in every 'new yorker' short story ever...

I couldn't even finish that Raj story; whenever the New Yorker and the NYT tries to do anything with "contemporary" culture, it reads like it was written by 60 year old hermits living in Upper Montclair, NJ or Westchester County, observing those "crazy kids" in New York through very powerful telescopes.

no, it reads like it was written by some young new york writer living in a brownstone

Also, McSweeney's gives me bloody, chunk-filled diarrhea

Something tells me it's not McSweeney's that's doing that.

actually he's in London, apparently
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hari_Kunzru

Well, the story's terrible regardless of origin.

Apparently he was one of Granta's "Best Young" whatevers, which is a mark of death in my opinion. They specialize in that whole "laundry room epiphany" style of fiction.

eh, Granta is sometimes a good mag. I rarely bother with anyone's "writers to watch" type lists though. I think there's just something that fundamentally doesn't work about labeling writers as rated rookies and eagerly awaiting all the homers they're going to hit a couple seasons from now. Course that usually doesn't work with baseball players either.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Burt Stanton.

trying to work out what Nabisco means by this phrase

maybe I hope he won't say

Hi pinefox!

I like yr urbane pastiches a lot, TH!

eg
15) characters with off-kilter names like "Claymer" and "Theria" whose relationship to the narrator is never spelled out; probably a cousin
-- Tracer Hand, Monday, 21 January 2008

btw what is 'Anhedonia'?

Look, why don’t you check out this band I’m working with?” He handed me a sleek little music player. I listened for a while, out of politeness.

“They’re the final wave of New Wave,” he explained. “After this, there will never be another reason to wear a Blondie T-shirt.”

Despite her eccentricities, she was no introvert, was a lively presence on various online sites and game worlds.

...

there's nothing sadder than some dude so out of touch, yet trying to appropriate what they think is youth culture. like, you're dad trying to get into hip-hop in the 90s.

No, I'm not.

where is Nabisco now?

that story people are quoting from does sound diabolical, in an entertaining way.

Actually, my dad identifying blues jams sampled in hip-hop records I liked (a useful skill) is better than average as memories go.

Hari Kunzru = top fella in many ways. You may not like the turn of his descriptions, or the weird indulgence of the story twist, but they are accurate in describing LDN '90-'96.

LolDN

Dunno, there are more deserving targets of internet playa hate than Hari - or me, for pointing it out.

23) stalwart avoidance of brand names or recognizable products and replacement with generic signifiers 'listened to his ipod' becomes 'put on some headphones'

-- remy bean, Monday, January 21, 2008 1:23 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Link

Look, why don’t you check out this band I’m working with?” He handed me a sleek little music player. I listened for a while, out of politeness.

remy ftw

Too much brands = you are Douglas Coupland. I am trying to recollect whether an author wrote a novel and asked for product placement as a lark. But remy b. correkt.

Fay Weldon!

The problem with picking on the Kunzru here is that ILX is, whether it's pro or con, largely obsessed with the kind of people the story is about -- and of course largely is the kind of people the story is about, as maybe evidenced by the implication that he's doing it wrong -- so the idea that there's something odd or embarrassing about him writing about these people isn't exactly a point that's been carried yet. It's clearly a set of social manners we're interested in, one that informs way too many arguments around here; so why wouldn't a writer of fiction try to tackle it? (And the opening paragraph lets you know straight off that it's not just scenery here, that this social class is kind of his topic.)

But of course it really is hard, and risky, to try this sort of thing, because there's a huge chance of embarrassment: we love the way someone like Waugh might write about the manners of his bright young things, because we weren't around to nitpick the cultural references, but of course it's hard as hell to do it in the moment when people are. (And magazine short stories are kinda the best place to attempt it.) That opening graph pasted above doesn't do a bad job of it at all, cataloging habits and boxing up a lifestyle in a way that'd still make sense from outside of it. There's an effective neutrality to it -- "this is what we did" -- that's a pretty good option when you're trying to do this sort of thing.

I also think it's kinda funny that there were a bunch of initial assumptions about Kunzru's relationship with the type of person his narrator is, mostly because he's taken on the necessary fictional task of treating his narrator as human. But then I also think several of Hurting's actual criticisms of the story-as-a-story are pretty dead-on.

Oh, you know what else is interesting to me, is that it seems way more common among English writers to try and honestly tackle portraits of modern-day social categories than it is for Americans! Or not even social categories: there's so much English fiction that's willing to go directly at realistic portraits of how specific types of (usually middle or upper-middle class) people actually live. Whereas the top-flight fiction of the U.S. -- or at least the stuff that gets attention -- tends way more often to be about unusual circumstances, elements of fantasy, abstractions from and metaphors for the actual stuff we do. You could say the same thing about the difference between an American crime procedural and a BBC detective show, actually, but I don't know if that means anything.

Ladies and gentlemen, Nabisco.

I haven't read the story but I think that the bits I've seen here are bad

you might like Evelyn Waugh but I don't - I think he was vile

other points re. US / UK sound interesting.

Many Britishes crazy about Fitzgerald for this very reason.

I'm finding that if I have to write a modern problem it's much easier to send it back in time a few decades and work it out like that.

but some of us also like FSF because he was a hopeless romantic who wrote with unabashed gorgeousness

Ha, yeah, Fitzgerald was the other example I had in mind, yeah. I tend to like the "sending it back in time" answer too, Suzy, especially for longer things -- even a small amount of perspective is ridiculously helpful in figuring out what defined a social class, or how it operated. (I also like how novels sometimes have this built in -- spend a few years working on it, a year or two getting it on shelves, and there you go.) But I'll admit to having a soft spot for people trying to do this sort of thing in the moment, usually in magazine stories, and especially since it's part of the PURPOSE of magazines, a kind of in-the-moment disposable "what are we doing right now" approach.

I'm trying to think of who has been good, in my lifetime, at getting into existing social groups and classes, ones I know about firsthand. I can't necessarily think of much.

nice point, Nabisco, about the built-in time lag.

Amis said of Money (1984, set in 1981), something like: 'I thought it would be fun to write a historical novel about something that happened the other day'

and a fair defence of the role of magazine fiction too.

I have a fond memory of the time we walked out of the west side of Central Park, february 2005, early on a cold Saturday evening, and at a subway newststand you remarked how 'New York is a MAGazine culture', or possibly even a magaZINE culture, unlike, you said, Chicago.

this isn't relevant to the debate, I'm just sharing my fond memory of your company.

did you ever read Geoff Dyer, The Colour of Memory: published 1989, set c.1986? it's good on dole-age bohemians in Brixton (a very small set). I saw him once say that the dole had inadvertantly constructed a new generation of Bright Young Things.

he also compared himself, then, to Michael Bracewell, who in a sense is obsessed with this issue - it's his whole schtick in a way. I was going to say "cf ... " - then realized, well, cf all his novels.

I realize this is basically UK 1980s whereas you're interested in US 00s

Miranda July: getting into existing group of sexually obsessed and frustrated pervert losers

nabisco i would say that a 'certain class' of people are overrepresented in popular culture today and i can entirely see why its annoying to open up the nyer and read about the same shit we read about in practically every mainstream music mag or whatever

FSF and waugh - whatever else you think of them - used cultural identification and social classification as grist and fodder for character development, always at a slight distance, a remove, and not for the purpose of self-supporting cleverness or with-it-ness.

both of them wrote with enough detachment (what john gardener called 'camera placement') to allow the characters hoisting on their own frequently-idiotic petards, without endorsing or scorning the cultural associations.

the story above, conversely, uses these tools as self-substantiating, apparently interesting on their own, names-as-currency b.s. stylewise, the story is not abjectly poor, it is just poorly edited.

Yeah but deej part of my point was that if we don't want to hear about that class of people, why do we read a message board that's heavily obsessed with them. (I'd also note that the NYer does not really spend a huge amount of time on that class of people, but I think that's mostly an age demographic thing, and they're already starting to shift their way down toward our age group.)

I don't really see any "self-supporting cleverness" in this just-okay story, but I will certainly agree that it is no Fitzgerald or Waugh.

Robin Carmody: getting into existing group of progressive ruralists for proportional representation

DJ Martian: getting into existing subculture of systems theorists

n, this is supposed to be clever:

I ended up adopting a sort of ironic nerd look, with thick, plastic-framed glasses and a clip-on tie. I wasn’t very satisfied with it. I considered wearing my “own” clothes, on the ground that it would have been the most sincere response—to dress as if there were no dress code—but I couldn’t work out what the most neutral choice would be. How to let everyone know that not only was I myself, I was expressing myself?

actually, I think Nabisco's thought re. "who has been good, in my lifetime, at getting into existing social groups and classes, ones I know about firsthand" - gives me an excuse to ventilate, once more with affect, my long-standing theory & complaint about the movies: they never have people like me in them.

How is that an attempt for the writer to be clever? It's not an attempt to be clever on the level of language, and it's not an attempt to be clever on the level of content -- content-wise, it's actually fairly earnest, setting up an issue of authenticity versus the character's need to be clear about constantly "expressing myself." That's the basic work that fiction is supposed to do, using situations of plot to examine character -- how is that "clever?" Do you mean "clever" on the part of the character?

Look, it is soooooo hard to write about any mode of dress well in the context of fiction, because it has to do all of those things.

To me the story seems like an awkward attempt to give the 2000s the same gauzy, heady perfume of nostalgia that Paris in the 1960s often gets

Brand new, you're retro

the first bit is cute, if overwritten in the way TH suggests. the plot development is like lightweight writers-workshop "idea-driven" sci-fi.

seriously. if i read this in a "dangerous visions" style collection i'd feel hella disappointed.

ehh, I don't have the patience to argue this point with you. If you don't find that story -- or that excerpt -- smugly 'clever' than we will just leave it at that.

Agreed, my problem with the story is the heavy-handedness, which goes along with the awkward tone.

xp

considering the sludge that the NYer can sometimes put between its covers, this story is really not that bad, not too offensive, from what little i have read. the writing--at least the first page or so--does not seem too cute or too clever at all.

"Sunita buzzed up fat Constantine, who was hefting a box of mangoes in his meaty hands."

"Otto was a long-haired German who shot music promos. 'I need information, man,' he said, shrugging. We were sitting in a sushi bar, drinking green tea. 'I don’t care how it gets to me.'"

My main problems with the story are that it seems more about an idea than about characters, that that idea isn't a very interesting or original idea, and that the writing generally isn't very good.