new novels and why they suck and whatever

aw

then again I really can't hang in this thread anyway because all I read is mass-market fantasy/SF

the potential for snark is kind of built into the phrasing of the question and first post though?

I read a lot of books, I don't really think about them in any real way other than if I like them or not. I don't hate modern fiction I don't even know what that term means. I just haven't read any new books in a while that I've liked.

idk it was a joke?

my real opinion is basically "new novels dont suck and tons of them are really good, even as good as old novels." its not very much more complicated than that--every year i read a bunch of books, and some of them are new, and oftentimes the new ones are easily as good as the old ones. so, if there is some kind of crisis in the literary fiction world, in my mind it has nothing to do with quality (and whining that published fiction is, i dont know, homogenous, or too samey--i.e., if you use the words MFA or new yorker in your complaint--is just, like, flat-out wrong, as horseshoe alludes to upthread) or experimentativeness or newness or whatever.

if there IS a 'crisis' in literary fiction it probably has more to do with the business of publishing and the culture of reading in this country, two things that i remain pretty well convinced arent related, in particular, to the artistic/literary merit of the produced works

I too wish the title of this thread weren't unnecessarily aggro

i just wanna wait around and see what people thought was good. what if i read something and i don't like it?

you burn the book

then you get to complain about it on the internet!

by the time I have finished writing/posting this I'll probably be like 50 x-posts but whatever...

my initial comment was my problem with modern lit is that so many authors are content to just stay within these narrow confines of traditional novel narrative structures - here's a narrator, plot goes from A to B to C, the end. *yawn*... what can I say, in this day and age I don't see the point in writing a novel that adheres to a format developed in the 19th century

I have always had a fascination with the way stories are told, even from when I was very young, and one of the things that most excited me about reading (and still does) is marvelling at how books were constructed, the formal devices used and the way different authors would play with the physical limitations of the format. I've always been drawn to books that were stories-within-stories, or were written with strange/unique grammar and narrative voices, books with unreliable narrators, books with multiple endings, books that could be read out of order or that required an unusual level of agency on the part of the reader, books that "broke the fourth wall" in the film crit sense - basically the kind of stuff that is hard to predict and full of surprises. There's plenty of prior historical examples of this kind of approach, (Apuleius, the Arabian Nights, Mark Twain, etc.) but 20th century lit really exploded with this sort of thing. So many great examples - Joyce, Borges, Faulkner, Burroughs, Cortazar, Calvino, Moorcock, Bester, Cabrera-Infante, Brandao, Morrison, PKD, etc. - and the best managed to marry ancient, age-old emotional tropes and themes to this kind of wild stylistic variation. What I appreciate about this kind of stuff is the continual push to open up what a book can do, how it can function and be constructed and make yr conventional literary stories and themes resonate in new and different ways.

So when people hand me some new novel that I HAVE to read - say, the Kite Runner or whatever - I just get bored really quickly with the kind of lack of adventurousness in the writing and construction. I'm just not that interested, for example, in books written in conventional language with an omniscient narrator that detail a bunch of stuff that happened to some fictional people. There's a fundamental lack of emotional engagement on my part, I have a hard time caring about anything that happens. I know the book is going to follow a format of introducing the characters, setting up a conflict, there's going to be a climax, and a denouement, with a couple minor subplots/digressions likely along the way. At the end I will have learned something, maybe, about a certain type of people I never thought much about. But rarely do I find the expenditure of energy worth it - like, why did I bother reading this book about bored New England housewives or abused children in the South or whatever? Might as well have just read some non-fiction about the subject, in most cases.

Now it's entirely possible I have been missing out on some new wave of wild fiction writers, if so tell me who they are and I will hunt them down. These days mostly all I read is old sci-fi, history, the odd popular science book. More recent novelists I enjoy have definitely been Victor Pelevin (who is genius-level imho), before that I dunno, Irvine Welsh was fun...

harbl that is basically my problem--never figured out how to tell what new fiction i would like

yeah and i generally know ahead of time what old fiction i like! i'm working on it though, i've read a few books from the 1990s lately

i dont read a lot of fiction but i would imagine that ppl trying to push the boat out hasnt disappeared. I guess, for me the things that are "critically acclaimed" always seem so safe, where do people read about new books that are stranger or at least not Yann Martel-ey?

(someone mentioned Cormac McCarthy upthread and I do think Blood Meridien is a stunning piece of work, way up there in the annals of American fiction. But I haven't read anything of his in awhile, the nihilism can be really oppressive/unhealthy for me)

xp

also like change the title of the thread if its such a thing

i like your title, plax

I guess, for me the things that are "critically acclaimed" always seem so safe, where do people read about new books that are stranger or at least not Yann Martel-ey?

^^^yeah this is how I feel. Looking at critically acclaimed/best-seller lists is like looking at the Oscars, it's all fucking unadventurous garbage, usually praised for all the wrong reasons

someone else new that I really love is Kelly Link. I was on the wagon with Lethem for awhile too, but Fortress of Solitude was awful and the beginning of the end. Matthew Derby's "Super Flat Times" was also amazing, yet dude has not published anything else as far as I can tell. All three of these kinda fall into that weird not-quite-sci-fi/fantasy and not-quite-straight-fiction category tho

Joyce, Borges, Faulkner, Burroughs, Cortazar, Calvino, Moorcock, Bester, Cabrera-Infante, Brandao, Morrison, PKD, etc. -

dunno how I managed to neglect Nabokov from the list. dude is ALL TIME AWESOME

i really liked fortress of solitude

have you read much david mitchell?

and which victor pelevin novel is good to start with?

ok now i have more thoughts--

1) i am pretty sympathetic to the complaint that a lot of new fiction that gets published is just not very interesting. but im not particularly sympathetic to the idea that the majority of critically-acclaimed stuff is uninteresting, depending on which critics were talking about.

2) how do you know these books are unadventurous garbage, if you havent read them--no snark but "bored New England housewives or abused children in the South" can be subjects of extremely adventurous books; ask william faulkner.

3) theres nothing wrong with "safe" books anyway but if we really have to feel like were freaking out the squares or whatever, theres still plenty of it.

4) its v possible to just ignore most book critics the same way you ignore most music critics and most movie critics. i mean, if this is a thing that is making it difficult for you to enjoy book culture.

5) do you guys go to bookstores ever? serious question. i get my recommendations from friends and some from publicists and some from "real life" critics. but it can be really fun to go to a bookstore and just spend twenty minutes looking around at their 'new arrivals' or 'new in paperback' tables! good bookstores have good buyers who recommend good books. ime.

Joyce, Borges, Faulkner, Burroughs, Cortazar, Calvino, Moorcock, Bester, Cabrera-Infante, Brandao, Morrison, PKD

btw this is a list of, you know, mostly all-time heavy hitters. kind of unfair to put them up against the average writers of any period of writing.

just saying, if you head to the library and are like, "where is all the stuff thats as good as joyce and borges" youre gonna be headed for disappointment

and which victor pelevin novel is good to start with?

this was my intro
http://img.infibeam.com/img/4e4341ea/76120/BE/EPB/P-M-B-9781101175262-BEEPB.jpg

I go to the local bookstore all the time & for the past year or so if I read about an interesting book on a blog or wherever I'll order it from them instead of alibris or powells. perusing the new arrivals is a highlight of my week pretty much every week, there are always more books than I'm ever going to get to but holding them in my hands & checking them out still feels to me like actually knowing something about them (as against reading about them online, which I'll forget having done inside of ten minutes or so).

I'm dying to read Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist" but it was £££ in hardback here and had a hideous cover so i couldn't - will have to wait for the pb. Anyway, that sounds exciting.

And the ilx top novels thread has plenty of recommendations on it, I picked up Tom McCarthy's "Remainder" off the back of that but I'm yet to get round to it.

serious question, shakey mo do you hate women

i don't go to bookstores because i end up buying books there!

also shakey it seems pretty strawmanish to list "those" authors and then talk about the fucking kite runner and lethem. i mean have you read anything recently "in that tradition"?

that's not a serious q unless you want to tell him/us why you are asking it.

xxp

yeah was gonna say, why are you even picking up the kite runner, seriously

also, what makes the kite runner suck is not its lack of experimentation, its the fact that its a poorly-written, poorly-plotted, paper-thin excuse for a tv movie masquerading as a book

i woulda been more acker, leyner? i admit i'm a bit of a loser wrt freaking out the squares. I never really got over reading brett easton ellis in secondary school and i kindof tend to like books that feel a bit more aggressive or whatever, and that are really stylish or stylised, that draw attention to themselves as books but not in a precious way (go f urself safran foer)

also shakey it seems pretty strawmanish to list "those" authors and then talk about the fucking kite runner and lethem. i mean have you read anything recently "in that tradition"?

― strongohulkingtonsghost, Friday, June 25, 2010 5:09 PM (1 minute ago)

i kinda genuinely want to know: who is now "in that tradition" i would like a good place to start reading new stuff that i will like from bc i am gen. clueless

have you read much david mitchell?

never heard of him. where to start?

2) how do you know these books are unadventurous garbage, if you havent read them--no snark but "bored New England housewives or abused children in the South" can be subjects of extremely adventurous books; ask william faulkner.

hey I can't read everything, I can get a sense of what things are from reviews (or from reading the first 20 pages or so) if I need to. but this is par for the course with any creative medium. and it's not the subject matter I was objecting to in those particular cases, it's more the relatively straightforward way in which those things are addressed. There's nothing inherently boring about the subject of the Kite Runner or White Teeth, I just didn't like how they were presented - the subject matter on it's own is not enough to recommend it. (And you just KNOW that particularly in the case of something like the Kite Runner, the purportedly "transgressive" nature of the subject matter was used as a selling point).

5) do you guys go to bookstores ever? serious question. i get my recommendations from friends and some from publicists and some from "real life" critics. but it can be really fun to go to a bookstore and just spend twenty minutes looking around at their 'new arrivals' or 'new in paperback' tables! good bookstores have good buyers who recommend good books. ime.

the big one I used to go to closed recently, unfortunately. City Lights is now a bit of a trek but I did enjoy perusing their staff picks (which introduced me to Link, maybe a couple others iirc). Unfortunately most of my friends have stopped reading fiction altogether, with a few exceptions. I do have a gay former lit-major friend who reads a TON, but his taste can be kind of indiscriminate and lately he's been super-into 19th century stuff like Thomas Hardy and the Brontes (which bores me to tears lol)

xp

JM Coetzee is one of the newer cannonized heavy hitters right

like i seriously doubt the middlebrow trade rags of the day were all "if you love fiction, you MUST read 'the ticket that exploded'!"

anyone who is recommending you the kite runner is just flat-out not to be trusted when it comes to book recommendations, end of story

i kinda genuinely want to know: who is now "in that tradition" i would like a good place to start

I echo this question

serious question, shakey mo do you hate women

I'm assuming this is a joke but I don't get it

mitchell is pretty awesome as far as mixing in sci-fi elements with literary fiction in a natural and interesting way, imo. 'cloud atlas' is his biggie, but i think his debut 'ghostwritten' is underrated. ('number9dream' is the only one i haven't read yet).

well i mean what range of years are we talking here? 1980 onward? '90 onward? last decade onward?

it was a joke, I didn't see morrison on your list tho so I guess it didn't even make sense!

btw this is a list of, you know, mostly all-time heavy hitters. kind of unfair to put them up against the average writers of any period of writing.

this is a fair point but just moves the goalposts to well, where are the heavy hitters of today then? Is Coatzee really considered on that level? My gay lit major buddy has a ton of his stuff, I could borrow some

xp

lets say 90 onward

coetzee writes about abused south africans so

i suppose Bolano is supposedly but i genuinely hated what i read of 2666

xxxp

shakey read waiting for the barbarians

I liked this piece a lot, and it seems at least indirectly relevant to new novels and why they suck:

https://medium.com/@emilygould/how-much-my-novel-cost-me-35d7c8aec846?src=longreads

_silby have you read /Americanah/? if you have and do not like it i don't want to hear about it fyi._

I haven't so you are safe from whatever opinions I would've had about it!

Okay, then you should read it! But also, it's okay to take a break from novels.

Americanah sounds interesting, just picked it up based on this thread (thanks silby!).

I don't get the feeling I would like Emily Gould's novel, but she managed to make me feel sympathetic to something I would normally be all "quid-ag" about. A very honest and thoughtful piece.

regarding why they "suck" i think it's more of an chicken/egg type of question. my inclination would be to say that new novels suck because their isn't really anyone around to read "good" novels anymore--it's the readership that has evaporated, a readership that in at least two ways (producing good readers and good writers) seems to be the prerequisite for good novels. and while the collapse of this special kind of literacy is tied to the decline of while/male/western cultural hegemony--which is certainly a good development--i think we're gonna inevitably see emergent forms of cultural hegemony that aren't really tied to being white/male/western. (indeed, embracing literature by non-white/male/etc writers seems only to reinscribe a kind of privilege modeled after the while/male canon!)

all of that a fancy way of saying i don't usually have much patience for cultural nostalgia but--and maybe this is because ive been reading too much pessimistic stuff lately--being liberated from old ideas of what "literacy" entails seems to me to be a bigger loss of imaginative freedom than a gain. feel like what we'd need more than anything is a new way for assigning value to writing even as words seem cheaper than ever.

my inclination would be to say that new novels suck because their isn't really anyone around to read "good" novels anymore

That's lazy of you to think so.

I think it's more tied to the shifting media and economic landscape than the "decline of white/male western cultural hegemony" tbh, but yeah I agree that you can't novels from their social and economic context -- readership, financial support, place in the culture. People with the hypothetical ability to write good novels are less likely to be motivated to do so, people who write good novels are less likely to be able to continue doing so, good novels that do get written are less likely to reach a wide audience.

I don't think there's literally "no one around anymore" to read good novels, just a lot fewer people, perhaps not enough to sustain the enterprise in its former glory.

Maybe there is more people than ever to read good novels but they choose to watch HBO instead.

------------

Someone should do a Piketty type study and have some DATA on its readers and so on.

I don't mean to imply any kind of judgment on people for not being good readers of what we think of (however loosely defined) as "good" novels--I'm not one myself and it's practically my job to be one!--just pointing out the rather empirically obvious fact that the reader of good novels isn't around anymore, even as an ideal. it's perhaps questionable if this kind of reader was *ever* around but that's a different issue, i suppose, since there existed a great many factors which propped up the idea of such a reader in any case.

now I am curious if anyone has ever written about the idea of the "good reader" and what that has entailed in different historical eras.

the rather empirically obvious fact that the reader of good novels isn't around anymore, even as an ideal

huh

yeah

I am obviously on shaky argumentative ground here.

also thinking about writers of previous eras writing for "future generations"--ie, positing a reader who "gets it" down the chronological line.

uh-huh

xp - i dont know if any of that is true or meaningful today on 2014 on this msgboard

theres so much slipperiness to the idea of a 'good' novel that it feels uninteresting to really pursue this line but i think theres lots of worthwhile stuff being written and read today. i am willing to believe other people feel differently but the reasons presented so far to bolster or confirm this worldview seem p cramped and reflexive to me at least so far

I think they're just not around in economically sufficient numbers anymore, nor are the people who maybe aren't "ideal readers" but would buy a literary book if it's enough of a sensation.

theres so much slipperiness to the idea of a 'good' novel that it feels uninteresting to really pursue this line but i think theres lots of worthwhile stuff being written and read today.

i definitely agree with this. good and great book are this very second being read and written. my (possibly wrongheaded) point is only to answer the question why it feels like "new novels suck" without going through a list of actual new novels and evaluating them.

There is lots of writing (not just novels) that are of interest (and end up doing similar things that novels, so we shouldn't restrict to that form) today and always, full stop.

That EmilyGould piece and Silby seem to be saying the same thing: they are not getting any joy out of the publishing industry, whether as consumers or producers, which is an entirely different thing. For Silby it leads to fatigue and throwing your hands in the air thread revival. I wouldn't spend anytime on it, and certainly wouldn't go on about ideal readers.

the rather empirically obvious fact that the reader of good novels isn't around anymore, even as an ideal

It seems to me that the phenomenon you are seeing is that, in a mass media culture, novels are no longer a mass medium, as they were prior to circa 1970. But there are hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of potential readers for 'good novels' in North America alone. I agree that the base of potential readers has shrunk in the internet age, but it is premature to pronounce their extinction as a species. The novel will bump along as an increasingly marginalized art form for quite some time to come.

it's like ib singer's line about yiddish: It was dying two hundred years ago, and will continue to die for another thousand years

I see a lot of parallels between publishing and record labels in this regard. The financing just isn't what it used to be, the sales aren't what they used to be, so there's not as much money for advances. There isn't the apparatus to sustain as many novelists. I harp on this a lot because I feel like too many people overlook it or ignore it, as though art gets made in a vacuum regardless of financial support. If a novelist's first novel isn't a hit today, no one's gonna keep taking chances on them. But it's harder to have a hit when the readership of a particular kind of novel has shrunk. So more "promising" novelists are just never going to write the second or third novel that might have been their breakthrough.

it's like ib singer's line about yiddish: It was dying two hundred years ago, and will continue to die for another thousand years

i like this. you could even apply it to the "bourgeois subject" which is the corollary for the "ideal reader" im trying to talk about (poorly). forgive the lapse into crit-speak.

would harry potter be considered a weak hit in the novel's heyday, the same way 30 rock's finale's numbers are miniscule compared to mash's?

xp Same can be said for madrigals, or tapestries, right? No artform ever dies. Every artform has been equally popular throughout history, and it's only chicken littles who say otherwise. The novel was thriving in the 14th century and will continue to do so for eternity.

Many good epic poems are still being composed every year.

I harp on this a lot because I feel like too many people overlook it or ignore it, as though art gets made in a vacuum regardless of financial support.

this is a good point, but i think it's only applicable to a small time frame? how many novelists of previous centuries wrote because they didn't have to work? there's a kind of bourdieu-ian social outbidding that was going on that's as important as economics as far "initial conditions" go for creating good literature--though neither are necessary/sufficient, perhaps.

I think a lot of novelists of previous centuries wrote because they didn't have to work, which would exactly be my point. An advance means you don't have to work. Not sure if that's what you meant or not.

I just sort of take the cliche that 'no novel can be judged in its own time' to be true, let's wait 20 more years until we read Emily Gould

lol, I am in no hurry to read Emily Gould's novel, I just enjoyed her description of what a $200,000 advance actually means to a normal, flawed, not particularly frugal but not absurdly excessive young person.

that's what i meant, Hurting. i suppose you could designate an era of the "publishing industry" which made it possible to make a living by laboring as a writer of novels.

and yeah 龜 otm of course about historical perspective.

the amount of time it takes to write a novel kind of sets a novel back in a previous era once it comes out though, no?

Takes like a few days, maybe a week at most ime

my buddy has been working on a novel forever, and i just envision him now hastily revising it to account for america's new middling interest in soccer and what that exactly means.

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--ZfjOWxE0--/1320199782204730216.jpg

http://review.gawker.com/25-unedited-excerpts-from-joshua-cohen-s-the-book-of-nu-1714663755

im coincidentally reading it rn, maybe 100 pages in -it's ok to good, too much and show-offy def, i feel like i skip like one of every 8th word and maybe im supposed to glaze thru it & its abt how we read ~online~ deep thots

this one 1 just read & is gold btw for "Words are garb." even tho he means it differently lol

Language itself is a burqa, an abaya—so many new words!...The garments that blacken even the tarmac, that blacken the lobby (irreligiously lavish). Words are garb. They’re cloaks. They conceal the body beneath. Lift up the hems of verbiage, peek below its frillies—what’s exposed? The hairy truth?

the excerpts i read seemed fucked up but not that bad. didn't notice all the nerdcore punchlines about beating his dick like it's leukemia i guess and the parts about arab women??

Naming your lead character after yourself and making it a thinly veiled slightly more despicable version of yourself is so basic. Literary fiction hack move.

It's supposed to be edgy but just signifies being too lazy to name your characters.

lol this thread

xxp