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That’s the old standby argument, and it may be right. I can’t really read John Barth or George Saunders the way I can read Richard Russo or Lionel Shriver or Ku
by mcnamaratw 1y ago
That’s the old standby argument, and it may be right. I can’t really read John Barth or George Saunders the way I can read Richard Russo or Lionel Shriver or Kurt Vonnegut or Michael Chabon or Barbara Kingsolver. For me the experimental writers are very unpleasant to actually read. David Foster Wallace is just inside that frontier for me, and I can enjoy IJ. Bernard Malamud was pretty dark but I could hang in. But Paul Auster … I love what nonfiction writing I’ve seen, but the New York trilogy is so dark and Spartan it makes Joy Division look like disco.
Nitpick: I finally gave up on Pynchon, but is he really postmodern??
- xhkkffbf 1y agoThe unpleasantness is definitely a problem. It's like the cool writers want to prove they are making something challenging by stripping away all of the sugarcoating that we normally love in narrative (and food!). I realize that the kind of pat endings that are so common in broadly popular narratives are a bit dull and predictable, but they're better than watching the protagonist go through the realities of life. We all have to suffer the worst parts of life each day. No need to do it at night too.
- voidhorse 1y agoRight. It's just like music. Some people can appreciate noise music, some people view it as just that: abrasive noise. It's a matter of taste. For some, the unpleasantness is of aesthetic interest and they have an aesthetic appreciation for it.
- mcnamaratw 1y agoGreat example. It is absolutely a matter of taste. Sadly noise music doesn’t support a lot of full-time jobs compared to writing songs more or less the way the Beatles did. Which was all new and stuff, but not completely foreign to what Stephen Foster did. We can try to reinvent writing, or we can focus on writing. But one may come at the expense of the other.
- tptacek 1y agoThe time frame for Pynchon fits and, of course, so does the style. He's postmodern.
- thinkingtoilet 1y agoI'm in a sci-fi book club with friends and we decided to read one modern literary fiction book and while I am enjoying it, the prose is beautiful and the deep dive into the characters is interesting, it's literally exhausting to read.
- syndacks 1y agoI also gave up on Pynchon. You should check out A Brief History of Seven Killings, postmodern done right if you ask me.