A novel is not BuzzFeed or NPR or Instagram or even Hollywood.
July 7, 2021 6:16 AM   Subscribe

 
Lydia Davis advised writers to not read so much contemporary fiction. "You are already of your time," she said. And yet we want to keep contemporary writers alive and fed, which means buying and reading and talking about their books.

The thing that stuck out at me the most in this piece was Julian Lucas pointing out how much modern fiction "hinge[s] on the “missed connections." Looking back over the new releases I've read in the last few years, it's hard to find some that don't have the characters orbiting each other like planets, never touching. Never coming to ground. Maybe the work of Ronan Hession. Jenny Hval, whose books could not be more different from Hession's. Olga Tokarczuk. Mieko Kawakami.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:51 AM on July 7, 2021


Thank you for the Archive.org link, simmering octagon.
posted by doctornemo at 7:12 AM on July 7, 2021


Thanks for this, it's more interesting than I thought it would be. I get the impulse but the onus isn't on the writer, it's the reader. Both should do what they want, sometimes it will connect. If you aren't able to find the kind of books you want to read, well, "be the change you want to see" and all that. And please, readers, graze. There are too many books in the world to not stop reading books you're not enjoying as soon as you realize you're not enjoying them.

And, QFT: Novels like American Psycho and Lolita did not poison culture. Murderous corporations and exploitive industries did. We need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. How else will we understand ourselves? (Ottessa Moshfegh)
posted by chavenet at 7:27 AM on July 7, 2021 [11 favorites]


from Karan Mahajan's bit:

I’d love to see a white novelist honestly address the experience of being racist, of having racist thoughts and feelings. I’m not asking for a self-flagellating confession or a stunt self-cancellation—just a writer brave enough to admit, through his/her/their characters, that we all bear ugly feelings, many implanted in us by the society we grow up in, and that to provide a full picture of this society, a reckoning with these feelings is necessary.

Mark Twain comes to mind, though he's not exactly contemporary.
posted by philip-random at 12:10 PM on July 7, 2021


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