The death of Philip Roth, the end of an era?

william kent

william kent

Well-known member
I couldn't fit the whole quote into the title, but in one of the recent NYT pieces on Roth someone came out with the line:

"The death of Philip Roth marks, in its way, the end of a cultural era as definitively as the death of Pablo Picasso did in 1973."

Now I don't know much about Picasso or painting, but I imagine it's safe to say that the loss of Picasso was a pretty big deal. Are we in a similar moment? The response to Roth's passing has been pretty muted and it feels as though writing peaked more or less in the 20th century and had begun to wind down well before Roth's death, Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy, Morrison and a few others are still knocking about but how many younger writers are there? Are novels even valued these days? Are the people who would previously have become novelists now going into screenwriting instead?

I seem to recall a McCarthy quote from somewhere about how it's pointless to continue writing big, important novels because there's just no audience for them anymore and I think he's probably right.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I picked up a donated copy of "Disgrace" by JM Coetzee the other day, had a quick perusal this morning. It reminded me from the off of an Ian McEwan novel. Extremely self conscious, very stylised, full of a sort of postmodern concern with literature (the main character, like a McEwan's character, happens to be an academic who can spout theory on romanticism). Too early to judge it but these things encapsulate for me what I don't like about the modern novels I've read. They read as if they're written by literature students, possibly by literature students who studied creative writing. They can't ignore postmodernism, but they wish they could. They can't ignore literature, either. Probably McEwan and Coetzee are just one small strand of the modern novel, but I wonder if my experience reading their novels points to a wider sense of exhaustion with the form - almost an embarrassment with it? Too encumbered by its history, too alien to its time.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Certainly there are lots of young novelists, but the endgame financially has to be to get those novels adapted into screenplays (which many do of course).

Is it true that publishers are increasingly looking for the breakout hit rather than nurturing younger novelists, as with the music industry living off Adele's success alone for a while back there? Probably. Top selling books of all time (UK) are all Rowling, Brown, James etc

On the other hand, some of the big prize winning novels are still pretty famous, and considered 'serious', 'important' afaik.
 
william kent

william kent

Well-known member
Corpsey said:
Too early to judge it but these things encapsulate for me what I don't like about the modern novels I've read. They read as if they're written by literature students, possibly by literature students who studied creative writing. They can't ignore postmodernism, but they wish they could. They can't ignore literature, either. Probably McEwan and Coetzee are just one small strand of the modern novel, but I wonder if my experience reading their novels points to a wider sense of exhaustion with the form - almost an embarrassment with it? Too encumbered by its history, too alien to its time.
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Yeah, it feels as though we're trapped in a feedback loop. I've read that we're now into "post-postmodernism" and "metamodernism", but it all feels like postmodernism to me. I keep picturing it as the effect of pointing two mirrors at each other, that seemingly endless but gradually diminishing reflection.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
version said:
I've read that we're now into "post-postmodernism" and "metamodernism", but it all feels like postmodernism to me
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oh yeah agree 100%

that leap into postmodern self-aware self-awareness is a one-way trip, everything after has to be in some kind of reaction, be it incorporation, rejection, whatever

i.e. the New Sincerity

I don't know if the novel if declining so much as changing - see Tao Lin, the kind of paradigmatic example, where his "writing" isn't ever really separate from his "life"

the financial nuts + bolts of publishing, making $ off literature, I have no idea, but it's hard to imagine there ever not being a cultural space for some form of the novel to fill
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
btw Corpse by Coatzee I'd recommend Waiting For the Barbarians, one of my favorite novels ever probably, or at least one of the few that has stuck with me

I guess there's a bit of postmodernism in it but it's really postcolonial allegory, in the postcolonial lit canon with Achebe + Naipaul + J.G. Farrell + the rest I suppose
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
it's just retrograde and embaressing. roth is the girly calender on the wall of a tyre fitters in 1989. made sense at the time but best forgotten now.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
padraig (u.s.) said:
btw Corpse by Coatzee I'd recommend Waiting For the Barbarians, one of my favorite novels ever probably, or at least one of the few that has stuck with me
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Is it better than Disgrace? I'm just finishing it. I don't care for it. Like McEwans novels, well structured, well written (in a way), a page-turner, full of the signals of seriousness but with this feeling of weightlessness to it. Also so much of it strikes me as flatly implausible - the way the characters speak, the way they think. Perhaps that's what postmodernity allows for. The appearance of realism but overarching it all this concern to be "literary".
 
william kent

william kent

Well-known member
padraig (u.s.) said:
oh yeah agree 100%

that leap into postmodern self-aware self-awareness is a one-way trip, everything after has to be in some kind of reaction, be it incorporation, rejection, whatever

i.e. the New Sincerity
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Totally. It also gets to the point where you basically have to be a lit. student to pick up on all the references and allusions. To get ... you have to have read ..., ... and ... . I think writers perhaps became too clever for their own good. I read Wallace's unfinished final novel The Pale King last year and there were a few good bits, but it felt more like an exercise in something. Supposedly he was trying to address boredom and attempted to write a book which would mimic the drudgery of working at the IRS which is pretty clever, but who wants to read a boring book?
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
It's interesting to me that people first predicted the death of the novel years ago (in fact stated it had already happened) but really literature - and other artforms for that matter - don't die out cos they run out of ideas or cos everything has been said or because they are somehow a less vital part of the culture, they die cos there is no money in them. And it seems that (apart from a few exceptions) that's really kicking in now. Or maybe that's a second death, but it's one there is no way back from.
I love novels though. Probably always will I guess. I'd be keen to hear some suggestions for novels that are truly new and original and good. I'm thinking of (off the top of my head) things such as Tom McCarthy - Remainder or Ryan O'Neill - Their Brilliant Careers (as tipped by Jenks on here in fact) which are (fairly) novel (ha) in terms of their style or structure or whatever but which still have an emotional effect on their reader, are still pleasurable to read basically ie aren't simply an academic exercise in pure originality.
As for Roth... I think he was the last of that group of Bellow, Roth, Updike etc to die so it's the end of their era. I put Pynchon more with Delilo and Auster in a slightly later group cos even if he was around earlier he has more in common stylistically with them.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
attempted to write a book which would mimic the drudgery of working at the IRS which is pretty clever, but who wants to read a boring book?
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Yeah that's exactly what I meant above. Something experimental and clever AND good would be nice.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Anyway, not sure how new that is... they say that 120 of Sodom mimics the empty boredom of fascism by being so repetitious don't they? Or is that a projection we make via Pasolini's adaptation? Could be in fact. But I'm sure I've heard other works described as being boring because they are about something boring. What am I thinking of?
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
I read Wallace's unfinished final novel The Pale King0
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It sounds ludicrous but I'm more and more convinced that DFW is a shit writer who fluked one masterpiece. Rather than a good writer who wrote some bad stuff, or even a blowing hot and cold writer. Pretty much everything I've read apart from IJ is properly bad.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Cormac McCarthy is an interesting one. Love him or loathe him, he has changed his style. Probably realised that he was stuck in a literary dead-end and decided to re-invent himself after perusing dissensus and seeing comments like this one

It also gets to the point where you basically have to be a lit. student to pick up on all the references and allusions. To get ... you have to have read ..., ... and ... . I think writers perhaps became too clever for their own good
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william kent

william kent

Well-known member
I think Wallace identified problems worth thinking about and could be insightful and funny at times, but I don't really like him.
 
william kent

william kent

Well-known member
IdleRich said:
It sounds ludicrous but I'm more and more convinced that DFW is a shit writer who fluked one masterpiece. Rather than a good writer who wrote some bad stuff, or even a blowing hot and cold writer. Pretty much everything I've read apart from IJ is properly bad.
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Have you reread IJ?
 
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