Novels about novelists

The Information by Martin Amis. Argh.

Incidently, I once interviewed a girl for a retail job and she said she liked modern fiction. I asked her what authors she admired. She said Martin Amis, pronouncing his surname, Amee. I looked at her oddly. She said, 'He's French'. I didn't give her the job.

Amee! Haha! The Information is momumentally awful, yes. The only one i have read and like is Mao II by DeLillo.

I read the first and last ten pages of The Information. That was enough.

The protagonist as novelist ploy is really overused by Auster as well, and is only really successful in the New York Trilogy.

Are you people kidding me? "The Information" was superb. Frickin' hilarious. Richard Tull and Gwynn Barry were like Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.

Rarely has there been a writer that divides people as much as Martin Amis. I have to say I can't stand him. I hate that pompous, attention-seeking prose. He almost typifies what I don't like in a novelist: "The contrails of the more distant aeroplanes were like incandescent spermatozoa, sent out to fertilize the universe." Aaargh!

I've gone off Martin Amis as I've got older. I still re-read Time's Arrow occasionally mind. London Fields and Money haven't dated so well.

I enjoyed The Dark Half by Stephen King when it came out. Don't know about now. And does The Shining count? That's a good one. I never read Bag of Bones which is also about a writer (I think). I don't know why i immediately thought of King.

Blue Angel by Francine Prose is a good one.

A friendly question: can the The Information-haters tell a little bit more about why they hate it? I thought it was awfully funny, whereas I hadn't enjoyed Money and London Fields as much. (The latter too ponderously oracular; the former too ... I dunno. You either like John Self or you don't. I didn't or not enough.) I also thought of Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, funnily enough, although I could've done without those interchapter meditations on dark matter and "information." Yellow Dog completely eschews those, and I actually sort of appreciate that book too. Maybe I'm completely insane.

Getting back to the question at hand: Chaucer's use of himself in The House of Fame is amazing and hilarious. An eagle swoops down on him while he's at his desk and takes him away to the House of Fame, where all the words ever said or written come to rest. On the way there, the eagle mocks him, describing how after he comes home from his mind-numbing clerk job, he sits at home and does even MORE reading "till fuly daswyd is thy looke." (I think we've all looked "daswyd" after reading too many hours in a row during college.)

Most of John Gardner's characters are writers of a kind, though I can't think of any that are "literary" writers (they're philosophers, manifesto-scribblers, crazy guys locked away in rooms, amateur poets, and monologuists a la Grendel). This way he gets around the problem of "Oh, damn, another writer talking about himself."

Maugham's Cakes and Ale is very good: a semi-great novelist recollects the life of a great novelist by relating the story of a bad novelist who is badly writing a biography of the great novelist. just finished that and could not put it down.

If At Swim-Two-Birds counts, then it singlehandedly redeems novels about novelists.

I read this year "Rouse up o young men of the new age" by a guy called Kenzaburo Oe. This was unashamedly self-reflective, and hence about a novelist/writer. I don't think I can recall seeing anyone mention his stuff on ILB. But it's a great book.

I am generally pretty fond of novels about authors. If it's done in the first person, you've got a great opportunity for some interesting observation/reflection. As for a list:

There's Roth's first Zuckerman book (someone else can do the googling)
Richard Ford's "The Sportswriter" and "Independence Day" are about a failed short story writer, which is close.
Platform is a book about someone whose written an account of something, which feels different from being a book about a novelist.
Harry Mathews' "The Journalist" is about a writer, not a novelist; and is just about my FBOAT.

Off the top of my head, I can only add Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again and Gissing's New Grub Street, both fine books.

I'd classify "blue angel" more as professor fiction or literature of the university (in that philip roth vein) than a novel about novelists. i suppose it can work in both ways, but his career as a professor is so crucial to the build of the plot that i find myself focusing on that.

Proust.

_Carmichael's Dog_ by Richard Koster... too much fun detailing the demons necessary for a successful writer's life. :o)

Here's another vote FOR The Information-- though I agree he can be pompous, and he overwrites-- but isn't that a Brit thing? I found it funny in a typically self-loathing (Brit?) way. And that description of landing a small plane on Martha's Vineyard in a hurricane is hilariously disgusting. I thought it was basically a pretty good book because the main character was so horrible.

Anybody every read "Second Lieutenants of Literature" by Tom Zigal? It's a GREAT short story about a once promising writer who finds himself judging a short story contest at a summer writer's conference in Oklahoma. (If you can find it, it's in a collection Careless Weeds.) It's a not-so-gentle poke at the MFA biz (the title is from Robert Stone, who said that creative writing programs are producing the second lieutenants of literature) Zigal wrote some novels but I never read them

With respect,

You either like John Self or you don't

is true in a trivial sense, but not very interestingly true. I think that the point of Money is more that eg

a) you hate him but you find him endearing

b) you disapprove of him but you like him

c) you hate him but you know that he's brilliantly fabricated (this would be more my line)

etc

I suppose Blue Angel is best categorized as a novel about teaching creative writing.

It's entirely fair to put it in the prof/university category, but because his being a writer is still essential to the plot (and there's much discussion of the process of writing, workshopping, etc.), I think it's relevant here. Though it isn't so much a novel about a writer writing as about a writer living/working.

and a writer's seduction... ;)

I would like to suggest William Boyd's "Any Human Heart". It is
just out in paperback here in the states. Boyd uses a diary format
to tell the story of his hero. Very well done tale of a writer
who finds success, then tragically loses his focus.

David Lodge! David Lodge! David... Lodge!

Salinger's Glass stories are all narrated by Buddy Glass, novelist and creative writing teacher. Buddy also lets slip somewhere that he's the real author of Catcher In The Rye.

But the Glass stories are where it started to go horribly wrong for Salinger. "Hapworth" = possibly the worst piece of creative writing I've ever read by an established author.

The Muse Asylum by David Czuchlewski is about a reporter trying to hunt down a Pynchonesque author. You have to make it through the first half of the book to get to the good part, but it's really worth it.

A Dance to the Music of Time?

Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout books to thread.

Some interesting novels that don't appear to have been mentioned so far include...

Dennis Potter - Blackeyes
Bernard Malamud - The Tenants
John Updike's Bech books
Iris Murdoch - The Black Prince

I'm writing a doctoral thesis on this very subject...

I was going to say the Bech books too, but falseazure beat me to it. Boo-hoo.

(The Bech books are pretty good, by the way.)

Has anybody mentioned Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon or Straight Man by Richard Russo?

I've had Lit Life on the shelf for almost a year, but haven't read it yet.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375760318/qid=1078630982//ref=pd_ka_1/102-4503958-9694513?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers.

I think you all really ought to go and read it right away.

I made a vow to myself not to read any more books with writers as the main characters (at the same time as promising myself to never go and see any art exhibition that "asks serious questions about the nature of art") but just broke my promise this week cos I was keen to read "Erasure"

Not much left to read, if you make that vow. I made it recently, and now I'm reading "Old School" by Tobias Wolff, which is about writers. Shit.

But all books are about writers. Take a book about a plumber; the plumber is seen through a writer's eyes, so how intrinsically plumberish is it?

Wait 'til you get to the end of Old School. It positively bludgeons you with symbolism.

I know it's fairly arbitary but at the moment I'd much rather read about a plumber through a writer's eyes than a writer. In the same way that if aliens were to learn about our culture by watching TV they'd infer that 85% of the population were rookie cops being teamed up with a grizzled old veteran with just one day til retirement the world of books is hugely overpopulated by 40-something professors of Eng. Lit. with writer's block.

(x-post)

the world according to garp- john irving

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Wonderboys by Chabon is entertaining.

The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight, no? Although it's actually kind of meta and discusses the problems of having a novelist as a character. It's been a long time since I read it though.