Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

So many bastards, so little time.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

No Kings: Americans standing in the way of bad history saying “Oh, Fuck No!”

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

When we show up, we win.

The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

You cannot shame the shameless.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

You are here: Home / Books / Late Night Epistemic Bubble Open Thread: Literary Predators / Parasites

Late Night Epistemic Bubble Open Thread: Literary Predators / Parasites

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What is a voice of a generation?” Honor Levy asks me at Corner Bar on Canal Street. “Is it the most controversial voice? The first person to write in the way that everybody writes? The person that most people hate or love?”

She’s not quite sure she qualifies as a VOG, as she calls it (rhymes with dog), though, as a 26-year-old writer with a lot of hype around her first book, titled My First Book, which she has been tweeting about since she was at Bennington College, she knows that is part of the reason people might read (and write about) her.

Levy was one of the niche icons of Dimes Square, the scene that bloomed on the little patch of the Lower East Side where we are currently drinking Diet Cokes. During the pandemic, it was synonymous with a squad of smart if somewhat bratty young people with vaguely anti-woke artistic ambitions. Their provocations can seem a little beyond their sell-by dates today…

Back in the dinosaur days, when I was still in high school, the NYTimes Sunday Magazine gave its cover to a frog-faced Yale frosh with an essay titled “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life“. Upon reading it, I thought This chick is Going Places, and I only hope some of them will be as repugnant as her writing here. Apparently the piece did attract fan mail from a number of Serious Literary People, among them J.D. Salinger, who would enter into some kind of a groomer / stalker relationship with that 18-year-old and further precipitate her literary career…

The NYTimes review of the latest Joyce Maynard / Lena Dunham / Lady Caroline Lamb ‘book’ is titled “Young, Cool, Coddled and Raised on the Internet” [gift link]:

… We count on our best young fiction writers to bring us news from the digital nervous system. Honor Levy, in “My First Book,” a collection of stories that is indeed her first book, does so with special bite and élan. What does she sound like when she plugs in? Here is the start of “Love Story,” this collection’s opener.

He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other. If they could have, they would have blushed, pink pixels on a screen. Monkey covering eyes emoji. Anime nosebleed GIF. Henlo frend. hiii.

… Levy maintains this tone, and this frazzled online love story, across nine pages. The cultural information piles up vertiginously. Reading Levy is what it must have felt like to read Ann Beattie on her generation in the early 1970s.

The bottom falls out of “Love Story,” or perhaps there was no floor to begin with. Online the young man is Pyramus, and the girl is Thisbe: “He’d burn a church for her.” He thinks, “I’m Ryan Gosling in Drive. I’m American Psycho. I’m Joker. I’m Taxi Driver.” About her, we read, “Her thousand-yard stare said she’d been on the carousel, in the trenches, and under the apple tree.” In real life, she’s a teen with her parents in an Olive Garden. He’s in a Wal-Mart aisle. They are about to withdraw back into their carapaces. And so here we are, convincingly lost amid America’s memes and mirrors in 2024, among what Joyce in “Finnegans Wake” called “the unhappitents of the earth.”

Levy is a young Bennington graduate from California, who has published stories in The New Yorker and New York Tyrant. She has a fine intake filter; her book unloads a ton of fresh writing. That’s the good news. The bad news is that she was encouraged to publish “My First Book” too soon. The falloff is steep between this book’s best stories and its lesser ones, a few of which I suspect were typed on a MacBook a long time ago.

In this collection’s finest work, Levy’s sentences are cold poetry of a sort. She deals individual cards rather than handles an entire deck. Her stories are vignettes, and the observations whoosh past your ears: “We wouldn’t be collectivizing the Adderall sector”; on drugs, “I could dig a hole to China and save the Uyghurs”; “Ronan Farrow is the only person who could truly relate to him”; “No one wants a Holocaust comparison, but isn’t this what we learned on those field trips we all had to take to museums of tolerance?”; “I wonder where the girls with mustache finger tattoos are now”; “Last night, Ivan and I were texting about all the hot art-world-adjacent millennial girls he knows who have been diagnosed with autism.” There are jokes about taking Greta Thunberg’s and Barron Trump’s virginity…

What pushes Levy’s stories beyond being merely on the level of smart magazine essays is the empathy you can sense below the starkness of her sentences. A typical observation: “When I’m at a party and I look across the room I can see everyone holding their red Solo cups and hurting.” Her characters are desperate and unfulfilled. They jockey for dominance in unlighted territory…

If “I wonder where the girls with mustache finger tattoos are now” is what qualifies as ‘smart magazine essay‘ material, it’s no wonder so many publications are in financial trouble. But I’m sure we’ll have all too many more chances to judge, since the main strength of all such lady writers is prolificity, and there’s always a market *somewhere* for narcissistic confessions from a very select socioeconomic demographic.

Reader Interactions

138Comments

  1. 1.

    Pete Downunder

    I have a niece about the same age, also in the NY literary scene, and I’ve asked for her comments on Honor Levy. I’ll pass it along if I get a response any time soon. As an old person I find her prose essentially unreadable, but that may be generational (by age I could be her grandfather). I’d be interested in the thoughts of other Jackals, both olds and any yoots.

  2. 2.

    MagdaInBlack

    Lord know I’m no literary critic of note, but reading the paragraph insert above, my first thought was ” she’s trying to hard.”

  3. 3.

    SpaceUnit

    Once again, I have no idea what this post is about.

     

    Seems to involve authors.

  4. 4.

    Brachiator

    Levy is a young Bennington graduate from California, who has published stories in The New Yorker and New York Tyrant. She has a fine intake filter; her book unloads a ton of fresh writing. That’s the good news.

    Interesting to see that the New York literary scene still exists, with all the stations of the Cross. Exclusive college, New Yorker, New York Times. I’m not familiar with the New York Tyrant, but I assume that it has the right pedigree.

    Reminds me of people I knew who would get an apartment in the Village or move to Paris on the path to becoming a writer.

    ETA In my college days, I knew people who knew people who knew Joyce Maynard. Her situation definitely conferred some celebrity, which sparked envy in some, mild curiosity in others.

  5. 5.

    matt

    “When I’m at a party and I look across the room I can see everyone holding their red Solo cups and hurting.”

  6. 6.

    Gloria DryGarden

    I don’t want to read her. I have a list of good books I’m waiting to have time to read.
    and what the hell do red solo cups have to do w hurting? It’s telling, not showing.

  8. 8.

    Tony Jay

    That is hilariously bad. I only wish that on my best day I could spin off such a collection of words so irresistibly meaningless, chum in the water for passing publisharks.

    How the fuck did anyone think that babble is Voice of a Generation quality?

      synonymous with a squad of smart if somewhat bratty young people with vaguely anti-woke artistic ambitions.

    Ah. Got it. How very not surprising.

  9. 9.

    opiejeanne

    @Gloria DryGarden: They’re young and hip and don’t have the money to buy even cheap wine glasses, and they feel isolated and bored, just like everyone else most of the time.

    ETA: almost everyone else at a party most of the time.

  10. 10.

    Shalimar

    The general writing advice is to know yourself and also to only write about what you know, and Jesus Christ she’s like a genius who never stops.  Please make her stop.

  11. 11.

    Baud

    This is good writing.

    as a 26-year-old writer with a lot of hype around her first book, titled My First Book,

  15. 15.

    Baud

    If I wanted to be a voice of a generation, I’d write a book when every there, their, and they’re was used incorrectly.

  18. 18.

    Jay

    @opiejeanne:

    except, I would read that, while sipping my Starbucks at a Barnes and Noble, then putting it back on the shelf.

    We don’t have toilet books any more.

  19. 19.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @opiejeanne: I don’t care about the cups, or wine glasses. Yes, people all feel Private lonely pain at a party, sure, that’s timeless. It doesn’t pull me in. It’s “hurting” that is too general for me. When a story pulls me in, it’s the specifics, the unique, that interests me. Hurting .. about what, because of what? It’s like saying there were colors in a painting. This author has 1-2 more sentences to get my attention. Else, I’m moving on..
    im Thinking how the first page of the color purple had me on my knees. Or harkness . Or Dorothy sayers.

    but I’m glad it works for you. How do y say it? YMMV

  24. 24.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    If you write a book that nobody reads did it make a sound

  26. 26.

    Tony Jay

    @Jay:

    Oh, I remember well the late 80s/early 90s craze for ‘working class books about druggies and dole-scum written entirely in phonetic pidgin idiom, preferably Scottish, because Irving Welsh’.

    But at least those books, occasionally, had something interesting to say about the times and the ignored people living in them. Another hefty dose of ‘upper middle-class white-girl being adorably naïf and a bit transgressive in a way fond white uncles find attractive – just look at me gazing up at you from down here Mister Publisher, wink wink’ is interesting only in predictability of its blandness.

    Yes, I do have a hangover. I’m grouchy.

  28. 28.

    Princess

    @matt: Deep, man. Very empathy. Wow.

    It’s a bad thing for Levy that I get just about all of her references. To be the latest voice of a generation you should probably be to some extent incomprehensible to an old person like me.

  30. 30.

    oldster

    Now that we can train a Large Language Model to write prose that sounds like Austen, Hemingway, or any of the greats, this young person concluded that the path to greatness lies in writing prose that sounds like an LLM.

  31. 31.

    bjacques

    @Princess: Dimes Square is the Spencer’s Gift that keeps on giving. A dash of the fash to make you feel a bit naughty on the weekends when you’re forced to be woke at work. I read the full article and could follow it, but I’ve been idly following the Dark Enlightenment-adjacent Dimes Square scene and what’s left of it since discovering them last year. None of its “stars” seems to have amounted to much since, but they’re still around and their ethos could erupt again like herpes.

    If Honor Levy is still tradcath, will she be Ross Douthat’s new muse? I’m not surprised to see Bret Easton Ellis name-checked, but if that’s supposed to indicate that the latest bright young things are conservative, it looks more like privilege revealed to be innately conservative, which isn’t news.

    I’m sure with her privileged background she’ll land a gig at FTFNY or the WaPo and have the last laugh. Maybe that Dimes Square playwright can do a reboot of All About Eve featuring her and Megan McArdle. I’d pay to see that.

  32. 32.

    Derelict

    “Young lady, if you feel the urge to write some more, please lie down until it goes away.”

    I used to run the radio station in Bennington, and I was treated to a non-stop stream of Bennington College kids doing their “community contact” term. With very very few exceptions, these were all the failsons and faildaughters of extremely wealthy parents, sent to Bennington to meet the other fail-offspring of other extremely wealthy parents. The college produces connections instead of education.

    And as for the writing instruction there, well, . . . in my magazine/book editing days, a colleague of mine once got into an amusing argument with one of the writing instructors from Bennington. The instructor was adamant that the core of the very best writing was about feeling and absolutely not about communicating. Indeed, trying to use writing to communicate was wrong. To which my colleague replied “That explains everything.” That exchange was nearly 30 years ago, and Honor Levy seems to be upholding that Bennington College tradition of making sure writing and communication never become entangled with one another.

  33. 33.

    RL

    “He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K.”

    Not a fan of this Hotel California remake.

  38. 38.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    I was happier when society could aspire to be a part of the Pepsi Generation

  39. 39.

    Princess

    @Baud: evidently. Dimes Square per Wikipedia: The term Dimes Square has become a metonym for a number of associated reactionary aesthetic movements centered in the area, particularly several events and podcasts funded by Peter Thiel.

    The article also tells me it’s was the home of post-ironic tradCatholicism. Sounds very Liz Bruenig. Now that’s a name I haven’t thought about in years. Best part of leaving Twitter was how certain voices just instantly vanished.

  40. 40.

    Anne Laurie

    @Baud: Wait, is Honor Levy a right winger?

    IRONICALLY!!!, you peasant… Last I remember, she was calling herself a tradcath (revanchist Catholic) anarcholibertarian, which:  You remember Zappa’s line, “like dancing about architecture”?

  41. 41.

    Anne Laurie

    @Princess: Liz Bruenig. Now that’s a name I haven’t thought about in years.

    Mommy Bruenig mostly disappeared from centrist / normie twitter, AFAICT, when Roe v Wade was repealed.  She’d made a good living insisting that only the existence of ‘baby killers’ stood between America and a fully-funded Scandinavian-style social safety net; when the general ‘conservative’ (GOP) response was to double down on cruelty & punishment, she literally ran away from social media, sobbing as she went.

  44. 44.

    Baud

    @Anne Laurie:

    She’d made a good living insisting that only the existence of ‘baby killers’ stood between America and a fully-funded Scandinavian-style social safety net

     

    Doesn’t Scandinavia allow abortions?

  45. 45.

    Betty Cracker

    @Princess:

    Best part of leaving Twitter was how certain voices just instantly vanished.

    Ain’t that the truth! There are voices I missed and knew in advance I would miss. But I underestimated the salutary effects of so many douchebags going silent all at once!

  46. 46.

    Ruviana

    Not sure why you had to make fun of Joyce Maynard’s looks.  It’s always a way to discipline and erase women. Just felt gratuitous and unnecessary to me.

  48. 48.

    Ramalama

    I went to Writin’ School at a time when a few of my cohorts wrote a snarling book under one assumed name that became a literary darling, briefly.

    Sometimes I feel the burn of people doing well with books I do not enjoy, but these days I am happy that people – maybe not so many people – are still reading novels. I say this as I toil every day for 1 hour on a something that’s gotten out of control. Was supposed to be a five paragraph remembrance that’s now a novel. I have a day job. I have French that I am supposed to be learning (24×7). I have a dog who is likely dying. I am writing and am not so jealous of others that it knocks me out of the game. Don’t read it if you disagree with the preciousness of vapid young. Instead keep reading.

    Adrian McKinty wrote eleventy gorgeous books in the Crime Fiction genre (set in mostly No. Ireland), garnered all kinds of praise and awards and still almost lost his house (literally). Then he gave up writing in order to drive a taxi to feed his family,  and likely depressed at not being able to make a living from his talent. Don Winslow somehow found out about it, called him, and connected Adrian with his own agent – and Adrian proposed a book for an American market, and now he’s maybe a zillionaire now living in NYC. I can’t get through the American book, but I love the fact that he’s on top of his world now.

    This has been an entirely random set of sentences as a response, yes.

  51. 51.

    Princess

    @Anne Laurie: I know a couple of semi-public women with her views (radar, anti-abortion, “democratic socialism”) and I have no patience for them. They purport to be soooo much lefter than the rest of us, they can’t possibly vote for Democrats. I haven’t seen any of them, for instance  speak about what Biden is doing for labour. They speak left but the entire effect of their lives is far right. No love.

  53. 53.

    Ken

    Though not quite the same thing, I’m reminded of reading the publishers’ catalogs of new plays*. There are always a disproportionately large number described as “A young gay man’s quirky adventures trying to break into the New York theater scene.” Write what you know, they say.

    * One thing I’ve learned from community theater — if you put on one play, the publisher will have you on their mailing list forever. I swear some of them have spent more money sending us catalogs than we originally paid for rights.

  54. 54.

    Baud

    @Princess:

    I don’t know why some folks still have difficulty accepting that some people are fraudulent. We’ve had so many examples over the years to learn from.

  55. 55.

    Ken

    @Betty Cracker: But I underestimated the salutary effects of so many douchebags going silent all at once!

    Was that a belated May the Fourth callout to Obi-Wan’s line about “a great disturbance in the Force”?

  57. 57.

    Baud

    @Princess:

    I know a couple of semi-public women with her views (radar, anti-abortion, “democratic socialism”)

     
    What does “radar” mean here?

  58. 58.

    lowtechcyclist

    What occurs to me is that a graduate of a school like Bennington College won’t be the voice of her generation because she’s almost surely known a thin and very unrepresentative slice of her own generation.

  59. 59.

    The Thin Black Duke

    I’m dreading the inevitable “prestige TV” adaptation on Max.

  60. 60.

    Matt McIrvin

    @MagdaInBlack:

    Lord know I’m no literary critic of note, but reading the paragraph insert above, my first thought was ” she’s trying to hard.”

    Yeah, but, you know, I was impressed as a youth when someone like Harlan Ellison or Thomas Pynchon did the 1960s-70s version of that.

  61. 61.

    TBone

    Already celebrated National Hoagie Day a little too early this week, so I’m going with Cinco De Mayo.  It’s cold and rainy but hot sauce is in the cards…🎶

    m.youtube.com/watch?v=1EQP5SNqxRw

    Oh dear, the loudest bird in the neighborhood just alighted to give them a run for the money in the volume dept. of LOUD 📢 😳

  62. 62.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Princess: We all know that the true left is religious ultraconservatism and the Divine Right of Kings.

    It always seemed like such a shallow ruse. And I seriously doubt that her generation is majority tradcath.

  63. 63.

    BruceFromOhio

    “tradcath (revanchist Catholic) anarcholibertarian”

    Woah, if that’s your claim, you’re doing it rong like three different ways.

  64. 64.

    Marmot

    @Anne Laurie:

    IRONICALLY!!!, you peasant… Last I remember, she was calling herself a tradcath (revanchist Catholic) anarcholibertarian, which:  You remember Zappa’s line, “like dancing about architecture”?

    I, um, she’s right-wing in an ironic sort of lookitme flirting with my own doom way?

    If that’s the case, I hate her. The only insight I have is that there was never such a thing as an ironic mustache. It just became a mustache. Same with pixie neo-revanchism.

  65. 65.

    TBone

    @Matt McIrvin: all the far lefties I know are just plain weird “woo woo” spiritually-insane with mish-mashed up ideas that are every bit as ridiculous as Dominionism.  I’m not saying my ideas on spiritual stuff are correct either.  But I gotta draw the line somewhere and it’s far, far away from the psychobabble I was subjected to by far leftie former friends.  Far. Far. Away.

  66. 66.

    kalakal

    @MagdaInBlack:

    Lord know I’m no literary critic of note, but reading the paragraph insert above, my first thought was ” she’s trying to hard.”

    It made me skip back a few decades to all the people who’d read Neuromancer or Burning Chrome and then spewed out unreadable totally formulaic dystopian SF noir where every second word was technobabble. I liked William Gibson’s stuff but boy did he open the door to an awful lot of bad writing

  69. 69.

    Starfish

    @Pete Downunder: When people this young get book deals, the correct questions to ask are “How rich is their family?” and “Who are they connected to?”

    The appropriate phrase is often “nepo baby.”

  70. 70.

    MomSense

    Ima let you finish Honor, but my friend’s daughter Yvonne Woon is writing award winning YA novels.  My Flawless Life and If You,Then Me are great reads.

  72. 72.

    Starfish

    @Baud:

    Your publisher: Do you have any title ideas?
    You: My First Book
    Your publisher: 🦗🦗🦗🦗

  73. 73.

    Starfish

    @Baud: This would be a good use case for generative AI. Just pop in the paragraphs, and say “This is a book by Honor Levy. What is she talking about?” The generative AI will be more coherent than the original.

  74. 74.

    RevRick

    I try to imagine preaching a sermon like this, and I would become the first UCC preacher to be dragged out into the streets and beaten to death.

  75. 75.

    Matt McIrvin

    @TBone: I’ve always assumed that the ones who were specifically “left” Christianist reactionaries had their moment in the sun as a reaction to Hillary Clinton running for President. The further left hated her for various reasons, but she was also running on an openly feminist platform, so you could point to Hillary Clinton and say “feminism is a corporatist/warmonger distraction!” and the news folk would eat it up.

  80. 80.

    kalakal

    @Derelict:

    The instructor was adamant that the core of the very best writing was about feeling and absolutely not about communicating. Indeed, trying to use writing to communicate was wrong

    She’s certainly taken that lesson to heart

  82. 82.

    kalakal

    @Omnes Omnibus: We have been described as a bunch of elderly shutins

    Personally I’ve always loathed the ‘voice of…’ as appointed by msm reviewers. These are people who’d buy an electric wok

  84. 84.

    TBone

    @Matt McIrvin: I meant “woo” as in New Age crystals and herbal crap mind games mashed up with all sorts of Hindu, “I Am,” satanic/pagan, reincarnation, Xtian, Druid/ Wiccan, and LOTS of pysychobabble in a big soup pot of crazy.  Like this one woman thought she was entering another level of being by chanting while trying to reach orgasm seated cross-legged in front of a scented candle, seeing “visions” of I don’t wanna know what.  Hopefully not Hillary 😆

  85. 85.

    Kay

    The Israeli government also faces mounting pressure at home. Thousands of Israelis rallied Saturday night calling for a deal to bring hostages home. Protesters in Tel Aviv chanted “war is not holy, life is”, with some accusing Mr Netanyahu of aiming to prolong the conflict in Gaza. Saturday’s demonstrations in Israel were the latest display of the increased domestic pressure Mr Netanyahu is facing to secure the return of the hostages. Of the 252 who were kidnapped by Hamas on 7 October, 128 are still unaccounted for – and among them, at least 34 are presumed dead. Natalie Eldor, a protester in Tel Aviv, told Reuters news agency she was there to “support a deal now, yesterday”.

    It’s funny because the United States keeps saying Hamas are opposed to a deal but protestors in Israel keep saying Netanyahu (and company) are opposed to a deal. I suppose both could be opposed to a deal but why would the US not acknowlege that Netanyahu is also blocking one and focus solely on Hamas?
    At this point I think I’m going with the protestors in Israel. I don’t know who to believe but they seem more credible than the US state department.

  86. 86.

    frosty

    @Starfish: ​I read Gravity’s Rainbow five times because every time I read it I found something new down the rabbit hole. Yes, I was in my twenties.

  87. 87.

    Marmot

    Philip José Farmer! That’s what Ms. Levy reminded me of. Obtuse, self-consciously avant-garde, a bit transgressional. Mind, I don’t have much experience with experimental prose. Or patience.

  88. 88.

    Starfish

    @Omnes Omnibus: I am usually happy to call everyone else here a bunch of olds, but this writing is trash and still got published in a book with a very generic title because this writer is probably either rich or connected.

  89. 89.

    Starfish

    @frosty: “I was in my twenties” explains the period when we had the free time to be so deeply absorbed in something so dense and nonsensical.

  90. 90.

    bjacques

    @Starfish: I love GR. I bounced off it hard the first couple of times in high school but roared through it in college, and I’ve reread it every several years. Having travelled more and learned more history in between each time helped a lot.

  92. 92.

    different-church-lady

    Hey, look, when Finnegan’s Wake came out it was considered unreadable gobbldygook, and now eighty decades later it’s considered an unreadable masterpiece.

  93. 93.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Starfish: If anyone has read more of her writing than the single paragraph quoted in the review, I would be interested in their opinion.  I have not.  As a result, I am not going say that she is good or terrible.  I would say that I was immune to the whole VOG thing, but I did buy Bright Lights, Big City, Less that Zero, and Slaves of New York when they came out.

  95. 95.

    different-church-lady

    @Peke Daddy:

    His face was a marble statue / Her face was an anime waifu / They scrolled into each other / If they could have, they would

    Are you with me so far?

  98. 98.

    different-church-lady

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I did buy Bright Lights, Big City, Less that Zero, and Slaves of New York when they came out.

    If anyone has read more of those books than the Wikipedia entries about them, I would be interested in their opinion. I have not.

  99. 99.

    different-church-lady

    @Peke Daddy: ​
      I tried Ulysses in my 20s. I found it mysterious and then got to the newspaper article part and found it impenetrable.

    I tried it again in my 40s. This time I totally got it, but then got to the newspaper article part and lost interest.

  101. 101.

    Mick McDick

    Since James Joyce, writers like to unload practically unreadable sentences in a bid for critical attention. None of them had Joyce’s genius, though, so they descend into pretentious, pseudo-schizoid drivel.

    Gore Vidal, a very readable and sharp author, spoke of books that were meant to be taught in college, not read by readers. Hello, Honor Levy!

  106. 106.

    Starfish

    I regret to inform you that I asked ChatGPT who Honor Levy’s parents were, and it repeatedly lied to me.

  107. 107.

    different-church-lady

    I suppose it’s theoretically possible to be the Voice of A Generation™ and a terrible writer at the same time.

  111. 111.

    jonas

    @Derelict: Bennington has a reputation as an incubator for aspiring writers and artists, but almost no endowment and one of the highest tuition sticker prices in the US, so very little financial aid. Probably not terribly representative of “her generation,” unless you mean that in jaded Gen-Z trust funder NYC terms. Which of course she does.

  112. 112.

    Melancholy Jaques

    I’ve completely lost track of the literary voices of my generation: Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, and Bret East Ellis. I haven’t read or heard anyone mention their names in many years.

    Isn’t it best to wait a couple decades before deciding who is the voice of a generation?

  113. 113.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Melancholy Jaques: I haven’t read or heard anyone mention their names in many years.

    Hey, I mentioned all three just a few comments up.

    ETA:  Well, I mentioned their books.

  115. 115.

    twbrandt

    @Ken:

    There are always a disproportionately large number described as “A young gay man’s quirky adventures trying to break into the New York theater scene.”

    Real virgin territory there.

  116. 116.

    Frank Wilhoit

    By definition, a “voice of a generation” would not be the voice of the next.  This is one of the false and harmful pressures that creative artists come under.  “Don’t be yourself; instead, look around you and be them.”  Then if you reject that, it immediately translates into, “Your work is bad because you are a bad person”.  And not only are these the gatekeepers talking, in academia and publishing, but they also got hold of the peer groups that you may try to find, and some (? enough) of them say these things too.  It is a grinding experience.

  119. 119.

    Another Scott

    @Baud: Her prose reads like bad AI to me.

    That’s fine.  I’m not her audience.

    But who is her audience??!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  120. 120.

    Melancholy Jaques

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I commented before reading the whole thread.

    I was trying to think if there were more authors than those three that were highly touted at that time. That was right when I got out of law school and started reading books again. My favorite from that era was Ironweed by William Kennedy, though I don’t recall that anyone thought he was the voice of any generation.

    ETA – I just did a little search: John Kennedy Toole, though being dead may preclude being a voice of a generation.

  121. 121.

    dnfree

    @Marmot: Philip Jose Farmer!  Riverworld!   One of the best beginnings to a series ever, then interminable waits for subsequent books and a totally overblown and rushed finish.  I’m still disappointed.

  122. 122.

    Brachiator

    @Melancholy Jaques:

    I’ve completely lost track of the literary voices of my generation: Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, and Bret East Ellis. I haven’t read or heard anyone mention their names in many years.

    They still write. Janowitz published memoirs in 2016, I think. The others have tried their hands at screenwriting.

    The literary scene dominated by New York sensibilities still exists but is less important.

    Nobody cares about who might be trying to write the Great American Novel.

  123. 123.

    Melancholy Jaques

    @Brachiator:

    I have a handful of literary PhD friends, I am going to ask them whatever happened to the idea of the Great American Novel?

  124. 124.

    opiejeanne

    @Gloria DryGarden: I didn’t say it works for me, I was saying that I understood what she was getting at, and as Baud pointed out, it was the least bad of her writing exhibited here. You’re right, it is too short  an observation, a cliche when left hanging there without some development.

  126. 126.

    Princess

    @Kay: Haaretz reported this morning that Netanyahu proposed the last deal expecting Hamas to reject it. I guess Hamas called his bluff.

  127. 127.

    moonbat

    @different-church-lady: ​
    I was of that age when Bret Easton Ellis was declared the VO my Gen X and I have always resented it. I read his books and the title Less Than Zero encapsulates them pretty well. I could not stand that author and he did NOT speak for me then or now. YMMV, of course.
    These mysteriously wealthy, well connected but reportedly brilliant (take my best friend’s word for it) VOG authors are trotted out every so often to instant acclaim, some mediocre movie adaptations, and the down the memory hole. If the above is indicative of the entire work I won’t be plunking down any cash to find out what the well- connected types think this generation sounds like. It’s giving AI mish-mash, Tik-Tok speak.

  129. 129.

    Captain C

    @Anne Laurie:

    IRONICALLY!!!, you peasant… Last I remember, she was calling herself a tradcath (revanchist Catholic) anarcholibertarian, which:  You remember Zappa’s line, “like dancing about architecture”?

    I think this falls under Popehat’s rule of goats, to wit:  if you’re fucking goats ironically, you’re still a goatfucker.

  130. 130.

    Captain C

    I haven’t gotten through the whole thread yet so I may not be the first to observe this, but this author seems like she looked at Lena Dunham’s character in Girls and said to herself:  “I’m gonna do that, but for real and from the right!”

  131. 131.

    cmorenc

    @Starfish: i was forced to read gravity’s rainbow for one of my required “electives” in college back in the 70s and write a paper critiquing/interpreting it.  UGH!  IIRC I was just enough versed in lit/babble at the time to write a passable enough paper to fit with the prof’s expectations to get a gentleman’s “B”, but I wish I had the courage at the time to turn in a paper only nine words long: “What a pile of pretentious unintelligible horse shit”.

  132. 132.

    WereBear

    @Baud: got me good.

     

    I was about to try to read Joyce Maynard’s memoir, again, and now I feel relieved not to.

    Writers/general creatives I will have a guest post Sunday 3 pm with my latest whacky plan.

  133. 133.

    Starfish

    @Layer8Problem: Maybe we are blocking out the memories of all the people who wanted to talk about Infinite Jest? There was definitely a type there.

  135. 135.

    burritoboy

    It’s a version of Bret Easton Ellis, who quite literally was branded (yes, branded as a marketing term) as the VOG and…..was a rich brat (dad was a real estate developer in LA) who went to Bennington.  Bennington, to some extent, manufactures (and yes, I am using these business terms as business terms intentionally) this type of writer. Ellis started out having at least a reasonable bit of self-awareness of his rich own brat-ness, but…..couldn’t maintain even a minimal level of inventiveness and quality.  There’s no point in this type of writing in my opinion anymore: Ellis did it already, and figures like Tao Lin extended it out for another few decades (and Lin did it a lot better than this.)

    The inch-thick political right wing-ness is probably meaningful, but is probably not the most revealing thing. (The inch-thick is likely far more important than the conservative bit, I would posit.)

  136. 136.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Starfish: Oh, gosh. We all read Gravity’s Rainbow just to say we had done it.

    And if you’d read V. or The Crying of Lot 49 beforehand you might even have understood it to a certain extent. (FTR I’d plump for the latter, it’s briefer and contains “the shortest line of blank verse ever written.”)

  137. 137.

    Annamal

    I thought Douglas Coupland was maybe one of the voices of generation X (given he pretty much coined the term). I was rereading Microserfs the other day and I think it holds up surprisingly well.

  138. 138.

    Quadrillipede

    A friend of mine “accidentally lost” a copy of American Psycho in my house once, so I ended up reading the whole thing. It eventually became an exercise in trying to find a single passage that isn’t entirely paranoid delusion and/or about unmitigated assholes.  (IIRC, there’s one half-a-page paragraph about 3/4s of the way through.) It was still better than the film adaptation though, so… 🤷‍♂️

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