Wallace recognized many real problems, especially the way consumerism has made it difficult for some people to see beyond their own desires. I also think he exaggerates the difficulty of doing this, of empathizing, and the degree to which our particular form of cynicism -- assuming everyone is a pure egotist and so, in a way, an enemy -- has come to dominate consciousness. I think this misanthropy is rooted in his depression and i empathize. However, when he drags out a concept like compassion and makes it seem like this totally forgotten virtue that might even be impossible today he sounds like a scold, and worse, disingenuous.

I think the early flirtation with conservatism is related to the Hobbesian distrust of the public that was always a major feature of his work.

Conservatism quite attractive to young men and women DFW's age in eighties tbh

Treeship's comments on DFW also basis of my take on Gravity's Rainbow, where TP's mixture of fatalism and idealism, creative exuberance and entrophic sense of entrophy, paranoid unease and fascination with the urges behind and results of conspiratorial thinkging, moralism and hipster games---all of which made for some pretty enjoyable fiction, enough so to get me through high school, anyway---really ran aground.
The opening is godhead, and there are other great set pieces, stairways to nowhere, which is his point, which he makes over and over and over. You're enjoying yourself because you seek distraction from Doom, from Accoutability, so here's another dead end, sinners. Time to float in the warfumes and rubble of truth and gibberish of portent for a while, then start over with some bad comedy, more punishment.

Although I'll probably re-read it and read the ones published since.

What got me through high school: short stories, among those very eventually collected in Slow Learner (great intro, with his very mixed feelings about his own writing; thought he was too tough on himself 'til I read GR), The Crying of Lot 49, and V. If you haven't read him yet, start with those three.

where you been, don? we are soooooo over pynchon on this thread.

Lol. Since he brought it up again, I wanted to add that I believe I read on M. John Harrison's blog that he loved V but found GR unreadable and that John Clute had the exact opposite opinion, fwiw.