Matt’s Comments (group member since Mar 06, 2009)

Matt’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

dont let them get to you JE - confederacy of dunces and what not - hang in there bro

the Redford one was meh

JE make sure you stop in our Barbara's stores if you fly through O'Hare!

she's my daughter! she's my sister! my daughter! my sister

there's a difference between acting like a normal person living a normal life and seeking out the exposure of a celebrity - on those rare occasions where we are confronted by someone who just wants to put work out and avoid the exposure (Pynchon, Delillo) or worst yet avoids putting work out to avoid the exposure (Salinger) our celebrity addled society doesnt know what to do with it so we decide there must be something odd or unwell about them

I dont know if anyone has posted about this or is otherwise aware of the fact but Jonathan's book West of Here has a soft release date and is already starting to get out into stores now

Neil wrote: "@ Matt

I don't think Mr. Stross makes any secret of the fact that he uses these to make him feel better about the one starred reviews his own books have gotten."

for what it's worth that was the only one for that title

I wondered if there are any one star reviews of the Atrocity Archives and there was one:

1.0 out of 5 stars Office Space + Lovecraft = FAIL, June 27, 2010
By DragonRock LTD "DragonRock LTD" (Richardson, TX United States) - See all my reviewsThis review is from: The Atrocity Archives (Paperback)
It claims to be James Bond meets Lovecraft and is, kinda ... but the everyman office worker main lead is just so dull I couldn't finish. The mundane office politics overwhelm the occult and the incessant expository dialog is a slog. Just call it a gun, don't give us all the statistics. Most of the part I read was either mundane office stuff (which I get plenty of at work) or people talking at length ABOUT summoning technology with plenty of long words that are meaningless. There was very little action and what little there was was over way too quick (like 10 pages of talking, 1 page of getting attacked by tentacles, then another 10 pages of talking about said tentacles). There are also too many in-jokes. Lots of "nudge, nudge, did ya get that name I just dropped?" That's fun occasionally but every other paragraph it gets old fast. Normally I'm a trooper and will finish anything I start but this one I just can't.

after further consideration a lot of her characteristics/interests come off as beat

Robert it's true - for someone so identified with CBGBs and the punk moment she really was kind of hippy-dippy (despite her disavowals of same) - then again (and not to get into some sort of semantical contretemps) is 'hippy' the right word for someone who clearly identifies with the darker ethos of the french symbolists (go Rimbaud, go!) - she definitely wasnt all 'peace and love' and 'flower power' and 'Jesus died for somebody's sins... but not mine' is definitely a provocation unlike those traditionally considered 'hippy' - it's not street theatre, just street, just straight 'fuck you' and her sexual assertiveness and ambiguity in songs like Gloria or Horses is not about some earth mother credo - it's less fairy tale and more from the gut - the more I think about it Hippy is exactly wrong - artsy-fartsy in the extreme maybe but visceral too

Mike wrote: "Thanks for posting the two articles, Matt, particularly the Docx; if you still have the links handy, I'd like to check out the responses (if any) to them both. I've been caught up in discussions of..."

http://www.salon.com/books/stieg_lars...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/...

Jcamilo wrote: "Please enlight me. The first text make me always wonder that I could write the entire literature section of Guardian withou having to even use my memory. It is dull, based on bookshelves selling, n..."

her argument is written in response to his and eviscerates several of his main points which in any event is either a pedantic exercise in arguing the obvious (literary fiction is of higher quality) or a tiresome jeremiad on non-existent ills (i.e. as she points out most people read either or both as the mood takes them and that's ok)

and btw as a stylist I prefer Raymond Chandler to Martin Amis any day of the week

I think you got it exactly backwards

Ben wrote: "but be warned, it's addictive!..."

and inspiring - another great resource

Are Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown a match for literary fiction?The Millennium trilogy and Da Vinci Code authors sell millions – but according to novelist Edward Docx their books are 'amateurish'. Here, he argues that even good genre fiction doesn't bear comparison with works of true literary merit


Edward Docx
The Observer, Sunday 12 December 2010

On my way back to London the other day, I was clawing my way toward the buffet car when I noticed with a shock that more or less the entire train carriage was reading… novels. (ed. isnt using 'way' twice in one sentence kind of bad writing? and the whole way-day-way sing songing deal? tin ear much?) This cheered me up immensely: partly because I have begun to fear that we are living in some kind of Cowellian nightmare, and partly because I make a good part of my living writing them. Where were the Heats and the Closers, I wondered? The Maxims and the Cosmos? Where the iPads, the iPhones, the Blackberrys and the Game Boys, the Dingoos and the Zunes? Why neither the ding of texts, nor the dong of mail? Barely anyone was even on the phone, for Christ's sake. They were all reading. Quietly, attentively, reading.

My cheer modulated into something, well, less cheerful (but still quite cheerful) when I realised that they were all, in fact, reading the same book. Yes, you've guessed it: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo who Played With Fire and who, some time later we are led to believe, Kicked the Hornet's Nest. In the next three carriages it was the same story – men, women, toddlers. A glance out of the window revealed that even the cows were at it – nose deep, hay forgotten. And when, finally, I arrived at the buffet car, I was greeted with a sigh and a how-dare-you raise of the eyebrows. Why? Because in order to effectively conjure my cup of lactescent silt into existence, the barrista in question would have to put down his… Stieg Larsson.

In terms of sales, 2010 has been the year of the Larsson. Again. His three books have been the three bestselling fiction titles on Amazon UK. Along with Dan Brown, he has conquered the world. The success of the Millennium trilogy is a tale of unimaginable public appetite, staggering international sales, big-screen boosts, perplexed publishers and (let's face it) not-that-originally-reformulated formula fiction. Not least among the reasons for the bafflement of the industry (and fellow writers) is the amateurishness of the books – something, curiously, that Larsson has in common with Brown. Readers, publishers and writers alike can agree that John Grisham, Robert Harris, Tom Clancy or Danielle Steel build up their massive readerships by knowing precisely what they are doing; they are master practitioners of their highly skilled craft. Conversely, Brown and Larsson – in their different ways – are mesmerisingly bad.

Here is Dan Brown, for example, describing – without flinching – how women find his hero's voice like "chocolate for their ears" before having said hero muse to himself that "he knew what came next" – "some ridiculous line about 'Harrison Ford in Harrison Tweed'". Leaving aside the queasiness of the gender politics (another communality with Larsson is the cod feminism), ridiculous is not the word we're after here. Larsson, meanwhile, opens Part 1 ("Incentive") of his first book with the most tedious acronym-packed exchange – not a conversation, not dialogue – that I have ever read. His two characters sit stranded in harbour because one of them can't start his engine (no joke) and begin "to explore what was ethically satisfactory in certain golden parachute agreements during the 90s". Says character "B": ''The AIA obtained government guarantees for a number of projects… The Swedish Trade Union Confederation, LO, also joined in… [and] Wennerström presented a plan, seemingly backed by interests in Poland, which aimed at establishing an industry for the manufacture of packaging food stuffs." Pause for a line or two to take this in before – again without irony – says character "A" in reply: "This is starting to get interesting." No it isn't.

I realise we are sailing into choppy waters here. With Larsson now dead and so decent a chap, how dare I go up on deck and start explaining – amid the storms of publicity and howl of Hollywood and the relentless sluicing of the sales – that his work is not very good even by the standards of his genre? Well because, in my view, we need urgently to remind ourselves of – for want of better terminology – the difference between literary and genre fiction; because, to misquote the literary essayist Isaac D'Israeli, "it seems to me a wretched national compulsion to be gratified by mediocrity when the excellent lies before us".

We need to be clear-eyed here because although there is much written about this subject, there is also much theatricality to the debate. And this serves to hide (on both sides) a fundamental dishonesty. The proponents of genre fiction are not sincere about the limitations even of the best of what they do while being scathing and disingenuous about literary fiction (there's no story, nothing happens etc). Meanwhile, the (equally insincere) literary proponents say either: "Oh, don't blame us, it's the publisher's fault – they label the books and we really don't see the distinction"; or, worse, they adopt the posture and tone of bad actors delivering Shakespeare and talk of poetry and profundity without meaning a great deal or convincing anyone. Both positions are bogus and indicative of something (also interesting) about the way we talk of literature and culture more widely.

It's worth dealing with the difference again, since everyone seems to have forgotten it or become chary of the articulation. Mainly this: that even good genre (not Larsson or Brown) is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. That's the way writing works and lots of people who don't write novels don't seem to get this: if you need a detective, if you need your hero to shoot the badass CIA chief, if you need faux-feminist shopping jokes, then great; but the correlative of these decisions is a curtailment in other areas. If you are following conventions, then a significant percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise. Lots of decisions are already made.

So it follows that genre tends to rely on a simpler reader psychology. If you have a body on the first page, then you raise a question: who killed it and how did it get there? And curiosity will power readers a surprisingly long way. As will, say, a treasure hunt (Brown) or injustice (Grisham) or the locked room mystery format (Larsson). None of this is to say that writing good thrillers is easy. It is still incredibly difficult. But it is easier.

These are the reasons, too, why a bad thriller or detective novel or murder mystery will feel so much better than a bad literary novel – why it might even thrive. Even in a bad genre book, you've still got the curiosity and the reassuring knowledge that the writer will eventually deliver against the conventions. Bad literary fiction, on the other hand, is mostly without such fallback positions and is therefore a whole lot worse.

To enlist a comparison, one might choose to set up a vast and international burger chain and sell millions of burgers. Or one might choose to open a single restaurant selling line-caught eel lasagne one night and hand-fondled quail poached in liquorice the next. We all like burgers – me as much as the next man – and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But let's be honest: there is a major difference in both the production and the consumption of the two experiences. Again, we can see why bad literary fiction is so much more annoying than bad genre. We pay more attention to the restaurant that claims to have carefully sourced its ingredients and then used skill and imagination to bring those to the table in a manner that is original, surprising, beautiful, clever and delicious. Failure in this second case, therefore, is far more irritating. But equally, if you are in the burger-selling business, then although your burgers may appear different – you can flip them with bacon or jalapeño or even Stilton – the truth is that they are all fundamentally the same; you are in the burger business or you are not in business at all.

This is why genre writers cannot claim to have everything. They can take the money and the sales and all that goes with that. And we can sincerely admire them for doing so. But they should not be allowed to get away with suggesting that these things tell us anything about the intrinsic value or scope of their work. Here, for example, is Lee Child talking the kind of ersatz machismo bullshit that so confuses the issue: "The thriller concept is why humans invented storytelling, thousands of years ago. [Is it?] The world was perilous and full of misery, so they wanted the vicarious experience of surviving danger. [Did they?] It's the only real genre and all the other stuff has grown on the side of it like barnacles. [Really? Barnacles?] I could easily write a work of literary fiction. [No you couldn't.] It would take me three weeks, [No it wouldn't] sell about 3,000 copies [Doubt it] and be at least as good as the competition. [Absolutely no chance.] But literary authors can't write thrillers. They try sometimes, but they can never do it. [Crime and Punishment.]"

I'd love to end this piece by dealing with the fallacies of relativism, exposing the other misconceptions surrounding both genre and literary fiction (class needs tackling) and then round the whole thing off with a series of extracts from any number of fine contemporary novelists whom I love – Franzen, Coetzee, Hollinghurst, Amis, Mantel, Proux, Ishiguro, Roth – to illustrate again the happy, rich and textured difference. But there's simply not enough space. Our culture is ever more congested – for lots of good reasons as well as bad. There's huge pressure on books, particular pressure on fiction, and the most pressure of all on literary fiction. And yet, the English language, not football, is our greatest gift to the world. So, if we are to save our excellence in this from its slow extinction, then we simply have to find a way to bring the finest writers of the language more often to the attention of the carriages of people up and down the country who are evidently still willing and able to buy novels for the journey. Because right now – as you read this – they are being subjected to an atrociously bad (and translated) exchange between character A and character B on a broken-down Swedish boat about the establishment of a Polish industry for the manufacture of packaging foodstuffs. Surely they deserve better. No?

Edward Docx's latest novel, The Devil's Garden, is published by Picador in April

Editor: Laura Miller
Updated: TodayTopic:
Stieg Larsson
Tuesday, Dec 14, 2010 20:20 ET
Laura Miller Why we love bad writing
Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown novels are riddled with cliches, but for many readers, that's a feature not a bug
By Laura Miller
SalonForget peace on earth -- there won't even be peace among the bookshelves after the salvo against popular fiction launched in the pages of the Guardian newspaper this week by the British novelist Edward Docx. Docx, dismayed to find himself on a train full of passengers with their noses stuck in Stieg Larsson thrillers, announced "we need urgently to remind ourselves of -- for want of better terminology -- the difference between literary and genre fiction." This, all too predictably, ignited multiple charges of outrage across the Internet.

Guardian readers have already ably dismantled the straw men in Docx's essay. I don't agree with most of what he says, but he has a point when he suggests that the other side often resorts to arguments as trumped up as his own. In fact, ferocious defenders of genre fiction seem far more numerous to me than its (public) detractors, and Docx may have even done them a favor; they seem to enjoy their indignation an awful lot. The not-so-secret reason why pissing matches are so common, after all, is that some people just really love taking it out.

Instead of getting into all that, however, let's consider the original source of Docx's concern: the enormous popularity of Larsson's Millennium Trilogy and the novels of Dan Brown. Certainly, these writers are far from the best their genres have to offer. Even the most vehement of genre champions will not argue that either man is a good, or even adequate, stylist. (Larsson himself seems to have been well aware that he was no Hemingway.) Rather, they are both, in many respects and apart from the whole genre question, fairly bad writers. So why do so many people devour their books?

I pose this question as someone who enjoyed all three of Larsson's books, although I don't care for Brown's. I am exactly the sort of person who might be glimpsed reading "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" on a train. Docx seems to think his fellow citizens only resort to these books because they aren't aware of the much better ones out there. "We simply have to find a way to bring the finest writers of the language more often to the attention of the carriages of people up and down the country who are evidently still willing and able to buy novels for the journey," he writes. These hapless souls are currently being "subjected" to "atrociously bad" thrillers when they could be immersed in such Docx favorites as "Franzen, Coetzee, Hollinghurst, Amis, Mantel, Proux, Ishiguro, Roth."

Continue reading
Now, I'm not only aware of all of those novelists, I've read much of their work, too; some of it I love, and some of it I don't. Yet this didn't stop me from reading Stieg Larsson with a considerable amount of pleasure. Most people who read a lot also read to satisfy a wide spectrum of moods and hankerings, and sometimes trash (provided it's sufficiently engaging) is just the ticket. This taste, like any other, can be highly idiosyncratic. My friend Lev can't abide Larsson, while I have in turn needled him for enthusing over a -- to my mind -- cheesily hard-boiled action-adventure fantasy novel. (Also: He claims to be a "Twilight" fan.)

Why do people like bad books? Some of them probably don't read enough to know the difference. But all the same, I suspect that they wouldn't be equally content with Martin Amis' "The Pregnant Widow" should the bookstore clerk have mistakenly slipped that into their shopping bag instead of "The Lost Symbol." Chances are, Amis' strenuously inventive prose would strike them as too much work. The popular species of bad writing (for there are many, many kinds of awful prose) abounds in clichés, stock characters and conventional plot twists, and, as Amis indicated in the title of a collection of his literary criticism, he is a general in the War Against Cliché.

Until recently, hardly anyone considered why some readers might actually prefer clichés to finely crafted literary prose. A rare critic who pondered this mystery was C.S. Lewis, who -- in a wonderful little book titled "An Experiment in Criticism" -- devoted considerable attention to the appeal of bad writing for what he termed the "unliterary" reader. Such a reader, who is interested solely in the consumption of plot, favors the hackneyed phrase over the original


... because it is immediately recognizable. 'My blood ran cold' is a hieroglyph of fear. Any attempt, such as a great writer might make, to render this fear concrete in its full particularity, is doubly a chokepear to the unliterary reader. For it offers him what he doesn't want, and offers it only on the condition of his giving to the words a kind and degree of attention which he does not intend to give. It is like trying to sell him something he has no use for at a price he does not wish to pay.


With the advent of Amazon reader reviews, such readers have finally found a voice, and a vocabulary with which to express their taste. Speed is the operative metaphor. Novels are praised for being a "fast read" and above all for having writing that "flows." "Flow" is an especially fascinating term because it's one that literary critics have never used, and it perfectly captures the way that clichéd prose can be gobbled up in chunks at a breakneck pace. "The Da Vinci Code" is over 400 pages long, but you can race through it in about three hours. Combine the large population of casual readers who limit themselves to such books with the hardcore bibliophiles who like an occasional dip into something easy, and you have enough buyers to create a hit.

Lewis also juxtaposed the unliterary reader with what he called the "Stylemonger," who makes too great a fetish of words and sentences for their own sake. (Persnickety grammar and usage monitors are included in this group.) "He creates in the minds of the unliterary (who have often suffered under him in school) a hatred of the very word 'style' and a profound distrust of every book that is said to be well written." Even if Docx were in a position to lecture his fellow railway travelers as to the superior merits of Proulx and Hollinghurst, he'd run the risk of activating just this sort of resentment, and doing his favorite authors more harm than good.

And, chances are, quite a few of his listeners would be well aware that Larsson and Brown aren't very good writers. If pressed, they'd say that sometimes they just want to gallop through a story -- or in the case of Larsson's novels, proceed along with a weird methodicalness that taps into what appears to be an amazingly widespread streak of latent obsessive-compulsive disorder. They'd say that they're not, at the moment, equal to the demands of literature, but that just last week they finished "Disgrace" or "Wolf Hall." And then they'd say, Would you mind? Are we done here? Because I'd really like to get back to my book.

nice - thanks JE

I know that many of us adore him - but there's lot of new blood about and with a truer adaptation of true grit hitting theaters at any moment maybe it's time for a little Charles Portis love-fest-

a recent appreciation:
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200...

or even better something from the author of the UR-appreciation text for many of us (cant find the Esquire piece on-line - had a link back on Myspace but groups is STILL not up):

http://www.observer.com/node/41533

you're not missing much

sounds like you got it