Novelists No One Reads Anymore

I have no quarrel with the notion that Moviegoer and Last Gentleman are the best of his novels.

For essays/belletres/nonfiction (stretching the term), Lost in the Cosmos is great and Message in the Bottle is pretty good.

Those four are probably all you need of Percy, but you definitely need him to have existed.

Yes. This is about my assessment as well. I am a pretty big fan of all of those. I liked a few bios of him I read too.

I guess his other claim to fame is kind of midwifing or being the doulos for A Confederacy of Dunces.

I'd never heard a "Jane ghost-wrote for Paul" accusation before, but a friend did describe to me at length one evening a scenario in which Paul was blamed for spiriting Jane away from her social circle, her descent into alcoholism, the drop-off in her literary output, and even complicity in her death. I re-read "Without Stopping" for any clues that this was the case, but if it was the case, Paul's autobiography didn't suggest it. I haven't read Jane's biography, but "Camp Cataract" is stronger than anything Paul wrote, imo

Bukowski widely reviled by most literary types, fwiw— people find his misogyny appalling, because it is!

Like, edgelord bros and pervy straights will always love him but anyone with sense knows the guy wrote maybe one book’s worth of food poems.

Mickey Rourke playing Charles Bukowski in Barfly was pretty much peak 80s bad bro masculinity.

John Irving

― Misirlou Sunset (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, October 2, 2022 12:51 AM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Was just thinking about him and wondered if he had been mentioned yet. I did my independent essay (let's not call it a thesis) for A-level English Literature on The World According To Garp, do not think I've a word of his since.

Nobody has mentioned E. L. Doctorow, is that because he's still widely-read?

Haven't read Bukowski since the 90s but think he had his moments.

Doctorow a good candidate, no idea who's reading him this days. In fact I tend to get him mixed up(!) with somebody who I believe was already mentioned, the author of The White Hotel, D.M. Thomas.

as far as the hipster-friendly writers go, Bukowski is the most enjoyable to me by far and seems like the one who is most likely to retain his cachet.

Going by what's available at my local Barnes and Noble, yes. Bukowski has more books on the shelves than Burroughs, Kerouac, Miller and Nin combined.

I started a book of his last night, but James Purdy was a real critical favorite back in the day, and despite the fact that many of his books were recently reprinted, I know very few people who have read any of them. Almost none of those who have have read anything beyond Malcolm or Eustace Chisholm.

I just read the New Yorker essay and was startled by how Purdy was considered part of the "hot center" of the literary scene in the early 1960s.

I never even heard of Purdy until I found a used copy of a 1960s black humor anthology a few years ago (not the Bruce Jay Friedman one, but a later one).

Oh, and although this is obviously drifting away from the thread topic, the rows of Dave Barry, P.J. O'Rourke, and Erma Bombeck etc. books in the humor section of the local used bookstore make me wonder if anyone still reads old humorists of the essay/non-fiction variety if they're not, say, SJ Perelman or someone of that stature.

Wait, that reminds me of one of the greats who is now out of print and barely read and fits the original, narrow parameters of this thread, Veronica Geng.

Except not a novelist. :(

John Edward Williams wrote four novels between 1948 and 1972. Stoner (1965) is his most famous and is really good, and Augustus (1972) won the National Book Award, but he definitely fits the description of a novelist who no one reads anymore

I’m not a fan of Bukowski’s misogyny but like many other awful people I find a lot of his work compelling.

You're probably not that awful, omar.

rows of Dave Barry, P.J. O'Rourke, and Erma Bombeck etc. books in the humor section of the local used bookstore make me wonder if anyone still reads old humorists of the essay/non-fiction variety if

I have a shelf that I call "cheeky bastards," reserved for mildly humorous essay/nonfiction. It does not contain Barry, O'Rourke, or Bombeck, but it does have:

Joe Queenan
Sarah Vowell
Bill Bryson
David Sedaris
Chuck Klosterman
Umberto Eco
James Thurber
Dorothy Parker

A few others I can't remember right now but you get the idea

(There is an adjacent shelf for non-cheeky creative nonfiction. It has Annie Dillard, John McPhee, George Saunders, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Sometimes the cheeky nonfiction blurs into the non-cheeky nonfiction; my categories are not perfect.)

John Edward Williams Has NYRB Classics reprints though, and has been popular around here at least for some time.

Also Stoner has 133,000 ratings, which is probably more than a lot current literary novelists

am dubious about 'popular around here' tbh

Ha. You haven’t been on ILB very long now, son, have you?

He’s so popular around here that he even has his own Loyal Opposition, of which I am proud to call myself a member.

I have only contributed recently. I would be happy to be pointed to some discussion about him. His name is comically common - John Edward Williams - and I haven't found it in a search

How are some of you so omniscient in every category and genre of culture, film, music and puzzles on ilx? It's unnerving

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

I've read Augustus. It's good.

Looks like academia is keeping George Meredith on life support.

Fletcher, ed., Meredith Now (good luck with that), 2017
Wilt, The Readable People of George Meredith, 2015

Nobody has mentioned E. L. Doctorow, is that because he's still widely-read?

I read Ragtime three years ago (I can't remember why), but he's definitely someone who's much lower-profile now than his reputation at one point would seem to have predicted.

John Williams belongs on a different thread entirely - novelists who are read more now than when they were alive. This article describes the remarkable posthumous success of Stoner:

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/international-book-news/article/56997-a-perfect-american-novel-strikes-gold-overseas.html

yeah stoner has sold decent amounts in the v mainstream airport bookshop in UK where I work for the last decade and a half at least.

Bukowski widely reviled by most literary types, fwiw— people find his misogyny appalling, because it is!

Biggest Bukowski admirer I know is a feminist woman who finds the insight into a misogynist mind of extreme value in a know your enemy sort of way. Which is not to say she reads him exclusively for that - she also rates him as a stylist and finds his depictions of childhood trauma moving.

but yeah 90% of Bukowski mentions I catch these days are from TikToks telling people to read YA instead

Augustus >>>>>>> Stoner

My local bookstore told me last year that they can't keep Stoner on the shelf; every time they order copies they're sold out in a few weeks. I don't have the numbers, but it might be a NYRB best-seller?

Please don’t take this the wrong way but I had you pegged as being in the pro-Stoner camp. Maybe I misremembered.

I do like it but prefer Augustus/

The only Stoner I care about is that one that played with Bob Dylan and Robert Gordon. #onethread

Bukowski widely reviled by most literary types, fwiw— people find his misogyny appalling, because it is!

Biggest Bukowski admirer I know is a feminist woman who finds the insight into a misogynist mind of extreme value in a know your enemy sort of way. Which is not to say she reads him exclusively for that - she also rates him as a stylist and finds his depictions of childhood trauma moving.

― Daniel_Rf, Friday, October 21, 2022 3:59 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Not to be overly insulting, but your friend is daft— I find the misogyny so appalling and the rest of the work so totally middling that I can't fathom how anyone with any sense would like him.

Like, one good poem "The Genius of the Crowd" and that's it— the rest is dreck, utter dreck

oh i think there are plenty of people with sense who like Bukowski, flaws and all. It isn't a black and white proposition. I of course am nonsensical.

I mean, I'm not the one who likes Bukowski— I try to not yuck on others' yums as much as I could on here, but Bukowski is a line for me. It's just not very good.

He's not my favorite, I think compared to some of the others mentioned I just like him a lot more. I do definitely think he probably has some attraction from a lot of extremely flawed types of men, let's put it mildly like that. His poetry doesn't do much of anything for me.

Not to be overly insulting, but your friend is daft

lol I reserve my drawing of lines for people who harm others or espouse bigoted ideologies, find the idea that one should do so in matters of literary taste pretty daft and not worth engaging with really.

It's been quite a while since I've read them, but I remember Post Office and Factotum being pretty good realist depictions of the world of mundane work, not without insight or humour.

Post Office was fine in the one read I gave it for those reasons.

Also I read one interview w/Knausgaard where the woman doing it talked about the insight she got into masculinity from his writing. It's a thing you can read other books for, literature included.

Don't remember reading Ragtime beyond the preview in the ever-handy litmag-as-mass-market paperback New American Review, which might be good for its own thread, though was v. informative, like the non-lit-aimed best sellers of Michener and others in same era,

do remember, all too well, that his The Book of Daniel mixed info and some eually apt imagined detail re lives and fates of the doomed Rosenbergs, with hot mess of their entirely fictional daughter, and hapless version of adoptive parents---why the first, when he had a very credible incl. truth-based sensationalist aspect with the Cold War hysteria x exploitation? Well, actual Rosenberg kids were both boys, and EL felt the need for a babe in there, apparently---and if the adoptives could cope, melodrama would run into a wall, not suiting his purposes either. The sons, who had already been raised as the Meeropol brothers, were not pleased, and their adoptive father was the hardy Bronx teacher who had already gotten in trouble for writing "Strange Fruit," not really a wilting suburban sweater dad with unread New Yorkers piling up (per book)
Re later ELD, Garry Wills did a really NYRB longread on either Billy Bathgate or Loon Lake, but I (don't know why I )didn't finish it, even though I liked Wills.

My wife went to college where Doctorow was teaching--he didn't let students from the Lit dept. into his classes because he hated theory.

(Don't think xpost Dorothy Parker wrote novels, did she? Was very impressed with some of her short stories, in I think The Portable Dorothy Parker
:one in the middle of very and evidently typical tense scene between mother and daughter, another wife and husband [just before his brief leave from WWII is up], and "Big Blonde," about house party of pent-up, day-drinking wives and girlfriends of goodfellas. Pretty tough stuff, vs. sometimes cringeworthy, ritualistically self-mocking intros to reviews [but once she got going with those, could be refreshingly down-to-earth blunt about limitations of review-objects, or her own taste-barriers, in some cases]. Verse kind of a more 3-D, hungover Ogden Nash? Not bad.)

In the spirit of being positive, then, I’ll recommend the work of Mike Amnasan, whom no one reads for any number of reasons, some if which probably have to do with the coterie he was in when he was first published. In any case, he’s a writer that gets at the philosophical and abject possibilities and negativities of masculinity in a way I find interesting.