Everyone hates the POSTMODERN novels we love!

Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, Rushdie: nobody out there in Library-Thing-Land really LOVES these authors the way we do. In fact, these authors are pretty roundly despised by all. We don't care! (Is this weird...that I keep writing in first person plural?) We think postmodernism is the most entertaining style going.

MY current favorite, most-hated book is Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Completely love its big, twisting, unruliness. That book could have been BIGGER, in my opinion. Let's hear about your postmodern favorites.

People just get the wrong idea about postmodernism. They just see big difficult books, and to be honest, sometimes they are right. On the other hand, these books refresh the parts that other books can't reach.

What about adding Vollmann, Barth, & Eco to that list?

I have a copy of Infinite Jest but haven't gotten round to it yet. Your two line review has moved it up my 'to read' list though.

I must say that there are few book reading moments with such a punch-in-the-gut-then -laugh-out-loud impact as the moment in Rushdie's midnight's children when we realise that we have been barking up the wrong family tree for the first several chapters. Although my personal postmodern favourite would probably be Tristan Shandy: even though only about half a dozen novels had been written at the time Sterne already saw you could do whatever you liked with the medium, and that the more you played with it, the more fun it could be.

Big shaggy books with a sense of humour rule.

(not tried Infinite Jest yet though)

Do even less people love magic realism? Or does this issue divide the sexes. Marquez doesn't do it for me, sorry.

I can manage some magic realism (and some Garcia Marquez). Rushdie obviously was very influenced by Garcia Marquez. But I think he surpassed the master. I can't really get through Allende: seems TOO MUCH an imitation of Garcia Marquez.

I love the notion of the postmodern novel NOT being limited to the late 20th century. Ulysses is obviously postmod. I'll take Tristan Shandy too. Other non-twentieth century postmods?

Vollmann's Europe Central is on my to-read list. John Barth is a favorite, but still haven't tackled Tidewater Tales. I bought that in Barth's hometown (?) while vacationing in Maryland's eastern shore.

I've got to say, Infinite Jest is pretty perplexing for the first 20 pages or so. Keep at it!

I have to admit that I detest Tristram Shandy. This is probably due to the fact that I had to read it for a course at the university (many centuries ago...;-)) and never could digest it. Perhaps, one of these days, I will try again...

I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Italo Calvino so far. Works like If On A Winter's Night A Traveller and Invisible Cities are the epitome of post-modernism, and have the advantage of being much shorter than a lot of the other major works, therefore being a good introduction to the style.

Re - magic realism. Not sure that Rushdie surpassed Marquez. Midnight's Children is a great book, but is it better than One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rushdie's other books by comparison don't approach his masterpiece, while Marquez has written two other great novels, Love in the Time of Cholera and The General in His Labyrinth. Agree about Allende though. Other Latin American writers like Alejo Carpentier & Miguel Angel Asturias also excel in this genre.

I would also like to mention Robert Coover as a leading exponent of postmodernism, The Public Burning is a great novel.

I like Allende. I love Infinite Jest, Ulysses, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, and Tristram Shandy, but while I've read and somewhat enjoyed Rushdie I can't somehow feel comfortable with any of his books to the point where I'd call them favourites or re-read them if something more alluring is on offer. I can't put my finger on why, which is irritating.

Slaughterhouse 5 and Gravity's Rainbow not mentioned yet?

Ooh, I love books like this. Another good example is House of Leaves which is a very divisive book in my experience... You love it or you hate it, and I loved it. All of the gimmicks were just dessert for me, the meaty center of it was the metaphor of the House as the Self, a labyrinth with no center, a well with no bottom. Which I found effectively disturbing and thought-provoking. Also the parody of literary commentary was pretty funny.

I think Gravity's Rainbow was lumped in with Pynchon in general.

Slaughterhouse Five is definitely worth reading but what about Vonnegut's other novels? Would it be fair to say they lack the depth of a lot of the other writers listed here?

Never heard of House of Leaves - I'm not even sure it was published here in the UK. The reviews on Amazon back up the idea of it being divisive. On the basic plot summary alone though it does sound interesting.

Robert Irwin also deserves a mention. Although better known for his nonfiction work - he is an expert on Middle Eastern history - he has written a number of novels. They are all worth reading but The Arabian Nightmare deserves special attention.

House of Leaves was published in the UK - I have a copy that I haven't been able to enter via normal routes, although this has just prompted me to grab it and enter it manually.

Anchor, 2000, ISBN 1862301107.

How about The Death of Artemio Cruz by Fuentes? One of the original Latin American "boom" novels, written in a combination of 1st, 3rd and 2nd persons. Can't recommend any particular translations, but it's a classic.

Robert Pinget is a writer who must be considered pomo. Anyone here read him?

Don't know much about Pinget other than he was linked to nouveau roman movement in France. What's his work like? I know Robbe-Grillet and a couple of others from this scene. As I understand it, the anti-novel was at the heart of this movement. Whether this was the last breath of modernism or one of the first bloomings of postmodernism still seems open to debate. However you define these novels, they seem to divide opinion completely.

Come now. It's just not right to have a thread like this and not mention Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau. Both very difficult to find in my neck of the woods though today I read a small chunk of Which Moped With Chrome-Plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard? in my favourite local bookshop/coffeeshop and must say I enoyed it.

jargoneer

Pinget's novels are difficult to read even though they are usually quite short. He probably isn't pomo, more nouveau roman. Not sure how to describe his books. Sometimes he reminds me of Beckett, sometimes of Claude Simon.

If it reminds of Beckett, it can't be a bad thing.. Of course, Beckett is almost impossible to read, any of his dramatic works are made purely for the stage, especially Godot..
And back to House of Leaves - any book whose acknowledgement page just says 'This is not for you', sounds to me as though it is well worth checking out..
I don't divide my books into genre and style at all, they just get lumped, but I'm busy checking out a lot of the aforementioned works..
Thank you..

This thread is beginning to make me feel guilty about what I HAVEN'T read. Georges Perec's Life: A Users Manual is sitting on my shelf and taunting me! Right next to Hopscotch. I should turn off the TV, shut down the computer, and pick up a blasted book!

srharris19: Life: A User's Manual is one of the most amazing things I've ever read. Completely engrossing and not 'difficult' at all. Enjoy.

I love most "pomo" stuff, but not too much into magic realism ... another big thumbs up for Robert Coover and especially The Public Burning ... I also highly recommend David Markson ... and I'm about 1/4 of the way through Joseph McElroy's Lookout Cartridge ... has anyone read this? It's ostensibly a "mystery" from 1974, but it's done very much in a Pynchon-esque fashion.

Back to no 20th century POMO: Don Quixote, in the second part, there is much discussion of the publication of the first part, so that it is self-referential. It is also absurd, cruel, and involves much criticism of prior literatures.
This suggests that people who hate post-modernism don't really know much about novels (heck, the only good books that DON'T refer to other works are the Iliad and the Odyssey.)

Perec I adore; Queneau, Eco, Carpentier, Calvino and Cortazar I love, but I admit I abandoned what little I touched of Pynchon (Gravity's rainbow, after one page), David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, few pages) and Vollmann (Europe Central, one paragraph).

I have to try again, at least so I can actually SAY why I can't stand them. :)

I vaguely remember being bothered by references to tennis in Infinite Jest. Or maybe I dreamt that.

This is an exciting discussion for me, since I've been reading a lot of the (originally cited) authors since before college. I'm only about 90 pages from finishing Against The Day by Thomas Pynchon (it's excellent), finally finished A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis only a couple of months ago (also well worth the trouble), and just I acquired a copy of Infinite Jest for my TBR pile. I love those big, bruiser tough novels, though Pynchon's previous two novels weren't very satisfying. His new one is excellent, and nearly as good as Gravity's Rainbow. His best work makes me feel smart just for "getting" the references.

As for Magical Realism, I don't know that I understand the term completely, but I would recommend Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes (a big, difficult, high octane and high-calorie novel) at one end of the scale and Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link (subtle, sly, short stories with magical twists) at the other end. They give fiction marvelous new possibilities for plot directions, without being just an easy out for the author.

And finally, someone I've always thought seemed "pomo" in the best sense is Donald Barthelme, several of whose books, Snow White, Paradise (and likely others), have been recently re-released in handsome paperback editions.

Edited to fix touchstones and typos.

Is Gabriel Garcia Marquez considered pomo?

(I'm coming into this a bit tardy.)

I haven't read Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, or Rushdie, so I wasn't sure how much I was into post-modern literature. Then the names of Eco, Perec, Calvino, Queneau, and Vonnegut came up and so I guess I do like a bit of post-modern literature. So, I then thought that I hadn't really regarded Oulipo as post-modern (Perec, Calvino, Queneau), so I turned to wikipedia, and sure enough they had a list of post-modern authors and there were my Oulipo authors. I also saw Paul Auster, Jorge Luis Borges, N. Scott Momaday, Haruki Murakami, Michael Ondaatje, Graham Swift, and Jeannette Winterson, all of whom I've read. And then there are some science fiction writers I've read: Isaac Asimov and Octavia Butler.

I suppose my question might be for those who know more than me: when did literature move from "modernist" to "post-modern"?

Bob Campbell

I haven't read Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, or Rushdie, so I wasn't sure how much I was into post-modern literature. Then the names of Eco, Perec, Calvino, Queneau, and Vonnegut came up and so I guess I do like a bit of post-modern literature.

Same with me, and I second the question!

Obviously, not everyone hates postmodern . I love Calvino, DeLillo, Rushdie and Pynchon, but I really can't stand Jonathan Sanfran Foer (whatever) or Neal Stephenson. To each his own.

I do have to say that my patience for experimentation has waned as I have aged. Sometimes it just seems like showing (or jacking) off. Even if the form is weird, I still want a good story and characters.

#26
Modernism is the period from the end of the 19th century to the end of the Second World War. While there are modernist writers and artists after this period, the postmodern era is really started with the detonation of the atomic bomb and the idea that anyone, anywhere could be wiped off the planet in an instant.

What's going to be interesting is seeing what the post-postmodern movement will be like.

-the mistress

I hope they find a different name for it by then.

To the Mistress,
Reading your description of post-modern as post-Atom bomb, explains how Isaac Asimov is post-modern. I am thinking of his Foundation series.

Bob Campbell

>26 vpfluke: Bob, I'd definitely add the wonderful Harry Mathews to the list you posted, even if Wikipedia hasn't.

Message 28: littlegeek -- Oh, littlegeek, you say it so well! Not only is Jonathan Safran Foer detestable, his wife, Nicole Krauss, is worse. I agree that some of these authors can be OK sometimes but you are absolutely right when you say your patience has waned. I take writing and reading too seriously now to enjoy authors who want to play games with them. Jacking off is a perfect description. And I do not believe these books will stand the test of time, not the ones written in the last 40 years anyway.

#33 Thanks for the support kageeh, but other books I happen to love, like Gravity's Rainbow, have the same criticisms levelled at them from time to time and I can't really argue. Oh well, consistency really isn't a human trait.

Besides, this is for postmodern LOVERS. Let's not hijack their thread.

Carry on!

How about the work of W.G.Sebald ? One book is one run-on sentence- I 've read The Emigrants, Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn Interesting but I can't have a steady diet of them. I need a old -fashioned good story!

So -- does post-modern ONLY refer to the time period the author writes in. I think not. Otherwise any contemporary fiction could be labelled post-modern. What exactly is the definition? Is magical realism part of post-modernism or a separate 'classification?'

From my limited reading perspective I think I agree with #28 littlegeek -- I hate books that come across as if the author is saying -- "I am so much smarter than you, but go ahead and try to read it anyway." I liked DeLillo's White Noise, and really liked Rushdie's Midnight's Children. But disliked Franzen'sThe Corrections and Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay. I haven't read David Foster Wallace or Pynchon though.

I think there is a subtle difference between being smart, provocative and innovative vs. a show-off that rubs me the wrong way.

Dear torontoc:

Besides Sebald, do you like Jose Saramago? Whom I have tried to read, but couldn't get through his long discoursive sentences (although Perec is ok).

Hi 37
I liked Baltasar and Blimunda- but have a number of his other books on my TBR pile. I started The History of the Siege of Lisbon but have to go back to it.

When I think of "post-modernism" as category I think of either "meta" type stuff with footnotes and playing with the form of the novel ... and books set in in the past but with the characters fully informed by modern times ... and, of course, plenty of irony!

I would agree with KromesTomes. So, would Doris Lessing's works classify as post-modern? Like, most people I have mixed reactions on her work.

#5
Regardless of its strangeness, Ulysses is in fact at the tail-end of modernism.

#41 While I accept Ulysses is modernist, it was not at the tail-end of modernism. 1922 could be seen as the peak modernism, with The Waste Land also being published, ushering in the true period of modernism literature in English. For example, leading modernist authors like Virginia Woolf and Wyndham Lewis were yet to publish, others like John Dos Passos & Gertrude Stein were still to publish their major works.

Regarding Doris Lessing (#40): Coincidentally, I just read Shikasta, which is a story told in different reports/documents from different people ... so I'd say it at least has some postmodern elements ... yet that gets me to wondering about epistolary novels in general ... I know they've been written for centuries, so does that mean postmodernism got it's start hundreds of years ago?

I remember reading a history of the novel that suggested what we consider postmodern existed before, when the novel itself was in a state of flux. The theory is that for the 18th, and early 19th, century the rules that govern the novel were not so firmly fixed so authors were more experimental. However, over time, forms became more rigid as it is found that readers (and critics) preferred them, hence the dominant structure that we see in most novels now.

It's inevitable that "the postmodern novel" should become formulaic and conventional. Reality is perception. Seeing meaning is not so different than being paranoid. If the world is a text, then the text is the world--beware the narrator. Et cetera. These ideas have become as worn and predictable as social codes in the stodgiest Victorian novel. Postmodern literature needs modernism all over again.

Rushdie began writing to his own formula after the brilliant achievements of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses. Eco, too, after The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum (see the discussion thread on the new Eco group). I was disappointed to find the same old formulae in the work of last year's Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk.

Is Pynchon writing to the formula? I still haven't gotten around to Mason & Dixon, let alone Against the Day.

I would give my right arm to meet David Markson. No, even better, I would give my soul to inherit his papers (right down to the post-it notes and grocery lists).

I have read Wittgenstein's Mistress about 15 times, and it changes every time. Vanishing Point was also outstanding.

One book I love that has a bit of a po-mo flair is Roger Boylan's Killoyle. It's really just a rip-roaring funny story, but there's another character in the footnotes. Much fun.

One thing I've noticed is that I prefer to read the po-mo books when I'm in the *mood* for them. If I try to read them at other times, they're just bad. I think that's why I didn't 'get' The crying of Lot 49 - it was my first Pynchon work, and I don't think I was in the right frame of mind for it. I probably should have been reading 'brain candy' instead (i.e., a fast-paced piece of contemporary fiction, usually in the mystery novel genre).

How about Arno Schmidt? His The School for Atheists: A Novella = Comedy in 6 Acts is classic, a masterpiece in it's (own) class.

I wouldn't try reading it in German, though. One thing about po|mo lit is that it's extremely challenging reading in a language you don't master perfectly. Eg. my English exceeds its limits in reading Gravity's Rainbow.

I like a lot such books that one can easily be read through a chosen category, like Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose as a semiotic study, an essay on medieval culture, a detective story.

Georges Perec's Life: A Users Manual is sitting on my shelf and taunting me! Right next to Hopscotch.

Interesting coincidence. I finished Life: A User's Manual just a couple of weeks ago and loved it. Just today at breakfast a friend came up to me and loaned me her copy of Rayuela!

Besides Georges Perec as an Oulipo writer, I am especialy fond of Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, where the author rewrites the same two paragraph vignette a hundred times in an explosion of different styles. I demonstrates the malleability of writing, which is rarely taught in schools.
-- Bob Campbell

P.S. I may have to reread Life: A User's manual. I wonder whether I should really be foolish and try it in French. La Vie: Mode d'Emploi

I'm not convinced by that definition (29), but I get your point. It's more a matter of artistic style and technique, for me, and I consider specific works, not authors. For example, Robert Coover writes primarily postmodern work, but The Public Burning is a modern novel in style and approach. None of Vonnegut's work is postmodern, in my view. Ulysses is a modern novel and broke ground with the internal dialogue that Joyce captures in a stream of consciousness approach, but it's really a pretty straightforward account of a single day.

It would be interesting to me to see how others define this lit. For me, singular characteristics of postmodern work include abandoning chronological "truth", shifting points of view, and juxtaposition of genre (House of Leaves would be a good example). And for sure there is an air of experimentation. Too often there isn't a plot -- apparently that's a quaint narrative device -- but I tend not to like reading books without plot.

I didn't mean to write so much. Mea culpa.

#50

I guess Paul Scott's Raj Quartet (Jewel in the Crown) would be definitely be post-modern, as it skips back and forth in chronology and has numerous points of view.

Bob Campbell

#50: Well, any kind of discussion like this about the meaning of a genre is going to be somewhat subjective, but I think incarnating "Uncle Sam" as a character and letting him, uh, "have relations" with Richard Nixon, as in The public burning, puts a book onto the postmodern list ... and, more seriously, Coover's treatment of Nixon and the presidency, IMHO, does go beyond a "modern" (in the traditional literary sense) approach to the subject ... it's just that the "postmodern" has become the "modern" to most people nowadays.

Re Coover, I agree with KromesTomes. How can The Public Burning be seen as a realistic novel when blatantly unrealistic things are happening?

#51 - I wouldn't include Paul Scott as a post-modernist. While playing with time could happens in a post-modern novel, it is not what makes it post-modern. That has more to do with intertextuality, fragmenting/breaking reality, etc.

#50 If you believe that pm includes juxtaposition of genre, how can you say that Vonnegut is not a pm author. Slaughterhouse-Five famously mixes sf and realism.

I didn't say the Public Burning was "realistic." I said it was modern. As to "realistic," I suppose here's a reason we call it fiction.

Maybe "juxtaposition of genre" isn't what I mean. I always read Slaughterhouse Five as as pretty straightforward story; that is, not the jagged clash of perspectives that seem to fill the books I think of as postmodern. Billy Pilgrim might not be a very reliable protagonist -- maybe the science fiction fantasy is just a coping mechanism for the horror of war. Time is definitely unhinged, for sure, in that book. Or maybe its just humankind that's unhinged.

I don't know Vonnegut except through his work, and I wonder if he would see himself as a postmodernist. I suspect he wouldn't care much for labels. But its a harmless game. And yes, quite subjective. The joy of being a reader!

Gilbert Sorrentino should be mentioned. It doesn't get more post-mod than Blue Pastoral and Mulligan Stew.

I just finished Ask the Dust by John Fante. Is he modern or post-modern? I liked it.

I am wondering myself, whether a book I just completed, "The lives of shadows: an illustrated novel" by Barbara Hodgson is post-modern or not. Or is an illustrated novel outside those ranks. Time gets displaced as well as reality or hoped for reality, but the illustrations, which include news clippings and house drawings, lend a sense of reality that might be appealing.

Has anyone gotten to David Markson's latest, The Last Novel? I just reread it and thought is really rivals Vanishing Point for his best in, as he puts it, "my own personal genre."

people in year 3000 will look back and perhaps say there was a ton of artistic experimentation in the 20th century. but they won't call it modern or postmodern. i can't help but think of Russell's nightmare that a libarian would throw away his magnum opus.

" 1922 could be seen as the peak modernism."

typically called High Modernism.

however, the human brain works with patterns. if people look at random or "chaotic" lists of words, they start seeing patterns, maybe a psychological analog of Ramsey theory.

life is too short to actually care about academia and paid reviewers. the usual ad hominems are someone is uneducated, lazy, pretentious, eggheaded, i've heard it all. my personal feeling is that lit crit got jealous of math and science, and decided to construct their own skyscraper.

read what you like and like what you read.

"(heck, the only good books that DON'T refer to other works are the Iliad and the Odyssey.)"

many books use allusions/references, and that has nothing to do with someone's dislike of pomo literature, or stated better their refusal to read enough until they find one they like. it took me a lot of listening to find Riley, Glass, Wuorinen, and books are really not that different.

Thank you slickdpdx, Sorrentino is so often overlooked in these kinds of discussions. I think you need to include John Hawkes & William H. Gass in these discussions also. These two writers niche within pomo is the exaltation of language over plot. Plot, in fact, particularly with Hawkes (read The Lime Twig or The Blood Oranges for starters) is irrelevant; language/ideas first and then character second is what matters most to him as a writer. I think pomo, to oversimplify it, is mostly about the rambling, metafictional journey...there is no destination per se in sight with pomo. If the work has a beginning, middle, and some sort of denouenment, then it's not pomo. I think, too, some of the writers listed above have elements of pomo in their writing, but much of their writing isn't strictly postmodern. I'm not sure I'd classify Vonnegut or Asimov as postmodern, or even Delillo completely as postmodern. Sure, White Noise is full of postmodernism, but I'm not convinced you can say that about Libra or Underworld. And if you're looking for something very hefty and very difficult to read free of a discernible plot (I'm getting rather aroused just at the thought) try Women And Men by Joseph McElroy.

Thanks Freeque! You inspired me to go back and give Sorrentino his touchstones.

I'm okay with hefty and with a lack of discernable plot. I don't mind a difficult read. But, I draw the line at "very difficult to read!" Sorrentino makes post-modern easy (except for the fungo bat and baseball obsessions.)

I'm re-reading a lot of these posts and was struck by srharris 19s comment that Infinite Jest could have been even longer in his opinion. I completely agree. In fact, if memory serves me, I remember reading an interview with DFW somewhere in which he stated that what he delivered to the publisher was actually to the tune of 1,700 pages, and that the editor line-editted out 700 or so pages. I hope someday DFW decides to release the complete and uncut edition of Infinite Jest...I bet there would still be an audience for it despite the girth.

Surprised nobody's mentioned the grand-daddy of many of the above: Nabokov's Pale Fire. It also shows that bigger isn't necessarily better.

Regarding Pale Fire: check out LT'er MichaelMenche's review.

Regarding Infinite Jest: Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/27769

May I say from the side that hates post-modern books, God bless you and keep you. I find them rather irritating and whiny at times, and a bit snooty. But of course the same can be said about some things I read.

Anywho, if you enjoy it, enjoy it and don't worry what us merely modern folk think :P.