Novelists No One Reads Anymore

(why late in the week in the uk does mark s get all pynchoned out: Thomas Pynchon )

Dunno if this Magic Mountain stuff is just a tangent but I can't imagine Thomas Mann not being widely read in German speaking countries still at least.

martin amis lol.

Heh. But Money might still be good, or is that challops at this point?

well i was discussing this with an intermittent ilxor the other day and the answer was a tentative yes. but more the point was just how much he isn’t part of *anything* these days. “he hasn’t even been cancelled” was an observation.

Hah!

He wasn't even the best curmudgeon in the Amises.

yeah does anyone still read kingsley amis?

or john braine, alan sillitoe, john braine etc

all those dudes were still in the school library when i was at high school (end of the 70s) but i get the feeling i was in the last generation to read them

might be wrong

Much easier to watch the films iirc.

Because I’m out for a good time. All the rest…

no one reads either of the john braines any more

The Man with Two Braines

lol oops

the other john braine is john wain i guess

Figured that’s what you meant but didn’t want to call you on it as it was kind of funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJf7_5vH1WE

you read one angry young man you've read em all

motherfuck him and John Braine

Lol!

(xp)
Never noticed until now that that song has a sub-Police faux reggae groove.

Insane in the Membraine

yeah does anyone still read kingsley amis?

― lambert simnel (doo rag)

hell does anyone read _martin_ amis lol

i read his book about pac-man i think

Julian Barnes?

Anybody seen
My old friend Kingsley
Can you tell me
Where he’s gone

Thought I saw him out walking
Out over the hill
With John Osborne
John Braine
And John

DO U SEE?

Jilted John to #onethread!

Jeez, you're busy, man

Sorry. Do you have a thread of your own you’d like to attend to?

(Thought I might have to help with homework tonight but kid is taking a break)

Again in truth I think this thread has undergone a, maybe inevitable, maybe somewhat productive, mission creep -- from genuinely listing people who are now very obscure (but maybe once weren't), to listing people who were once central and are now, necessarily, past, and recognised as important in an earlier generation but not current.

Anyone studying, say, England in the 1950s is likely to read Sillitoe (I've read SN&SM maybe 3 times, others here may have too - not to mention the LONELINESS book), and also the early Braine and Wain. (Wain btw was quite an interesting critic - a good essay on Orwell for one, as I recall.) I have actually been lining up HURRY ON DOWN and ROOM AT THE TOP to read for months myself.

These authors are not now extensively read as current authors (which they're not), but they are still read and part of the catalogue of cultural and literary history. In sum I don't think they are really good candidates for the thread.

I believe that people do still read Kingsley Amis, though clearly his stock has fallen since say 1995.

Martin Amis is I think a more specific and interesting case - he ought still to be, or could be, central and current in some way, but has faded away from that - as is correctly noted. I think that he made a number of particularly bad calls - the wayward statements on feminism and matrimony around PREGNANT WIDOW an example - in an attempt to maintain public profile. In that, indeed, it is hard to resist the obvious parallel with Morrissey - people vaguely know the controversial opinions, better than they know any of the later work.

MONEY I would say is (naturally?) as good and bad as it ever was. It was outrageous, extreme, nasty, brilliant, central. I still think it's his most impressive feat by far.

Sorry. Do you have a thread of your own you’d like to attend to?

― If The Damned Are United (James Redd and the Blecchs)

That was a compliment.

yeah does anyone still read kingsley amis?

― lambert simnel (doo rag)

*raises hand*

The NYRB rereleased his only good books.

So The Alteration then.

And The Old Devils too, I think.

Sorry Alfred, I was a bit irritable last night for some reason.

pinefox speaks wisdom - honestly for me the mission creep is cool.

I mean, it might well be true that there aren't a lot of people reading (say) Elinor Glyn or John Galsworthy or James Branch Cabell. Fades like those are going to happen.

To me it's WAY more interesting to speculate when people will stop reading more recent authors, even (perhaps especially) ones who are still alive. Because a relatively modern writer going out of style quickly is a more dramatic development than the natural process of forgetting the distant past.

There's a line in my second-favorite novel (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight) about how hyper-modern art sometimes gets dated really fast, and I think it is accurate.

Has anybody here thought much about Douglas Coupland in this century? (pause for show of hands)

There will be a day when Bret Easton Ellis or Kathy Acker become a footnote, interesting only to specialists in a particular zeitgeist. Not sure when that will be, but I'm interested in finding out.

literally 5 minutes ago i was looking at a half-obscured book on my shelf and wondering what it was. it was Generation X.

You forgot #onethread!

Good post from Ye Mad Puffin. It's these specific developments that are intriguing, rather the general fade-out of everything.

In 2005 Coupland was hired (by the Observer Music Monthly as I recall) to interview Morrissey in Rome. He produced a strange text that showed that he hadn't bothered to interview Morrissey, had written up almost nothing Morrissey had said - I'm not certain he'd even met him. People were unimpressed. That's the last distinctive thing I can remember from Coupland.

Ellis and Acker, though, I feel still have kinds of cachet. I believe that people value Acker as some kind of avant-gardist - she had a big LRB retrospective only a few years ago. Ellis seems to have followed a different path - becoming some kind of ... maybe gay libertarian shock jock?

Of the 80s lit brat pack, Tama Janowitz is the one who faded without a revival. (Ellis has a tome coming out January, and even if McInerney is more bon vivant now, I feel like I see/hear Bright Lights, Big City referred to often.

Wasn't there a novel recently told in first person in the voice of Kathy Acker? Crudo, by Olivia Laing iirc.

The shiftcreep was inevitable. The only way the thread could have survived in its original form is if somebody else had actually read, say, Wilfrid Sheed. Either him or some other obscurity was posited who at least turned out to be a folie à deux.

lol, koogs and Eazy. Plate of shrimp, I guess. I think of how prominent Coupland and Janowitz were on my friends' DIY bookshelves circa 1993 and shudder. A few years later the same people were all knee-deep in Infinite Jest.

Maybe the thread needs a "future edition" spinoff. I dunno.

My sideswipe at Elinor Glyn reminds me that I only ever heard of her because of Dorothy Parker's deliciously snarky reviews. Her collected book and theater reviews are a very good source of fodder for this thread.

I know have a couple collections of Woolf's criticism, as well as Eliot's (somewhere, probably in the attic). Negative book reviews from 100-ish years ago will reveal people you've justifiably never heard of. Is that cheating? I dunno.

There was a recent New Yorker piece about Elizabeth Hardwick that was chock-full of extremely precise evaluations of people I had never read, and it made me a bit melancholy.

Feeling this last bit.

I would think twice about a Future Edition thread. The one I started seem to only sow confusion.

I think I said before that it might be more rational to posit that EVERYTHING becomes unread, except a handful of things, lights in a vast darkness, islands on a dark sea.

What are those islands? Things that do remain in print, prominent, or read?

I posit:

1: old canonical stuff, often in translation, like the Odyssey or DON QUIXOTE - things that are presumably cheap to publish and that readers still keep attempting because of an admirable desire to educate themselves.

2: English canonical material within eg: the C19 novel - so the Brontes, Dickens, G Eliot, not to mention Austen, remain always above water whatever else drowns. In modern times this is true of Woolf, Joyce, then Orwell. Meanwhile lots of things around them have wayward, up and down fortunes. Lewis went up as Lawrence fell away - but this surely still didn't mean that Lewis ever became as widely read as Lawrence had been (or even still is).

3: within genre fiction, some things that become canonical and hold their place: Christie, Chandler, Simenon; Asimov, Dick?

4: then you have a world of Current Literary Fiction which is prominent and read. Zadie Smith and J Franzen would be good cases from UK and US. Slightly longer established names hang on: Jonathan Coe, Jeanette Winterson, and yes, McEwan. And this contemporary corpus gets added to - probably especially now by writers of colour.

4a): you could add a sub-category for independent publishers and more experimental writers - ILB favourites like C-L Bennett, who are read by, maybe, passionate subcultures.

5: then add the tendency of publishers, sometimes critics, to go back and reclaim, republish, champion. Penguin making pretty new editions of something, multiple titles by an author, is a good sign. Feminism has broadly been a factor here - so Jean Rhys is more prominently in print than ever before? - perhaps so are Elizabeth Bowen, Djuna Barnes. Yet there must still be people who were contemporaries of theirs who do not get salvaged (yet).

The logic of the premise, justifying that perhaps increasingly predictable perambulation, would be that anything NOT in those categories is no longer read - and in any given case you would be positing a happy exception or surprise.

pinefox

In 2005 Coupland was hired (by the Observer Music Monthly as I recall) to interview Morrissey in Rome. He produced a strange text that showed that he hadn't bothered to interview Morrissey, had written up almost nothing Morrissey had said - I'm not certain he'd even met him

That is so David Foster Wallacesque it almost physically hurts. In retrospect there was a whole genre based around 90s white dudes who - consciously or unconsciously - sought to invent a very specific neo-gonzo aesthetic. "I'm not a real interviewer, I'm just going to submit 5,000 words about how nervous you are about peeing, and how we needed to find a very specific snack." I'm looking at you, Chuck Klosterman, David Sedaris, Joe Queenan.

There is another, demographically related, subgroup of probably genuinely sensitive souls who had a BIT more to say, but who are not without their own flaws. David Shields, Allan Gurganus, Lionel Shriver.

And there is another more elite tier of writers with some pretty solid literary merit who I don't think will vanish quite as easily: Chabon, Franzen, Lethem, Michael Cunningham. But

...but I dunno

The pinefox otm. Part of me wants to attempt to make a case why people should read those Wilfrid Sheed novels and novellas I enjoyed so much as a nipper, in particular The Hack and The Blacking Factory. Seems to me there was some kind of, not to say existential dread or malaise but just some kind of sense of discomfort in his work that spoke to me, but maybe I have misremembered that, you really can’t go home again, maybe there was something offensive or clumsy or wooden I forgot about or overlooked, or maybe the stuff was actually really good but people won’t care, they will say “Why do we need him? We have Walker Percy, we have J.F. Powers” and so ultimately it wouldn’t be worth the tilting at windmills effort.

Your loyalty to your past is laudable, Mr. Redd. But I generally feel there is just way too much culture for any one brain to comprehend. So any particular lacunae (Enid Blyton, or Wilfrid Sheed, or Banana Yoshimoto, or R.F. Delderfield) are forgivable.

I feel the same way about music, FWIW. No, I don't know as much about Wu-Tang Clan as the person sitting next to me at the bar. But she doesn't know as much about Nanci Griffith or Elvis Costello. The person two stools over knows way more about Ultravox than I do, and that's okay.

It's all a vast tapestry.

Crap I think I meant to put George Saunders in the last post but I forget which category.

Carry on, y'all

Here in Canada, Coupland has become the kind of cultural presence who is called upon to make government-sponsored installation art.