george saunders

Zadie Smith has recently accepted Wood's criticism of her (though she defends Wallace against him) and seems to be moving towards a less "inventive" style, thank goodness.

Wood is no great fan of suburban realism - he has criticised Updike, and he likes Hamsun and Hrabal - but he dislikes the cartoonish element in serious fiction. For example, he criticises Smith for writing in places like Tom Sharpe:( '"Mickey . . .prised Samad's face off the hot glass with an egg slice." This kind of writing is closer to the 'low' comic style of a farceur like Tom Sharpe than it ought to be. It has a pertness, but it squanders itself in a mixture of banality and crudity.')

For me, the same tendency weakens Saunders. He is a gifted writer of sentences, but sometimes his sharpness cuts against itself: so, for me, parts of "Sea Oak" read two-dimensionally, and that interferes with my belief.

Anyway, I hadn't heard of this guy before this thread, and I went from being interested to being not so interested in him. I suppose I wouldn't kick him out of bed, at least not at first.

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200310/article_moffett.php

http://maudnewton.com/blog/?p=5610

Being about systems and ideas is one field where books have the advantage over film. But when it comes to whimsy, the book/film connection seems to be something else: the literary novel is officially Not Important Anymore. There's something so half-ridiculous about the fact of even writing one that it's easy to see where the whimsy comes in: what the hell, it's your novel, people hardly even read books anymore, might as well have fun with it. The problem here isn't whimsy, or "books about ideas" versus "books about people," but the fact that neither of those categories usually packs the ambition to say something grand and far-reaching and real.

Still, though, I'm sensitive to seeing someone congratulate a writer for being "less 'inventive'," despite the scare quotes. Why? Because I don't trust the way things are written off as whimsy or wacky when they very often mean something completely unwhimsical, both to writer and reader. Since this is a Saunders thread, "Sea Oak" again -- it has the tone that many would call whimsical, but I can't sort out a single element in it that doesn't seem focused and meaningful and directly relevant to something serious (and serious-minded) to say about people. So I sometimes read charges about "hysterical-realist" books as being like charges about "pretentious" bands -- sometimes they're spot-on, but all too often they're a way of dismissing some perception of "style" without even bothering to notice that it's actually genuine substance.

Naturally, I'm in favour of inventiveness that's natural and creative; but zaniness for the sake of it - like the talking turd in Frantzen, or the talking lawnmower in a story by Frances gapper that I read recently, or the relentless counter-realities in Eggars's flash fiction - strikes me as too easy. The hardest thing is to extrapolate from the real into something original, not to be original by sidestepping the real. I'm not against all surreal flights of fancy - I liked Arthur Bradford's "Dogwalker", for example - but I admit I prefer the writers who avoid it, for example Tobias Wolfe. I don't want to get polarised about this (I do like Saunders, and occasionally love him), but I'm uneasy about the relentless infiltration of fantasy tropes into literary fiction. (I'm just one of those people: as soon as a ghost, a miraculous occurrence, a post-modern conjuring trick, a metatextual irony, appears in a story, my heart sinks.)

(a) Isn't that stuff partly the result of the film era and the Coover dictum -- i.e., you should write stuff that can only be written? (I think this is an idiotic dictum, for the record, but I do understand why modern-day writing would select for people interested in only-in-fiction tricks.) But then more importantly:

(b) Can you defend this "relentless infiltration" line? Like I said, it's certainly a trend, and it's one associated with the highest-profile young writers today. But it's also a "trend" in the opposite sense -- it's a limited cadre. I mean, can we get past just saying "relentless" and "everywhere" and actually justify this idea that "everyone" is doing it? Because so far as I can see the bulk of fiction, high-lit and low-lit, remains as traditional as ever.

I think it might be even harder to sidestep the real and make it work for an audience who are only familiar with the real.

(And since "making it work" is a writer's job and not "keeping it real"...)

and hardly anyone would say that cream soda thing like that.

Arf. Saunders plays with those sorts of constructions all the time, yes. So can people like Wallace and Baker, when they want to. So does whoever writes The Gilmore Girls. Maybe I've been spending time in the wrong places, but so far as I know people often talk that way. It's normal, is what it is.

someone give us another weird attempt at vernacular we can argue over.

18. I think people could be encouraged to read through: Wearing "author" t-shirts, much like band t-shirts

And maybe George Saunders heard me, because check it out: go to reignofphil.com! You can buy Reign of Phil t-shirts! I have just purchased one.

I got the wig t-shirt, though, and got to be overjoyed when I came across the relevant part of the text. I guess for my high-lit t-shirt I will just have to get started on a Steven Millhauser Neighborhoodie. (Possibly it will say: "Rose Dorn / Rose Dorn / I am / forlorn.")

"Cruel freight" made me laugh.

x-post. I'm all for the Looney Tuney direction, not because of the anti-TV meme, but because the story seemed like a spirited amalgam of Twain and Barthelme.

"CommCom" was also pretty fucking solid.

Definitely the closest thing to Barthelme we've got going these days.

outtakes!

new collection:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=br_ss_hs/104-8034997-6351146?platform=gurupa&url=index%3Dblended&keywords=saunders&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go

its everything I didnt like about Bardo but more

His new book stinks.