post itt writers you think are bad

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

richard ford makes me snooze. i'd rather read richard russo.

Good point

iirc richard russo's 'straight man' is great

his early ones are good. Mohawk. The Risk Pool. then he got a little too crowd-pleasing and Hollywood for me. Straight Man is totally funny.

absolutely, unreservedly love the lay of the land and independence day, despite ford not really knowing how to end his books

lots of inner monologue about the look of certain highway interchanges, and residential drainage

Not challopsing here, but I was starting the Ann Tyler novel 'Breathing Lessons, not having read any of her books. The writing was so poor, uninteresting, and pedestrian in the opening paragraph that my feeling was 'if you can't be bothered to write, I can't be bothered to read it'.

An example of the offending prose style:

Deer Lick lay on a narrow country road some ninety miles north of Baltimore, and the funeral was scheduled for ten-thirty Saturday morning; so Ira figured they should start around eight. This made him grumpy. (He was not an early-morning kind of man.) Also Saturday was his busiest day at work, and he had no one to cover for him. Also their car was in the body shop.

[My own argument slightly undermined by getting the author's name wrong]

Tracer otm about Richard Ford.

The Tyler is drab but not bad bad, I think? It reminds me of Vineland, a book I love, but some of the stuff about Zoyd is drab.

Ford — my first exposure was Rock Springs, which I love. Tried The Sportswriter and got bored about 100 pages in. Just didn’t find the main character and his travails that interesting. Would still definitely call him a “good writer” though.

Also saw Ford do a reading when Independence Day came out, and he was a very likable guy in that setting fwiw.

It's a matter of personal taste, but the Tyler wording comes across to me as a flat monotone in the style of someone careless jotting down their shopping list.

I feel like giving a motivational talk:

Me: "Writing is a branch of the entertainment industry... Feel the expectation of the crowd waiting to be entertained... Make it vivid - really try to convey to us what type of person this is . Give it all you've got...Remember what made you have this driving ambition to be a writer in the first place."

Tyler: "This made him grumpy. (He was not an early-morning kind of man.)"

Me: Hmm...anything else? What's the situation that character is in? What's motivating him? Again, try to convey it.

Tyler: "Also their car was in the body shop"

Me: Closes book - let's leave it there then.

Problem with looking at novels on a sentence by sentence level is you don't get the big picture - not that I'm saying it matters, we all make decisions on what's worth our time and I'm not a patient reader myself. A reverse example would be I still think Updike is magical at the level of the sentence but I've no interest in putting myself thru his full steez any more

Now that I know that ford spit on a reviewer that panned his book I can’t take his writing seriously

Like, your shit ain’t all that bro, relax

I agree. There are writers with a luminous style that leaps off the page in just a few sentences. There are other great writers with a more pedestrian style. Fiction works on multiple levels. Many great books contain “bad” writing.

That was replying to NV.

That Ann Tyler open reads exactly like Stephen King to me (note: I like Stephen King)

In the spirit of the thread I will say that the last book I put down without finishing was Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. To me that was bad writing, mainly because it seemed to be constantly trying to do too much but also in a different sense too little.

Problem with looking at novels on a sentence by sentence level is you don't get the big picture - not that I'm saying it matters, we all make decisions on what's worth our time and I'm not a patient reader myself. A reverse example would be I still think Updike is magical at the level of the sentence but I've no interest in putting myself thru his full steez any more

The only Ford I have ever read was a short story, “Great Falls,” which I was surprised I enjoyed so much, to be honest.

Cheever is, in my opinion, the best of the 50s upper-class/aspirational white male writers from the US. I used to teach “The Swimmer” in tandem with Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals” and it drove the kids crazy in a good way

What are we doing here.

i just figure whole thread is in the classic ilm tradition :D

I used to have a huge paperback of Cheever short stories but didn’t make it though, the stuff was so depressing

cheever is the goat

even his novels are great even though they're basically interrelated short stories

Whaddya mean "even though"? That's hard as hell to do well.

idk it’s not a value judgment it’s just a description

Yeah, I like O’Hara too, but I haven’t read him since I was a senior in high school so my admiration is probably rose-colored by nostalgia. (I was very into the “misunderstood and self-destructive alcoholic man” trope when I was 18 lol)

What would you recommend

anything early.

I think the writers currently itt aren't bad enough

I'll tell you who's bad, Stephen Markley, author of _The Deluge_ is bad, I opened this up at random in the bookstore and couldn't believe what I was seeing

I'm sure the book has virtues but being well-written is not one of them

the early stories are very cool and then you realize lots of american short stories in the future totally came from him and not hemingway. the style. the attitude. the pessimism. but later he got bloated and rich and boring. any of the stories from the 30s and 40s are worth reading. the novels of the 30s are likewise cool.

xxxpost

"I think the writers currently itt aren't bad enough"

we should have a reading club where we all read fuccboi.

https://i.imgur.com/fkNsJMz.jpeg

Is this a good thread to post my VC collection

i am pretty good at buying books. i rarely buy anything THAT bad. maybe some old sci-fi comes closest. mostly something might turn out to be, as the kids say, MID. it will be boring or tedious or it goes someplace uninteresting or is just too damn normal for me to want to continue. i have no problem now stopping a movie 45 minutes in or a book 60 pages in. i'll stop reading a book with 30 pages to go! sometimes i just don't care anymore and i drop them. no big deal.
i don't really read a lot of online non-fiction either and i'm sure i would find terrible stuff there. or music writing. i leave it to more intrepid souls to seek out stuff that ends up on the ilm bad writing thread. i have a TON of good writing to get to.

is denis johnson overrated? and do only dudes read him? people kinda worship him but i never want to read his later stuff. the old stories might be all i need.

xp NICE. Of those, I've read Bright Lights Big City, Bushwacked Piano, A Fan's Notes, The Last Election, and Cathedral. All five in VC edition I'm pretty sure.