post itt writers you think are bad

Male ones.

i'm working through the Richard Ford edited "Book of the American Short Story vol. 2" - Granta, 2008 - and am coming across some of these famous post-war men that i'd never read before. the stories he cherry picks are all amazing in their own ways. But I realised i'd never read Updike - a novel or a short story before - and the story included, "Natural Color", is both 1) extraordinarily written - vivid and sharp, perfectly conveying the kind of panicky, unruly emotion that adults usually need to tamp down and 2) utterly poisonous; would i want to spend more than these few pages with these people? no i would not

I think "bad stylist" is a conversation that interests me more because "bad writer because shitty views" is a conversation that is had all the time.

Personal preference tho, not trying to thread police.

A case of someone who is sometimes one of those things and sometimes another, but also sometimes totally brilliant: Tom Wolfe. I love a decent amount of his ‘60s work, The Right Stuff is pretty great, but he is obviously objectionable on some ideological levels — and I think he is actually a BAD fiction writer. I don’t know why I read “A Man in Full,” much less why I finished it, but that book has some terrible writing in it.

You listen to Know Your Enemy, right? Their recent Wolfe episode was pretty good.

Yeah, I think I mentioned this before, but A Man In Full was my first "this is a book by a respected author but it is...bad?" experience. Even as a teenager living on a different continent I could tell Wolfe's attempts at capturing the voices of protagonists of different races weren't a success.

the bonfire of the vanities was not great either.

You listen to Know Your Enemy, right? Their recent Wolfe episode was pretty good.

I saw they'd done one but haven't listened yet. Definitely a good subject for them.

It's interesting that Bonfire and Man in Full were such big hits at the time, and people actually read them.

Today, if I looked a block of ellipsis-filled Tom Wolfe text, my first response would be "I am not reading that." It's funny that a paragraph of copy can just look dated.

if i have to read "solar plexus" or "rutting" i am going to 100% blame tom wolfe

it's not that these men couldn't string words together it's that they chose such a narrow swath of humanity to write about. personally i find that dull.

1) extraordinarily written - vivid and sharp, perfectly conveying the kind of panicky, unruly emotion that adults usually need to tamp down and 2) utterly poisonous; would i want to spend more than these few pages with these people? no i would not

See this is Martin Amis for me. Updike I find much more agreeable. Maybe this is because I am the American and not the English.

But re what Daniel_Rf said, I would never say Martin Amis is a bad writer, just that his books are bad in some moral sense while being well-written.

if i read ‘solar plexus’ i will think of señor don gato

frankly the venality in that updike is so curdled that it actually does detract some from the glittering hardness of his observation - these people’s contempt for each other is so extreme that it almost makes them seem non-human to me - i don’t recognise it from life

i slogged all the way through the rabbit series until rabbit fucked his daughter in law and i thought, you know what, this updike guy is a pig

omg that is SO gross
glad i never read those books

it kinda makes a person wonder why i picked up these books at all -- i can only say that i think it seemed like a way to peek into the inner lives of men, which i wasn't exactly privy to and was genuinely interested in, and it turns out that i wasn't all that interested in what i saw in these mens' minds (or was revolted by it)

i still think tim o'brien was good

Re Wolfe I think his dullness (and bad writing) emerges in his fiction. His nonfiction, especially his first 10–15 years, is anything but dull or cloistered. Hot-rod culture, pop music, San Francisco acid tests, the space program — he was attracted to interesting people and events and he wrote about them with energy and imagination.

But he needed that outside stilmulus, and also probably he needed the incentive of making a name and proving himself.

i wonder if that's a product of the subject(s) being so interesting and imagistic--i revisited electric kool aid a few years ago and I thought it was hot garbage. you could do so much better w/the 60's and stuff with many many other books

do people still read his 60s WHAM! BLAMMO! ZOOOOOOOOOOOM stuff now? i wouldn't want to read it. but i'm sure it was exciting for lots of people. i wonder if a lot of it would be cringe-y to me now. like hunter thompson or something.

i keep meaning to look for or start a thread on ILB about great forgotten journalism to seek out. you see the same names all the time and i just know there must be great stuff that i've never read.

I thought Bonfire of the Vanities was ok. Maybe lower expectations because the movie had already come out. I think I was more interested in what the stereotypical characters were in that era of NYC than in reading a story about actual people. I should reread MauMauing the Flakcatchers again … it’s been 30 years since I first read it probably and I remember being super impressed by it. Also that era is relevant rn.

I feel like both Wolfe and HST’s classic eras hold up just fine. They are easy to parody, partly because both of them almost became parodies of themselves in different ways, and also because they were massively influential, which means they influenced a lot of terrible stuff as well as good stuff. To me they are both good illustrations that good writing is not just a function of talent, it is circumstantial and especially it is a huge amount of work. I think there is a sort of natural arc for people who reach certain levels of success and recognition where that spark and especially that effort is just harder to motivate.

His nonfiction, especially his first 10–15 years, is anything but dull or cloistered. Hot-rod culture, pop music, San Francisco acid tests, the space program — he was attracted to interesting people and events and he wrote about them with energy and imagination.

Because once upon a time, this was what being a freelance journalist meant. Find cool shit that nobody else is talking about, and write about it in a way that will sell papers/magazines and make you the editor's new best friend. Now, being a freelance journalist means reading the same emails from the same publicists as everyone else you know, and frantically bashing out 1000 words to make $75.

...can we back up and talk about this from Scott here:

i can't read styron. i did watch him die though and i did clean his death bathroom a couple of times. someday i will write a poignant short story about that.

Right??

Hah I went on an Updike mini-binge recently courtesy of New American Library, not quite hatereading more like thisfuckenguy reading. The most nuts was Couples, quite a cause celebre in the late 1960s just a bizarre period piece now. I mean, did this kind of suburban promiscuity actually happen or was it Updike's twisted fantasy? Overall his celebrated descriptive prose is both impressive and frankly, insane.

Highly recommend the Know Your Enemy pod on Tom Wolfe. His novels after Bonfire are unreadable but his early non-fiction, for writers of a certain age like me, was hugely influential. For better or worse. Not that I ever tried to imitate him thanks god.

I’ve been reading an unlikely amount of 50s short stories lately and it’s wild how many “parties” seem to be happening in them, several times a week. It seems like there would be social networks that would support a cocktail hour literally every night of the week, at different people’s houses, and people would just live in each other’s houses practically. Did this really happen? In a certain moneyed set, I guess? And I guess the amount of alcohol consumed and the general age of the participants (pre parenthood) and the total lack of anything that could be called feminism would lead to some hanky panky (at best) but probably pretty easily shading into abusive, sex pest behaviour

You can see how that might be utterly repellent to a young woman in the 90a.

Reminds me of how everyone is always going out for steaks at like 10pm in those stories

I can enjoy campy send ups of this style (like The Love Machine) but the style itself dnw

Yeah it’s been fascinating in a kind of anthropomorphic way but don’t want to spend much more time reading about whether Thad is going to drop in again tonight at the Andersons or whether he’s out at the lagoon with that hussy Christine

we should all start reading Hortense Calisher.

i need to read some more Daphne du Maurier. i don't know if i'm ready for Anya Seton though. or maybe i am!

i really enjoy the books of Daphne du Maurier. My Cousin Rachel is just as good as Rebecca IMO

this was my favorite column online. i wish they hadn't stopped it. other than the interviews, it was the only thing i wanted to read on PR's site. unlike the interviews, you can actually read this column without subscribing. which is nice of them.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/columns/feminize-your-canon/

nice to see my old pal lovebug starski posting on here. but maybe i've just missed the threads he's been on.

Du Maurier is high on my read-next list. We actually stayed at Jamaica Inn this summer, I should at least read that.

my boy mailer continuing to fly under the radar: so completely forgotten people don’t even think to mention him when complaining about postwar misogynists. from his perspective, a colossal failure; relaxing for the rest of us.

i barely know who styron is but this thread has now contributed to a weird phenomenon wherein i know multiple people who were at his funeral. i was at william styron’s funeral, they told me in college. gosh, i said, furtively googling. you should hear what i overheard about mia farrow, they said.

wolfe sucked.

as for parties, people still go to them.

"i barely know who styron is but this thread has now contributed to a weird phenomenon wherein i know multiple people who were at his funeral. i was at william styron’s funeral, they told me in college. gosh, i said, furtively googling. you should hear what i overheard about mia farrow, they said."

at the height of woody/mia in 1992 i was in the local bookstore and mia came in looking stricken and she quickly bought a self-help book about families being torn apart. she looked so sad. i was not buying a william styron book. i was getting the iain banks book that i'd had the store order for me. The Bridge.

it's a small world.

for the record: i was friendly with Kevin Bacon's father. #onedegree

After The Bridge, Banks’s non-SF novels pretty much all qualify for this thread.

lol the first banks novel i read was THE BUSINESS and it was terrible

at the height of woody/mia in 1992 i was in the local bookstore and mia came in looking stricken and she quickly bought a self-help book about families being torn apart. she looked so sad.

in 1995-96 i was working at a bookstore in minneapolis and louise erdrich came in and went to the 'divorce' section and we were all like 'oh no!' little did we know

oops...

I've read very little of Updike's fiction ("The A&P" used to bean English textbook staple, and seemed OK for that: sligtly dusty minor realism, but appropriate for the A&P, liked "The Lucid Eye in Silver Town," better, where maybe the same now ex-A&P kid and Dad go to NYC). I like a lot of his book reviews collected in Hugging The Shore and Odd Jobs: descriptions and quotes usually leave me with a clear impression of the book, whatever his verdict. So far, he's led me to some good stuff, although maybe it's too easy to be right about Henry Green (he does note various complaints). He tackles and seemingly clarfies some very complicated-looking non-fiction, though usually chooses fiction, usually novels. Also likd his book about painters, Just Looking, where I could compare his takes with good reproductions of the art, in a very large-page trade paperback, not coffee-table format, but vivid and handy.

i still think tim o'brien was good

I am re reading the stupid Richard ford bascome stuff just because I’m old af