american fiction of the early 90s

last summer i was at value village (which is like goodwill but cdn i think) and somebody had donated a bunch of early 90s serious guy books in hardcover ('vineland', 'mao ii', 'the barnum museum', 'rabbit at rest') which i bough and have been reading over the last 14 months or so. they seem to share a kind of illusive sensibility w/ both each other and some of the other roughly contemporaneous stuff i associate w/ that time period - 'the border trilogy', 'american psycho', maybe 'the broom of the system' and im kinda interested in fleshing out some of the ideas i have abt these books but dont really know what else to read

so i was curious if anyone had any recommendations abt books from this time period but also if im right abt there being a few throughlines specific to the 80s hangover period - specifically an interest in adopting some of the tropes of genre (partic. male genres like scifi and the western) and using the 'shock of violence' as a formal play. but also the prose, this idea of 'denseness' that seems impt. w/o being too vague i also think theres a preoccupation with 'mass media' or 'mass culture/consciousness' thats impt as well

a couple of things spurred this: one was thinking a bit abt the formal qualities of 'ada' and how much it seemed like a book from this time period the other is 'the marriage plot' and the vogue of 'theory' a decade or so earlier, another is the way that some of these same preoccupations are reemerging again in american lit. this is probably too loose and big an idea for a successful thread but idk, well see i guess

Richard Ford's The Sportswriter was published in '95 but is still suffused with that getting-over-the-sixties trope of the seventies and eighties.

stuff like this was why I spent the early 90s reading George Eliot & Herman Melville

imo ford firmly belongs to another well, not tradition, but lets say group of writers with different preoccupations (haha that being their dicks) that also have a much different quality to their prose, no interest in genre, no real interest in capital-i Ideas &c updike belongs to both camps imo (although maybe i havent read enough updike)

i think my idea as presented here is probably too amorphous to be useful, idk

fwiw in my mind the other big preoccupation w/ serious american lit in this time period was identity - obv all the writers i can think of fitting into my first post are (white) dudes, have no real sense how these too (made up by me?) groups related w/each other or w/in the 'culture'

I think the early '90s was a time when the influence of Pynchon was in the ascendant: "postmodern" use of genre trappings, density of prose, society as conspiracy-theory. Other books I associate with this period: Martin Amis "London Fields", Denis Johnson "Jesus' Son", Mark Leyner "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist".

paul auster-mania

i would still recommend The Things They Carried. meta-fiction/autobio that was good. at least i think that came out in the 90's.

although my fave american white dudes of the 90's were probably larry brown, barry hannah, thom jones, harry crews. tough guys! and they had all probably read a lot of hemingway or something.

though they all fucked with genre/form/etc. in their way.

so i guess i prefer hardboiled dudes who might be worshipped by the french instead of dudes who might wish to be french.

chris offutt. i liked him too. another tough guy. but not andre dubus. his name is too french.

chris offutt also hasn't put out any more fiction since the 90's as far as i know.

cannot honestly think of books with more different approaches/ends than the ones lamp lists in his opening post, though i think i get what he's getting at

late 80s/early 90s seems like one of those pauses between falling/rising "schools"

minimalism burned out and those claimed for it struggling in search of where next, neo-meta stuff still consigned to the margins but would rear itself to prominence by mid to late 90s, 60s dudes on the way out entirely

delillo and mccarthy feel like outliers here, but maybe its telling that this was when they'd finally ascend into the canon?

what i was reading usa fic-wise, early 90s, was: beat (burroughs) post-beat (tosches, meltzer, dennis cooper) old guard experimental (ballard, gaddis, selby jr, donald bartheleme, robert coover who is always GREAT). so i guess i had the mindset that ppl like ellis, delillo, auster, mccarthy, ford etc etc were to some extent 'mainstream' guys, the 'establishment' - THE MAN, literally as well as figuratively - sold in wankmags like playboy, vanity fair, cushioned by academia blah blah. all bullshit of course but - in my actual experience of meeting similar fellow readers - not an uncommon feeling then, maybe not uncommon now.

american psycho, which i love, is obv partly inspired by/riffing on thomas harris, who is in his way a BIG part of this kind of fiction in the early 90s (hasn't martin amis spent his post-Money career trying - and failing! - to emulate some of the atmosphere/feeling of 'masculine' crisis as found in Silence of the Lambs, or some of james ellroy's major bks?)

i can't read richard ford or john updike. i've tried. i've really tried.

no offense to any of their family, friends, or fans.

how do you feel abt raymond carver, scott? i remember tosches REALLY slagging carver off in something or other.

i liked him a LOT in the 80's. a ton. i feel funny now knowing the whole editing/re-writing story, but, heck, some of those stories are just some of the best amerikan short stories. period. no matter how they got written.

still kinda wonder how i would have felt about carver back then if i had known about richard yates back then!

I discovered Alice Munro in the early nineties, and in my mind this is the period when she really hit her stride.

i mean, yates wins any and all devastating/excruciating small moment prizes in ameri-lit.

i don't think i actually started reading her that early. unless i read some new yorker stories and just don't remember. probably later 90's for me. fave living fiction writer at the moment. now that muriel spark is dead. and janet frame. r.i.p.

Mine too.

Lamp, I know I've railed against this exact moment/movement in fic before, because I HATE IT, like I really cannot read it without throwing things, and I guess I was looking for fiction with "credibility" in the mid/late '90s when this stuff was out in PB and solidifying as "cannon" for its era, and I got it recommended to me ALL THE TIME. So I will be reading this thread with increasing excitement that this was a moment and is not some kind of universal fiction truism.

There's someone that I always mistake for being W Gaddis, btw, another novel about a white academic man having a midlife crisis/thinking with his (declining) libido, wrote a book that is called The...Something-ist? Not The Intuitionist. It has a scene in which he believes himself to be floating around with some young nubile waitress from the diner where he goes to eat w his academic colleagues...WHAT is it called??

The Intuitionist, Donald Antrim

cannot honestly think of books with more different approaches/ends than the ones lamp lists in his opening post

yeah, thats why the strong but hard to articulate sense of commonality struck me so much, i think! what you say abt the time being a pause is good too - im really interested in these periods of flux where there are no real 'dominant' styles and all sorts of undercurrents and revivals start to play out in, as ward fowler puts it, the 'mainstream'. like i can think of dennis copper as fitting into this moment ('frisk' is 91) but he certainly predates it, selby as well.

btw is o.nate right that pynchon is probably the impt touchstone here? society as conspiracy-theory is p perfect

also i def should have mentioned noir/detective fiction in my first part probably as influential as science fiction or westerns

There's someone that I always mistake for being W Gaddis, btw, another novel about a white academic man having a midlife crisis/thinking with his (declining) libido, wrote

Gaddis doesn't have any novels like this BTW

yeah fwiw i dont really think of gaddis as 'belonging' in this, which is partly abt a specific time period...

i like alice munro more than any other writer listed itt and maybe more than any other writer alive right now but i def dont think this is her 'moment'. in some ways im interested in how much this stuff is posed against the sort of spare, elegant, moment-of-truth fiction that i associate her with (and with being dominant in the culture like a decade later? idk theres a real danger of this just all being in my head isnt there). like i think of this kind of stuff as coming out of the academy rather than like, the newyorker/paris review culture? its probably less adversarial than that tho

xxp Oh well that explains it! I kept thinking "The Intuitionist!" and telling myself it was the Colson Whitehead one about elevators. Donald Antrim. I don't know why I confuse him w Gaddis. Maybe they were recommended in the same thread. It was Antrim I meant to include in the thread category.

NO!!!! It's The Verificationist!!!!

oh shit that's what i meant

i think of that one as "The Pancake Supper"

It's okay, you gave me Antrim, that was all I needed.

mr. que what do you think of this thread?

is pynchon like lester bangs or someone like that. like oh yeah he's good but DON'T EVER DO THAT. cuz i can't think of any pynchon-esque writers that i like and i think a LOT of 90's people were definitely in his camp. dfw definitely the mostest.

well i like nicholson baker okay but he's probably more of a barthelme kinda guy maybe.

been thinking hard about books to add to it. weird stuff like the shipping news. i was thinking lives of the monster dogs fits in here but turns out that was late 90's. i worked in a bookstore during the late 90's it's all confusing

. . . your inheritors of the Roth/Updike scene (Moody, Franzy Pants, Eugenedies, DFW) hadn't written anything "major" yet, it was a weird time. Garden State, The Ice Storm, Virgin Suicides, Broom, 27th City.

i gotta say alice munro does not fit in here (with what you're talking about) but the early 90's i feel is like when she took the fuck off. Open Secrets. and let's not forget Birds of America, though i think that was 98 or 99.

steve erickson, lamp you read him? seems like he might fit into your category

i've never actually read the "famous" baker books though. like vox.

I had Donald Antrim's father Harry as a teacher in grad school (he was one of FIU's founders) -- one of the few gentlemen I've met.

i don't think alice munro belongs here either. but i will use any excuse to talk about her.

Richard Ford's The Sportswriter was published in '95 but is still suffused with that getting-over-the-sixties trope of the seventies and eighties.

Pretty sure The Sportswriter *was* an 80s novel!

vox is pretty blah, i'm kinda blah on baker. i read the mezzanine for the first time pretty recently, kinda not very good. remember zero about the fermata.

yeah alice is perfect. even her so so stuff just kills.

anyone like Jernigan by David Gates? that was 91, probably read it more towards the end of the 90s. one of those downward spiral of a fuck-up novels. speaking of which, i associate the early 90s with Russell Banks even tho Continental Drift and Affliction were written a few years earlier.

oh man i have only read one r. banks, the bus one. i couldn't stand it.

sweet hereafter? didn't read that one

the wonder boys movie is better than the book (whatever that means)

the nobodys fool movie is close but i think the books still better

I have seen the wonder boys movie again and again and again, an improbable number of times
and if it came on TV now I would probably want to watch it yet again

pinefox otm

yeah it is a kind of "comfort movie" for me

first saw it on flight to NYC, new year's day 2001, then I think again on the flight back! (but wasn't fully paying attention either time)

the future is safe, apparently:

Are there two other siblings in the midst of such a wildly imaginative run as Maile and Colin Meloy? Maile Meloy is one of the most acclaimed writers of her generation, a terrific storyteller with boundless range, nary a word out of place, and a genius eye for the smallest details. Colin Meloy fronts the Decemberists, the arty Portland, Ore., alt-rock collective whose catalog includes wild concept albums, 18-minute songs based on Irish myths, sea shanties and perfect, concise pop songs. Oh, and he piloted the band to the top of the Billboard album charts this year with “The King Is Dead.”

Now both Meloys have new young-adult novels in stores. Colin’s adventure-fantasy, “Wildwood,” is a collaboration with his wife, illustrator Carson Ellis, and the first of a planned trilogy. As the New York Times notes, it “brims with grimly comic violence. Coyotes dressed in Napoleonic uniforms train musket, cannon and bayonet on woodland bandits, talking birds and an industrious rat named Septimus.” Maile, meanwhile, steps away from her realist adult fiction with a fantasy of her own, “The Apothecary,” brimming with teenage spies, Cold War fears, magical elixirs and thrilling first kisses.

*furiously reads european fiction*

it seems 2012 will be another year of me trying not to let colin meloy's success embitter & depress me

this will ruin me in the eyes of steven tyler but i thought maile meloy's strange pair of alternate reality novels were really good and interesting! they were occasionally staid and lifeless but overall i thought it was p neat experiment that really managed to enrich the writing with a sense of purpose and mystery. her short stories are kind of workshop-y (in the burt_stanton sense) tho

i... im kinda shocked that anyone wld consider delillo and millhauser to be 'dull adult realism'!!

naw man I didn't read 'em and if they were good I wouldn't be surprised, I just dislike his music & am jealous of his money, if he writes well then more power to him

dull realistic airborne toxic event

It's the dismemberers sister lamp is repping for fwiw

young adult novels are where the $$$ is at

young adult novels are where the $$$ is at

this could not be truer

Kids these days

i dislike his music too but dude is $mart

i will admit the idea of colin meloy's children book fills me w/derision, like it will just be the worst thing ever

^^^

tho i gotta say the eschaton video was kinda rad

He wrote a dull 33 1/3 on the Mats' Let it Be.

i will admit the idea of colin meloy's children book fills me w/derision, like it will just be the worst thing ever

― we were cool once (Lamp), Saturday, November 12, 2011 4:38 PM (26 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

But its got a furious cat named 'fanglypusithic' in it

fuck u icey for making me google fanglypusithic

Man at least u learned something

thank u for teaching me

the eschaton video was just another milestone in my long estrangement from the 'cultural elite' (*types emoticon for choosing wry self-mocking in the face of utter despair*)

total challop but despite being superficially more welcoming and admiring the mcsweeney's/internet sitcom/dull unadult take on appropriating 'genre' is so much worse than the writers in my op

Here is yr decemberists fan club badge now que

dude areosmith yuou caan take pride in fact that nobody nohow will ever compare you 2 a tweeeeeeee muthrfkr like that dude. chin up, bright eyes.

fuck where is bright eyes dude's kid's book????? gotta be coming soon.

Man he LIVED IT *rides away of adult sized tricycle*

*pins decemberists badge onto chest, hurls himself over cliff*

*Plays mournful flugelhorn*

*comes back from the dead, writes horrible YA book about the afterlife**

man i wld def read the hell out of connor ohbz bukowski-aping novel abt the emptiness of loft parties and banging goodlooking hunter college chix and mid aughts brooklyn, it killed the artist in him man

hell when you put it that way i'd read it too.

Once I went to a party at a yoga studio and bro eyes bro was there true story

I will say some of the novels mcsweeneys put out are good. that 1st john brandon. the yannick murphy. what is the what was fab. the convalescent was pretty bad tho. oh and "i" by stephen dixon.

every generation gets the ethan hawkes that it deserves.

Lmao

theoretically i would read anything by anyone! like i would read a novel about something rad by mr. decemberists, but some YA novel about talking birds wearing military medals, uh, no.

i read ethan's first sentence of his first book, it was pretty yuck as i recall

i feel really comfortable writing off anything that approves of ruffles and superfluous es on the ends of words

Ruffleses

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzItX3UmduQ

ethane is one of the very few actors I know of that writes books on a daily basis other than william shatner.
hoppers001 2 years ago

How long before ryan goslings novel is out btw

this is way better though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQMNcR6JCtA

i started a new thread for this impt topic btw

Lol all this Ethan hawkeing has borne two new threads

I kind of skimmed this thread and didn't learn anything

^solitary posts that &c &c