I love the idea of people discussing what they haven't read rather than what they have, it seems more informative - akin to asking people their least favorite Beatles song (mine is, Here There and Everywhere). I haven't read John Updike, but I did stand behind him in line at the Metropolitan museum once and a hush had fallen upon everyone else in line, as if he was, I don't know, Bono or someone. Also haven't read Saul Bellow. Or Rachel Kushner. Among so many others.
Maybe I’ll do more pieces on stuff I haven’t read. (Re: Kushner: I quite liked The Flamethrowers, but my gut tells me that Creation Lake is bad.) The real theme is a sense of liberty from the need to keep up with whatever the latest thing is. There are certain trends in literary discourse, especially online literary discourse, that I feel bound to resist, and that’s one of them!
The Updike anecdote is hilarious. Is there a writer today who could insure the same sort of hush? Probably not.
His first two novels are really quite good. Though I love modernist writing (I did in fact once create an independent study to read all of the Cantos) I never disdained realism and found the Corrections quite engaging as a thing of its moment and an illuminating way to see people. It’s a good book. You may not like it. And DeLillo is better, and you should read him much more urgently than Franzen.
Also, The recognitions was a book I looked forward to for ages. When I finally read it I was bored by its very coldness to a milieu that was engaging and inherently interesting to me. If anything it needed a slightly stronger dose of psychological realism to make it interesting Gaddis was actually a very shallow writer, his character all seem flat and trite, and the only actual appeal was stylistic
Hi Josh, your piece has inspired me to go and buy your latest novel, which I ought to have done already, given my affection for certain SF novels we know of. I’ve been meaning to anyway!
Thank you! It’s not SF, I’m afraid, it’s autofiction, which seems a bit cringe in late 2024. Hoping the SF novel will attract an editor’s interest next year. Nice to see you in Substack-land!
I know it’s autofiction, but I also know it’s Josh Corey, so I suspect I’ll be happy reading it. Fingers crossed for concord and co! Btw, the poem featuring Hob (I think with much more material than the version you saw) is coming out with BlazeVOX in early February.
I really enjoyed this! I’ve always been a little baffled by Franzen’s insistence in that essay that The Recognitions is the most difficult book he’s ever read-sure it’s allusive and long as hell, but Ulysses for instance is a much tougher read on a sentence to sentence level.
It’s true—and he ought to give Finnegans Wake a try! But I have reluctantly come to accept that my love of difficult books is a form of perversity, which I can’t expect everyone to share.
I appreciate these candid lists of reading and not-reading. I could make my own lists, and there would be some overlap with yours in both cases. At the very least, it inspires some thoughts:
I wish I could read more stuff, but having a full-time job and other commitments makes it difficult. Possibly related to this: too many novels are too damn long. Often, I'll read a contemporary novel and think, "that was a good 300-page novel. Too bad it's 500 pages long."
Regarding Franzen: I did read "The Corrections." It was uneven. Parts of it were entertaining and thoughtful and pertinent to modern life; others were dull or frankly dumb and tasteless (the notorious "talking turd" episode for instance). But given that all great big novels are flawed, it wasn't a bad performance.
On the other hand, I tried to read two other Franzen books and they failed my personal 50-page test. Why? In both cases, because the characters weren't interesting enough to sustain a long narrative. If the characters in a long book don't grab you and hold you, that book will be a slog, no matter what other virtues it may contain.
I read an unreasonable amount and sometimes finish books that I should have stopped reading two hundred pages ago out of sheer inertia. It’s not as though my attention span hasn’t been degraded like everyone else’s; I very rarely have the patience to read more than a couple of grafs in the newspaper, for instance. But books still cast a spell on me.
Maybe I’ll hate Franzen! Certainly I haven’t loved his po-faced public persona—but I also respect an author perverse enough to try and resist the parasocial relationship that it seems modern authorship has been reduced to. We’ll see if his characters hold my attention. When it comes to my tastes in fiction, voice is paramount but character comes a close second.
"(his Jew-fro notably diminished)" is reminding me of the son's mustache like his dad in the other movie.
It’s true! Samson, Jr.
I love the idea of people discussing what they haven't read rather than what they have, it seems more informative - akin to asking people their least favorite Beatles song (mine is, Here There and Everywhere). I haven't read John Updike, but I did stand behind him in line at the Metropolitan museum once and a hush had fallen upon everyone else in line, as if he was, I don't know, Bono or someone. Also haven't read Saul Bellow. Or Rachel Kushner. Among so many others.
Maybe I’ll do more pieces on stuff I haven’t read. (Re: Kushner: I quite liked The Flamethrowers, but my gut tells me that Creation Lake is bad.) The real theme is a sense of liberty from the need to keep up with whatever the latest thing is. There are certain trends in literary discourse, especially online literary discourse, that I feel bound to resist, and that’s one of them!
The Updike anecdote is hilarious. Is there a writer today who could insure the same sort of hush? Probably not.
His first two novels are really quite good. Though I love modernist writing (I did in fact once create an independent study to read all of the Cantos) I never disdained realism and found the Corrections quite engaging as a thing of its moment and an illuminating way to see people. It’s a good book. You may not like it. And DeLillo is better, and you should read him much more urgently than Franzen.
Also, The recognitions was a book I looked forward to for ages. When I finally read it I was bored by its very coldness to a milieu that was engaging and inherently interesting to me. If anything it needed a slightly stronger dose of psychological realism to make it interesting Gaddis was actually a very shallow writer, his character all seem flat and trite, and the only actual appeal was stylistic
Hi Josh, your piece has inspired me to go and buy your latest novel, which I ought to have done already, given my affection for certain SF novels we know of. I’ve been meaning to anyway!
Thank you! It’s not SF, I’m afraid, it’s autofiction, which seems a bit cringe in late 2024. Hoping the SF novel will attract an editor’s interest next year. Nice to see you in Substack-land!
I know it’s autofiction, but I also know it’s Josh Corey, so I suspect I’ll be happy reading it. Fingers crossed for concord and co! Btw, the poem featuring Hob (I think with much more material than the version you saw) is coming out with BlazeVOX in early February.
I really enjoyed this! I’ve always been a little baffled by Franzen’s insistence in that essay that The Recognitions is the most difficult book he’s ever read-sure it’s allusive and long as hell, but Ulysses for instance is a much tougher read on a sentence to sentence level.
It’s true—and he ought to give Finnegans Wake a try! But I have reluctantly come to accept that my love of difficult books is a form of perversity, which I can’t expect everyone to share.
I appreciate these candid lists of reading and not-reading. I could make my own lists, and there would be some overlap with yours in both cases. At the very least, it inspires some thoughts:
I wish I could read more stuff, but having a full-time job and other commitments makes it difficult. Possibly related to this: too many novels are too damn long. Often, I'll read a contemporary novel and think, "that was a good 300-page novel. Too bad it's 500 pages long."
Regarding Franzen: I did read "The Corrections." It was uneven. Parts of it were entertaining and thoughtful and pertinent to modern life; others were dull or frankly dumb and tasteless (the notorious "talking turd" episode for instance). But given that all great big novels are flawed, it wasn't a bad performance.
On the other hand, I tried to read two other Franzen books and they failed my personal 50-page test. Why? In both cases, because the characters weren't interesting enough to sustain a long narrative. If the characters in a long book don't grab you and hold you, that book will be a slog, no matter what other virtues it may contain.
I read an unreasonable amount and sometimes finish books that I should have stopped reading two hundred pages ago out of sheer inertia. It’s not as though my attention span hasn’t been degraded like everyone else’s; I very rarely have the patience to read more than a couple of grafs in the newspaper, for instance. But books still cast a spell on me.
Maybe I’ll hate Franzen! Certainly I haven’t loved his po-faced public persona—but I also respect an author perverse enough to try and resist the parasocial relationship that it seems modern authorship has been reduced to. We’ll see if his characters hold my attention. When it comes to my tastes in fiction, voice is paramount but character comes a close second.