Novelists No One Reads Anymore

Gore Vidal’s whole American History series is pretty great and catty.

I read several of GV's novels and all of Wolfe's in high school, but have long since forgotten virtually everything (may not be their fault: the drug years appeared soon after). My ruthlessly pruning local library still has those ancient volumes of xpost Look Homeward, Angel and You Can't Go Home Again, so somebody must have read them fairly recently. Will give him and Vidal and Powell more chances. (Thanks for the Powell recs, hadn't heard of those titles.)

In his collection Hugging the Shore, Updike says of xpost DM Thomas,

...he was busy lecturing, translating, and writing poetry before becoming a novelist. It is a happy move: he writes with a poet's care, an academic's knowledgeability, and the originality of a thorough unprofessional. The popular success of The White Hotel could not have been aimed at.

astonishing novel...an elegantly experimental yet quite warm work whose unhyped best-seller status during much of 1981 represented an authentic triumph pf reader discrimination and word of mouth

...there is nothing like the propulsive telescopic action of The White Hotel, where the epistolary prologue yields to the heroine's erotic poem, the poem to its prose retelling, the retelling to Freud's psychoanalysis of the young lady, the analysis to her later history, her history to the historical horror of Babi Yar, and Babi Yar to a miraculous Palestine---at every shift new perspectives opening thrillingly and a superb suspense maintained.

I didn't remember any of that specifically, from the early 80s---to the library now!

When I was a teenager I was sent to a summer school for gifted mutants and D M Thomas was one of the guest speakers. He read an extract from The White Hotel, making a point of stopping just before he got to a rude bit. This really got the audience on his side!

He also had some short stories in the later incarnations of Moorcock and Bailey's New Worlds.

DM Thomas’ poetry is great, any critic of it can kiss my grits

Oh, Updike said it, no wonder.

Heh.

Someone on my twitter feed mentioned Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. I'd never even heard of it so I'm wondering if it fits in this thread.

Not really.

He is extremely well-known, read and talked about all the time, especially on but not restricted to this board, that book in particular.

James Redd OTM !

Yeah, that’s a bit like asking ILM if we’ve heard if Insane Clown Posse.

Hell, I did a reading with Chip just last March! Delightful person.

Dhalgren also Delany's best-selling novel by some distance.

Wondering now whether anagram was trolling.

No I wasn't, I never troll. I was genuinely wondering if he was widely read these days, since I'd never heard of him. But I don't read book threads much and I never read SF, so there we are.

Oh okay, thanks for clarifying.

has anyone ever read Johan Bojer? norwegian novelist, nominated for 5 nobel prizes in literature, never mentioned on ilx. i'm intrigued by his Last of the Vikings and The Emigrants, was curious if anyone knows much about his work

Never read him, I know The Emigrants got turned into a highly regarded film with Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann.

reading a book published in the mid-sixties in the corgi "modern reading" series with a bunch of otherwise mostly big name authors: a novel about a forgotten novelist by the forgotten novelist thomas hinde. never heard him referenced or mentioned in any form before, but he seems to have put out quite a few.

I've a couple of the books in that Corgi series and have been keeping an eye out for others - I've never heard of the Hinde one. How is it?

The internet is really bad at having reliable lists of series like that one (cases in point: how hard it was for us to have a decent go at all the books in the Harvill Leopard series; the comprehensive list of the Penguin Modern European Poets is similarly down to one mildly obsessive internet person). I wish I could find full lists of the Corgi Modern Reading Series and Quartet Encounters.

A reference librarian or someone else handy with WorldCat could probably generate lists of the titles in those series.

Maybe - I’ll have an ask around and find out. It certainly wasn’t possible with the numbered Harvills: it’s easy enough to get lists of everything from a particular publisher in a period of time but the data around particular editions / formats / series can be spottier I think.

Dhalgren is one of my three most beloved novels of all time.

xposts: it's written from the pov of a glib & cynical london journalist in search of his literary quarry, very much about 60s brashness running up against pre-war restraint. not a lost masterpiece or anything, but i'm quite enjoying it.

the only other in that corgi series i have is queneau's zazie. what i can see online of some of the others they have quite an appealing design style.

WorldCat is incredible, I use it often but mostly for rudimentary purposes

also re quartet encounters, i came across this awhile ago when trying to recall the author/title of a book i'd seen once and then couldn't remember the details of except it was from that series... not sure how exhaustive that list is though.

Wow thanks - there are things on there I've never seen or heard of. It's not exhaustive - can't see my old favourite "The Demons" by Heimito von Doderer on there, for example, but it's' a lot better than nothing.

Yeah there is about 2/3 I can think of that are missing.

Agreed re: the inconsistency of bibliographic info on the interweb.

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database has a broad remit and can sometimes be good for genre-adjacent writers - certainly puts literary fiction equivs to shame. Thomas Hinde has an entry:

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1615330

There's a critical anthology called The Salon.com reader's guide to contemporary authors, published in 2000. "Contemporary" in this case means "first published after WWII", although they specifically omitted the Beat writers on the basis that "they've been over-discussed" and everyone had their fill of them now.
Obviously the Beat writers stay in public memory as names and cultural figures, but what of their writing? Was this dismissal common in literary circles at the turn of the millennium? Has attention swung back towards these writers in the years since, or are they locked in the past? My guess is that Burroughs is probably more read than anything except maybe "Howl" these days.

I think Kerouac still gets checked out by readers as a "big name" and captures a smallish but continuing readership in that way. I think the Beat poets have had a bit better luck at finding readers than the novelists who aren't Kerouac. But this is a novelists-no-one-reads thread so poets are just tag-alongs here.

There were two Kerouac movies about 10 years ago. He's probably still being read, but since we're not in high school it's hard to know.

I'm surprised to see that Kerouac has four Library of America volumes.

Re: the Beats, Kerouac and Burroughs are still widely read among the novelists.

I wrote a big term paper about Wild Boys back in 2009. That’s his best afaic, and the most pornographic.

He was very interested in young men ejaculating while being hanged. Not judging.

He was! Also the power of gay sex to overthrow the state.

Which, frankly, I am totally here for.

xxxp i agree abt wild boys. it’s a great summation of the cut up trilogy + naked lunch, while shifting from the early single focus on hard boiled fiction to the “now we’re pirates / now we’re cowboys / now it’s sword and sandal” thing of the cities of the red night trilogy

idk how to describe the arc i see , except maybe trying on a succession of “mens adventure” styles as a formal device, whereas the early stuff is tied to hardboiled crime conventions and the middle is based in cut ups. wild boys is the one stop shop, the one single book of his that never gets stale or overdoes it in any part

i also think cities of the red night trilogy is really great, i recently got the boy scout manual he wrote but sadly haven’t even opened it. he has a million minor works to track down

i guess i think of wild boys as the spot where he jettisons the formal bs and the confessional junky stuff and really gets down to it, and then the cities of the red night is an expansion on that (pirates, cowboys and indians, sword and sandal being popular topics for early 20c runaway wild boy imaginations)

yeah, i would agree. of course the themes remain, but Wild Boys feels more apace with a fantasy novel about a war of feral twinks against polite society than the sad junky elicit desire exoticism of the early works.

he was, of course, an execrable person, but Wild Boys really is a treasure.

yeah for me i sort of got into the beats via burroughs. like i wanted to hang out with this weird poltergeist ii looking dude from ministry's "just one fix" and learn his weird negative philosophies. it wasn't like "now i want to read the one who hooked kerouac up with pills like a creepy older cousin with a fake ID, and survived hard drugs by turning into a scarecrow"

actually that makes it sound a lot cooler than it is, esp when you get into actual biography. i also appreciate that he moves away from the misogyny during that period, although i guess if you look at papers, interviews, etc he never quite hangs up it up entirely, even the worst stuff

yeah i found out enough to know i was fine with liking one of his books a lot, nothing more.

I think the Beat poets have had a bit better luck at finding readers than the novelists who aren't Kerouac.

Those are the only Beat-associated novelists beyond the Big Two that I can even think of (although later, when I read Tropic of Cancer, I thought the Beats might be influenced by Miller, who hasn't been mentioned yet on this thread, has he?)

i remember a burroughs interview where he specifically denies any miller influence, on him anyway.

ferlinghetti wrote at least one novel which i don't think i ever finished. lew welch wrote an unfinished novel which i liked. haven't read any of these peeps since my teens.

will always have a soft spot for miller for pointing me in the direction of so many other better writers.

Miller isn’t read much by young people because shocking sexism and graphic sex scenes aren’t too welcome.

Ginsberg’s aura has gone down a lot since his death and people became aware of two things: firstly, he was a NAMBLA supporter (yuk), and secondly, other than about ten poems, most of his work is abysmal

I picked up a copy of *The Colossus of Maroussi* recently. I think I'll leave Miller to memory but if I was to re-read him, this is where I'd go.

i don't find Miller especially graphic but his misogyny is very hard to get past. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare was the last book of his i still felt affection for but that's probably 20+ years ago

i've read a couple of Clellon Holmes's books, Nelson Algren feels like a proto-Beat in that mould, i think these are not "nobody reads" authors but v limited interest nowadays?