To be fair I think people turned on Haruki Murakami because he stopped writing good books. His last several were meandering and dull, a parody of his earlier, better works. I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with a consensus of opinion on an author’s downturn.
I have generally like everything I have read by him, some are better while some are just so-so. Like any other writer.
That said, I read almost nothing by contemporary authors anymore. Last couple times I tried, I was less then impressed. And why bother, when there are so many classics to read out there?
Totally feel you on this. I am finding Crime and Punishment very difficult (just turns my stomach so far) but I feel like it’s definitely worthwhile to get some Dostoevsky in the can before messing around with this year’s fêted novel.
Completely unrelated to the post, but I am a big reader (I average about a book a week), and I dated a guy about 20 years ago who was reading The Windup Bird Chronicles the entire three months I was dating him. He kept saying he was reading it and how good it was, but he never finished it and I never saw it move from his nightstand. He was a sweet guy but I was very bored by him and we were obviously not very compatible. Anyway, that's what I think of anytime I hear that novel referenced.
Say Nothing is an excellent book -- it's also written with exactly that, being an "excellent book," in mind. It doesn't even attempt to take in the full scope of the conflict or the actors involved in sustaining (or ending) it. Ed Moloney's work, especially A Secret History, is much denser, but leaves the reader with a much fuller picture because it is less concerned with arranging narrative strands in a provocative and interesting manner to dazzle judges -- it wants you to know exactly what happened and why. For that reason Moloney is much less readable but much more informative and, ultimately, far more interesting to engage with than Keefe.
I know less about that episode than I'd like to. My impression is that the prerogatives of a wealthy and selective private university do not include an aggressive defense of the peace process, or a search for the truth as such. In my time at BC, and in the Irish Studies and history depts in particular, this episode was not spoken about openly. It was clearly a source of embarrassment. The university's proximity to Ireland and Irish issues is only treated as an asset if it can be slotted into a brochure ("BC Ireland!" "Mary Robinson!" "BC football in Dublin!"). But the admin evidently didn't feel like they had skin in the game and chose to cut bait in pretty lame fashion, to the edification of all involved.
Hell, I’ve never even been to Boston. Everything that I learned was through books and the news. I’m fascinated by the project from a lot of standpoints, particularly the fact that they got the buy-in that they did from participants. From an oral history perspective, it’s remarkable. Given the aftermath, it’s unlikely to ever happen again.
I have written a number of books, which I have enjoyed as a labour of love (self-pub and indie press). As mock-humble as it may seem, I’m not sure if I even want them to ever be popular. They probably won’t be, so it’s not a very significant worry lol.
Also, the thing about Say Nothing that blew my mind had little to do with the book itself, it concerned the Boston College project that led to the publication of Voices From The Grave. Simultaneously fascinating and mind-bogglingly irresponsible.
One of my nonfiction pet peeves is how often the vast majority of a "popular science book" isn't actually about its purported subject, but sort of nibbling around the edges of it. A good portion of it is often not about the subject, but the history of the subject. Not even the history of intellectual debate within the field, but actual, mini-biographies of some of the leading luminaries within it! And if it's a scientist who does a lot of field work (like say a paleontologist) they'll spend a third of it recounting personal anecdotes from their travels. Even like an astronomer could get into it, regaling tales of their relationship with their PHD advisor.
I mean dude, if I pick up a book on Mesozoic mammals, it's because I want to read more about them than what's available in a Wikipedia entry, without the sort of jargon in (largely inaccessible) academic papers. That's what I came for. Not all that filler.
<Cynical mode = ON> Most people read book reviews, not to choose whether a book is worth reading, but to have smart (but socially acceptable) things to say about it at their book clubs and dinner parties. This creates incentives for the reviewers to look at books they think everyone will be reading, and to generate opinions that everyone will find useful in their social sphere. Most reviewers do not want to be "friends of the new," driving an audience to a deserving writer; they want to jump in front of a parade, following the tastes of the crowd. Hence the flatness of the book review world. <Cynical mode = OFF>
The best book reviews and recommendations I've read are from established authors who don't make their primary income from reviewing books, but rather like to tell their fans what they're reading and why, e.g. Diana Gabaldon's Methadone List.
I thoroughly enjoyed this. They only thing that would have made it even more fun is if more perps had been named, but I get why that didn't happen.
Like lots of Boomer dweebs my first book loves were whatever stuck from summer reading lists of literature dictated by school, and lots of...sci-fi. With age I shifted away from the latter (best not to reread much of that, I've found...) to more 'real' lit. I even finally got around to 'Middlemarch' last year (you're supposed to have read this, now). My favorite novels of the last decade were Rachel Cusk's 'Outline' trilogy, very highly praised at the time, now somewhat backlashed against? (Not sure.) Anyway it wasn't a traditional narrative.
I've always disliked Murakami's stuff , going back to 'A Wild Sheep Chase', so I'm ahead of the curve there.
I liked 'magic realism' when it was new -- written by the South Americans -- but now I can't stand it.
And OMG, the James Baldwin thing, it's still happening! (See: NYRB, Jan 16 issue)
> I liked 'magic realism' when it was new -- written by the South Americans -- but now I can't stand it.
Even middle stage magical realism by the likes of Rushdie is good but the big problem is that modern magical realism is based on Rushdie rather than Borges, Calvino or Márquez which leads to incredibly drab fiction by people without the command of the English language like Rushdie to make up for it nor realising what makes magic realist literature enjoyable to read.
Well, if it was written by Borges, Calvino or Marquez it wouldn't have much to do with the English language anyway. None of them are native English speakers, and everything by them would be, by necessity, in translation.
Also, only one of them is a Magical Realist: Marquez. Borges wrote fables and allegories, while Calvino was much more in the Post Modernist camp, working from an entirely different angle with a different purpose.
You seem to have deliberately misread my comment. The sentence about command of the English language was explicitly about Rushdie and English language imitators not the original Latin American works. I don't know how you could possibly misread that considering I literally said "like Rushdie". Magical Realism is a loose enough category (as De Boer points out in the article this is a comment on) that Borges is generally considered a foundational author to the genre and Calvino is often described as having magical realism style since post-modernism and magical realism are not mutually exclusive, and of inspiring much overt magical realism. When you have a descriptive literary genre it is really splitting hairs to argue that these authors must be excluded because technically they can be described as part of a non-mutually exclusive literary school.
Its also utterly irrelevant to the broad point of my comment.
Can't quite tell if you were making this allusion or if you were riffing, Freddie, but the "mauve" example is all too real: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mauve/TqjAGwAACAAJ?hl=en (Read it years ago and recall it being p interesting, for what it's worth.)
Y'know, I'd read it. As Freddie himself observes, the style can be done well, and with restraint, using a particular thing (the discovery of a new dye) as a lens for a particular region of history (19th and early 20th century chemistry) can be a great way for the humble layperson (like me) to learn something that'll enrich them.
I’d like to nominate Heaven and Earth Grocery Store for the Most Predictably Acclaimed Bad Book. Pandering, predictable politics. Cartoonish, flat characters. Unremarkable prose. And, yet, targeted middlebrow flattery aimed at the people who review modern fiction worked. I’m still irritated.
So glad someone else did not like this book. Read it for book club. None of us liked it. Too many peripheral characters, not essential to the plot, to the degree there was a plot, and you never felt you really knew the main characters. Just because a book is written by an acclaimed Black author does not mean it's good and Must Be Praised. Bad books are an equal opportunity endeavor.
yes, it's kinda' funny how Baldwin has gone from being borderline unacceptable, to "everyone loves James." I want to push back a little though on the Magical Realism critique. Poor mr has to carry a lot of weight; the technique can be a cop-out, as you indicate, but writing with the slightly unreal can also produce something like EXIT WEST, which really does good political work it seems to me. And THE CITY IN THE CITY is ridiculously good. WRONG WAY is the best effort I've seen yet in a novel to talk about how tech indeed won't save us (to cite the podcast). And then there's The NEW NATURALS, which did get written up in NYT, and it's amazing. These are all books that taught me something and made me see things differently politically. Whether they're straight-up mr, or slipstream, or "weird new" or whatever you call it, there's something potentially powerful about writing this way, imho.
Do people actually praise Baldwin's fiction, though? My view of the situation was that he came to be seen in the same light as Gore Vidal: good essayist, middling writer of fiction. Even then people are pretty selective in their appreciation, e.g., refusing to engage with his defense of Styron's `Nat Turner'.
I think people do, but I think mostly because Baldwin is "unimpeachable." He was obviously an amazing thinker and social critic but I don't think we're allowed to say his fiction is not very good. (And I think most people haven't actually read it.)
Look, maybe Tree of Smoke was low on the list because it’s a weak imitation of Robert Stone powered by an unbelievable relationship and limping to a half-conclusion. Based on my own research.
I haven't read it - not my thing/my century and honestly probably not capable of reading it - but I recall B.R. Myers wrote a piece for the Atlantic not unlike this that we're responding to - in re "Tree of Smoke". He made no concession to cool, though, nor attempted it himself so was deemed wrong and interloping by the literary establishment. He had an amusing line wondering at the fact that that the over-praising reviewers, all themselves wrote much better prose than did the author in question; and another about "writer's writers" for some reason trumping "reader's writers".
My book career started in the 1990s and, for about 15 years, my book publicity tours were days filled with local TV, radio, magazine and newspaper interviews, and bookstore appearances at night. I sometimes got interviewed on morning TV shows in between the cooking demonstrations and the local weather reports. That world is gone, gone, gone.
I do a fair amount of reading old book reviews of scholarly books. Before the Internet an academic book might get 10 reviews. These would be two-three pages of solid prose.
Not now. Many journals have dropped book reviews entirely. It's worth a study to get precise data, but my perception is that writing about books has decreased greatly since the Internet.
To be fair I think people turned on Haruki Murakami because he stopped writing good books. His last several were meandering and dull, a parody of his earlier, better works. I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with a consensus of opinion on an author’s downturn.
I liked Colorless Tsukuru tazaki. It’s no windup bird chronicle, but I’ll take a mediocre Marakumi over almost anything else.
I have generally like everything I have read by him, some are better while some are just so-so. Like any other writer.
That said, I read almost nothing by contemporary authors anymore. Last couple times I tried, I was less then impressed. And why bother, when there are so many classics to read out there?
Totally feel you on this. I am finding Crime and Punishment very difficult (just turns my stomach so far) but I feel like it’s definitely worthwhile to get some Dostoevsky in the can before messing around with this year’s fêted novel.
Completely unrelated to the post, but I am a big reader (I average about a book a week), and I dated a guy about 20 years ago who was reading The Windup Bird Chronicles the entire three months I was dating him. He kept saying he was reading it and how good it was, but he never finished it and I never saw it move from his nightstand. He was a sweet guy but I was very bored by him and we were obviously not very compatible. Anyway, that's what I think of anytime I hear that novel referenced.
Say Nothing is an excellent book -- it's also written with exactly that, being an "excellent book," in mind. It doesn't even attempt to take in the full scope of the conflict or the actors involved in sustaining (or ending) it. Ed Moloney's work, especially A Secret History, is much denser, but leaves the reader with a much fuller picture because it is less concerned with arranging narrative strands in a provocative and interesting manner to dazzle judges -- it wants you to know exactly what happened and why. For that reason Moloney is much less readable but much more informative and, ultimately, far more interesting to engage with than Keefe.
I agree with your evaluation, but what shocks me is how Boston College thought that their promise of confidentiality would withstand legal scrutiny.
I know less about that episode than I'd like to. My impression is that the prerogatives of a wealthy and selective private university do not include an aggressive defense of the peace process, or a search for the truth as such. In my time at BC, and in the Irish Studies and history depts in particular, this episode was not spoken about openly. It was clearly a source of embarrassment. The university's proximity to Ireland and Irish issues is only treated as an asset if it can be slotted into a brochure ("BC Ireland!" "Mary Robinson!" "BC football in Dublin!"). But the admin evidently didn't feel like they had skin in the game and chose to cut bait in pretty lame fashion, to the edification of all involved.
Hell, I’ve never even been to Boston. Everything that I learned was through books and the news. I’m fascinated by the project from a lot of standpoints, particularly the fact that they got the buy-in that they did from participants. From an oral history perspective, it’s remarkable. Given the aftermath, it’s unlikely to ever happen again.
I have written a number of books, which I have enjoyed as a labour of love (self-pub and indie press). As mock-humble as it may seem, I’m not sure if I even want them to ever be popular. They probably won’t be, so it’s not a very significant worry lol.
Also, the thing about Say Nothing that blew my mind had little to do with the book itself, it concerned the Boston College project that led to the publication of Voices From The Grave. Simultaneously fascinating and mind-bogglingly irresponsible.
Big blow to my self professed love of magical realism … but also wondering Freddie if you’ve ever read Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith?
It fits a lot of your criticisms but also transcends some of them imho. One of my favorites so just curious.
One of my nonfiction pet peeves is how often the vast majority of a "popular science book" isn't actually about its purported subject, but sort of nibbling around the edges of it. A good portion of it is often not about the subject, but the history of the subject. Not even the history of intellectual debate within the field, but actual, mini-biographies of some of the leading luminaries within it! And if it's a scientist who does a lot of field work (like say a paleontologist) they'll spend a third of it recounting personal anecdotes from their travels. Even like an astronomer could get into it, regaling tales of their relationship with their PHD advisor.
I mean dude, if I pick up a book on Mesozoic mammals, it's because I want to read more about them than what's available in a Wikipedia entry, without the sort of jargon in (largely inaccessible) academic papers. That's what I came for. Not all that filler.
Oh god this is the absolute worst. No one came for your life story, professor.
<Cynical mode = ON> Most people read book reviews, not to choose whether a book is worth reading, but to have smart (but socially acceptable) things to say about it at their book clubs and dinner parties. This creates incentives for the reviewers to look at books they think everyone will be reading, and to generate opinions that everyone will find useful in their social sphere. Most reviewers do not want to be "friends of the new," driving an audience to a deserving writer; they want to jump in front of a parade, following the tastes of the crowd. Hence the flatness of the book review world. <Cynical mode = OFF>
The best book reviews and recommendations I've read are from established authors who don't make their primary income from reviewing books, but rather like to tell their fans what they're reading and why, e.g. Diana Gabaldon's Methadone List.
I thoroughly enjoyed this. They only thing that would have made it even more fun is if more perps had been named, but I get why that didn't happen.
Like lots of Boomer dweebs my first book loves were whatever stuck from summer reading lists of literature dictated by school, and lots of...sci-fi. With age I shifted away from the latter (best not to reread much of that, I've found...) to more 'real' lit. I even finally got around to 'Middlemarch' last year (you're supposed to have read this, now). My favorite novels of the last decade were Rachel Cusk's 'Outline' trilogy, very highly praised at the time, now somewhat backlashed against? (Not sure.) Anyway it wasn't a traditional narrative.
I've always disliked Murakami's stuff , going back to 'A Wild Sheep Chase', so I'm ahead of the curve there.
I liked 'magic realism' when it was new -- written by the South Americans -- but now I can't stand it.
And OMG, the James Baldwin thing, it's still happening! (See: NYRB, Jan 16 issue)
> I liked 'magic realism' when it was new -- written by the South Americans -- but now I can't stand it.
Even middle stage magical realism by the likes of Rushdie is good but the big problem is that modern magical realism is based on Rushdie rather than Borges, Calvino or Márquez which leads to incredibly drab fiction by people without the command of the English language like Rushdie to make up for it nor realising what makes magic realist literature enjoyable to read.
Well, if it was written by Borges, Calvino or Marquez it wouldn't have much to do with the English language anyway. None of them are native English speakers, and everything by them would be, by necessity, in translation.
Also, only one of them is a Magical Realist: Marquez. Borges wrote fables and allegories, while Calvino was much more in the Post Modernist camp, working from an entirely different angle with a different purpose.
You seem to have deliberately misread my comment. The sentence about command of the English language was explicitly about Rushdie and English language imitators not the original Latin American works. I don't know how you could possibly misread that considering I literally said "like Rushdie". Magical Realism is a loose enough category (as De Boer points out in the article this is a comment on) that Borges is generally considered a foundational author to the genre and Calvino is often described as having magical realism style since post-modernism and magical realism are not mutually exclusive, and of inspiring much overt magical realism. When you have a descriptive literary genre it is really splitting hairs to argue that these authors must be excluded because technically they can be described as part of a non-mutually exclusive literary school.
Its also utterly irrelevant to the broad point of my comment.
Can't quite tell if you were making this allusion or if you were riffing, Freddie, but the "mauve" example is all too real: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mauve/TqjAGwAACAAJ?hl=en (Read it years ago and recall it being p interesting, for what it's worth.)
lol no I thought I was making it up
Y'know, I'd read it. As Freddie himself observes, the style can be done well, and with restraint, using a particular thing (the discovery of a new dye) as a lens for a particular region of history (19th and early 20th century chemistry) can be a great way for the humble layperson (like me) to learn something that'll enrich them.
We need a new Rule 34 but for ridiculous book examples. 😆
I’d like to nominate Heaven and Earth Grocery Store for the Most Predictably Acclaimed Bad Book. Pandering, predictable politics. Cartoonish, flat characters. Unremarkable prose. And, yet, targeted middlebrow flattery aimed at the people who review modern fiction worked. I’m still irritated.
So glad someone else did not like this book. Read it for book club. None of us liked it. Too many peripheral characters, not essential to the plot, to the degree there was a plot, and you never felt you really knew the main characters. Just because a book is written by an acclaimed Black author does not mean it's good and Must Be Praised. Bad books are an equal opportunity endeavor.
yes, it's kinda' funny how Baldwin has gone from being borderline unacceptable, to "everyone loves James." I want to push back a little though on the Magical Realism critique. Poor mr has to carry a lot of weight; the technique can be a cop-out, as you indicate, but writing with the slightly unreal can also produce something like EXIT WEST, which really does good political work it seems to me. And THE CITY IN THE CITY is ridiculously good. WRONG WAY is the best effort I've seen yet in a novel to talk about how tech indeed won't save us (to cite the podcast). And then there's The NEW NATURALS, which did get written up in NYT, and it's amazing. These are all books that taught me something and made me see things differently politically. Whether they're straight-up mr, or slipstream, or "weird new" or whatever you call it, there's something potentially powerful about writing this way, imho.
Do people actually praise Baldwin's fiction, though? My view of the situation was that he came to be seen in the same light as Gore Vidal: good essayist, middling writer of fiction. Even then people are pretty selective in their appreciation, e.g., refusing to engage with his defense of Styron's `Nat Turner'.
Love Vidal's essays!
I think people do, but I think mostly because Baldwin is "unimpeachable." He was obviously an amazing thinker and social critic but I don't think we're allowed to say his fiction is not very good. (And I think most people haven't actually read it.)
Look, maybe Tree of Smoke was low on the list because it’s a weak imitation of Robert Stone powered by an unbelievable relationship and limping to a half-conclusion. Based on my own research.
I haven't read it - not my thing/my century and honestly probably not capable of reading it - but I recall B.R. Myers wrote a piece for the Atlantic not unlike this that we're responding to - in re "Tree of Smoke". He made no concession to cool, though, nor attempted it himself so was deemed wrong and interloping by the literary establishment. He had an amusing line wondering at the fact that that the over-praising reviewers, all themselves wrote much better prose than did the author in question; and another about "writer's writers" for some reason trumping "reader's writers".
My book career started in the 1990s and, for about 15 years, my book publicity tours were days filled with local TV, radio, magazine and newspaper interviews, and bookstore appearances at night. I sometimes got interviewed on morning TV shows in between the cooking demonstrations and the local weather reports. That world is gone, gone, gone.
Book Beat.
I remember when books even used to have commercials on TV!
"Why not let a thousand flowers bloom, before the moneymen uproot the garden?"
Because the status games are the point, the books are just the cards used to play the status game.
I remember the James Baldwin day. You were on twitter still and doubting if anyone had actually read him. That was a good day.
It's not just current fiction and non-fiction.
I do a fair amount of reading old book reviews of scholarly books. Before the Internet an academic book might get 10 reviews. These would be two-three pages of solid prose.
Not now. Many journals have dropped book reviews entirely. It's worth a study to get precise data, but my perception is that writing about books has decreased greatly since the Internet.