Colson Whitehead

So far, I can't say it's gripped me. Part of it is that I just finished Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Chabon's style is so rounded out - it's like he brushes his images across the page. Whitehead is much more angular, there isn't nearly as much detail. And I'm kind of irritated that the protagonist doesn't have a name - he's only referred to as "he" - so I keep having to go back to see who was doing what in some sentences. But I liked what I read of the Colossus of New York, so I'm definitely sticking with it.

'the intuitionist' is a pretty neat debut, a fantasia about competing schools of elevator inspection as a halfway-allegory for race & class politics. it didn't actually strike me as a ridiculous conceit when i read it first; but when i took a class with it last year and the professor in question summarized it as "being about a feud between two rival schools of elevator operators .. ah, yeah ..." people started laughing. but it's a marvellous idea. i figure.

'john henry days' kind of a mess. it sort of plays the changes on the narrative of john henry, who i actually only sort of knew because of the DC comics john henry beforehand, oh dear.

intuitionist >>>>> j. henry days >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>apex

That much?

really? that's sad. i was sort of absentmindedly looking forward to getting round to it one day.

The voice he uses in Apex doesn't help things. It's really detached, almost at an ironic distance, and when things are happening in the present time, it's hard to get into them. But when he delves into the past, particularly the scene I just read about his college days at Quincy, it really opens up. The voice is much better for summation and observations that dart around than prolonged scenes.

I really, really liked the Intuitionist, but just haven't felt like reading any more of his stuff.

i read the 1st 2 and enjoed them - especially the yellow crackhead deli scene in john henry cause it takes place in my neighborhood i was all this sounds familiar omg! then i went to the deli and tried to tell them abt how they were in this book i was reading but thee guy didnt speak such good english. now that place is the biggest dbag sports bar.

I finished Apex about a week ago but haven't felt like writing anything about it. It's not egregiously bad, though that actually may have made it easier to finish. Thank God, at least, it was mercifully short. You risk being superficial, anyway, when you have a book about a guy who names things, and when you make the guy empty and uninteresting and incapable of change, well, why bother? Whitehead knows how to write, there's no denying that. I caught myself laughing at a number of lines, and I admire a great deal about his craftsmanship, but did no one look over this story before it was published and tell him, "But what am I supposed to invest in this story?"

He can write, but the central conceit of "The Intuitionist" was too much of a B-I-G I-D-E-A about race for me to get with. The first page of "John Henry Days" was so belabored and writerly it stopped me dead.

"Sag Harbor" is great. Very low-concept for him (it's a semi-autographical coming-of-age story) and maybe it's well-worn territory, but it's well-written and I really enjoyed it.

"if holden caulfield had some prozac and an xbox, catcher in the rye would have been a much shorter (and better) story"

i didn't finish 'the intuitionist' :/

has a zombie novel coming out?
w/the caveat that "Zone One is a zombie novel in the way The Intuitionist is a detective novel"
& that "If “Zone One” were three songs that came out between 1977-1992, it would be Wire’s “Reuters,” Leonard Cohen’s “The Future” and Joy Division’s “Decades.”"

that book seems to have some hype going for it

i have nothing against colson whitehead, it's just i noticed sag harbor about a week before it came out and four months before 'zone one' comes out i've already heard more talk about i did sag harbor in the entire release cycle

but eh i mean i guess zombies

enough w/ the zombies

i didn't read the other HEY YOU I WROTE A LITERARY ZOMBIE NOVEL novel yet, did anyone else

you mean the jane austen one

or were there others

i meant this:

http://fandomania.com/book-review-amelia-beamer%E2%80%99s-the-loving-dead/

although max brooks' 'world war z' is also interesting, i guess

Saunders's Sea Oak: best New Yorker zombie fiction.

anyone reading zone one? it is...a very well-written zombie novel. no surprises so far but i'm enjoying it.

i kinda want to

i LOVED the intuitionist and couldnt finish anything else hes written. sag harbor was cute i guess but i put it down one day and never felt the need to pick it up

those are the only two i've read, loved them both (although i'm the only sag harbor defender i know)

huh i liked sag harbor more than any of his other stuff that i've read. plan to get to zone one soon, didn't realize it was out. i liked the pieces he wrote for grantland about entering the poker tournament.

sag harbor was cute i guess but i put it down one day and never felt the need to pick it up

^^
i think i thought this was going to just continue producing enjoyable + funny anecdotes but not necessarily have much direction/pull otherwise. i enjoyed apex hides the hurt i think.

people seem really into the new one. he tweets a lot

he lives near me, i saw him at the bookstore once

zone one is a well-written zombie novel, yes. also at one point it pulled exactly the move i expected it to ha ha

intuitionist is one of those 'incredibly assured debuts' tho yes it is amazing good

john henry days is sort of overwhelmed by its own whatever

sag harbor i think will grow on rereading; i thought its secret centre was going to be something to do with the dad, but it just seemed to be that he was occasionally yelly or hitty and that was that

'zone one' seems occasionally almost on the brink of actually pulling something interesting w/r/t the zombies-are-US trope but never quite there? i'm not sure what i can point at other than the odder moments of how mark spitz relates to the world

i don't really know that you actually can do anything that interesting with a zombie novel, specifically

that's zombies-are-(first person plural) btw, not zombies-are-(the united states of america)

e pluribus undeadum

'overwhelemed by its own whatever' is p good, i agree w/ that

maybe ill read zone one, i like zombie still i guess

Cosign on Intuitionist love (it's kinda the perfect early Jonathan Lethem novel); enjoyed Apex's brevity and am currently reading Sag Harbour though not hugely motivated to finish it. Anyone read The Colossus of New York?

I couldn't get past the third paragraph of the New York Times review of Zone One - there are still critics like this, really?

ha, i didn't think that was going to turn out to be a positive review. that's the guy who wrote the not-very-good 'i, lucifer'; the guardian got patrick ness to review it. someone should run a HEAD TO HEAD review between a popular fiction type and an actual critic. or just get an actual critic who has actually read some genre fiction to do it, that would also work

http://thenewinquiry.com/post/11865195066/zombie-novel

i LOLed a little at the part in zone one that specifically references "the road" - when he's talking about the types of people he avoided teaming up with, says something about the parent and child traveling on the highway, the parent paranoid you're going to try to rape and eat their kid ... there's more too it than that but it seemed like a pretty direct allusion

^^totally

read the first two, nothing since, he is k annoying on twitter

are any fiction writers great at twitter? serious question.

http://twitter.com/#!/blakebutler

@blakebutler blake butler
came out of the house & heard someone blasting Neutral Milk Hotel from their car & came back into the house & locked the door

I got Zone One on reserve at the library.

Sag Head struck me as an inept novel. The accents, milieu, tone, setting -- most of it read as if you or I were twenty-two in Iowa's creative writing program and asked to write a novella about, say, Uruguay (and it's his "autobiographical" novel)

huh?

'sag head'

*Harbor

I dunno I don't like this guy's work that much he seems like one of those big american writers right now whose work is fairly inconsequential

the guy in that pan i posted accidentally calls 'sag harbor' a memoir and then tries to back it up

i think ppl should be allowed to write inconsequential novels, and that in a serious body of work their inconsequential novels will be more interesting for what they reflect and amplify in the less inconsequential novels

i think whitehead could try harder to write a less inconsequential novel, but as inconsequential novels go he's probably unbeatable

i think zone one's belief that CULTURE IS OVER NOW MAN is too obviously affected; i think mark spitz is simultaneously too clumsy and too subtle a central reflector

apparently i summarised my feelings abt. john henry days already four years ago, oops

i think ppl should be allowed to write inconsequential novels, and that in a serious body of work their inconsequential novels will be more interesting for what they reflect and amplify in the less inconsequential novels

The British are better at this sort of thing, but Roth is trying.

I just don't like that people write inconsequential shit and then take up a public persona of a "writer", in america at least, I guess, I don't know, its not that big of a deal

almost done with zone one, it's kind of overwritten but i'm enjoying it

http://www.sparkletack.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/jumping_frog.png

http://www.artvalue.com/photos/auction/0/48/48678/faulkner-william-1897-1962-usa-the-unvanquished-2683641-500-500-2683641.jpg

now post the bible

http://covers.openlibrary.org/w/id/119259-L.jpg

now post the bible

http://www.4sephardim.com/merchandise/EN%20obadiah%20sm.jpg

"Inconsequential but fun novels by major writers" is a good thread idea.

I just don't like that people write inconsequential shit and then take up a public persona of a "writer",

he is a writer. on a sentence level he's fantastic imo.

it's kind of overwritten but i'm enjoying it

maybe this is why i'm enjoying it? i actually think it's fairly restrained!

I just don't like that people write inconsequential shit and then take up a public persona of a "writer", in america at least, I guess, I don't know, its not that big of a deal

people are allowed to write things you don't like and think are inconsequential, btw. how should writers act that they will be acceptable to you? let the world know.

I am just being curmudgeonly, I'm not saying that he shouldn't have written whatever he's written, to me he just kind of fits into the lil space that franzen and zadie smith fill of important writers these days or whatever whose work doesn't really move me or that I don't see as being meaningful in the future, I'm probably wrong about this tho or being selfish and wrongheaded (I doubt it tho), I'm just going on gut feeling

i think he is in a much more interesting space than franzen, as is smith maybe kinda sorta, but the internet has pretty much reached saturation point w/r/t Thoughts About Jonathan Franzen now so whatever

i'm still hoping zadie smith's best work is ahead of her

i'm a little concerned that she seems to have published no new fiction in years

zadie smith: are you okay?

Her essay on Obama and language made The Best American Essays 2010.

essays are not fiction, though.

(except when they are, right franzen?)

http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/a-supposedly-true-thing-jonathan-franzen-said-about-david-foster-wallace

i'm concerned that you seem to have published no new fiction in years!

believe me, you shouldn't be

it's kind of overwritten but i'm enjoying it

by overwritten, i mean language-wise ... his prose can be way more purple than it needs to be for this kind of book

i feel like that's kind of his thing though. (last one I read was John Henry Days.)

still my favorite ^^

for me that's kind of the point...it's not really a plot or character-driven book, might as well enjoy the nice sentences (and atmosphere, digressions, etc).

xp

are any fiction writers great at twitter? serious question.

― this is unusual for batman. (Jordan), Thursday, November 3, 2011 2:45 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

good quesht, cant think of any, seems like itd be a natural fit but the ones ive followed just dont take it serious

just as btw the nyt review of 'zone one' has been absolutely infruriating me for days now

lol it is really dumb

there was this, but i don't know how much it helps: http://io9.com/5856158/why-science-fiction-writers-are-like-porn-stars

The whole thing grossed me out, and felt like such a cheap shot that the only proper response was a sort of inchoate rage — the very response, I felt sure, that Duncan was counting on to prove his point. So I figured I'd interview Duncan about it, find out what the hell he was thinking, but he never got back to me. Here are the questions I wanted to ask him.

Q: Have you ever dated a porn star? How did it go?

Q: Are you aware that "porn star" is a job, not a class of person?

(...)

Q: There's an undercurrent, in your Times review, of frustration with the readers of your werewolf book, The Last Werewolf. Have you actually had exasperating interactions with genre fans who felt that your work included too much reality? What form did these interactions take?

i thought 'zone one' was a failure but fun one, it kept me up reading it last night at least. a lot of his sentences seemed really cluttered and ungainly, sortof badly dressed but thinking they look quite cool or s.thing. it was also terribly plotted, he had some decent ideas and i liked a lot of the asides and minor characters but they were certainly not that welldrawn or distinctive, really.

i enjoyed the temporal fugue state, i get that the relative lack of action is mb 'the point' but its hard to forgive a zombie novel that had neither something interesting to say abt the 'idea of the zombie' or an exciting story to tell abt zombies?

i was wondering about what i was trying to get at earlier, with regards to the character of mark spitz

i think the bit where the narrator explains that every person he has ever been in a relationship with he's come to regard as a kind of unthinking creature is key for colson whitehead's Idea Of The Zombie: like i was trying to think about what this book does with it that isn't already in 'dawn of the dead', and i think that's where it lies: that the point is that actually the zombie myth is deeply consoling for a certain class of horrible, horrible person

that one review i linked in says that the key note of the novel is the relish for the destruction of the aesthetic of Stuff White People Like

But while Whitehead declares—with more than a little satisfaction—the end of irony post-plague, his characters play a game called “Name That Bloodstain!” in which they try to come up with the best New Yorker style cartoon subtitle for the grizzly scenes of carnage they encounter. It’s the culture that Whitehead seems intent on exterminating once and for all (and who could blame him?) that walks undead in his own narration. Could it be those ripped apart by the hordes of diseased are the same people who saw Zone One excerpted in Harper’s? Perhaps the chai-sipping Netflix-watching bourgeoisie had been listening to an NPR rebroadcast of Whitehead in conversation with Michael Krasny when the plague hit.

but i think this is missing the fact that the central reflector is mark spitz, who is kind of a dick -- the novel is pointing out that the great irony of the genre is that the people who would actually survive in the situation are the kind of assholes who'd welcome it

which it says explicitly! but it doesn't quite get at the point that mark spitz, thinking this, is kind of a dick

the author of that review for example would probably do fine.

i think whitehead does a bad job of putting across the thesis i've just put across to him because of yeah the failure to do 'character' -- in that, too, the prose doesn't do a good job of getting inside mark spitz and finding the mots juste (oy) to quite triangulate between what's going on in his head & in the outside world -- only explaining and occasionally going on writerly tangents

i wonder how much of this is because this is (jeez) like twice the word count of 'the intuitionist' -- i feel like a good editor was probably needed, actually: one that would actually think through what the project of the novel implies

i really loved apex hides the hurt, but maybe i'm the only one. i think i'm just a sucker for noirish 'stranger comes to corrupt town' stories

This is pretty great:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/books/review/colson-whitehead-by-the-book.html

Thanks for that. He can come off a bit too glib---Mr. Sensitive here, Mr. Old Cool-Wry there--but I will check out his teaching faves, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere and Autobiography of Red (enthralled by Anne Carson's epic Paris Review interview). Off-putting tendencies in his own interview responses here are reflected in some posters' objections to his fiction, but anyone who thinks they might possibly enjoy Zone One should check it out. It's a big shambling, soned-out construction, but appropriately so, and finds its own path through shocked, re-animated material, a welter of thematic elements. One kind of zombie revisits areas it seems to associate with personal significance, and so does the zombie-hunting protagonist, who compulsively encounters memories of the world before the plague, which is always barely beyond the mind's eye, still re-shaping, mutating memories, not that the brain doesn't do this anyway ( for inst.how do you review the lives of Mom and Dad, when the Primal Scene of your childhood gets upstaged by Mom eating Dad in another way)(and yet this gets seen and raised, in its own way, by the hunter finding himself in a cafeteria which was once the scene of many family meals, and which was always such a middle class mulch---not like he wasn't always kind of repulsed, in a somewhat tween and teen way, in something of an isolated, xpost dickish way too, which may have helped him to survive).
Also, he's hunting zombies to clear out some of that prime Manhattan real estate, black clean-up man, rounding out the Action Team too! And, as Clute observes in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, At one point, a secondary character reflects upon the Statue of Liberty, and uses the term "suppurating" to describe the huddled masses to whom she promises sanctuary: ironically underlining the Paranoia attendant upon much earlier zombie literature, where immigrants and members of other races were seen as threatening the health of the body politic.
Lots of stuff here to chew on, piling up as it's sorted out, in a fairly grand, lit-pulp way ("lit-pulp" just means he makes good use of elements scavenged from Romero's movies and gothic novels, without being too dependent on them)(and "grand" just means I liked it).

i didn't ):

i was thinking back on john henry days and sag harbor and thinking why is this guy a deal again and then i remembered the intuitionist. man o man

Haven't read any of those.

The new poker one, The Noble Hustle, is entertaining, though it overplays the Whitehead-as-emotionally-dead-loser schtick

the central concept of the intuitionist was pleasantly absurd in a borgesian way but i forget everything else about it. should i read it again?

yes, probably