post itt writers you think are bad

see the challenge with writing like oyler's is to talk about it _without_ making fun of how bad it is

that's a difficult thing to do. well, at least, i've just conspicuously failed to do it, despite my best intentions

Lionel Shriver has another goddamn book out. (gift link)

As a novelist, Lionel Shriver has made her strongest impressions selecting some hot issue of the day — school shootings, the American health care system, the ballooning of the U.S. national debt — and working it into a well-paced drama about its effects on one family. When this formula works, as it did best with “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2003), the result can be riveting and also very popular. The intimacy of domestic politics moderates Shriver’s polemical side, which, when given free rein — as during an infamous 2016 speech she gave on cultural appropriation while wearing a sombrero — usually turns out to be smug, crude and obtuse.

In Shriver’s tiresome new novel, “Mania,” the balance is off. “Mania” is the story of Pearson Converse, an untenured academic who lives with her tree-surgeon partner and three children in a Pennsylvania college town. Most of the novel takes place during an alternate version of the 2010s, when a social-justice fad has been ignited by a best-selling book titled “The Calumny of I.Q.: Why Discrimination Against ‘Dumb People’ Is the Last Great Civil Rights Fight.”

god damn that sounds dire

"inventing a person to be mad at: the novel"

I mean I can understand her being worried about discrimination against dumb people.

Although ...

It goes on and on. Cars blow up because they’re built by idiots.

Actually true if you own a Tesla

Did no one tell her they made a whole movie about this already?

"Pearson’s partner, Wade, is forced to hire an assistant who knows nothing about arboriculture and drops a branch on him."

haha, would read. i actually think she can be funny and has written books that i have enjoyed. she's madcap. i know about the whole sombrero thing with her. writers can be dunces. they are famous for it. that's why they all get married 10 times because nobody can stand living with them for more than a year or two. though i think she actually has been with the same person forever.
also, yeah, idiocracy. but, also, it doesn't sound like that much of a stretch from reality.

she is terrible in interviews too. and i have read really terrible essays she has written. but i STILL think she has written some good stuff. like, good writing. would still take her over ben lerner or jonathan franzen.

but i'm not gonna die on her hill. feel free to rant about her.

she kinda reminds me of one of those comedic writers from the 50s or 60s. maybe british. would come out with a book every year or two. probably a penguin paperback. daffy. there used to be a bunch of those guys. they were usually guys. she's a throwback. speaking of which, i was totally going to start a david lodge book tonight.

i still read peter devries books though. and cyril connolly apparently. jesus, i need to get a life. i swear i am not going fox-hunting tomorrow.

I read Lauren Oyler's novel (Fake Accounts) a couple of years ago bc I guess I am always interested in fiction about the internet and what it's like to live in an internet-mediated world ... but I found it kind of annoying tbh. I didn't know about her Gay/Tolentino/etc. hit pieces before reading the recent Bookforum review.

It's funny because Gay is bad, and Oyler is also bad. And Shriver's a nasty racist piece of shit.

Finding an Internet novel "kinda annoying tbh" sounds exactly how it ought to feel.

Oh! I Always Get Those Two Mixed Up! - Lauren Oyler / Patricia Lockwood

oh okay i goggled and i didn't think james would call her a npos just for the sombrero thing and now i see her eric clapton essay. yeah that is not something you want on your author's bio. okay i take it all back. she sucks. the books i read weren't terrible though. can't remember which ones they were.

more annoying than the buzz-y internet novel or even the AI mayhem novel are all these middling middle american mfa workshop writers doing their climate apocalypse novel with an eye toward Netflix money. there are so friggin' many of them and they are all middling. actual science fiction writers just need to sit there and wait for it to pass but by the time it passes there will be an actual climate apocalypse and it will be too late!
full disclosure: i am pitching the idea of a novel about an mfa workshop writer pitching their climate disaster novel at the Sundance film festival when an earthquake hits. and an eclipse. and a tsunami. in Utah.

lol

Do all the Johnny-come-lately SF writers claim they're not really writing SF, as their books are about human relationships and science fiction is all purple space monsters travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots? Or is that just the British lit types? Anyway their SF is largely terrible other than Kazuo Ishiguro who does take the genre seriously.

Nah that's not the vibe, remember these ppl are aiming for netflix, not the Booker prize.

I recognise scott's description a lot from my comics discussion group - quite often we'll discuss something that feels very slight and rote and those more in the comics biz will say "yeah this is probably just proof of concept for this person to try to get a streaming adaptation going". Depressing.

I've noticed that every new Netflix show does appear to be apocalypse-oriented (not that I use Netflix) - it's awfully tiresome isn't it

Doris Lessing was unapologetic about writing sci-fi, and was damn good at it, too

shriver's book sounds so... routine. i'm starting to feel like there is a meaningful distinction to be made between being a "bad writer" and a "bad thinker"... regardless of the "acid wit" or whatever of her writing, shriver is certainly a _bad thinker_. which is also, in my mind at least, distinct from being strictly _stupid_. i feel like there are so many different ways of being a bad writer.

in fact, not only is shriver a bad thinker, but she's not even a _creatively_ bad thinker. someone like dave sim reaches obviously ludicrous conclusions but does them in such an interesting way that i can't help but be fascinated. against my better judgement, i absolutely want to know more about his bizarre thought process and how he's reached the conclusions he's reached. the beliefs shriver expresses are evil, but they're also, well... banal. i don't know that i'd call the beliefs of someone like dave sim (or, say, janice raymond) banal.

shriver's variety of bad thinking... to me it kind of seems like _lazy thinking_, the way that certain writing is lazy writing.

like with so many of these novels, my question is less "who writes this shit" as "who publishes it". harper? harper published this? were they contractually obligated to? what the actual fuck? i feel it's important for me to ask this question without assuming an answer.

Finding herself hemmed in in the International Literature Survey course she teaches, Pearson decides, much as Shriver herself did, to introduce an incendiary object into the lecture room. She switches out Dostoyevsky's "Crime And Punishment" for a later novel of his, you know, the one called "The Idiot." Predictably, in this anti-brain-shame era, when the fool has been edited out of Shakespeare's plays and fictional eggheads like Sherlock Holmes and Victor Frankenstein have been banished from the curriculum, Pearson must apologize to her class or be fired.

This is giving Ayn Rand vibes.

Even that name, Pearson Converse.

why are we discussing shriver, she's been a known menace/joke/bad writer for decades, fish in a barrel stuff

i just opened up my kindle to do some reading and it reminded me of the ads for terrible books on the lock screen. people pay amazon presumably, so that i see these ads for awful self-published books on my lock screen. the obviousness of the grift is apparent from the self-evidently poor quality of the books. the book i'm seeing an ad for right now is called "Glory of The Pack: A Joe The Werewolf Novel". the author doesn't matter. i'm not sure whether he drew the cover himself or commissioned someone else to do it. in any event it's bad art. a 3.5 star rating from 20 reviews as of 3/21/24. the blurb:

A murdered werewolf. Packs from another state. Can Joe put the pieces of these puzzles together before tragedy hits Iowa werewolves?

it's cheating, right? it's cheating to say this writer is a bad writer, which is why i don't say his name. it's like dunking on jim theis. jim theis wrote _The Eye of Argon_ when he was 14 and published it in a fanzine that had, like, two dozen readers, and it went viral, and he was so embarrassed by the critical reaction to his work that he never wrote another work in his life. there's still a tradition at nerd conventions today of trying to read the eye of argon aloud without bursting into laughter. it is indeed risibly terrible. i do wonder sometimes if theis could have become a good writer. i guess it doesn't matter.

who's the audience for this? the author. (it would actually be really fucking funny if the reason it's set in iowa is because the author is attending the iowa writers' workshop. i don't have any reason to believe that, though.) a terrible title, terrible art, a terrible blurb... all _unexceptionally_ terrible. it's senseless to me that harper publishes shriver but doesn't publish, like, this guy.

pardon me if i'm stating the fucking obvious as if it's novel... well, people figure out the obvious every day.

"but she's not even a _creatively_ bad thinker."

i would have to disagree. the novels i read were creative! and did have a lot of thought put into them? not saying her views were my views but she has an imagination. and knowledge. and she can write compelling sentences. she is an actual writer. but she has shitty opinions irl despite having lived all over the world! that's what surprises me the most about people who end up spouting horrible isolationist shit who have actually seen the world. shouldn't they know better? she has lived in Africa! wiki says she lives in Portugal now.

but whatever. it happens to so many people as they get older. its a weird phenomena. look at alice walker.

but i do have to say her novels are often elaborate constructions plot-wise. they are not your standard middle of the road lit fic or whatever. they're weird!

there's still a tradition at nerd conventions today of trying to read the eye of argon aloud without bursting into laughter.

I play the same game but with random copies of The Da Vinci Code I might encounter in holiday homes / charity shops / litter bins. And that sold 80 million copies! So what do I know.

all these middling middle american mfa workshop writers doing their climate apocalypse novel with an eye toward Netflix money

This is one of these by the way

Steven Markley, The Deluge, much talked-about novel from last year, I looked through it in the bookstore and the writing was v v bad

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Sunday, March 24, 2024 10:10 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

i read two earlier ones. maybe they just devolve from there. i don't know. i have an SF-ish one here somewhere that i didn't read. it looked too long/didn't want to read. The Mandibles.

"why are we discussing shriver"

thread title...

"who's the audience for this?"

people who read We Need To Talk About Kevin probably. that book sold a ton. don't know if there have been diminishing returns since then. but a lot of people who read her probably have no idea about her racist britain essay. i didn't!

oh shit i'm sorry i thought you were talking about shriver when you asked "who's the audience for this?" i scanned too quickly.

“The world is run by idiots because of cancel culture” is just inane quite apart from the terrible politics of the writer

i would have to disagree. the novels i read were creative! and did have a lot of thought put into them? not saying her views were my views but she has an imagination. and knowledge. and she can write compelling sentences. she is an actual writer. but she has shitty opinions irl despite having lived all over the world! that's what surprises me the most about people who end up spouting horrible isolationist shit who have actually seen the world. shouldn't they know better? she has lived in Africa! wiki says she lives in Portugal now.

― scott seward

ah i feel like i didn't explain it well, like i'm not disputing any of the stuff you say above... i'm not agreeing with it either, i haven't read her books and am not likely to at this point lol. being intellectually curious, being able to learn and discover things, being able to use that knowledge to reach conclusions that _aren't_ shitty, to me that's what i would call being a good thinker, and i'd say that's something different from being a good writer.

Only time I want to read the name “Lionel Shriver” is in an obituary column.

she's a grotesquely bigoted one-shit wonder, if everything is so woke why is she still being published, reviewed and frequently given a platform by the bbc despite none of her terrible books selling in significant numbers since Kevin...

I don't know if she's still indulged by the bbc but it seemed she was popping up everywhere about 5 years ago on QT and multiple R4 shows etc

And proving to be a boring dimwit in all of them.

i'm remembering the book i read now and it was actually a long book about how horrible health care is and there were lots of polemics and rants but what i also remember is that the main character throughout the book wanted to retire to Africa! what most impressed me about the book was that NONE of the characters were sympathetic in any way. that always kinda impresses me for some reason in normal novels. it was a little like reading a book by a particularly well-read stand-up comedian.

"being able to learn and discover things, being able to use that knowledge to reach conclusions that _aren't_ shitty, to me that's what i would call being a good thinker, and i'd say that's something different from being a good writer."

i totally get this and i agree. and that was well said. having said that, and i am not including lionel shriver here, there are a lot of kinda crappy people who write really insightful books about the human condition. i don't know how they do it other than that they are human and we can be kinda crappy. myself included. like, you can have great ideas and be wonderfully creative and STILL do the crappy awful wrong thing. or say the crappy awful wrong thing. or reach crappy awful wrong conclusions despite knowing better. i do it all the time.

wait. is david lodge horrible? i should google him. was he in the national front or something?

and meanwhile i just finished a joanna trollope book last night! i think she used to go out with Skrewdriver in the 80s. i mildly enjoyed her book. it had a good wish-fulfillment ending. the rector got it in the end!

david lodge still alive by the way in case you didn't know. 89 years young. joanna trollope a frisky 80. her husband, the poor man's ian curtis, ian curteis, died in 2021.

always love people who decide they don't like wokeness and cancel culture so they not speak out against that but also simultaneously abandon every belief they previously held.

I wrote a fairly misogynist article for the school newspaper in high school claiming men were oppressed in high school when I was a privileged idiot, and my friend's girlfriend wrote a scathing email tearing me down which was well-deserved. was pretty much a feminist as long as I knew her.

abandoned it all and became a creepy Trumper in the blink of an eye for...reasons I still don't understand.

i'm remembering the book i read now and it was actually a long book about how horrible health care is and there were lots of polemics and rants but what i also remember is that the main character throughout the book wanted to retire to Africa! what most impressed me about the book was that NONE of the characters were sympathetic in any way. that always kinda impresses me for some reason in normal novels. it was a little like reading a book by a particularly well-read stand-up comedian.

i've had cerebus on the mind a lot lately, i think, my point of reference keeps being dave sim. anyway that's something that strikes me about cerebus, _none_ of the characters are in any way remotely sympathetic, including the literal author self-insert. like here's a guy who's a self-described "masculinist" and i look at his stuff and... i genuinely think i hold masculinity, men, and maleness in higher regard than sim does. the cynical part of me wants to say that awful people have a particular skill at writing books in which all the characters are horrible, but like that flattens things too much. it's a certain _perspective_, i think. someone isn't, i don't think, an awful person, in most cases. someone merely hates themselves, and acts in such a way as to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

i totally get this and i agree. and that was well said. having said that, and i am not including lionel shriver here, there are a lot of kinda crappy people who write really insightful books about the human condition. i don't know how they do it other than that they are human and we can be kinda crappy. myself included. like, you can have great ideas and be wonderfully creative and STILL do the crappy awful wrong thing. or say the crappy awful wrong thing. or reach crappy awful wrong conclusions despite knowing better. i do it all the time.

for me, crappy isn't something one _is_, it's something one _does_. i defecate, but i'm not a piece of shit. i have reached _so many_ crappy awful wrong conclusions, done and said so many crappy awful wrong things. that's kind of the importance of the idea of being a "bad thinker" as being something like a "bad writer". it's not, like, you're born "smart" or you're not. i'm _smart_, i have a _high IQ_ (which... this isn't even _controversial_... is a culturally biased and kinda racist social construct and a poor measure of "intelligence" by any standard), but this doesn't mean i can't also be a _bad thinker_.

one of the things i like about ilx is that the critical environment here has inspired me to become a better thinker. i still reach crappy awful wrong conclusions sometimes... i don't expect that i'll ever stop reaching crappy awful wrong conclusions. just like one can be a "good writer" and still write, even publish, some godawful crap, one can be a "good thinker" and still come up with some terrible conclusions. "good criticism" for me is the sort that inspires people to write and think better. i mean i guess that's just constructive criticism. i'm literally just advocating for constructive criticism.

i'd be interested in knowing more about what people you _do_ think are crappy and write really insightful books about the human condition. without knowing more about who exactly you're thinking about i don't totally understand what you mean by that.

the rector got it in the end!

― scott seward

is that a double-entendre?

There are a few of the MFA middlebrow apocalypse books that are fine, but most are, indeed, utter shit. I liked ‘On Such a Full Sea,’ by Chang-Rae Lee, quite a bit.

Was Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel as stupid as it appeared?

catching up here, but it's very funny that shriver managed to recreate Harrison Bergeron from first principles

turns out the writer of that bookforum review is a known peter thiel associate. i love new york media lol