Not having read many of the novels discussed, I'm interested in others' takes, too. In general I find the kind of character Elaine Blair describes incredibly tedious.
In the middle of the article, but taking a moment out to say wtF is Franzen on about with comparing sexual freedom to... the former East Germany?
Also interested, but also without much to say because the books discussed aren't my kind of thing. (Updike does leave me absolutely cold.)
I did read The Corrections and found the loser character referenced annoying: to summarize a reaction I can't defend because I read the book years ago and don't remember it in detail, I felt as if we were being told to empathize with the character because flawed and pathetic as he was, that's as good as people get: any realistically drawn man will be at least that much of an ass. And this struck me as simply untrue: the character was much more of a self-deluded ass than lots of real people I know.
Writing about pathetic, fucked up characters is one thing, but presenting them as an inescapable norm bores and annoys me.
omparing sexual freedom to... the former East Germany
It's a sausage-fest?
What 1 said. In fact, I generally despise the GMN style of novelist, and I largely despise the successors described in the article.
2: Comparison is about whether freedom is always a good thing. Some people do better in situations, where they don't have choices, and they don't have to compete.
(I'd like to apologize for the punctuation in the first sentence of the second paragraph of 3. Clearly, I am either not a literary novelist, or an avant-garde one with exciting ideas about the abuse of the colon.)
Further, when reading novels of that type, as per LB's 3, I don't really recognise the characters, either in myself or in my male friends. I don't know if that's a class thing, or a national thing, or if people I know are atypical, or if, rather, the novelists-of-loser-assholedom are writing about an atypical type themselves.
6: It's incredibly hamhanded. The specificity of his comparisons makes it confusing. First wives are like people who used to work in a Trabant factory?
I have shortly to go to class (woo) but this bit, from the section of the post on Wallace's Updike review, strikes me as oddly uncharitable: "In reality, of course, women have a variety of opinions, but for Wallace there exists a single under-forty female judgment on Updike--and, potentially, on other novelists as well."
Why not just say that Wallace is interested in this phenomenon, a certain kind of rejection of/reaction to Updike et al., and therefore focuses on it? It's not even clear from the bit quoted that Wallace is talking solely about female readers: "Most of the literary readers I know personally are under forty, and a fair number are female, and none of them are big admirers of the postwar GMNs". It would be strained to suggest that "none of them" refers to the "fair number" of "most of the literary readers" that are female, rather than the literary readers all together.
9: I suppose. People who thought they had a secure position that would last for their whole life who may have hated it and dreamed about freedom, but then find themselves liberated in a world in which they have no place. It probably sucks, but it doesn't seem particularly strange or original to me.
exciting ideas about the abuse of the colon
So to speak.
Neb would never misuse a colon so.
One thing that prompted my posting of the article: over the weekend, my GF and some of her artist friends were talking about a (straight, male) painter who does (apparently very well executed and interesting) female nudes, and not in an ironic or visibly self-deprecating way, and I was surprised to find myself finding this mildly shocking, and I don't think out of prudery. The guy himself (who I haven't met) apparently isn't skeevy per say but also pretty unabashedly a straight male dude; I had a kind of "but he can't do that without being a social pariah -- what will the women think?" internal response.
That is, that he'd be a pariah for making pornography disguised as art? Huh, I wouldn't have expected that reaction.
Your response is weird. Are you saying that you'd expect him to self-censor out of fear of the PC-police?
I would imagine that such a person would be disdained as a lecher.
10: I was struck by that, too. It seems to bend Wallace's prose artificially to make it support the essay's main theme.
No, not fear of the PC police exactly, just that you'd need to do that art in an irony-laden way to avoid coming across as a weirdo or a creep. My reaction could well be personally idiosyncratic and weird, but I dunno, if I invited you over to look at my paintings and it was all nude attractive women, wouldn't you have a bit of a whoa creepster reaction, even if the paintings were well done?
19: Nope. Can't think of anything terrible about liking attractive nude women absent blood splatters and yellow crime scene tape.
Yeah maybe. Not that they're creepy, but I'd roll my eyes that there couldn't ever be at least one painting of a male body (that is, if I were looking at the artist's entire stack of work, as opposed to those selected on a theme.)
Usually given that it's an artist, and most artists are liberal, I wouldn't think they were homophobic, but if they were cheesy in some way I might suspect they were homophobic about spending that much time studying the male body.
Having just read the article linked in the OP, I enjoyed it -- it's well written, lively, and appears to describe a phenomenon clearly enough to make it identifiable (I haven't read most of the authors mentioned).
What I'm not sure is what, if anything, she's asking for, other than hoping that whatever next generation of novelists comes to prominence will have a different set of limitations.
At the risk of violating the analogy ban, I think one of the things that's clear in pop music is that any genre of music is going to have it's limitations (and frequently obvious limitations) and that no piece of music can contain all possible musical virtues* and that's why it's good that there are many different genres active at any given time.
* Imagine me vaguely gesturing at Isaiah Berlin's concept of incompatible virtues.
*
19:Steve Hanks
ARC used to block links, and it has been ages since I hung out there, so this is a test.
I liked the stuff I discovered early, but as he got more and more obvious and erotic I found myself questioning his earlier stuff. And of course, the fun de siecle pre-pinup painters he reminded me of.
19: It's not that I don't follow what you're talking about at all, but I can't see it being a problem for someone doing serious art (and 'serious' isn't intended to require any particular level of skill, just someone who's interested in what they're doing as art rather than only because of the subject matter.) I can imagine someone painting nudes who would strike me as creepy, but I'd need to add some stuff making him creepy beyond just the painting (like, they're fantasy images of celebrities who don't appear nude IRL posed to replicate the 1978 Playboy centerfolds. Or something.)
19: I think it's probably fair to say that nudes that seemed purely sexualized might attract some distaste and/or be denigrated as porn. (Although even that is arguably currently on the wane as "pin-up" culture mainstreams.) The paintings being of nude attractive women, "irony-laden" or not, wouldn't be enough.
As with the Christmas thing, I think I am sympathetic to Halford's reaction here—can't you see, in response to learning this, thinking, "I didn't know you so much as could be taken seriously as an artist doing female nudes 'straight' these days"? Like finding out that someone was a non-kitschy painter of harbor scenes, of the kind often sold near harbors in resorty places.
26: Maybe there are two questions that can be separated here -- 1)could such an artist be take seriously by the art establishment? and 2)would people tend to think such an artist was a creep?
That link come through? That guy and those paintings are typical, and typical of the Art Renewal Center Project.
The millionaire who built the site was mainly pushing his collection of Drapers and Sargeant watercolors, and I guess it paid off.
just that you'd need to do that art in an irony-laden way to avoid coming across as a weirdo or a creep.
23:Yes, look at the paintings on the linked page. The point of the ARC project was in part to abandon irony and self-consciousness of modernism and after, and enjoy the sentimentality and direct pleasurable feelings of the pre-post-impressionists and pre-modern.
Which offends you more, the little kids in the wagon or the September Morn naked lady?
I was speculating that this was one of those things that makes LA so very different than Texas, along with being embarrassed to be openly Christian.
Like finding out that someone was a non-kitschy painter of harbor scenes, of the kind often sold near harbors in resorty places.
Well, the reason these things are sold near harbours in resorty places is that people, including the artist, make money out of doing so. I'm surprised the commercial aspect hasn't been addressed. For example, the stuff in Bob's link at 23 seems to me to be clearly created for a market, and the question of whether it's in good taste or has any artistic merit is entirely subordinate to that. Why paint hundreds of pictures of idealised naked white women? Because it helps me afford a bigger car.
and then
At one point I got very bothered by the outrageous perfection of the women in Hank's nudes, but the his kids are kinda perfect too.
But the time I spent at the ARC years ago made me question "why am i so bothered by this idealism, realism and sentimentality? Were all previous societies so sick, or is it ours?"
And putting it in the context of the 20th, I decided it was ours. This did not make me a conservative, but a Marxist.
30:Possible, but then go ask Felix Salmon where the really big fucking money is made in Art. Richter is probably approaching billionaire status.
14: since when has sexualized or even misogynistic art by men been a barrier to female fans? Plenty of female fans for the Rolling Stones, Eminem, etc. Not to mention that female nudes can be sexual but far from misogynistic.
"why am i so bothered by this idealism, realism and sentimentality? Were all previous societies so sick, or is it ours?"
It's funny, in another context I'd expect you to be arguing the opposite side of this one -- the problem with idealism, realism, and sentimentality is that (almost inevitably) they reproduce divisions between favored and unfavored groups in society.
I have a friend who was 8 when the Jessica McClure story happened and remembers thinking, "nobody would care this much if I had been stuck in a well because I was not cute and blond."
(That said, I clicked on the second link in 31 and it is well chosen --- off putting, but it's difficult to specify exactly what's off putting about it).
Well, I haven't seen the paintings (my awesome cultural criticism: let me show you it) but let's assume for purposes of discussion that the nudes are unabashedly sexualized but that the work is not pornographic -- that is, it's not designed for spanking purposes and doesn't just riff on porn tropes. Anyhow, I thought there was a connection there possibly between my response and the article's description of the need to ironize straight male sexuality or turn characters into nebbish buffoons to make it culturally palatable as serious culture. Obviously it's not a direct connection since it's not like there was a big tradition of nude painting by over the top straight males in the 1950s-1970s.
I don't read fiction, and never cared for the GMN's very much, but damn if just last night I didn't read a long article about Lena Dunham and watched some of her early shorts. Which probably relates to the original topic.
I think a big part of the change from the postwar GMNs is (as the article implies) the change in the economic status of the novel. The GMNs were celebrities with a status closer to a minor movie star than a novelist today.
The David Duchovny character on Californication is in a way the last GMN. He's a Hollywood idea of what it would be like to be a Great Author -- a more 'authentic' version of a movie star. BTW, that is an example of an unbelievably awful male character.
31 last. Probably right.
Is Hanks trying to make really big fucking money or a comfortable living? He probably knows he can't be Richter.
30: There's something to be said for the relatively unsophisticated market acting as a counterweight to the people who dictate what constitutes real artistic merit. An enormous amount of crap (occasionally literally feces) gets held up as serious art.
22: Does Berlin argue for the incompatibility specifically of virtues? I know about value pluralism, but I was wondering if it was specifically applied to character traits.
I know Owen Flannagan has argued that different virtues cluster around different personality types, so that it is basically impossible to have all of them at once. I've only skimmed Varieties of Moral Personality however, and I haven't been able to find a brief, straightforward statement of the view that I can use in class.
Does Berlin argue for the incompatibility specifically of virtues? I know about value pluralism, but I was wondering if it was specifically applied to character traits.
You are probably correct that I was misremembering (and was over-generalizing from what I remembered). I would be inclined to believe that virtues are also incommensurable, but I don't know that Berlin actually made that argument.
On the other hand this list of quotations contains some nice bon mots including
Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.
And (slightly related to the various discussions of the phrase "Overton Window")
Few new truths have ever won their way against the resistance of established ideas save by being overstated.
35: I really don't read enough modern literary fiction to have this conversation, but what you'd want is to look for counterexamples: male characters in modern literary fiction who aren't this type of defensively written nebbish. I agree that the article describes something: that characters like Franzen's are (oversimplifying wildly here) an apologetic attempt to write characters like Updike's while demonstrating recognition that they're on some level contemptible. But that doesn't mean that non-apologetic male characters are absent from literary fiction. They might be, I suppose: I don't really read enough of it to say.
You can explore around Hanks, page 3 is even more troubling. But he is a little unusual with his nudes.
Stephen Gjertson is more typical, if there is such a thing, but a little too photo realistic for my taste, note the softness and slight impressionism of Hank's work in comparison. Gjertson even alludes to Bouguereau
...
The Marxist thing has to do with being able to enjoy a sunset or waterfall, and maybe a photograph of a sunset or waterfall (see:film) but not a painting of a sunset or waterfall. I think this has to do with the relation to commodities in late Capitalism and capture by the Lacanian Symbolic. Makes my head spin, gotta go.
The incredibly bad paintings linked by Bob (Bob, I order you to go watch 3 Ozu films in a row to restore aesthetic sanity) don't really have much to do with the point I was trying to make, which was about self-consciously high art, not stuff that knows it's pure commercial product.
There is nothing wrong with being nebish!
Wow, those are some amazing watercolors. A nicely realized ideal. No weirder than many others, less pathological than Kincade or other repetitive commercial artists. Is Bill Martin suspect the same way?
There are a number of contemporary painters who work against this ideal-- Staurt Pearson Wright is pretty famous, I think, and still paints the homely and ignored along with celebrities. I came across Mark Powell recently, I like many of his drawings with a similar focus.
it's difficult to specify exactly what's off putting about it
There is indeed something off-putting about them, even though they're technically well done. And the thing that's really bad? The interior decoration.
44:Look, dude, currently in my wallpaper rotation are the complete works of George Tooker, Anna Chromy, and Richard Lindner.
I have preferences, but I deliberately forsook the comforts of taste.
I am populist, see me riot.
To the OP and 42. None of the characters in 2666 or AUsterlitz fit this role, IMO the best fiction since 2000. Contemporary fiction where the characters and narrator should be likeable usually seems pointless to me.
to 44, I think that the middle ground is pretty interesting. R Crumb, Rick Griffin, maybe Eric Fischl.
Back to the OP, I think the article (or, really, the attitude of the DFW generation as described in the article) is unfair to Updike. Rabbit certainly has an aggressive sexuality, but it's not like he doesn't get "called" on it or suffer consequences from it; those books aren't just some sort of glorification of the male id. Updike seem to avoid the specific kind of nice-guy bargaining described in the article.
Full disclosure: I like Updike, which I understand is pretty much like liking those paintings Bob linked to these days.
49.1: She is talking about U.S.-American male writers.
In Franzen's most recent novel, Freedom, neither of the male protagonists fits her thesis.
49: Great examples, and interesting that they're not from Anglophone literature. Isn't the article making a point specifically about American (or at least Anglophone) literary fiction? (Real question - I mostly skimmed it.)
I had a reaction to Updike that was a recognizable version of the reaction described in the linked article. Rabbit's not flawless and he suffers consequences, you're right -- I'd have to reread to recall what I found so offputting about the Rabbit books (I only read the first two).
I haven't read Freedom. My impression from hearing people talk about it is that it traffics in a lot of lame David Brookisms. Is that impression correct?
51, 53, If that's the scope, I'm usually not interested, personally, and should shut up. Russell Banks is OK, actually Jonathan Lethem also, who writes not-especially-likeable characters. Walter Moseley's early work, I guess, but now that's 20 years old.
Ok but what about the narrator of The Last Novel? Or (fumbles in thought) My Life in CIA?
I need to read more, and more recent, fiction :(
55: It's not entirely incorrect, but I would say it's glib and unfair. I didn't love Freedom, and I don't think it's a great novel, but I do think it deserves to be taken seriously.
54
Speaking for myself, it's that they feature a self-absorbed, unsympathetic protagonist. Yes, I'm sure it's hard to grow old and not be worshiped as much as you were in high school and not be able to bone random women anymore. But what is it that I'm supposed to like about Rabbit, again?
I also object to a kind of anti-Mary Sue element to Rabbit. It's obviously not that the author wishes he was Rabbit. But it seems like the author thinks he's Rabbit and deserves sympathy for it.
Right, but aren't the books conscious of his surface unlikeability and the relative banality of his condition and problems? And yet still make them moving.
59: Around the time it came out, Franzen also had that piece in the NYT about how we need to unplug and see the world listen to the birds and love our friends and bla bla bla. I wasn't particularly inclined to read Freedom to begin with, but that sure didn't make me more likely to pick it up.
For book club I have to read another fucking Paolo Coehlo disaster. We've had a string of really enjoyable books, but I fucking hate Paolo Coehlo.
Maybe that's it -- that to the extent you can say a book has a point, the point of the Rabbit books is "Look at this unlikeable man with banal problems: when you really look at him, you have no choice but to empathize with his suffering humanity." And I do have a choice -- Updike can throw all the not-inconsiderable skill he has at the problem, and I'm still not interested in or particularly sympathetic to Rabbit.
62
True. I think it's a highly personal thing. I can't stand people who troll for sympathy, and that's the biggest sense I get from Updike (through Rabbit). Since there's nothing else particularly likable about the character, it doesn't do much for me.
60. Austerlitz, much of Kafka, and Sterne as well. Bridget Jones' Diary which is a stylistic tour de force, is fantastic despite being a first person self-absorbed unlikeable diary.
The idea of bonding with the characters in a story works well for children's books, but insisting on it means skipping a lot of good writing. It certainly means that finding writing that really changes your perspective on something is very unlikely. I already know hat I think, and I have plenty of sympathetic middle-class friends. Why should I look for more of the same in a novel? I just don't get it.
I like likable characters. They're likable.
much of Kafka
Ha. That Josef K seems to be pretty much an asshole is one of the greatest things about The Trial. But as I think I've said before, god do I hate reading Kafka. Love having read it after,* don't enjoy it while I'm actually reading it.
*Because it's interesting to think about, not because I want to be the kind of person who has read Kafka.
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Tornadoes in Dallas! Hope bob's dogs are ok.
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I have a hard time with unlikeable central characters because my chain of thinking goes roughly - "This guy's a dick. And completely imaginary!" at which point I realize I can simply set the book aside and do something that doesn't involve imaginary dicks.
I realize I can simply set the book aside and do something that doesn't involve imaginary dicks.
There's nothing to add.
72: Well, that's more or less the same reason why people like escapist fluff -- that life is sad enough, you can at least get a happy escape by reading a happy book. But I have the opposite theory -- I read miserable books, so my real life will seem great in comparison.
I ran across another article on the movie Sleeping Beauty, apparently they are doing a sleep-in contest in London for the DVD release.
Nobody of course was aware it was based on a Kawabata (Nobel winner) novel that is 100 times worse than the movie.
Likeable characters? The whole fucking 20th century high-lit Japanese scene is based on I-novels with 1st person narrators who need to be killed and want to kill themselves because they are too useless and cowardly to even be interesting sociopaths and are usually auto-biographical.
I think they are mostly feminist art, in that the main message is that male subjectivity is terminally diseased. In your female subjectivity art, the male viewers can say about the jerks and geeks:"Well, that's not me, I'm not like that." That must be overcome.
What the fuck with these American kid writers, are they creating role-models? It is the men who need to be reached, they shouldn't give a shit about their female readers. I think they just, like all young men, like Mailer and Updike, just want to get laid.
I don't have any problem reading about unsympathetic characters -- they can be as interesting as anything else. But if my sense of the book is that the author is trying to make me love the unloveable, and the trick doesn't come off, I'm out.
From the link in 43 to Nosflow's ear (as new mouseover text: destruction of boundaries and standards, pointless emphasis on 'newness,' or pursuit of the bizarre and ugly as ends in themselves
I think they just, like all young men, like Mailer and Updike, just want to get laid.
That's part of it -- the other part is that women are the main consumers of books, so they need them to buy their books. Of course, the two things could go together.
"Coelho" is Portuguese for "rabbit," so it's just more Updikeism, obviously. I dare not read the OP article, because it is clearly full of triggers for me and I may as well stop at being interpellated as a female reader. (You know, small-i interpellated; I'm not a real Althusserian.) I do wish "literary fiction" by men were not so often about girly bullshit like relationships and families and consumer products, and were more about sea voyages, machines and corporate subterfuge and the wastes of modern history, but these fuckers nowadays lack all the ambition of Melville or Conrad, to say nothing of the talent.
Wow, I didn't realize I had such strong and utterly ridiculous feelings on the subject until I typed this out. Submitted for laffs! And recommendations!
For real pain, though, you must pay.
That Josef K seems to be pretty much an asshole is one of the greatest things about The Trial.
Absolutely.
49 I haven't read 2666, but the lead character in Savage Detectives seems to fit the OP pattern quite closely.
And yet you're here.
You all are a bitter, complex acquired taste, but eventually you get quite fond of it.
Counter-thesis to the linked article -- in The Broom of the System the primary mail protagonist, Rick Vigorous, is a pathetic loser and very unsuccessful in love, but he is unsympathetic and completely unlikeable (intentionally so, I would say).
Cormack McCarthy tries for large themes, so does Richard Powers, Andrei Pelevin, IMO none very succesfully. Coetzee is pretty interesting, but a different setting.
JG Ballard-- is he recent enough? Writes in English, well IMO, not much to like.
What about more recent writers than Vonnegut where the narrator is sympathetic but the characters and settings mostly aren't? Russell Banks is also like this, I think, as well as many short story writers.
Lorrie Moore is maybe worth discussing-- she manages compassion in contemporary realism without IMO being saccharine.
75: I have to take the "feminist" stuff back, at least provisionally. Like Osamu Dezsai was a feminist, having taken two women out in double suicides, third time a charm. But The Setting Sun is...complicated.
85: Oh, yeah. Arturo Belano. I have to try harder to remember the middle part of the book.
You all are a bitter, complex acquired taste, but eventually you get quite fond of it.
Then why is JRoth here?
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Like everybody is all excited, got twisters all over DFW. Sirens still aren't stopping after an hour.
Took dogs for a walk. C'mon F-4, I ain't scared of you!
Gunshy dog got two valiums and is still trying to escape the thunder through my lap.
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76: With some writers you get the feeling that they think like competitive divers -- that they get extra points for degree of difficulty. So that if they choose the most extremely unlikeable person ever, and make one reader feel a slight twinge of empathy, they should get as high a score as some other writer that gets millions of people to fall in love with a more sympathetic character.
I confess that I'm left cold by most contemporary "literary" fiction, for reasons I've not really analyzed. For serious fiction I generally stick to the 19th century and the first half of the 20th (although since I was a big Pynchon fanboy I revisit his stuff occasionally). Infinite Jest wasn't bad but I don't much care for DFW's short stories.
Most of my contemporary fiction reading is genre stuff.
89: He's a trendy sort, who is willing to keep trying something yucky because everyone else seems to like it.
What happens if a woman tries to write a story from the perspective of a horny, nebbishy, male loser? Has any woman tried it? Or is the interior life of horny, nebbishy, loser men something that every woman on earth is sick to death of?
women are the main consumers of books
I recall seeing numbers for fiction of around 65%,women IIRC, and for fiction excluding sci-fi (thus, all literary fiction) higher still, on the order of 70-75%. Basically all lit these days is in some ways chick lit.
52: I think the main male character in Freedom definitely fits the thesis, and Richard Katz doesn't -- part of the attraction between him and the main woman is what Blair might approve of.
Glad to see this end up here.
Lorrie Moore is maybe worth discussing-- she manages compassion in contemporary realism without IMO being saccharine.
Man, Lorrie Moore. I really like her writing, but so many of her characters seem so, I don't know, shabby. I find this to be more the case in Like Life than in Self-Help.
96.1: I don't think so. Walter Berglund isn't a horny narcissist.
94: The Adrian Mole Diaries perhaps?
No, but his flavor of self-abnegating liberalism feels of a piece with the reaction to the GMNs.
What happens if a woman tries to write a story from the perspective of a horny, nebbishy, male loser? Has any woman tried it?
What, you've never read "Ethan Frome"?
Also, this post is somehow connected to the Kickstarter campaign for a Leisure Suit Larry reboot, right?
94: my cousin did that. It was pretty good. I didn't really like the nebbishly loser that much better than I usually do, but I liked the book.
100: Ok, but it's a quite different kind of reaction.
What I especially have no appetite for these days is the New Yorker style slice of life story (still frequently appearing in the New Yorker, after all these years) about someone tiresomely but not excitingly loathsome, or if not, entirely surrounded by other people who are. Let's spend enough time with this person to see how callous he or she is, or how petty and nasty everyone else is, and... okay, cool, we're out. That's a wrap!
What, you've never read "Ethan Frome"?
Actually, pretty much everything I read is either philosophy or has pictures.
94: What happens if a woman tries to write a story from the perspective of a horny, nebbishy, male loser?
Not a neb, but I think Iris Murdoch set the bar pretty high with Under the Net (in fact the narrator could be a GMN creation).
Does Shipping News qualify?
So does Bellow get lumped in with Updike et al? He's a bit emo, but I never read him as narcissistic.
108: Yes. And you didn't think Herzog was narcissistic?
The canonical list of GMNs is Bellow, Roth, Mailer and Updike. I guess Updike is the token goy.
108 ??? More
Gaddis, Gass, Barth, Barthelme, Hawkes, Banks, Baldwin, Pynchon, Capote, Cheever...I am obviously going through the alphabet because I can't remember all I read in the 70s but these guys, and more, were a lot more important to me than the 109 crew.
And that's not to mention genre.
Oates. Sorry. Very sorry.
Vidal. Alex Theroux.
And you know, I still consider the names in 110 more valuable than the names in 109. Why are these kinds of conversations focused on those 4-5 jerks? Not that the others weren't also jerks.
Strawman strategies abound.
I actually read a lot of dark literature with relatively unsympathetic protagonists. It's just something about the GMNs that rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it's that they're not interestingly unsympathetic. Gosh, you mean there are some guys who really want to have sex more than they actually do and do stupid things to get some? Shocking! Or maybe, as I mentioned above, that it comes off as "feeel sorrry for meee"
Coover. And I haven't gotten outside America.
Sometimes I think, without paying any attention, if Franzen is all you got now. "We had ten Franzens"
But it was pretty good times, in the male-jerk-art-novel mode, and maybe, like the music, it's all gone dormant.
And maybe none of them were worth a damn and will all be forgotten, they just created a flash culture to swim through.
More women now? More noticed? I wouldn't say a word about male writers if I was now the guy I was in 78. Ignore them to oblivion.
OTOH, does Jeanne Dielman get made today?
I stood up and fucking cheered in my fucking bedroom at that movie a month ago.
Claire Denis is good, Breillat is ok. And both are a lot closer to my generation... actually they are my generation.
I am not so impressed with Lena Dunham. Is this your young feminist star? Ooof.
And get offamylawn.
I'd like to check out my books now, sir.
NOVELISTS JUST MAKE THINGS UP. THEY MAKE IT UP.
I LIVE IN REALITY, YOU SHOULD TRY IT TOO.
I reckon a guy doing female nudes is deffo setting off heaps of alarms, but I may be partly confusing the fact that I suspect I'd hate them as paintings for what I might feel about him.
why am i so bothered by this idealism, realism and sentimentality banal, mendacious, stereotypical Reader's Digest-illustration-level crap?
god do I hate reading Kafka.
Really? I feel that way about The Castle and The Trial, so much so that I never finished The Castle, but I love Amerika and the short stories. The Bucket Rider? So great.
Going back to the OP, I was surprised that no one picked up on the France/USA comparison in the article. Basically, Houellebecq takes the unappealing male protagonist and takes it up to 11 -- this isn't a nebbishy nice guy, it's a totally despairing loser who ends up in sex clubs and the like. The contrast is interesting.
Haven't yet caught up on the thread, but read both the article and the author's review essay on Houellebecq, and I'm very sympathetic to her argument. I'd add that it's not just young American novelists; I think the move described in the OP's quoted paragraph is also a bargain implicitly offered by many men, literary or not, in how they present themselves in the world more generally (not to mention internet personas!).
50: I like Updike too, we could start a secret society. I don't think his characters are contemptible either. But I don't love Updike, there's a weird...airlessness?...in his writing despite the fantastic prose.
but I love Amerika and the short stories.
You're right, Amerika is pretty different. The madcap Kafka!
I love Phillip Roth; love Augie March, like Herzog and hate Humboldt's Gift; like The Naked and the Dead a lot and love The Executioner's Song; and have never gotten into Updike at all.
Careful readers of my pseud may detect a kind of cryptographic key therein.
I haven't read the thread to speak of, but I'm finding the linked post rather annoying, to be honest.
the decade or two of post-college bachelorhood that has become standard among the educated middle class during which men (and women) continually risk romantic rejection and size themselves up in relation to their peers
Really not as standard as the article makes out to be.
Bellow, Roth, Mailer and Updike
God, what a line-up of Amises. Huge American Novelists really turn me off. Didn't Paul Theroux call the Rabbits "immoral and asinine"?
the fun de siecle
Just popping in to say: best typo ever.
129:Wasn't a typo.
Signed, Joycean who restrains himself on the Internets
