Novelists No One Reads Anymore

Like, how do I feel personally? Burn every copy of Myra Breckinridge. Bury it wherever they buried the Gore Vidal biopic starring Kevin Spacey. Heine saying "Where they burn books, they will one day burn people" - I don't think it's _true_. Where they burn books, they are _already_ burning people, and people care more about the books than the people. Those famous pictures of the Nazi book burnings - Magnus Hirschfeld's _Institut Fur Sexual Wissenschaft_. A great loss to history, to _science_? Sure. How about Dora Richter, though? Where's her fucking obituary? She was "presumed dead" when the Nazis destroyed it. Presumed. Nobody _bothered_ to make note of her murder. It's only by chance that we know she ever existed.

Happy Nobel Prize week to all who observe. This is your reminder that, in October 1922, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Rilke were all alive and publishing major work. The prize that year went to Jacinto Benavente.

— Ryan Ruby (@_ryanruby_) October 3, 2022

https://www.nobelprize.org/images/benavente-12925-portrait-medium.jpg

Not huge on "banned books" lists. Oh, everybody makes a big deal about Huck Finn being a banned book and I mean. I read it in, I don't know, sixth grade. It's a 19th century novel by a racist white guy and this is the novel we use to teach children that racism is bad? I don't think I benefited from reading that book. I think there are better ways of teaching kids about racism. I don't think reading it made me less racist, though it did _eventually_ help me figure out that America is, and always was, a white supremacist ethnostate.

I think this is part of why I liked Huck Finn (apart from being a good to excellent yarn): besides showing the origins of the white ethnostate, it shows an America full of grifters and (nyuk nyuk) huckers.

There's this rift, I think, between liberal and radical approaches to... life, really, just life. And I've been on both sides of that divide. The liberal approach is look, can't we just expand the divide? Let's read more Octavia Butler. (I really need to read some Octavia Butler.) The radical approach on the other hand is... the monoculture isn't just _impoverished_, it's fucking insane and is killing all of us. I like the idea of _a_ monoculture, one where we don't have this fundamentally adversarial relationship with the "other". At the same time to defend _this particular version_ of the monoculture is an exercise in defending the indefensible.

I would certainly throw my lot in with the radicals when it comes to life - hierarchies are to be abolished, not tokenized, and sure canons qualify. The problem I guess with any kind of less horrible monoculture we could dream up is it's always going to be based on exclusion to some extent, because what's in it will always be less than what's not.

On the other hand, deciding then that monoculture is a lost cause and canons to be entirely abolished is that it cedes cultural ground to capitalist forces who do not share the hand wringing - so the shared culture becomes, at best, the front page of Netflix and, at worst, the youtube front page before you log in.

I'd say capitalism is killing us all, and, yeah, capitalism opposes monocultures of any kind, i.e. "You will no longer stream Von Sternberg on Netflix, suckers."

On the other hand, deciding then that monoculture is a lost cause and canons to be entirely abolished is that it cedes cultural ground to capitalist forces

Yes there's that. But for me the problem is that _I_ can curate my cultural intake just fine (for me). But so can everyone else, and "everyone else" will inevitably include horrible people.

So yeah, I'm curating for me. Kate is curating for Kate. And so on. There's a part of me that is glad that a few dudes on one specific island no longer decide who gets published and who doesn't.

But Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Eric Trump and Lauren Boebert are curating for Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Eric Trump and Lauren Boebert. I am not suggesting things were better when there was an alleged "consensus" about the world and reality - because I am old enough to remember that consensus sucked too.

This is your reminder that, in October 1922, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Rilke were all alive and publishing major work.

I'm not sure if this proves very much. Recherche was unfinished, Ulysses wasn't published until that year, Woolf's best-known novels are later. Rilke, sure.

That's well argued!

Yeats, winning in 1923 I think, is a more encouraging case.

the photo proves the nobel was correctly assigned in 1922

Yeah the Nobel is (by design) meant to be for your whole canon, and therefore tends to indicate that you're "done" (whatever that means). Which is why at least some writers have drily regarded the Nobel as a death sentence and sought to avoid it.

(At the same time, that's a pretty good problem to have, just sayin)

Woolf should've gotten the Nobel in 1882 imo.

Sick burn on toddler, damn

Her stuff up to age 6 was quite experimental. Lots of alternative spellings.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo....

I'd say capitalism is killing us all, and, yeah, capitalism opposes monocultures of any kind, i.e. "You will no longer stream Von Sternberg on Netflix, suckers."

Not sure I agree with this! Personalised choice is what streaming services claim to peddle, sure, but I'm not sure it actually pans out that way. You won't stream Von Sternberg, but you sure as hell will stream Squid Game! Which is not the greatest example of the evil of this model, being as it is a non-anglo show that from all I've heard is very well made and ideologically right on, but it's when I became aware of a certain disconnect - all these breathless articles going "wow a Korean show is the most watched thing on netflix, how could this be??". And, well, it can be because Netflix fucking put it on their main page for everyone. Which those of us accostumed to curating our culture might ignore, but there's still a huge amount of people who will click on that. And having that sort of mass audience will always be better for capital than tailoring a thousand different things to different niche audiences.

I'm not sure if this proves very much. Recherche was unfinished, Ulysses wasn't published until that year, Woolf's best-known novels are later. Rilke, sure.

― jmm, Monday, 3 October 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Ulysses was published in February. Fine. I doubt they could've give it to him the same year.

They could've easily given this to Proust. Even if it was for Swann's Way I'm sure by then many could see the ambition for the entire project.

"Yeah the Nobel is (by design) meant to be for your whole canon"

Beckett also had a whole period of work ahead of him!

Not sure I agree with this! Personalised choice is what streaming services claim to peddle, sure, but I'm not sure it actually pans out that way. You won't stream Von Sternberg, but you sure as hell will stream Squid Game! Which is not the greatest example of the evil of this model, being as it is a non-anglo show that from all I've heard is very well made and ideologically right on, but it's when I became aware of a certain disconnect - all these breathless articles going "wow a Korean show is the most watched thing on netflix, how could this be??". And, well, it can be because Netflix fucking put it on their main page for everyone

This is what I meant to say -- merely that "I can't watch what I want on Netflix because Netflix has decided for me; the rest goes into the memory hole."

I think this is part of why I liked Huck Finn (apart from being a good to excellent yarn): besides showing the origins of the white ethnostate, it shows an America full of grifters and (nyuk nyuk) huckers.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

Oh, I agree with you totally - Huck Finn is a well-written and entertaining book even for the contemporary reader and it's of invaluable historical importance. I'd put it on the reading list for a university course on 19th-century American history, along with _Democracy in America_ and that book by Anthony Trollope's mom. There was a lot of important stuff about 19th-century American history nobody taught me in school, not just thinks like that impeachment was first used successfully to reinforce white supremacy but things like the vice president who tried to fund an expedition to the center of the hollow earth, or that on the floor of Congress nearly everyone was drunk constantly.

I just don't think it's appropriate as summer reading for sixth-grade English. That's all.

Agreed. In elementary school we read an illustrated abridged Tom Sawyer, which, correct me if I'm wrong, is not as fraught as HF.

I'd put it on the reading list for a university course on 19th-century American history, along with _Democracy in America_ and that book by Anthony Trollope's mom.

Now this is a curriculum. Also: Dickens' American Notes.

the vice president who tried to fund an expedition to the center of the hollow earth

*perks up*

well, what do you expect with a middle name like Mentor

On the other hand, deciding then that monoculture is a lost cause and canons to be entirely abolished is that it cedes cultural ground to capitalist forces who do not share the hand wringing - so the shared culture becomes, at best, the front page of Netflix and, at worst, the youtube front page before you log in.

― Daniel_Rf

I'd argue that it cedes no ground at all - they already have the high ground! They control the media, they control what you see and don't see. Why has everybody heard "Plastic Love"? Because Youtube promoted it to anybody and everybody. They _are_ the monoculture. Marjorie Taylor Greene may curate for Marjorie Taylor Greene, but it's the capitalist media - Facebook, Youtube, Netflix - who decide what people see.

I open a new private tab and I search "transgender" and what do I get? Abigail Shrier. Matt Walsh. Blaire White. This is what the monoculture is teaching cis people about what it means to be trans today. Hatred. Bigotry. Lies.

Was it ever different? Has it _ever_ been different? Hahahahaha. No. Fuck no. Before that, the monoculture was the acclaimed, best-picture winning, virulently transphobic film _The Silence of the Lambs_, a film about which the major argument was whether Buffalo Bill was _a homosexual man_. This is the world I grew up in, the world I lived in my entire life. That I exist at all is the result of a collective struggle waged by trans people from before I was born, and were we given voices within the monoculture? No. The voice of trans people, according to Youtube, is fucking _Blaire White_, apparently, and that is NOTHING NEW. In the UK media monoculture, who is given voice to speak about trans people? The openly genocidal Lily Cade. Do we get to speak for ourselves in the UK media?

In fact the only way I can even _hear_ the voice of a British trans woman in the UK media is through... YouTube. Abi Thorn. This is how fucked up the monoculture is, YouTube spends all of its money and time preaching hate, promoting hate, and people like Abi fight for the _scraps_, because if she wasn't on YouTube, hardly anybody would hear her at all. When the only way we can get heard at all is through an openly transphobic platform, well, that's what we do.

If Sam Feder's amazing documentary _Disclosure_ is picked up for peanuts by Netflix, and Netflix then turns around and pays incredible amounts of money to Dave Chappelle to spew transphobic vitriol, then, well, that's what we have to do for anybody to hear us, anybody to know we exist, because silence = death, as always. Capitalist monoculture means that "the debate" means elevating the voice of Dave Chappelle, and silencing the voice of, say, trans sex workers who will gladly tell you about their professional interactions with Dave Chappelle. Like there's maybe some important fucking _context_ missing to this debate.

I'm ceding _nothing_ to them, because they started with everything, and I started with nothing. I, and the people I fight along side, are _taking back what is rightfully ours_. We are fighting to _exist_ in a world that has always, ALWAYS tried to erase us. Is capitalism killing us all? Yes, absolutely. And that's more... _evident_ to some of us than others. I don't have the luxury of pretending otherwise. Alfred doesn't have the luxury of pretending otherwise. And the monoculture, that _is_ capitalism. That is an _essential part_ of how capitalism gets its power, through _capitalist media_.

Hi! I have _opinions_!

well, what do you expect with a middle name like Mentor

― “uhh”—like, this is an insane oatmeal raisin cookie “uhh” (President Keyes)

but was it pronounced "menner" like the Ohio town

that book by Anthony Trollope's mom

DON'T SLEEP ON THIS ONE, people, it rules

Agreed. In elementary school we read an illustrated abridged Tom Sawyer, which, correct me if I'm wrong, is not as fraught as HF.

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

Right, Tom Sawyer is a fun all-ages adventure story, and then people kept bugging Twain to do a sequel and he's like "OK, fuck it, you know what I'm gonna go Darker and Grittier".

(He did so some stuff like Tom Sawyer, Detective later on, maybe vs. one of his bad business adventures)
Continuing the threadcreep, re novelists we'd like to see more of:
Before I got off the Anne Tyler bus somewhere in The Accidental Tourist, gave her points for giving the Tourist an ideal longread travelling companion, which could even or especially be read satisfyingly at random: the massive novel Miss Mackintosh, My Darling, by Marguerite Young---wiki sez:

As she worked on The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler cured spells of writer's block by reading pages from Miss MacIntosh at random. "Whatever page I turned to, it seemed, a glorious wealth of words swooped out at me."[12] Tyler made Young's novel a traveling companion for her main character Macon Leary. A hardcover edition of the book was used as a prop in William Hurt's suitcase in the film adaptation.

In her zeal to demonstrate that nothing lives except in the imagination, Miss Young, with superb virtuosity, may have written a novel that in the profoundest sense does not exist.

— Melvin Maddocks, Christian Science Monitor, 9/16/1965

Isn’t Dalkey Archive republishing that?

According to Amazon the Dalkey Archive reissue "will be released on June 6, 2023."

Yes. But this fact was already mentioned on this borad at least once recently.

I saw your question mark and jumped to a conclusion.

Not sure why I put the question mark or worded it that way. Maybe because I wasn’t sure whether it had come out or not. Believe it’s one of those new Dalkey Archive Essentials.

As far Anne Tyler, I remember really liking Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant at the time and also reading a few others but then felt a sense of saturation or diminishing returns or paradigm shift in the Zeitgeist or what have you and so stopped reading.

Dinnerseemed like a creative peak, then Accidental got too cuet---but I loved A Slipping Down Life, which seemed to incl. a parody of early Michael Stipe lyrics (boondocks zen sequitur indie rock), but then I realized it was published in 1970---also enjoyed Searching For Caleb(1975). Some of the other early 70s novels looked good, maybe should get back to those.

I haven't rereading but remember Breathing Lessons being great, and Morgan's Passing pretty good

I really dug the family dynamics aspect way back when, but feel like there is an intentional artless to the writing that I don’t know if I could stand anymore at this remove.

Morgan's Passing is yet another relatively early novel I remember being favorably mentioned. But maybe she's just written too many for her approach, the reader's pattern recognition acceptance level, something:

If Morning Ever Comes (1964)
The Tin Can Tree (1965)
A Slipping-Down Life (1970)
The Clock Winder (1972)
Celestial Navigation (1974)
Searching for Caleb (1975)
Earthly Possessions (1977)
Morgan's Passing (1980)
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982)
The Accidental Tourist (1985)
Breathing Lessons (1988)
Saint Maybe (1991)
Ladder of Years (1995)
A Patchwork Planet (1998)
Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
The Amateur Marriage (2004)
Digging to America (2006)
Noah's Compass (2009)
The Beginner's Goodbye (2012)
A Spool of Blue Thread (2015)
Vinegar Girl (2016)[47]
Clock Dance (2018)
Redhead by the Side of the Road (2020)
French Braid (2022)

That seems like hella fan service.

Reviews of earlier work, as quoted on her wiki, are grrrreat! Although later:

Reviewing The Patchwork Planet, Kakutani states: "Ms. Tyler's earlier characters tended to be situated within a thick matrix of finely nuanced familial relationships that helped define both their dreams and their limitations; the people in this novel, in contrast, seem much more like lone wolves, pulled this way and that by the author's puppet strings ... Ms. Tyler's famous ability to limn the daily minutiae of life also feels weary and formulaic this time around ... As for the little details Ms. Tyler sprinkles over her story ... they, too, have a paint-by-numbers touch. They add up to a patchwork novel that feels hokey, mechanical ... and yes, too cute.[46]

Having recently watched both The Friends of Eddie Coyle and Killing Them Softly, I wonder if anyone is reading George V. Higgins (other than to mine him for dialogue-heavy screenplays)?

I tried Eddie Coyle once, based on a friend’s recommendation, but couldn’t really get into it.

But really came to post
Mordecai Richler

Also, I popped in a modern art museum today and one of the installments featured a plexiglass box full of James Michener paperbacks.

was going to give george v higgins a reread actually. my recollection of impostors, outlaws, and the kennedy novels is that they are exceptionally well written, not just the dialogue, which is about as good as dialogue gets (spare, witty, sharp, advances matters without being information delivery), but the depiction of material culture, legal and financial matters, and dense, psychologically astute plots.

he rated v highly for me when i read him in my late teens.

Co-sign on that, Fizzles. GVH's non-fiction book on writing also v good.

Even at the time, Higgins used to complain about being pigeonholed as a crime writer AND about his relative lack of commercial success compared to ppl like Grisham or Scott Turow. But some of his early novels, in particular, are as hardboiled as they come while approaching a level of abstraction that doesn't scream bestsellerdom to me.

Legal textbooks were always a horror to be avoided when I worked in a secondhand bookshop, because they date so rapidly. I wonder if the same is true for legal thrillers.

Maybe think of them as historicals? Thanks guys, will check him

I think the Marguerite Young books I might start with are Harp Song For A Radical and Inviting The Muses:

Young's next project was to be a biography of Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley,[4][5][7] the creator of Little Orphant Annie. Her experiences in joining the protests against the Vietnam War made her turn her focus to Riley's friendship with Eugene V. Debs.[3] The digression was to occupy the rest of her life, becoming an ambitious biography of Debs, the union organizer who evolved into the first Socialist candidate for President of the United States (1904, 1908, 1912, 1920). She projected a three-volume epic history of the people, through Debs's battles for workers rights and the development of the Locomotive Firemen's workers union.[1] Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs remained unfinished at the time of her death.[5]

Part I, “Prelude in a Golden Key,” portrays Swiss agnostic Wilhelm Weitling’s cross-country tour of the pioneer utopian communities built during the settlement of the western United States. He visits the Mormon communities in Nauvoo, Missouri and Salt Lake City, Utah; the Shakers; the Amish communities in Pennsylvania; the Oneida community; the Icarians; the Rappites, and many other settlements in the wilderness. Through this perspective Young establishes that this nation was founded and settled on the principles of communal ownership and mutual assistance. In Part II of Harp Song for a Radical, Young establishes that Eugene Debs was the catalyst through which these principles became the basic tenets of the labor movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

During Marguerite Young's final illness, her unfinished manuscript was compiled by Marilyn Hamilton and Suzanne Oboler and was then submitted to her publisher. After her death, the manuscript was edited by Charles Ruas to include Young's survey of utopian communities as well as her portraits of major historical figures encountered by Debs in his struggles as a labor organizer: the portraits of Mary Todd Lincoln, James Whitcomb Riley, Joe Hill, Sojourner Truth, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith and Susan B. Anthony. This edited version of Harp Song for a Radical was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1999.

Also in her last illness, Marguerite Young returned to writing poetry. Inviting the Muses, a collection of her stories, essays, and reviews, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1994.

Mickey Spillane used to be the king of crime fiction. According his wikipedia article "more than 225 million copies of his books have sold internationally", but I don't see many of them on the shelves in bookshops. Are many of his titles still in print and do crime fiction readers still read him?