My wife is an avid reader. All types of fiction, including historical fiction. 2-3 novels a weeks is her normal. Not sure how much "Young Adult" gets on her list, since her fellow cloistered cat ladies are all in their 60s or 70s. Some are even dog ladies. My wife does this so I don't have to.
You’re describing me, two dogs and about 10,000 books of some very serious fiction and non-fiction. And I read Infinite Jest, Bukowski, Mailer, Pynchon, Bellow ... and Baudrillard and Foucault ... yeah, it was my job to know these works, and to know them well. Who is Lenny talking about? I’m not clear who these people are that he disdains.
Nope, I’ve never been on BookTok, and I don’t like Good Reads. There are novels that I’ve read that were so awful that I chastened myself for committing the time to them that I’ll never get back. And, I am weary of what some young writers are producing -- too self-referential, barely disguised attempts at serving the gods of movie rights, and, sorry to say, victim writing.
I’ve known several very smart people who felt the same as you do. The novel is a bit precious at times, but I enjoyed it as a refreshing narrative experiment. Footnotes are an academic thing, and he may have been poking fun at academics with them, I’m not sure. Some folks can read without bothering with either footnotes or endnotes. I’m OCD enough to read every word. I’ve a PhD in literature, so it came with the training. BTW: With all that training, I still enjoy the pleasures of reading and struggle with some works. And I agree almost wholeheartedly with Freddie.
I am a 53 year old woman who read Infinite Jest when I was 23 and it was recommended by another woman who seemed to have good taste. It was an unforgettable reading experience and so when I read AO Scott describe DFW as the voice in your own head I felt my experience captured precisely. It is a beautiful and humane and brilliant book by a once in a generation talent. Who is in his league? I would say Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison and that’s it for American authors in my view.
"I don’t really agree, but I also don’t have it in me to defend a core artistic principle in a culture that’s so inimical to my values" #relatablecontent
'Oblivion' (in which 'Good Old Neon' is collected) is a largely a strong collection. Wallace definitely produced some striking essays and short stories that have stayed with me. He's long dead so none of my money is getting sent his way and some of his ideas (and ways of expressing them) were/are valuable.
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, short stories from 1999, was something I found quite striking back then. His experiments with form. Appreciated what he was trying to do, which is not the same as *loving* the stories (many quite dark), but that's unreasonable to expect. From a book. Not even in my vocabulary so to speak, when it comes to reading. But young people seem to expect it? Uplifting tales from reputationally impeccable people. No white guys please. Haven't they done enough damage??
I've definitely noticed (from undergrads and secondary school students I've taught) a desire for, as you say, "uplifting tales from reputationally impeccable people". Rite Gud podcast did quite a satisfying critique of this tendency in indie sci-fi which they termed 'Squeecore':
'Tonally, squeecore tends to be very uplifting and upbeat; and it’s didactic. And there’s almost a weird, like, YA-ish, young-adult fiction tone to it, even when it’s supposed to be “for adults”.'
I was born in 1961, and agree I have no idea what this post is about. I tried to figure it out. But I don't Tik Tok and have never heard of a Lit Bro. Maybe that's just as well.
That’s ok. Have another glass of Metamucil and we’ll have someone wake you up for dinner. But I feel ya, for sure. In fact, I’m a year older and have the same kind of problem. FdB just happens to have a nicely barbed prong in his toolbox and I enjoy his merciless skewering of today’s cultural conceits. The guy is very near the equal of Orwell, whose gratifying demolition of adversaries still had flavor even when I sampled them decades after the lot of them died. I undertook that odd diversion while grieving the loss of my album collection to a storage-area thief who probably used my precious Bukowski LP, a cur-out bin treasure that is now going for $25 on eBay, as a coaster or dart board. Suffered a lot of other devastating losses along with it, including such treasures as the very first Joe ‘King’ Carracci album on an obscure Tex-Mex label, the double 10” version of the second Police album, and the first Lene Lovich record, among numerous others. Years down the road I started to get a bit curious about David Foster Wallace but hadn’t.t quite taken the plunge by the time he killed himself up the freeway in Claremont, and wrote him off at that point. Anyway, if I have one message for you, FdB and the rest of humanity it is this: Rolling Stone hasn’t been hip since the early 70s. The truly hip read Creem instead.
Was it on the 10 or the 210? I went to college in Claremont. In the early 1980s, My last year, I lived in a house that bordered the vacant strip of land that would become the extended 210 freeway, which I subsequently drove on later in life. Maybe I have some sort of connection to this Wallace guy (is he always referred to by all three names)?
I haven't read a Rolling Stone magazine for many (many) decades. Not sure where that came from. I did notice them again when they caused a big stink some years ago by publishing an obviously faked gang rape story to smear some college frat. Was nice to see that blow up in their face.
I live in OC, a ways down the 57 fwy by CSU Fullerton. Yes, he reliably gets the whole-entire-name treatment. Like most I’ve read about him - including an interview or two - but not much of his actual writing. He ended up in Claremont because he was a hot property at the time. A sad story.
I referenced Rolling Stone b/c FdB did, and it still has a visible cultural profile but, like you, I haven’t read it in forever. They weren’t hip anymore by the time I became a music fan but it took awhile to figure that out. Now Jan Wenner is a cultural grandpa and as full of himself as ever.
I know that freeway well. I worked in Brea for a spell and also took some classes at Fullerton. Years later, which was still years ago, we took one of our kids on a Cal State campus tour of SoCal. Campus had grown beyond what I recognized.
Jaan actually sold the rag and it's now in the hands of moralistic Zoomers pursuing Johnny Depp and Marilyn Manson with decade-old allegations that keep falling apart. But by the time such stories get exposed as bogus, the damage has already been done.
I was born before you and had never heard of these trends before. I looked them up and found them less than appetizing to have for dinner. Speaking of which, I did enjoy most of "Consider the Lobster," by DFW, but may never try on the "Infinite Jest."
Most of the subject matter of this post was foreign to me as well, and I was born in '75.
I could be wrong, but I get the sense that one needed to be both a writer of some sort at one time, and at least warmly participated in the early social media phenomenon, in order to really 'get' this post.
I was happy his roulette wheel spin stopped on Bukowski though, I thoroughly enjoy his stuff.
I've often felt Bukowski's book titles > his books. 'Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit' remains one of my favourite titles for a poetry collection.
I also suspect I've never drunk hard enough to really click with Bukowski. I enjoyed reading him in my late teens around the same time I was listening to The Mountain Goats a lot.
Not only are men not reading, the vast majority of popular books are written by women also, whether literary fiction or more popular stuff. IME as a fiction writer in the starting out stage, most agents are women also. I really think some people believe that literary agents are all men called Wyndham Smythe whose office smells of whiskey and gun smoke or something, and men in linen suits are all having boozy literary lunches. People really can't imagine power in any realistic or modern way.
I also find it tiresome the extent to which people's gender identity is weaponised with fiction, like as if all books can be boiled down to whether they were written by a man or a woman. If someone's book collection was all ancient Roman history written by men would this really be worse than if it was the collected works of Ann Coulter or something?
Books are a conversation between the writer and the reader, it's always a two-person relationship.
So much of what I read (or watch) seems to be reacting to 1965, or 1995 at best. Look around at 2023; it won’t grant you as much easy heroism as saying things that everyone is saying now, as if you were saying them in 1965 or 1995. But there’s lots of interesting stuff going on!
Having said that, genuinely insightful commentary about the world as it exists in 2023 is likely to get you in trouble with your peers.
There hasn't been much original since the turn of the century; once remakes started dominating the box office, video games became a series of sequels, and op music became the same 5 producers, with different cultivated talent.
I think this is true only if you focus on mainstream commercial production; independent video games have been wildly experimental and ambitious for the entire 21st century (but particularly after the rise of digital distribution)
A year or so ago, someone (perhaps Freddie) wrote an essay on how literary agent and magazine publisher were the made-for jobs for the overindulged mean-girl wives of high-flyin' stock brokers.
LOL this describes the workforce of pretty much every underpaid NYC vanity job.
I used to work at one of NYCs larger universities and "Overindulged Mean-Girl Wives of Stockbrokers" - or the 20 somethings who aspired to this - describe literally every colleague I had, even the ones I liked LOL
I guess I am just so old and so out of what currently passes for culture that I have no idea who any of the people mentioned in this essay are. And I still have no idea what "litbro" is. On the other hand the essay is interestingly written . . . though I was left wondering in which "Bush administration" whoever David Foster Wallace was done himself in. Have I somehow missed someone so very important that there is an airport in Texas named after this fellow David Foster Wallace?
I respected Infinite Jest without liking it. (Reading it was like driving 3,000 miles on a coast-to-coast highway that has a speed bump every 20 yards.) The pain in the book was palpable, but I thought Wallace was trying to treat a sucking chest wound with a box of fireworks. Didn't work.
You know what I really liked? Valley of the Dolls.
I just want to say that I wrote my college application essay on DFW. Then, I got my freshman roommate into him at a liberal arts college and we read Infinite Jest together and we talked about it all the time.
It was me. I was the litbro. Maybe the litbro barely existed but it existed in at least some form, and that form was me and some people on my freshman hall. You’re welcome for the content.
I did it because I enjoyed his writing tremendously and because I thought it made me look cool. Later, I got into drinking straight bourbon for the same reason — a habit that’s persisted longer than reading DFW.
Fwiw, I have more mixed feelings about his writing now but think some of his ideas and work was great and I’d like to read IJ again some day. It didn’t get me laid but there’s still time and I certainly enjoy watching tennis more because of him. Brothers Karamazov I read last year and it is indeed a triumph.
Nah, I mean, we talked about it a lot and I definitely thought it made me cool and intellectual — he def had a certain cache for like a couple years after he died. And then people picked up on the cache and the backlash began. But I feel like you can do something because it’s cool and still genuinely like it, even if there’s some artifice there.
I was kind of like that, too, with Hemingway. I genuinely liked his work, but I also thought that liking it gave me a certain cachet and a certain kind of "literary" cred. (Not that anyone else was particularly impressed.)
Now....I still think he was a good author, but I just can't read him anymore. I read and re-read him way too much and simply got tired of his work.
"The horror, the horror" ... that's what I eventually took from Hemingway ... the first whisp was in Islands In The Stream, and later revelations of his involvement with Che Guevara sealed the deal. Ernest & Ernesto were monsters.
And to answer your question: no idea. I think people like to make fun of cliches, especially if they think their interests make them unique.
But it’s a big world and patterns are bound to emerge in how people pave their paths intellectually, especially when they’re young and the possibilities are more limited.
One of the saddest things to happen in the book world is that far too many brown and black writers have entered into the sad-ass self-referential performative state that Freddie references here. It was a white thing, really, and now it's a multicultural thing. Ugh.
These narratives are impossible to stamp out because they lend themselves to publishers making lots of money and allow them to continue to do so unimpeded. DFW is a convenient heel for them, but it's not even really about him. It's about making sure that the books, music, and movies which are currently being produced (and heavily invested in by said publishers) stay profitable. In order for this to continue it is necessary to believe these same media products are the best use of your time (instead of say, I don't know, getting a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets from the library for free).
And you know something? I could almost handle "poptimism" if they were self-aware or even acknowledged that the economics were what was driving the whole process. But the overwhelming majority of the time they do not, they act like these products of the culture industry are somehow intrinsically superior based on artistic merit, which they aren't and even if they were that has nothing whatsoever to do with why they are popular. At it's core its the same canard that the marketplace is a meritocracy and that the best things "naturally" rise to the top under this system.
The reason popular art is completely enthralled with "identity" is because this is the most effective means through which the culture industry can attract customers and create profits. It's a way to brand old things as new and sell the same intellectual property yet another time. I don't think it's controversial to say Marvel films have basically run the exact same playbook for 20 years, but if you slap a veneer of identity politics over it, suddenly it seems novel. Disney paid a lot of money for those intellectual properties and they are going to do whatever it takes to make that money back and then some.
Ha! Touche, I guess book publishers don't make much anymore, but most of what they do comes from YA fiction so it only makes sense that narratives which promote that as the best artistic product possible.
I wish we lived in a world where lit-bros actually existed. It would mean more men were reading fiction, and a more literate and empathetic populace that actually debates and argues about good and bad books on their merits-and not just their reputations-would be a nice world to live in.
if a dude was into violent anime fanfiction, he'd be a really shitty boyfriend ... thus an ex-boyfriend—unable to land another girlfriend—behold: your incel.
I'm about to enter a stage of my life when I will have far more time to read fiction than I have had for the last 30 years. I'm kind of excited about that. Like...it's an actual thought that has crossed my mind several times in the last 12 months. I read about three or four novels a year, but I miss the time, pre-children and job, when I would read two dozen books a year. On the chance someone else will appreciate the recommendation, the last two novels I read that I thought were truly masterpieces, works that I believe will be read 100 years from now, were: (i) A House for Mr. Biswas (V.S. Naipaul) and (ii)The Three Arched Bridge (Ismail Kadare).
1. "The answer, perhaps, lies somewhere in this recent piece from The New York Times Magazine, which argues that the artistic obsession with novelty and experimentation, the primary obsession of modernism and so something like the default goal of artists for more than a century, has recently run aground."
It is my theory that romanticism eventually gives way to snarky irony, once authenticity-at-all costs has nothing new to say, there arw no remaining taboos to break and the bourgeoisie have become shockproof. Irony itself also being a dead end, in the same way that most of us outgrow kittenish name-calling.
2. Why do humans let critics tell them what to like? If you want to like Robyn (whatever that is) and the critics wax rhapsodic over Interpol (not for me), so what?
3. If you are bored, go through old human fashion magazines and compare the way we imagine human fashions of, say, the 1950s with what people actually wore. You can play similar games with the popular music charts.
Thanks for posting this. I read a fair amount pretty regularly, and I have never heard of any of the the books and only John Grisham of the writers. For some reason, I don't feel the slightest interest in any of them either.
I read Big Little Lies back in 2018, but nothing else by Moriarty.
Kristin Hannah is one if the authors who has been on my list to check out for a while now. The plots of her books sound interesting to me.
I've heard of Colleen Hoover, but her books don't sound like my kind of thing.
I read Jenkins Reid's book Daisy Jones and the Six earlier this year. It was okay. It didn't leave me clamoring for another.
I read Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow in 2020. Pretty good. I might read another book of his one day.
Never heard of Audrey Blake.
John Grisham isn't really my style
I've heard of Schwab's book, although something about the "The [Adjective] [Noun] of [Woman's Name]" titles feel very overdone to me. (Another reason why Jenkins Reid's novel doesn't appeal much.)
Reading habits show us what different worlds we inhabit. Of course these don't show who buys books for themselves. Just what is obtained from library users. I forgot to add the link:
My wife is an avid reader. All types of fiction, including historical fiction. 2-3 novels a weeks is her normal. Not sure how much "Young Adult" gets on her list, since her fellow cloistered cat ladies are all in their 60s or 70s. Some are even dog ladies. My wife does this so I don't have to.
You’re describing me, two dogs and about 10,000 books of some very serious fiction and non-fiction. And I read Infinite Jest, Bukowski, Mailer, Pynchon, Bellow ... and Baudrillard and Foucault ... yeah, it was my job to know these works, and to know them well. Who is Lenny talking about? I’m not clear who these people are that he disdains.
Nope, I’ve never been on BookTok, and I don’t like Good Reads. There are novels that I’ve read that were so awful that I chastened myself for committing the time to them that I’ll never get back. And, I am weary of what some young writers are producing -- too self-referential, barely disguised attempts at serving the gods of movie rights, and, sorry to say, victim writing.
I read Infinite Jest and enjoyed it, why don’t you read it? Footnotes aren’t your thing?
I’ve known several very smart people who felt the same as you do. The novel is a bit precious at times, but I enjoyed it as a refreshing narrative experiment. Footnotes are an academic thing, and he may have been poking fun at academics with them, I’m not sure. Some folks can read without bothering with either footnotes or endnotes. I’m OCD enough to read every word. I’ve a PhD in literature, so it came with the training. BTW: With all that training, I still enjoy the pleasures of reading and struggle with some works. And I agree almost wholeheartedly with Freddie.
I am a 53 year old woman who read Infinite Jest when I was 23 and it was recommended by another woman who seemed to have good taste. It was an unforgettable reading experience and so when I read AO Scott describe DFW as the voice in your own head I felt my experience captured precisely. It is a beautiful and humane and brilliant book by a once in a generation talent. Who is in his league? I would say Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison and that’s it for American authors in my view.
"I don’t really agree, but I also don’t have it in me to defend a core artistic principle in a culture that’s so inimical to my values" #relatablecontent
For those of us who are new here...so, you liked Infinite Jest? Or didn't?
It's in the post. "I’ve always found it an admirable attempt that nonetheless fails at most of what it attempts, for a thousand pages. "
Joseph Campbell stuff. Who controls the popular mythology, controls the people. So, who controls is the important point of consideration.
Love this scene in the new Netflix series based on Edgar Allen Poe material: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIK-q6JoOeU
This entire post was incomprehensible to me, perhaps because I was born in 1962.
I will say that DFW's "Good Old Neon" is one of the best short stories I've ever read.
'Oblivion' (in which 'Good Old Neon' is collected) is a largely a strong collection. Wallace definitely produced some striking essays and short stories that have stayed with me. He's long dead so none of my money is getting sent his way and some of his ideas (and ways of expressing them) were/are valuable.
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, short stories from 1999, was something I found quite striking back then. His experiments with form. Appreciated what he was trying to do, which is not the same as *loving* the stories (many quite dark), but that's unreasonable to expect. From a book. Not even in my vocabulary so to speak, when it comes to reading. But young people seem to expect it? Uplifting tales from reputationally impeccable people. No white guys please. Haven't they done enough damage??
I've definitely noticed (from undergrads and secondary school students I've taught) a desire for, as you say, "uplifting tales from reputationally impeccable people". Rite Gud podcast did quite a satisfying critique of this tendency in indie sci-fi which they termed 'Squeecore':
https://kittysneezes.com/squeecore-transcript/
'Tonally, squeecore tends to be very uplifting and upbeat; and it’s didactic. And there’s almost a weird, like, YA-ish, young-adult fiction tone to it, even when it’s supposed to be “for adults”.'
I was born in 1961, and agree I have no idea what this post is about. I tried to figure it out. But I don't Tik Tok and have never heard of a Lit Bro. Maybe that's just as well.
That’s ok. Have another glass of Metamucil and we’ll have someone wake you up for dinner. But I feel ya, for sure. In fact, I’m a year older and have the same kind of problem. FdB just happens to have a nicely barbed prong in his toolbox and I enjoy his merciless skewering of today’s cultural conceits. The guy is very near the equal of Orwell, whose gratifying demolition of adversaries still had flavor even when I sampled them decades after the lot of them died. I undertook that odd diversion while grieving the loss of my album collection to a storage-area thief who probably used my precious Bukowski LP, a cur-out bin treasure that is now going for $25 on eBay, as a coaster or dart board. Suffered a lot of other devastating losses along with it, including such treasures as the very first Joe ‘King’ Carracci album on an obscure Tex-Mex label, the double 10” version of the second Police album, and the first Lene Lovich record, among numerous others. Years down the road I started to get a bit curious about David Foster Wallace but hadn’t.t quite taken the plunge by the time he killed himself up the freeway in Claremont, and wrote him off at that point. Anyway, if I have one message for you, FdB and the rest of humanity it is this: Rolling Stone hasn’t been hip since the early 70s. The truly hip read Creem instead.
Was it on the 10 or the 210? I went to college in Claremont. In the early 1980s, My last year, I lived in a house that bordered the vacant strip of land that would become the extended 210 freeway, which I subsequently drove on later in life. Maybe I have some sort of connection to this Wallace guy (is he always referred to by all three names)?
I haven't read a Rolling Stone magazine for many (many) decades. Not sure where that came from. I did notice them again when they caused a big stink some years ago by publishing an obviously faked gang rape story to smear some college frat. Was nice to see that blow up in their face.
Now they are running allegations against male rock stars from previous eras, charges that keep being exposed as bogus money shake-downs....
Woke signaling is the last refuge of scoundrels.
Yep. The aim is to inflict maximum damage on the target, so that by the time their charges fall apart, the damage has already been done.
I live in OC, a ways down the 57 fwy by CSU Fullerton. Yes, he reliably gets the whole-entire-name treatment. Like most I’ve read about him - including an interview or two - but not much of his actual writing. He ended up in Claremont because he was a hot property at the time. A sad story.
I referenced Rolling Stone b/c FdB did, and it still has a visible cultural profile but, like you, I haven’t read it in forever. They weren’t hip anymore by the time I became a music fan but it took awhile to figure that out. Now Jan Wenner is a cultural grandpa and as full of himself as ever.
I know that freeway well. I worked in Brea for a spell and also took some classes at Fullerton. Years later, which was still years ago, we took one of our kids on a Cal State campus tour of SoCal. Campus had grown beyond what I recognized.
Jaan actually sold the rag and it's now in the hands of moralistic Zoomers pursuing Johnny Depp and Marilyn Manson with decade-old allegations that keep falling apart. But by the time such stories get exposed as bogus, the damage has already been done.
I think it's sort of abt someone who disdained guys who didn't like Ulysses vs. people who did, only Wallace wasn't Beckett..
I was born before you and had never heard of these trends before. I looked them up and found them less than appetizing to have for dinner. Speaking of which, I did enjoy most of "Consider the Lobster," by DFW, but may never try on the "Infinite Jest."
Infinite Jest was not for me,
Most of the subject matter of this post was foreign to me as well, and I was born in '75.
I could be wrong, but I get the sense that one needed to be both a writer of some sort at one time, and at least warmly participated in the early social media phenomenon, in order to really 'get' this post.
I was happy his roulette wheel spin stopped on Bukowski though, I thoroughly enjoy his stuff.
Ham On Rye is a classic. Does that make me a "litbro?"
I've often felt Bukowski's book titles > his books. 'Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit' remains one of my favourite titles for a poetry collection.
I also suspect I've never drunk hard enough to really click with Bukowski. I enjoyed reading him in my late teens around the same time I was listening to The Mountain Goats a lot.
That's fascinating, because I read this post wondering what the fuck it was about and never once connected it to my age but I, too, was born in 1962.
Of course, so was David Foster Wallace!
Not only are men not reading, the vast majority of popular books are written by women also, whether literary fiction or more popular stuff. IME as a fiction writer in the starting out stage, most agents are women also. I really think some people believe that literary agents are all men called Wyndham Smythe whose office smells of whiskey and gun smoke or something, and men in linen suits are all having boozy literary lunches. People really can't imagine power in any realistic or modern way.
I also find it tiresome the extent to which people's gender identity is weaponised with fiction, like as if all books can be boiled down to whether they were written by a man or a woman. If someone's book collection was all ancient Roman history written by men would this really be worse than if it was the collected works of Ann Coulter or something?
Books are a conversation between the writer and the reader, it's always a two-person relationship.
So much of what I read (or watch) seems to be reacting to 1965, or 1995 at best. Look around at 2023; it won’t grant you as much easy heroism as saying things that everyone is saying now, as if you were saying them in 1965 or 1995. But there’s lots of interesting stuff going on!
Having said that, genuinely insightful commentary about the world as it exists in 2023 is likely to get you in trouble with your peers.
This was around 2010 — I think DFW excitement and backlash mostly took place in the 5 years after he died.
There hasn't been much original since the turn of the century; once remakes started dominating the box office, video games became a series of sequels, and op music became the same 5 producers, with different cultivated talent.
I think this is true only if you focus on mainstream commercial production; independent video games have been wildly experimental and ambitious for the entire 21st century (but particularly after the rise of digital distribution)
these days a lot of writers learn their craft writing fanfiction, and that community is predominantly women.
A year or so ago, someone (perhaps Freddie) wrote an essay on how literary agent and magazine publisher were the made-for jobs for the overindulged mean-girl wives of high-flyin' stock brokers.
LOL this describes the workforce of pretty much every underpaid NYC vanity job.
I used to work at one of NYCs larger universities and "Overindulged Mean-Girl Wives of Stockbrokers" - or the 20 somethings who aspired to this - describe literally every colleague I had, even the ones I liked LOL
What the fuck is 'IME as a fiction writer'? What does this mean?
'in my experience' - sorry
I guess I am just so old and so out of what currently passes for culture that I have no idea who any of the people mentioned in this essay are. And I still have no idea what "litbro" is. On the other hand the essay is interestingly written . . . though I was left wondering in which "Bush administration" whoever David Foster Wallace was done himself in. Have I somehow missed someone so very important that there is an airport in Texas named after this fellow David Foster Wallace?
I respected Infinite Jest without liking it. (Reading it was like driving 3,000 miles on a coast-to-coast highway that has a speed bump every 20 yards.) The pain in the book was palpable, but I thought Wallace was trying to treat a sucking chest wound with a box of fireworks. Didn't work.
You know what I really liked? Valley of the Dolls.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, litbros.
I much enjoyed your simile. Having read some other of DFW, I am impressed with how it felt like only every 20 yards, instead of feet.
No way could I get through a book that long if I hated it.
I just want to say that I wrote my college application essay on DFW. Then, I got my freshman roommate into him at a liberal arts college and we read Infinite Jest together and we talked about it all the time.
It was me. I was the litbro. Maybe the litbro barely existed but it existed in at least some form, and that form was me and some people on my freshman hall. You’re welcome for the content.
I did it because I enjoyed his writing tremendously and because I thought it made me look cool. Later, I got into drinking straight bourbon for the same reason — a habit that’s persisted longer than reading DFW.
Fwiw, I have more mixed feelings about his writing now but think some of his ideas and work was great and I’d like to read IJ again some day. It didn’t get me laid but there’s still time and I certainly enjoy watching tennis more because of him. Brothers Karamazov I read last year and it is indeed a triumph.
Hold on - you think just the act of liking that book makes you a litbro? If that's true, what even is the critique?
Nah, I mean, we talked about it a lot and I definitely thought it made me cool and intellectual — he def had a certain cache for like a couple years after he died. And then people picked up on the cache and the backlash began. But I feel like you can do something because it’s cool and still genuinely like it, even if there’s some artifice there.
I was kind of like that, too, with Hemingway. I genuinely liked his work, but I also thought that liking it gave me a certain cachet and a certain kind of "literary" cred. (Not that anyone else was particularly impressed.)
Now....I still think he was a good author, but I just can't read him anymore. I read and re-read him way too much and simply got tired of his work.
"Litbro" = white males who read books written by white male writers. As one of the latter once wrote, "The horror, the horror!"
"The horror, the horror" ... that's what I eventually took from Hemingway ... the first whisp was in Islands In The Stream, and later revelations of his involvement with Che Guevara sealed the deal. Ernest & Ernesto were monsters.
the audacity of enjoying reading books about things you relate to!
Yes, how dare they?
And to answer your question: no idea. I think people like to make fun of cliches, especially if they think their interests make them unique.
But it’s a big world and patterns are bound to emerge in how people pave their paths intellectually, especially when they’re young and the possibilities are more limited.
In my day, it was JD Salinger ... people killed for it.
You had to read Catcher in the Rye forwards and backwards, 20 miles in the snow.
One of the saddest things to happen in the book world is that far too many brown and black writers have entered into the sad-ass self-referential performative state that Freddie references here. It was a white thing, really, and now it's a multicultural thing. Ugh.
There’s no colour barrier on naval-gazing garbage any more, that’s for sure.
There never was, nor has there ever been.
You mean "multi-racial"? Because its sounds like the the exact same culture.
Oops. Yes, multiracial and now that I think about it, there's an assimilation going on. So it is multicultural, too
"As a (fill in the blank) person, I ......"
These narratives are impossible to stamp out because they lend themselves to publishers making lots of money and allow them to continue to do so unimpeded. DFW is a convenient heel for them, but it's not even really about him. It's about making sure that the books, music, and movies which are currently being produced (and heavily invested in by said publishers) stay profitable. In order for this to continue it is necessary to believe these same media products are the best use of your time (instead of say, I don't know, getting a copy of Shakespeare's sonnets from the library for free).
And you know something? I could almost handle "poptimism" if they were self-aware or even acknowledged that the economics were what was driving the whole process. But the overwhelming majority of the time they do not, they act like these products of the culture industry are somehow intrinsically superior based on artistic merit, which they aren't and even if they were that has nothing whatsoever to do with why they are popular. At it's core its the same canard that the marketplace is a meritocracy and that the best things "naturally" rise to the top under this system.
The reason popular art is completely enthralled with "identity" is because this is the most effective means through which the culture industry can attract customers and create profits. It's a way to brand old things as new and sell the same intellectual property yet another time. I don't think it's controversial to say Marvel films have basically run the exact same playbook for 20 years, but if you slap a veneer of identity politics over it, suddenly it seems novel. Disney paid a lot of money for those intellectual properties and they are going to do whatever it takes to make that money back and then some.
Publishers make lots of money?
They sell to libraries.
Ha! Touche, I guess book publishers don't make much anymore, but most of what they do comes from YA fiction so it only makes sense that narratives which promote that as the best artistic product possible.
so is this the deal? now the hip thing is YA fiction?
Over Covid I re read a lot of old books, mainly Russian and Shakespeare and then I couldn't come back to the present writers.
I think the only writers I've read whilst alive are Hemingway, Peter Benchley, Jean Auel, and Camille Paglia. All the others being dead white men.
Yeah, I stopped reading newly published novels about 5 years ago.
I'll read the latest Michael Chabon or Ann Pachett, but other than that it's classics for me, all the way.
I just have no interest in the latest poorly written Identity Angst Fiction.
Also: that insufferable headline.
I wish we lived in a world where lit-bros actually existed. It would mean more men were reading fiction, and a more literate and empathetic populace that actually debates and argues about good and bad books on their merits-and not just their reputations-would be a nice world to live in.
I've found lit-bros to be extremely insufferable ... find yourself an incel, you've probably got a lit-bro.
Incels don’t read novels, at least in my experience.
If they read a few books, maybe they could speak to women and sound intelligent, and then soon wouldn't be incels?
In the 80s, all the incels I knew read SciFi, swords & sorcery stuff.
Incels only read PUA manuals and violent anime fanfiction.
Interesting contradiction: how can litbros both be the manipulative shitty ex-boyfriend and an incel?
if a dude was into violent anime fanfiction, he'd be a really shitty boyfriend ... thus an ex-boyfriend—unable to land another girlfriend—behold: your incel.
My point is that incels AREN'T litbros.
My point is that LitBros can be incels too.
a) Litbros can be incels but the terms aren't interchangeable
b) The platonic incel isn't a litbro.
I'm about to enter a stage of my life when I will have far more time to read fiction than I have had for the last 30 years. I'm kind of excited about that. Like...it's an actual thought that has crossed my mind several times in the last 12 months. I read about three or four novels a year, but I miss the time, pre-children and job, when I would read two dozen books a year. On the chance someone else will appreciate the recommendation, the last two novels I read that I thought were truly masterpieces, works that I believe will be read 100 years from now, were: (i) A House for Mr. Biswas (V.S. Naipaul) and (ii)The Three Arched Bridge (Ismail Kadare).
Wait: Rolling Stone still exists? Why?
to sell full page color ads. The last time I read one there was a full color ad for M&Ms.
ahhh, that makes sense :)
Mainly to smear white male rock stars from previous eras with specious allegations of events alleged to have happened a decade or more ago....
Kind of surprised they weren't bankrupted by all the UVa lawsuits tbh
It's an anti-rock and roll mag now, there to enforce the social mores of neo-Puritan Zoomers.
1. "The answer, perhaps, lies somewhere in this recent piece from The New York Times Magazine, which argues that the artistic obsession with novelty and experimentation, the primary obsession of modernism and so something like the default goal of artists for more than a century, has recently run aground."
It is my theory that romanticism eventually gives way to snarky irony, once authenticity-at-all costs has nothing new to say, there arw no remaining taboos to break and the bourgeoisie have become shockproof. Irony itself also being a dead end, in the same way that most of us outgrow kittenish name-calling.
2. Why do humans let critics tell them what to like? If you want to like Robyn (whatever that is) and the critics wax rhapsodic over Interpol (not for me), so what?
3. If you are bored, go through old human fashion magazines and compare the way we imagine human fashions of, say, the 1950s with what people actually wore. You can play similar games with the popular music charts.
readers borrowed 555 million ebooks in 2022 from libraries.
Here are the top 10:
The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave (Simon & Schuster)
Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty (Henry Holt and Co.)
The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s Publishing Group)
Verity by Colleen Hoover (Grand Central Publishing)
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Washington Square Press)
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (Penguin Publishing Group)
It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover (Atria Books)
The Girl in His Shadow by Audrey Blake (Sourcebooks) *Big Library Read title
The Judge’s List by John Grisham (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group)
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by E. Schwab (Tor Publishing Group)
Thanks for posting this. I read a fair amount pretty regularly, and I have never heard of any of the the books and only John Grisham of the writers. For some reason, I don't feel the slightest interest in any of them either.
Same here except for Lincoln Highway.
Top 40 Billboard lists spring to mind. Unfamiliar with 90% of artists.
Same here.
https://company.overdrive.com/2022/12/22/2022s-most-popular-ebooks-and-audiobooks-from-public-libraries/
But also look at Amazon's best sellers for 2022: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/2022/books
Never heard of Laura Dave.
I read Big Little Lies back in 2018, but nothing else by Moriarty.
Kristin Hannah is one if the authors who has been on my list to check out for a while now. The plots of her books sound interesting to me.
I've heard of Colleen Hoover, but her books don't sound like my kind of thing.
I read Jenkins Reid's book Daisy Jones and the Six earlier this year. It was okay. It didn't leave me clamoring for another.
I read Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow in 2020. Pretty good. I might read another book of his one day.
Never heard of Audrey Blake.
John Grisham isn't really my style
I've heard of Schwab's book, although something about the "The [Adjective] [Noun] of [Woman's Name]" titles feel very overdone to me. (Another reason why Jenkins Reid's novel doesn't appeal much.)
Reading habits show us what different worlds we inhabit. Of course these don't show who buys books for themselves. Just what is obtained from library users. I forgot to add the link:
https://company.overdrive.com/2022/12/22/2022s-most-popular-ebooks-and-audiobooks-from-public-libraries/