The Exley Thread and also "Minor American Realists"

dubus and yates were pals. i still haven't dug into dubus yet, though i have a big fat collected stories collection that i keep meaning to get to.

"got "pages from a cold island""

aw, i shouldn't say this, but you should really read A Fan's Notes first if you haven't already read it.

and for yates, just in case people don't know where to dig in: revolutionary road, easter parade, collected stories are good places to start.

i'm scared of the forthcoming Revolutionary Road movie! Sam Mendes directing (i hated American Beauty - and wasn't that his version anyway?) and Leo and Kate starring!! i am a kate winslet fan though. i dunno, maybe it won't be so bad.

i will see your paula fox's desperate characters, t g, and raise you christina stead's the man who loved children. so wild and tough and strange and primal. stead was australian but the book is set in the states. it has the power to mark you permanently with its fire.

http://img.timeinc.net/time/2005/100books/jackets/the_man_who_loved_children.jpg

thanks for the tip, scott-- i'll hold off on "cold island" until i find "a fan's notes". i would have bought it if they had had it.

ooh! ive never read any christina stead. and i'm from nz + used to live in australia so i really shld! for shame. and i agree abt the revolutionary road movie, i remember reading something abt it and it was like 'TOGETHER AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE TITANIC, IT'S KATE + LEO IN REVOLUTIONARY ROAD'.

i'm rereading all the king's men and then on to hecate county, which should help me deal with cold island quite a bit -- much more interesting to read atkm thinking about why exley likes it so much, and why it matters so much to him that burden and not stark is the main character, which is, i think, that if you find stark the main character you A) don't know what a novel is and B) have no soul.

now i need to reread some fitzgerald too, who yates and exley both idolized, and ask the same question about the great gatsby.

of course the sense of place is the other strong linking thing.

i find it hard to imagine filming any yates tho -- his summary narration.

by the way i just finished reading cold springs harbor and it was so devistatingly good.

i just finished ATKM last night (restored version; your post threw me until i realized that stark = talos). it boggles my mind that anyone would argue stark is the main character. yet wikipedia for instance lists him first under Characters and says the book "portrays the dramatic political ascension and demise of Willie Stark." oh poor jackie bird :(

incidentally, david simon considers ATKM the great american novel. interesting in light of Burden's being of and then gradually more above or least separate from the Boss as institution.

i really like this boston review article on yates by the way
http://bostonreview.net/BR24.5/onan.html

fan's notes before cold island seconded though. christ, i really want to get a copy soon so i can reread it and think it through more carefully.

the exley passage that "responds" to atkm is the passage on his breakup with april (and looking at cold island, i note that the sections he reads his students are all the intense and lyrical ones concerning burden and love and stark isn't in there at all, and of course atkm is deeply reactionary because what all the king's men couldn't put together again is the proper and genteel dream) and while exley finds a sort of meaning and humanity in the way in which barriers between people break down and so become messy and awful that's where warren, or at least burden, finds simply a, very funny, granted, misogyny and misanthropy and so thinking again of why exley and yates seem linked its not just the dissoluteness and discipline and depressing themes and etc. but also that they deal with female characters so well because they deal with how men *treat* women which is also in part what makes the end of cold spring harbor so amazing, if abrupt, in that everything hasn't gone to hell yet, as it might in others of his books, but the way the relationships are created and with the choices of a previous generation pressing down on them, its so clear that it all will go to hell, and again after that.

so also there's a reactionary element to yates and exley which is offset, maybe like with warren, in their sense that the past they're longing for it a somewhat fake one (but less so with warren).

and reading through hecate county now, which is terribly amusing once you give yourself to its mannerisms and bear through the long setups to get to the elegant twists, i'm seeing the wilson in cold island too, and get the sense that exley was a very permeable writer, half-consciously pastiching, but also probably simply immersing and reproducing, so there's a different sort of criticism going on throughout cold island too, a second-order "see what i did there" that makes you think about how he's distilling what he wants to draw from out of the whole of the works he's thinking about.

also while just waking up it finally hit me what the walking stick was about. wow was i dense missing that.

just read that boston review thing at lunch time, so great. makes me want to definitely pick up some more richard yates (and of course this thread does also) i hadnt even heard of him till last year when i got revolutionary road cheap somewhere. I loved it but then didn’t persue him any further, not sure why. It’s weird tho, this is totally not the kind of thing I would have enjoyed a few years ago. Would have found it too boring, too sad, too um real I guess. Same thing w/ the first time I read alice munro, didn’t get it at all. But now, wow – alice munro. That lady sure can write.

i still haven't dug into dubus yet, though i have a big fat collected stories collection that i keep meaning to get to.

Start with the collection of four stories (or two novellas and two stories, I think) they collected to go with We Don't Live Here Anymore. Crazy good.

In terms of current writers people who like the above might like, has anyone read Julie Orringer's "How to Breathe Underwater"? Brilliant short stories, sort of what Yates might have written if he was a woman. Though I know that's a stupid thing to say.

I have never read the Orringer book. I'll keep it in mind.

anyone ever read this:

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/c2/c12166.jpg

i read it years ago, and remember really liking it. i've never read any of his non-fiction (which is what he most famous for, i suppose.)

IS most famous for, that is.

note the carver blurb. was it carver who was the big amy bloom fan? or was that saul bellow? maybe bellow.

I read Wolff's Old School, I don't remember anything about it except that the teenage Wolff stand-in finagled a meeting with Ayn Rand and found out she was a bitch.

All of Wolff's short stories are really, really good - I came across a collected edition a few years ago, dipped into it and was grabbed. Actually, thinking about it, the same thing happened when I got Yates' collected stories, and they hit a similar nerve.

i like North American Martyrs quite a bit, esp. title story, "Hunters in the Snow," and "A Brief Episode in the Life of Professor Brook". Need to revisit The Night In Question, i remember only "Bullet in the Brain". Carver and Wolff were buddies, i think they taught or were students together.

the Orringer/Yates comparison is new to me, though admittedly i'm not very familiar with Yates (just started RR today)-- she is more frequently compared to Flannery O'Connor. is Yates big on coming-of-age stories? because Orringer sure is.

ok so i've been reading some of jane smile's 13 ways of looking at the novel b/c i'm thinking about writing as craft and it seemed mildly interesting and yeechh. i haven't read her fiction tho but this is confused and bilious and weird in leaving out lots of the cannon i'm interested in, and also anti-this-thread but helps me realize that classical realism (which she writes scads about) and "minor realism" are two v. different things, and she's interesting actually in giving a sort of feminist account of the rise of the novel in relation to women and the condition of women as a central theme, although the creation of "family" is maybe a better way of putting it, but... anyway, "minor realism" almost strikes me as the inverse -- an avoidance of melodrama (even though there are situations that are melodramatic), an avoidance of big social statement (even though they are sociologically grounded often), an avoidance of morality (even though they are deeply moral) and also via all this the fact that novels and short stories don't seem so far apart in this tradition even as smiley is so insistent on the absolute difference between the two. smiley also harps on the core rhythm of the novel as action reflection action reflection etcet, and there's a narrowing of that too, the idea that action and its meaning are the same.

i like where she talks about voice, but its too scattered and loose, but i've been thinking about this a bunch in terms of how yates uses the third person omniscient and how exley's first person is at such a distance in time (very hecate county there) that there's a distinctiveness all its own.

what do ppl think of robert penn warren's short stories b/c i read a few of those too? blackberry winter was weird for me because i'm sure i read it back in jr high or high school at some point and the whole collection reminded me of the feeling of "oh, this is supposed to be a story and i'm supposed to get a theme out of it and then discuss it." that i despised in school so much, even though i could appreciate them now nonetheless, partly by stepping away from them and looking at them as saying things to an audience that is not me at all. and this is where blackberry winter really comes in b/c sure enough google up the crit and it all deals with the hobo as some sort of evil and the idyll of childhood and fall from grace and etc which makes sense on some level, but on another level i'm reading it as a story of someone trapped in a small town rendered too preciously for my liking getting a glimpse of a much more *interesting* world to explore, so the morality does whatever the opposite of resonating is.

another precept of minor realism: actions are more lyrical than words?

sterl, you should really read flannery o'connor on writing. so interesting. she was very anti "theme". she was very pro "seeing" and "the truth". she was very absolute about things. which i dig sometimes. everything, to her, had to come from reality and honest observation no matter what you wrote. everything had to add up. oh, it's a helluva book. and i'm not an o'connor fanatic or anything. her observations on religion and writing and the religious writer is so smart and matter of fact. almost the polar opposite of some horrible c.s. lewis book i read on writing years ago.

i think maybe some waugh at his best and less broadly comic also fits here? i've been reading the short stories.

ok the yates/stephen crane connection in spades right here in a section from crane's "Maggie":

One day the young man, Pete, who as a lad had smitten the
Devil's Row urchin in the back of the head and put to flight the
antagonists of his friend, Jimmie, strutted upon the scene.
He met Jimmie one day on the street, promised to take him to
a boxing match in Williamsburg, and called for him in the evening.

Maggie observed Pete.

He sat on a table in the Johnson home and dangled his checked
legs with an enticing nonchalance. His hair was curled down over
his forehead in an oiled bang. His rather pugged nose seemed to
revolt from contact with a bristling moustache of short, wire-like
hairs. His blue double-breasted coat, edged with black braid,
buttoned close to a red puff tie, and his patent-leather shoes
looked like murder-fitted weapons.

His mannerisms stamped him as a man who had a correct sense of
his personal superiority. There was valor and contempt for
circumstances in the glance of his eye. He waved his hands like a
man of the world, who dismisses religion and philosophy, and says
"Fudge." He had certainly seen everything and with each curl of
his lip, he declared that it amounted to nothing. Maggie
thought he must be a very elegant and graceful bartender.

He was telling tales to Jimmie.

Maggie watched him furtively, with half-closed eyes, lit with
a vague interest.

the way that sort of irony of perception, half sympathetic, half sociological is rendered throughout maggie in particular seems to have been lifted almost wholesale by yates, like even becoming the driving force in easter parade.

i used to be so obsessed with stephen crane. all of it. the poetry, the reportage, all of it. sterl, are you a fan of kazin's on native grounds? i guess i am always searching for forgotten children of crane/hemingway/anderson/fitzgerald/dreiser/lewis. it's in my bones, i suppose. do you know what book REALLY impressed me after ignoring it for years cuz it just looked like one of those eat your vegetables/homework kinda things: sarah orne jewett's the country of the pointed firs.

so modern! so very much a harbinger of what was to come!

love carver, tobias wolff and ford.
i saw richard yates in the book store recently, and was tempted to buy.
anyone read "jesus' son" by denis johnson? possibly - no, definitely - in my top 5 novels. and "weep not, my wanton" by maggie dubris - a good friend sent me a blacksparrow edition of this collection, it's fantastic; very much in the johnson/wolff/bukowski/carver style - 'realist' but also incredibly funny and powerful.

who came up with the "dirty realism" tag anyway? to describe carver and the gang.

it was granta's doing, no?

dirty realism issue 8 from 1983:

Duncan Bush, Claudia Cardinale is a Mexican Revolutionary
Michael Herr, The State of the State of Things
Russell Hoban, Fragments of a Lament for Thelonious Monk
Marek Nowakowski, War Reports from Poland
Jayne Anne Phillips, Rayme - A Memoir of the Seventies
Richard Ford, Rock Springs (read)
Raymond Carver, The Compartment
Elizabeth Tallent, Why I Love Country Music
Frederick Barthelme, Monster Deal
Bobbie Ann Mason, Still Life with Watermelon
Tobias Wolff, The Barracks Thief
Angela Carter, Sugar Daddy
Karin Liden, Moscow Women (Interviews)
Jean Mohr, Russian Women (Photographs)
Carolyn Forche, El Salvador: An Aide-Memoire
Todd McEwen, Evensong

more dirt issue 19 from 1986

Richard Ford, Empire
Jayne Anne Phillips, Fast Lanes
Richard Russo, Fishing with Wussy
Ellen Gilchrist, Memphis
Robert Olmstead, The Contas Girl
Joy Williams, Escapes
Louise Erdrich, Knives
John Updike, Getting the Words Out
Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Without a Map
Adam Mars-Jones, Slim
Mary Benson, A True Afrikaner
Primo Levi, From Lab to Writing Desk
Robert Olmstead, Eye for an Eye: Chronicle of N. Ireland
Nan Richardson, Eye for an Eye: Chronicle of N. Ireland

i hope people don't forget how very good bobbie ann mason was.

and i will just say that i MIGHT be fanatical enough to get a JOY WILLIAMS 4EVER tattoo someday.

ok i just read cheever's bullet park too and was disappointed. i'll try the stories tho. it had nice moments but even without the overarching weird "big" device, which was the crazy murder scheme, everything felt too externalized, almost american-beautyish (which is, i suppose, the worst and ultimate hazard of these sorts of things, the typified reliance on the striking image, the skin-deep sense of "exposure" the feeling that the author is more outside these characters than ever, that they're subordinated to the little idea.) some very nice well-rendered moments, but.. all the motion is like from some magical external source, not any sense of living people.

read the ford story from granta too ["rock springs"] and again... who talks like that, if you're going to do first person, and it felt again like it could be distilled to a formula, a combination of an aimless road travel story and a creepy and depressing vignette where the meaning is supposed to magically coalesce, or maybe just be in the mood of at once things are possible and things are also inexplicable and terrible, and again, there's an unreality to it, not a flatness of prose, but a flatness of motivation that i suppose is supposed to be what's highlighted, but instead we get the emotional woman and the rock solid man and i dunno... so ... textbook. maybe i'm missing something.

but, scott, thanks for all the posts! i want this thread to live! i know only bits and pieces of the stuff ppl are mentioning, due to a weird and eclectic set of reading habits that's also been very canon driven in a way, but also almost purposefully steered clear of lots of this stuff in the past.

dirty realism isn't quite minor realism of course, though, because the focus on the grit can become voyeuristic and sensationalist in its own way, which is my problem with the ford story (where in independence day, whatever i thought about it, it felt a much more natural place to inhabit) whereas minor realism has a much more naturalistic feel as i think of it. somehow i group kawabata in as a relative here. anyone read The Old Capital? it seemed to hold that quality much more than, say, Snow Country.

but yeah, the Crane reader I've been going through is great. it really lets you feel how he's coalescing a style and a way of entering the text and struggling with being and overcoming being journalistic. seems like he's coming from the same place melville's shorter stories did when they were developing from scene and character sketches.

you know what was neat to read recently - well, a year or two ago - was Jim Thompson's first novel before he went for the pulp fiction paychecks. semi-autobiographical. on the skids. large family. struggling to write. actually reminded me of exley a little. came out in 1942.

http://www.booksamillion.com/bam/covers/0/67/974/013/0679740139.jpg

Oooooh, I have to get that Jim Thompson. I love his pulpy stuff, but this seems even more my bag. And Stephen Crane is wonderful, too, and such a strong body of work for a guy who died young. I really loved Orne Jewett's 'Country of the Pointed Firs' and some short stories she wrote, and recently got hold of 'A Country Doctor', which looks really interesting. But now I MUST have that Thompson.

omg i had no idea jim thompson wrote the getaway. thanks, wikipedia!

just got the yates collected stories. wow. "the best of everything." so perfectly crafted. a few are too pushy, too story-like and trying for the big deliver, like "b.a.r. man" and some are almost awkwardly autobiographical and intimate (including, oh, joseph, i'm so tired, although the ending to that is an incredible payoff) but some of them, like the best... his characters are at once so typified and so particular (i think that ford talks about this in the intro to revolutionary road).

OK, am now reading Stephen Crane's excellent novel 'Active Service'.

you guys are making me want to read so much stuff

you can feel how the first set of yates stories tried harder for the big thing, were more compact and had that o'henry moment except the moment ends up being not what happens per se but the character coming to a realization that they thought they were the bigger person, but in fact others were accommodating them, this flash of painful self-recognition. the later ones, from liars in love, all more autobiographical, are also much gentler and more complex, with this underlying notion that all the lies we tell one another are the necessary foundation of human relations. Goodbye, Sally just kills me, as does the title story. Then there's all these other nice devices, like when the voice in Trying Out For The Race suddenly shifts to the consciousness of the maid, for just a moment, and the shift there too when you realize that the story is really about another set of characters than the ones you expected, the dream of the boy left behind of having a mother that was at least differently crazy.

also, he writes the happy moments so perfectly, since of course he needs to underline their fragility, and what distinguishes them is often, just, the absence of anxiety.

the uncollected stories are a mixed bag too, where you can feel him trying new voices and sometimes they're just the plain meanest of the bunch but, "A Last Fling, Like" is totally adorable, and I can imagine it as yates just cutting loose and letting a sort of satiric nod at clueless youth running away into an escapist fantasy before bringing it back down again. it feels just like high windows. and also like the waugh story about the cruise (and of course there are the hollywood stories too, and the ones puncturing the thoughtlessness of those with money, and... all v. waugh)

i'm off to the library to return this round of books and start with a whole new one now, including lots of these recommendations. so excited.

ok i just read cheever's bullet park too and was disappointed.

just want to chime in here and gotta say cheever's real strength is his short stories and not novels. the big book of collected stories is excellent.

haha after all that i forgot my list of books to get but ended up with fifteen-odd anyway, among which finally fan's notes and also last notes from home!

also, among which a bunch of b. traven and the swados and wolff and some joy williams, and updike's complete bech (for which i thank smiley for reminding me, along with telling me that Fielding's first novel was a satire of Pamela called Shamela.)

also the book from the iowa writers workshop, whose stories i have not yet tackled, but whose reminiscences are, with a few exceptions, terribly disappointing (all this about the old green fields and the other bar and really who gives a, i wanted stories about people. besides which, sentence after sentence after topic sentence starting "I remember..." i mean c'mon, i thought all these people, y'know, graduated from the frikin iowa writers workshop here. show a little effort.)

i can't remember from the Yates biography what his take on John O'Hara was. You would think that some of Yate's early stuff was modeled on O'Hara's early stuff. But boy oh boy did he love his Fitzgerald and Flaubert.

i used to love those early O'Hara collections.

another writer whose short stories are supposed to be great is Irwin Shaw. i've never read any! i have a big fat collected stories collection of his, but i haven't dug in yet.

also, among which a bunch of b. traven and the swados and wolff and some joy williams, and updike's complete bech (for which i thank smiley for reminding me, along with telling me that Fielding's first novel was a satire of Pamela called Shamela.)

Wow, you've got yourself some fun ahead. Time to pull a sicky, methinks!

Another great thing about a yates story: comptroller and the wild wind, way it rushes through the whole marriage thing in the first few pages, a little condensed version of all his stories, feeling like he just knocked it out to get to the good stuff, but somehow couldn't stand to have the story without it. Also lending an interiority, the comptroller just flashing through the story of his life, trying to work out what went wrong. "summary narrative" or whatever in perfect refinement.

i really love tobias wolff, ive decided, does he count

waaay xpost - I have read & enjoyed Jesus Son by D Johnson which is surprising cause I loathe Ray Carver, horrible influence on a generation of writers, what can I say? sorry. stories need endings.

got those Dirty Realism issues of Granta on my shelves, will reread. I was quite taken w/them at the time but thought the contemporaneous Best of Young British Novelists issues were better. does anybody read Granta now? I haven't looked at it since the early 90s.

I think Cheever's short stories >>>>>> his novels. And I love John O'Hara, even his flabby sprawling later epics are enjoyable.

i randomly bought fans notes in phenom phen - i liked the cover or something? anyway i'd never heard of it, but the guy at the book store seemed pretty psyched that i was getting it. later i learned that my brother in law, who's also a guy at a book store, is pretty psyched about it too - its his favorite book.

i really enjoyed it. my traveling companion wouldnt stop talking abt how much she hated him and what a pussy he is and id go yeah but doesnt that make it a good book that it affected you so much? but she was all no fuck that guy i kill him.

"I loathe Ray Carver, horrible influence on a generation of writers, what can I say? sorry. stories need endings."

eh, the lesser stuff is easy to avoid though. i adored carver in the 80's and a couple years back i re-read some of the stories for the first time in years and i enjoyed them quite a bit. Cathedral, the story, still kills me. and it has a GREAT ending.

wait, has anyone mentioned David Gates yet? Jernigan is right up Exley's street. Preston Falls was good too. i haven't read his short story collection, but i'd like to.

waaay xpost - I have read & enjoyed Jesus Son by D Johnson which is surprising cause I loathe Ray Carver, horrible influence on a generation of writers, what can I say? sorry. stories need endings.

try maggie dubris' "weep not, my wanton" - very much in the johnson style, but even funnier. very moving stuff.

i like that carver's stories don't have "endings" - i'm left for days wondering about his characters. i love 'cathedral', and another favourite is 'a small, good thing'.

i've only read 'falconer' by cheever, and it didn't really do anything for me. but i should maybe try one of his other works.

OK I'm between books now so I'll dig up some Carver. not sure why I reacted so violently to him in the 80s, I was more volatile then.

collected stories of john cheever, that old red mass-market paperback, is a real touchstone for me. try "the swimmer" also a weird great movie starring burt lancaster as the homewrecking suburbanite who "swims home" across the backyards of connecticut.

my opinion of carver might have been a little different back then if i had read yates first! i mean, i dig them both, but i thought carver was so singular. yates draws more blood. there is wincing involved when i read yates.

oh, and when i said that the lesser stuff was easy to avoid, i meant the 80's workshop minimalists under his influence who are pretty much forgotten by now anyway. just to be clear.

oh man, not completely on topic, but i'm excited about this:

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/41GxUU6bCUL._SS500_.jpg

HIGHLY recommended. what a cool writer. so nice to see this exist. the old story collections aren't always easy to find. plus, there is extra stuff i've never read.

mona simpson, who probably does belong on this thread, reviews the stories and a novel today in the nyt:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/books/review/Simpson-t.html?em&ex=1181534400&en=af1e9f1fd3a506f3&ei=5087%0A

oh man, i got that this week. i've never read him and he totally kills me. he writes the best sentences.

m coleman, i think 'cathedral' is probably the best collection, if you're wanting to give carver a second chance. and thanks for the cheever recommendation - if you're willing to give RC a 2nd go, i'm willing to give JC one, too ;).

i know this belongs in another thread but: i'm currently reading celine's 'journey to the end of the night' and loving it.

ok i just started on some of the joy williams stories in "honored guest" and... maybe it was also the wrong place to start? first off, i'm not sure if she belongs in this thread or scott just mentioned her coz he digs her stuff? they have this elliptical moods and spiritual truths quality that was what turned me off of lots of modern short stories actually. even when there's an arc to the narrative its written as though suspended in a sort of no-time with a blank narratorial voice, like a crystal of a sensation that's examined from different sides in arbitrary succession. and then, of course, i started just playing a game where i looked for what animal was going to be discussed and what element of human mortality. this impressionistic stuff feels always like a dead end to me?

should i have started somewhere else instead?

also, finished the bechs. gosh but they're fun -- mainly don't fit this thread at all of course, except that updike when he feels like cutting loose is as lovingly objectifying in his parade of women that march through as exley ever is. speaking of which, looking back at Fan's Notes now it doesn't feel as well-written as back in high school, no surprise there, and sometimes the vocab seems so consciously reaching which i think he toned back on in cold island. the outrageousness connects a bunch less with me as does the specific america he comes to loathe, which is now long gone, but the spiritual conflict over alienation, to what degree its justified and to what degree a terribly psychological crutch, the self-consciousness and ability to approach one's past with an ironic eye -- that all works more now, as do all the character sketches of his various encounters.

but also, to the degree i've read anything on it, and there's very little, its striking how ppl. avoid talking about what a horny book it is, so to speak, how its just laden with his sexual fantasies and frustrations. which is odd, b/c nobody pretend's portnoy's complaint, say, doesn't deal with that stuff, but really the whole structure of fan's notes more than cold island rests almost purely on the way he draws equations between his carnal lusts and what's held out to him as lives by the women he chases. actually a big parallel between sections of Bech Wed which is one of my fav. bechs (they only really take off in the latter era when updike is more affectionate to the guy) and the section of fan's notes where ex too is married in westchester county and "writing." more exley talk on this thread, plz, if anyone has any?

i just mentioned joy cuz she was in one of those grantas from way back. she doesn't really belong here. she has a wild streak. and an unreal streak. she's got a deadpan/deadzone thing going on as well as an atavistic thing. kinda like a mix of renata adler and angela carter. or patricia highsmith if she had been a hippie. maybe. which sounds dreadful. she was another big 80's fave of mine. though i like her later even wilder stuff too. she was a big influence on me. her and janet frame. i'm more subdued now though. lorrie moore. alice munro. that's how i get my kicks these days. joy actually wrote a novel that i REALLY couldn't get in to. can't remember the title. too majik for me. but i stand by the stories. she wrote a noted guide book to the florida keys as well. and also probably one of the greatest pieces of music writing i've ever read. about wendy o. williams in spin magazine. she is an edward abbey-esque earth firster. she is full of fire. she can be strange and witchy. she sees the world from a strange vantage point. if there was a good way in i would suggest *Breaking & Entering*. a story collection. she gives my brain great ideas. like thea astley used to. and muriel spark. and barry hannah. and even harry crews! they are loners of a different stripe. there is blood and there is guts, but maybe less spleen. their tales are taller.

wait, has anyone mentioned David Gates yet? Jernigan is right up Exley's street. Preston Falls was good too. i haven't read his short story collection, but i'd like to.

Read that collection ('Wonders of the Invisible World'). When I read it I thought at the time that it was what I'd _hoped_ Carver would be like, but was disappointed in (Carver was disappointing, not Gates). I loved 'Jernigan' too, though 'Preston Falls' seemed a drop-off.

One thing almost all these "minor American realists" seem to have in common is that they can write damn fine short stories. To that end, a couple of writers I think people who like the above writers might like.

Deborah Eisenberg: http://ec2.images-amazon.com/images/P/0374299412.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_V1126634354_.jpg

David Levinson:
http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Y8FYVDBAL._SS500_.jpg

ok just read exley's last one now, "last notes from home" and wasn't sure if i liked it at all until the last 50 pages and its still way too sprawling and disjoint, but some of the thematic stuff he manages to work in, revisiting and rewriting his childhood, the pathos with which he sees himself as in all respects now the acted on instead of the actor, some of that stuff is really great and it ties together, partially but neatly. i think cold island really holds up the best of the three, actually, but each one makes the others richer too. now i really need to read that biography to get a sense of just how much pure invention he ended up with, especially in last notes, which feels the most fictional and racontourish of the bunch.

its like you finally understand what in the first he was rebelling against, but it takes him a great deal of machinery to get to the point of coming clean with it, while the first read, for all its skipping around, much more the work of someone who had come to terms with what they needed to say.

also read mcinerny's "the last of the savages" recently which was mainly a letdown even though i thought it might be a nice break from this other stuff (gawd, has a novelist *ever* done a convincing rock character!? richard hell aside, i guess) and anyway the echoes of paranoid fears v/v family secrets and the military sort of ring through both, so i feel like i've been playing a skip around and connect the novelistic dots game lately.

did i mention good call on the swados by the way, although i find some of the weaker ones almost unendurably sappy? look forward to reading some of his other stuff though.

Yeah, I want more Swados - the rest seems to be out of print, though, and nothing of his seems to turn up cheaply 2nd-hand in Australia.

have you tried abebooks.com?

wait, has anyone mentioned David Gates yet?
I posted the cover of Jernigan uptread, but it went missing.

reading b. traven short stories now. he doesn't belong, except in the sense that he sometimes writes about people who work and he's also got that o'henryish tradition in his stories -- too ironized and dry tho to fit (tho never read Treasure of the Sierra Madre) and also more action than psychology.

there is that opposition tho i feel -- the stories of mood vs. the stories of plot and the gestalt shift that feels like it hit vis a vis that.

read some wolff too, and he was mixed, like half each of the types. what the yates and exley have is the "not a detail out of place" feeling which is what makes them so rare, i think. the danger with so much in the realist tradition is the idea that rendering a thing in text somehow in itself makes it part of a story.

ok, i'm a huge carver fan, but even i had to laugh at this (anyone who has read carver and not liked him, will love this):

http://www.yankeepotroast.org/archives/2007/06/raymond_carver.html

Scott Seward: you know what was neat to read recently - well, a year or two ago - was Jim Thompson's first novel before he went for the pulp fiction paychecks. semi-autobiographical. on the skids. large family. struggling to write. actually reminded me of exley a little. came out in 1942.

Nice one, Mr Seward. Am reading this now, and it's excellent - very much life-of-quiet-desperation, blackly-humourous, vaguely Kafkaesque in its exploration of vastly complicated and mostly meaningless jobs.

What's NOT good is the intro by Stephen King, which only served to remind me why I hate Stephen King. While it makes a couple of good, if fairly obvious, points, it's full of his usual grating folksiness (ie insisting on referring to Thompson as "Big Jim" all the way through, for no good reason whatsoever).

hahaha the only thing missing from that carver parody is a portentious monosyllabic exchange over the kitchen table ;-)

Am now reading A. M. Homes' 'The Safety of Objects', which I was initially reluctant to start due to my dislike for 'The End of Alice', but it's actually really good. A number of the stories in it really fit this thread, especially "Jim Train" and "The Bullet Catcher" (there may be more, but I'm only halfway through).

okay on a whim read some yasuoka shotaro and wow! really the closest analogue to yates in some ways i've found, in terms of mannerisms, the treatment of movement and time and between psychological and desscriptive moments in the text, and also the sorts of people and issues he writes about, and also yeah the renderings of adolescent awkwardness, mommy issues, postwar listlessness, and even the elegant brutal ways his characters are rendered with these massive flaws that are really just the sum of small emotional betrayals. ppl really should read A View by the Sea.

i never read the end of alice by homes, but i was really underwhelmed by music for torching. it reminded me of perotta's little children. a screenplay disguised as a book. and it even reminded me of the fight club guy a little. (i've only read the book about the song that kills people by the fight club guy.) but that same kinda not at all shocking "shocking" thing and a lot of ridiculousness. they should all just write horror novels and then i wouldn't mind so much (although i guess the fight club guy kinda does). they aren't bad storytellers. if i'm gonna read pop suburban lit, i'll read anne tyler. who is a fine writer AND a fine storyteller. (not that everything she writes is gold, but she is better than most. feel bad i haven't read an ann beattie book in years. loved her 70's stuff. i'd recommend any of her 70's short story collections.)

for horror novels you have to try hynes, who it turns out was actually one of the iowa crowd, but anyway he writes these insanely funny horror stories set in academia based on petty departmental politics meet witchcraft and whatever.

wait! scott, did you tell me about hynes to begin with? i think you did.

Scott, you're spot-on about the Homes. Having actually finished the book, I'd say half of it was great, half of it was oh-I'm-so-shocking gross-out crap. Bit of a mixed bag, really.

we have yet to talk about tobias wolfe, please offer opinons

yay anthony for joining us! you are please to offer opinions too? i read Back In The World and thought it was fine, but not something that inspired me to put the rest of his stuff on the top of my list. I've got this aversion to short-story-like short stories even though i'm now reading them in the droves, which is also why I read one dubus collection thus far and The Pretty Girl and a few others were great but there were any number that didn't strike me either, too much just trying to create certain moods of alienation we're supposed to identify with or something. I imagine people sitting around and reading these stories either like wine-snobs trying to come up with funny terms to describe the precise differences between each and savoring particularly tangy emotional combinations or like cultured stoner mystics on the other hand looking for spiritual avenues to reconciliation with the infinite by textual exegesis. dubus' catholic side doesn't help here (tho i imagine you may dig it?) nor his ideas of how parents and children interaction and off course these are somewhat related things. i was also getting the same thing out of some of ford's independence day and how he treated fatherhood there?

oooh the paula fox was delicious though. (read "poor george" but have yet to read any others) a bit psychologically draggy here and there and i guess this is the one where she has the emotional catharsis as opposed to the other, but still the whole gimmick of the act of violence as distilling/disrupting/casting-into-relief the nature of the overtly placid suburbs is... sheesh.

also reading the yates and exley biographies now. the exley one is so far very disappointing while the yates one is better than i could possibly have hoped. of course, neither very inspiring in an sense given the subject matter and all.

s.clover: glad you liked the paula fox! i really need to read more by her. and stop reading whatever rubbish i'm reading at the moment.

and that whole gimmick w/ the violence is (from what i remember) totally the whole thing abt 'desperate characters'. the book starts w/ the wife trying to be nice to some stray cat + it ending up scratching her which then keeps on coming back thru out the rest of the book.

i must add that i just read dubus' "seperate flights" which is i guess an earlier collection (where "We Don't Live Here Anymore" first appeared?) and this is more exactly what I was looking for -- there's a creepy one on abortion and the coming of age stuff is there over-and-over but the ones on failing marriages are so sharp and crackling and perfect.

grr the exley bio made me so mad. shallow on investigation, shallow on understanding (except for a weird psycho-whatever section) and shallow on the literary front. seemed to be a rush job so you get what you'd expect from the standout anecdotes of a few interview subjects plus the obvious stuff from his papers. i mean, to be fair, i'm glad i read it, but still... also the utterly dismissive treatment of his later work, lack of analysis of his prose as opposed to just a little para praising it along the way, simultaneous overreliance on his work for biographical info plus admission that large sections are fabricated... to be fair, i'm still glad i read it tho.

read some nathaniel west too, but dunno how much i can shoehorn it into the theme of this thread (tho its half my what sterl is reading blog to be fair anyway).

oh, and joy williams gave another try to with breaking and entering and she seems very much west inspired tho, i now see. still haven't made my way through it tho, somehow feels like too much of a slog through literary effects to get to the story.

i just reas mcinnery's essay on being taught by carver--and it made carver sound both gentle and genorous. i wonder if his influence was about being an educator?

I feel like I'm reading a lot of these minor American realist nowadays--
Nelson Algren's Neon Wilderness seems to be the prototype for a lot of Beat writing, though it's far superior IMO. I want to read read Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion which sounds pretty ace.

this thread is terrific. it almost makes me want to go read some mod-day fiction

the first picture also reminds me how much i adore the look of those NYRB special edition books.

I'm with you there.
This one started me off on a mild Louise Brooks obsession.
http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product-file/29/thei1229/product.jpg

I will generally grab a NYRB reprint if I find it on sale and it's nonfiction. Hence my unexpected discovery of Hindoo Holiday.

Speaking of Beat sources, when I finally read Tropic Of Cancer, I thought, "Oho." I think Philip K. Dick's early non-S.F. novels, like Mary And The Giant, recently re-published, might qualify as good minor realism. Mary's this young girl in a small, foggy 50s California town, and she's trouble, see? Yeah, aren't they all, and she ranks on folk singers and audiophiles (young PKD had given up his record store and radio show to be a writer fulltime, and hadn't gotten to to the speed and dogfood diet quite yet, but mebbe already some sour grapes?)She's a trip, even without the special effects (but nobody sees and tells itlike PKD, and I wonder if he wasn't some kind of influence on Carver's better stuff, maybe he himself is even the "Cathedral" geezer?) Speaking as Sterling was of doing whatever it takes to make the story go forward, have yall read Edward P. Jones' collection, Lost In The City? Mostly set in blue collar black D.C. neighborhoods, 50s-60s, though the title story takes it up a few notches, chronologically and income-wise. So good it's a problem: could easily see him getting slick and writing for the better cop shows (great for them,would suck otherwise). I bet Eastwood knows about him, which could work out very well (Mystic River, at least) or good enough (Million Dollar Baby). But so far, *sort* of like the early best of Hemingway times Angus Wilson, Charles Burnett, Chester Himes maybe (got a more recent collection, which is probably even better, judging by some of its stories in The New Yorker, but i don't want Lost In The City to end, awwww)

znot *Angus* Wilson! (Well maybe, but not that familiar with him). Meant August Wilson, if he wrote short stories instead of plays.

I'm very excited about reading some Stuart O'Nan now after reading reviews of his new Red Lobster novel.

oh yeah, tried reading swados' "Standing Fast" a while back and its sort of languishing -- the sap/interest ratio is way off for me, even though the subject matter (1940s radicalism) is pretty rare.

1940s radicalism: ever read Trilling's novel (blanking on title it's late I'm sorry)? The central character is based on Whittaker Chambers, known from college, and the book was written before Chambers became that notorious (outside certain circles). It's something of an allegory and extention of urban academic/rad relationships/implications into New England seaside small town, but lots of homely detail (with some teeth).Also (not based on first-hand knowledge, apparently, but much plausible detail), Doctorow's The Book Of Daniel.

zomg btw Mad Men is the tv show love letter to minor american realism. not only is the whole thing very man in the grey flannel suit (the film more than the disappointing book) but also they had an episode "The Hobo Code" which was a super-homage to Blackberry Winter!

huh. Just started reading A Fan's Notes last night (hooked already), and also sort of loving Mad Men (which is 4 episodes in here in UK)--is it doing well, ratings-wise in the states?

“But I did follow him, all the years.”

What is this 'Mad Men' of which you speak?

'Mad Men' is a television program. It is not a book. Around here we love books.

'Mad Men' features advertising execs from the early 1960s, their flunkies and their families. Therefore it overlaps a bit with A Fan's Notes. A pardonable lapse.

I was given A Fan's Notes for my birthday. I'm excited to read it!

Is anyone contemporary doing this kind of realism well?