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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The word "genre" only has so much meaning. It's either a critical term or a marketing one. It doesn't really have much use as a marker of merit or quality because for any genre you can almost always find a work of fiction that has literary merit and fits the markers of the genre (e.g., fantasy : Tolkien (or The Tempest), mystery : Maltese Falcon, etc.) Then explain the term literary fiction and how it is always contrasted with genre
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Mar 16, 2019 23:50
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The word "genre" only has so much meaning. It's either a critical term or a marketing one. It doesn't really have much use as a marker of merit or quality because for any genre you can almost always find a work of fiction that has literary merit and fits the markers of the genre (e.g., fantasy : Tolkien (or The Tempest), mystery : Maltese Falcon, etc.)
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Mar 16, 2019 23:50
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:We have a good mystery thread that's just getting rolling -- the knox's rules one. At the moment my plan for next months BotM is to pick a genre mystery to help that thread get.kickstarted -- it has great potential but almost went to archives. I've been having a hard time getting into BotM threads (never did finish Bear, which is shameful because it's like 120 pages long) but I'd certainly participate in a mystery BotM. I enjoy mysteries but have a hard time getting out of the Agatha Christie Comfort Food Hole, so it'd be good to expand my horizons.
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Mar 16, 2019 23:51
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Flesnolk posted:Then explain the term literary fiction and how it is always contrasted with genre It's a term about content, not quality. "Genre" designates a story as having specific kinds of content, and "literary fiction" is used as a catch-all for stories that don't have that kind of content -- usually, by exclusion, stories without speculative/fantastic elements and without certain kinds of codified plots or settings associated with specific genres. (This can get mushy -- I've seen crime fiction considered "mystery," "thriller," or "literary" a bit arbitrarily.) It's true that, in literature criticism, "genre" and "literary" have been conflated with quality, but it's not really what the terms are intended to or should mean. This thread aside, there's plenty of good to great genre fiction, and plenty of mediocre to godawful literary fiction. (For more on that, I recommend B. R. Myers's A Reader's Manifesto, which is long-form takedowns of several popular authors of literary fiction. I imagine some of his takes would spark fights on these forums, which is fair enough, but at bare minimum I think he's right on the money about Paul Auster.) Antivehicular fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Mar 17, 2019 |
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Mar 16, 2019 23:57
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There's a lot of celebrated mid-20th century literary fiction that's mostly just men complaining about their terrible marriages and issues with women but the percentage of litfic ["literally fictive" writing] that's terrible is so much smaller than that of genre fiction. There's no reason to be defensive of genre work, but it has to be acknowledged honestly.
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Mar 17, 2019 00:07
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Flesnolk posted:Good genre fiction is an oxymoron. The term in itself means it's not good enough to be real fiction. Ah yes, the well known distinction between "real" fiction, where the book is really not factual and "fake" fiction, where you can't be certain it's not a true story!
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Mar 17, 2019 00:08
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I’ve never really liked the use of term “genre” to mean “thing bad” and really prefer it when it’s used simply as a categorization to describe content—they way the term “genre” is used in music or film. Categories aren’t indicative of quality and are used to describe content. Some genres have a less stellar ratio of bad to good than others, naturally. I also find the “literary fiction” pretty useless as it’s used as a marketing category, since it’s just basically a catch-all for something that isn’t super obviously SFF, romance, mystery, or horror and doesn’t tell you anything about the actual content of the story or even the quality—I used to work at a Barnes & Noble and a lot of what you’d find in the literary fiction section was anything but literary and some of the lines were blurry. Thrillers sometimes got shelves in litfic and sometimes mystery, seemingly arbitrarily. I remember Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was shelved in the literary fiction section despite being pretty clearly fantasy on account of it having fairies and magic in it and not in a magical realist sort of way. I prefer the term “pulp” to mean “thing bad” and “literary” to mean “thing good,” where either can be applied to any genre. So within fantasy you’d have pulp fantasy (Sanderson, Gurm, Rothfuss, honestly most fantasy because most fantasy sucks rear end) and literary fantasy (LeGuin, Peake). And naturally some poo poo that’s kind of in the middle.
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Mar 17, 2019 00:17
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Doctor Faustine posted:I prefer the term “pulp” to mean “thing bad” and “literary” to mean “thing good,” where either can be applied to any genre. So within fantasy you’d have pulp fantasy (Sanderson, Gurm, Rothfuss, honestly most fantasy because most fantasy sucks rear end) and literary fantasy (LeGuin, Peake). And naturally some poo poo that’s kind of in the middle. This comes with its own huge slew of problems too, mainly that pulp stuff can be really entertaining, and entertainment is one of the largest measures of success imo, for this medium of entertainment that is books. For example, I'd personaly classify all of Stephen King's books as "pulp horror" even though I think many of them (okay, some of them) are great novels. To be honest, I think the term "pulp" describes more of an "ease of reading" than general quality. In that case I'd definitely agree that Stormlight Archive be classified as pulp fantasy (I love the series, sue me). Whereas stuff like Peake which is objecively more difficult to read, deserves to be called literary fantasy or whatever, which speaks nothing to the quality (I love Gormenghast too though).
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Mar 17, 2019 00:27
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The word "genre" only has so much meaning. It's either a critical term or a marketing one.\ We all know where I stand
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Mar 17, 2019 00:29
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onsetOutsider posted:entertainment is one of the largest measures of success imo, for this medium of entertainment that is books
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Mar 17, 2019 00:35
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Mel Mudkiper posted:We all know where I stand I don't Wait poo poo nice new av mel
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Mar 17, 2019 00:35
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onsetOutsider posted:In that case I'd definitely agree that Stormlight Archive be classified as pulp fantasy (I love the series, sue me). Whereas stuff like Peake which is objecively more difficult to read, deserves to be called literary fantasy or whatever, which speaks nothing to the quality (I love Gormenghast too though). How difficult something is to read isn’t really a measure of literary quality. I mentioned LeGuin as an author I would consider to have written literary fantasy, and there’s nothing particularly challenging about her prose. It’s clean and tidy and very easy to read, while still having an aesthetic quality that is elevated. Prose quality is the main issue, not difficulty or ease of reading. You can have challenging prose that’s good and challenging prose that’s bad. Ditto easy to read prose. Imo the real differentiating factor is thematic weight. If you could write a term paper on it how it deals with a particular theme without resorting to completely bullshitting your way through it, it’s probably literary.
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Mar 17, 2019 00:43
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FactsAreUseless posted:This doesn't seem like a great basis for critical thought about writing. I knew somebody would call me out for this! My argument is this: Treating entertainment as a metric of value is not mutually exclusive with thinking critically about writing. Critical discourse about writing should absolutely take into account the factor of entertainment value, not as some wishy-washy shield from all criticism, but as a valid metric that may be supported by textual evidence, just like the equally vague concept of "good characterization". So there.
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Mar 17, 2019 00:43
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onsetOutsider posted:I knew somebody would call me out for this! My argument is this:
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Mar 17, 2019 00:47
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Entertainment value is totally subjective and can be (and often is) completely divorced from actual merit. I find trashy historical bodice rippers wildly entertaining. They are also not good by any reasonable metric.
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Mar 17, 2019 00:52
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FactsAreUseless posted:Entertainment isn't a metric of anything. What people find entertaining is shaped by culture and familiarity. It is neither quantifiable nor qualifiable. It is less measurable than anything else you could possibly talk about regarding writing. Agents and buyers everywhere would disagree, I imagine.
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Mar 17, 2019 00:55
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Doctor Faustine posted:I prefer the term “pulp” to mean “thing bad” and “literary” to mean “thing good,” where either can be applied to any genre. So within fantasy you’d have pulp fantasy (Sanderson, Gurm, Rothfuss, honestly most fantasy because most fantasy sucks rear end) and literary fantasy (LeGuin, Peake). And naturally some poo poo that’s kind of in the middle. I think there’s definitely such a thing as enjoyable pulp and bad “literary” fiction but I agree with you in terms of having a spectrum of pulp<->literary to classify genre books based on style, quality of prose, etc. Otherwise you end up in impossible situations where you are calling The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and The Plot Against America literary fiction and The Man in High Castle genre even though they’re all alt-history. Or you have to tie yourself in knots avoiding calling The Buried Giant fantasy even though it has dragons and swords and King Arthur.
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Mar 17, 2019 00:58
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Thranguy posted:Agents and buyers everywhere would disagree, I imagine. The capital value of an artwork is not a measure of artistic value
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Mar 17, 2019 00:59
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Thranguy posted:Agents and buyers everywhere would disagree, I imagine.
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Mar 17, 2019 01:00
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FactsAreUseless posted:Agents and buyers aren't critics. I would argue that all readers are critics, but unfortunately our culture has been brainwashed by capitalism to confuse financial merit for cultural and artistic merit
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Mar 17, 2019 01:01
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I would argue that all readers are critics, but unfortunately our culture has been brainwashed by capitalism to confuse financial merit for cultural and artistic merit
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Mar 17, 2019 01:05
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FactsAreUseless posted:I think being a critic - or at least reading critically - takes training and knowledge. I would say every reader has the capacity for it but that doesn't mean they're doing it. Well, I argue that criticism is simply exploring the relationship between reader and text. Even the most superficial assessment of a text is still a critical response. The goal of training and study is simply to expand the toolkit one uses.
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Mar 17, 2019 01:09
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Well, I argue that criticism is simply exploring the relationship between reader and text. Even the most superficial assessment of a text is still a critical response. The goal of training and study is simply to expand the toolkit one uses.
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Mar 17, 2019 01:10
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FactsAreUseless posted:Agents and buyers aren't critics. They are in the business of quantifying and predicting what will be found entertaining, with enough success that it isn't viable to dismiss their methods as pure voodoo. If it is possible to do this for profit motives it is also possible for criticism to be in informed by those methods.
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Mar 17, 2019 01:15
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Thranguy posted:They are in the business of quantifying and predicting what will be found entertaining, with enough success that it isn't viable to dismiss their methods as pure voodoo. If it is possible to do this for profit motives it is also possible for criticism to be in informed by those methods. No it isnt. You havent clarified why we should accept commercial value informs artistic value
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Mar 17, 2019 01:20
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Doctor Faustine posted:Imo the real differentiating factor is thematic weight. I'd suggest it was depth not weight, depending on how you define weight of course. Literature can take repeated passes of thought and reveal more meaning each time, but I know nothing so
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Mar 17, 2019 01:21
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Bilirubin posted:I'd suggest it was depth not weight, depending on how you define weight of course. Literature can take repeated passes of thought and reveal more meaning each time, but I know nothing so Probably the same way you’re defining thematic depth, to be completely honest. Basically just that there’s thematic meaning that goes well beyond fluffy or surface.
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Mar 17, 2019 01:24
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Doctor Faustine posted:How difficult something is to read isn’t really a measure of literary quality. I mentioned LeGuin as an author I would consider to have written literary fantasy, and there’s nothing particularly challenging about her prose. It’s clean and tidy and very easy to read, while still having an aesthetic quality that is elevated. Prose quality is the main issue, not difficulty or ease of reading. You can have challenging prose that’s good and challenging prose that’s bad. Ditto easy to read prose. I agree with you on the LeGuin point. And by extension, pretty much the entire point. To be honest, I prefer when libraries just put every fiction book in the same section all together sorted alphabetically, because genre distinctions are largely... well, fake. But the metric of thematic weight is, I feel, a bit broader than you intend it to be. Like, I definitely get it if we're comparing, like, any of the 50 cyberpunk tiger-anthro thrillers to basically anything else. But for example there's this children's book I am very fond of, "The Phantom Tollbooth" that I could absolutely write several term papers about. It's very rich in themes. Actually, much like other fables, it priorities theme over many other aspects of plot. But I wouldn't call it high literature or anything. To bring up a particularly divisive example just to showcase my point, I could also write papers about the themes and literary merits of Homestuck, since there is definitely a cohesive message to be found there. But that's almost as far away from "literature" as you can get. FactsAreUseless posted:Entertainment isn't a metric of anything. What people find entertaining is shaped by culture and familiarity. It is neither quantifiable nor qualifiable. It is less measurable than anything else you could possibly talk about regarding writing. That's pretty true, but I have to wonder... are things like good characterization, poignant themes, and excellent prose inherently entertaining? For me, I know good prose can carry me pretty far in an otherwise boring book, but I don't think these things alone are what make something a "page-turner" or whatever. I'm pretty sure we all have books that we acknowledge have great literary weight, but we nonetheless can't get into them. I'm wondering, what is it exactly that makes a difference there? I think examining that area is also a part of serious criticism.
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Mar 17, 2019 01:24
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Flesnolk posted:Then explain the term literary fiction and how it is always contrasted with genre "Literary fiction" is a marketing genre aimed at people who read The New Yorker. FactsAreUseless posted:Genre fiction is always going to be held back by the fact that publishers want to publish works that tightly fit the genre's formula. Sure. I'd even go a little farther -- most current marketing genres have been jumpstarted by one or two seminal works that created and set the genre's formula (sherlock holmes, tolkien, etc.) It's the ciiiiirrrrcllleeee, the cir-cle of boooooooooks Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Mar 17, 2019 |
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Mar 17, 2019 01:26
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All right, let’s give this a spin. I don’t have a linguistics or literature background, so any analysis I make will be deficient in those areas; I can only apologize. At the same time, I am a historian and so I will tend to be interested in those aspects: hence the lengthy bio and publishing background bits here to start. I'm choosing to put this here because I'm aiming at some reflection on the post, rather than a more general chat and such I'd expect in the (solid) detective thread. John D. MacDonald (1916-1986) was a businessman and Second World War vet who decided once he turned 30 to devote his life to writing. There’s a common idea regarding artists that your first products are going to be garbage, whether that’s painting or music or writing or whatever. MacDonald held to that: after his discharge from the army, he spent four months trying to become a writer by producing short stories non-stop, generating some 800,000 words and losing 20 pounds while typing 14 hours a day, seven days a week. He just basically sat at his typewriter and hammered out piece of poo poo after piece of poo poo. And it was all rejected. Those were the dying days of the pulps (the actual pulps, not the mangled way the term is used today to mean “bad writing”), but even then it was a genre-writer’s paradise. Consider the genre field today. If you’re writing fantasy, the big magazines are Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons. If you’re writing science fiction, you can submit to the above, plus Asimov’s and Analog and Lightspeed, plus Interzone and Apex. For mystery, there’s really only two: Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock. For weird tales and more niche stuff like sword and sorcery, it’s all small-press stuff, with Weird Tales itself in limbo since 2014. In the late 40s, when MacDonald was trying to get off the ground, there were dozens of titles one could submit to. There were pulps for every possible niche: air war, jungle stories, romance, nurse romance, ranching, westerns, sports, and 20 different flavours of detective and science fiction. MacDonald tried it all, and if a story didn’t sell to one place, he just sent it on to the next most-prestigious magazine dealing in that genre, until he’d crossed them all off and knew the story was truly hopeless (later in his life, after he’d become a success, he took all this early material out in the back yard and burned it). After four months or so he began getting hits. He enjoyed the most success in the detective genre, and soon became a regular contributor to Dime Detective, one of the biggest magazines in the field, which had a nice mix of solid writing and churned-out garbage. Eventually you could find him at the very top in Ellery Queen and Black Mask. The pulps died in the early 50s, never really recovering from the wartime paper shortages that curtailed their profitability and distribution numbers, but also because the newly invented mass-market softcover pocket book essentially took over its niche. For 25 cents you could get a trim 150ish-page novel of all-original material at pretty much any store in America—all-new stories (previously the softcover was solely the domain of reprints of successful hardcovers, so this was truly unusual for the time and many publishers thought it was a crazy plan doomed to failure). It completely transformed the publishing industry, and MacDonald was in on the ground floor, being scooped up by Fawcett’s Gold Medal line, which would go on to produce some of the most notable detective and noir books of the 50s and 60s. If you want a feel for how Gold Medal marketed their line, check out this: https://www.pinterest.ca/injunbookworm/gold-medalfawcett-gold-medal-books/ MacDonald’s background fueled a lot of his work. He did his service not on the front lines but as an administrator, and not in any of the usual theatres but in the most overlooked one of the war outside of Iceland: Burma. His experiences in Burma were a crutch for him for much of his early career, as the exotic east proved to be an easy way to stick out from a crowded pack and add some spice to his tales. Eventually one of his editors, Babette Rosmond, told him to “take off the pith helmet”, and he moved away from it. However, Burma was a major plot point in his first Travis McGee story, as we’ll see. With his WWII administrative work and his business background (his father was also a successful businessman), he often focused on the more mundane side of life compared to many action / adventure stories. Several of his novels involve capable managers getting caught up in industrial and/or international espionage, or more typical noirish plots involving femme fatales. Where a lot of writers would brush over the bits actually involving production or the nuts and bolts of how something operates, MacDonald could at times revel in these details. At the same time, this is only by comparison with other genre writers of the time: he’s still writing tight 150-pagers, and anyone expecting reams of Neal Stephenson or Tom Clancy-ish technowank is going to be disappointed. You can divide MacDonald’s work into three periods: pulp, non-series novels, and the McGee period (Travis McGee being his incredibly successful series character, who starred in 21 stories from 1964 until 1984; his non-series novels mostly dried up once he started on McGee). Even before the pulps died he was moving into novels. He was a 9-5 writer, treating it as a full-time occupation. Between that and the fact that genre novels in these days were much, much shorter, he managed an astonishing output. Between 1950 to 1964, when the first in his Travis McGee series was printed, he wrote 38 standalone novels. His first novels can be rough, with the very first one being a weak hardboiled effort and his fourth a bad James Cain knockoff that MacDonald refused to allow to be reprinted. At the same time, he’d already had some 300 short story publications before he started on novels, so he was a practiced writer even at the start.
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Mar 17, 2019 01:29
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I've been a huge John D. McDonald fan since I found a bunch of his sci-fi stuff when I was a kid. The Travis McGee books would be a great post in the mystery thread -- they do the same trick that Nero Wolfe does, one book a year in the same setting and after a while suddenly it's historical fiction.
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Mar 17, 2019 01:32
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Mel Mudkiper posted:No it isnt. I was responding to a claim that entertainment was unquantifiable. But the idea that commercial value is a proxy for popular appeal should be obvious, and to deny that popular appeal has a part in measuring artistic value is intolerably elitist.
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Mar 17, 2019 01:32
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 I thought to start with the first McGee, but I changed my mind and went for a younger work, one of his pre-McGee standalones. Published in 1960, The End of the Night was MacDonald’s 32nd novel, and broadly falls into that subgenre that might be called the teen hysteria novel. Growing out of things such as the publication of 1947’s The Amboy Dukes, the release of 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause and The Blackboard Jungle, and of course the real-life 1954 Brooklyn Thrill Killers and 1958 spree killings by 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and his 14-year old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate (later also one of the inspirations for Natural Born Killers and Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska), there was this sense that postwar teens had somehow become animalist hedonists falling into drugs and jazz and nihilism. I’ve read a few works along these lines, and a lot of them tend to be hollow, not surprisingly (I remember being disappointed by the legendary Leigh Brackett’s effort, The Tiger Among Us).        The End of the Night is 192 pages, fairly typical for MacDonald and the time, the popular fiction book-size bloat of the mid-70s not having hit yet. It employs one of his favourite techniques of his early novels, the use of multiple character perspectives. We open with a letter introducing us to the main characters of the novel, while at the same time leaving us no doubt as to their fates: they're being led to their executions. It also reveals how they end up mentally and emotionally, which makes for an interesting contrast when the main narrative takes over and we get to watch these characters perform (some of) the deeds that will lead to their executions, what the media winds up dubbing “The Wolf Pack Murders”. As the book is just starting, of course we have no idea who any of these people are. quote:Shires was scared sick they wouldn’t get the woman here on time, but it was timed right, and they brought her in through that little back death-house gate where the stiffs go out. I guess all those guys behind the glass were thinking about all the sexy pictures that got printed of the Koslov woman, and if they were, they had a hell of a disappointment. She put on maybe twenty pounds, and she had her hair in braids, and she’d got religion. She walked in steady, her hands together in front of her, her lips moving every minute, following right along with the Father who was with her, looking down toward the floor. She had on a white dress like a confirmation dress, I swear, but real plain. She didn’t even flick an eye at the throne until she come to the step up onto the little platform, and then she stepped up and turned and sat down, not missing a word. She crossed herself before we strapped her arms, and she kept right on with the praying. She was shaved good under those braids, and the plates went on neat and tight. The only thing was just before the hood went on, it was like she saw all those guys behind the glass there watching her for the first time. She said a few words, not loud, but loud enough for Bongo and me to hear them, and I can tell you, Eddie boy, I can’t put them in no letter going through the U. S. Mails. She picked up the praying when the hood went on, and we stepped back, and all I have to say to you is that it was a good one. You know how bad even the good ones are. The first time was enough, and when they were running her out on the cart, I looked over and saw our audience had shrunk some, which is always to be expected, and there were a few bottles out, and some of them didn’t look like they’d last much longer. From there we switch to a frame narrative, as though written by some historian/biographer coolly looking back on the case and explaining the setup. It focuses on the defense attorney, Riker Owen, explaining his performance and character: quote:Owen had not only his comforting record of success, but also a persuasive plausibility that lessened, to some small and necessary extent, their horrid fear. They could not know that they had retained not a savior, not a hero, but an assiduously processed imitation, the hollow result of boyhood dreams distorted by the biographies of Fallon, Rogers, Darrow and other greats. This frame in turn sets up a narrative from the attorney himself, a memoranda that lays out his appraisal of those he was to defend. It’s an interesting authorial choice, so rapidly switching from jailhouse guard hick to detached but cutting historical assessment to ponderous legal analysis mixed with on-high reflection on Owen’s charges in the space of twelve pages. MacDonald is flexible with his prose style, able to effectively capture these shifts in diction and attitude. I like the lawyer’s narrative. It’s ponderous as the character at times, but effectively so rather than just plain old bad writing, capturing his mindset while at the same time serving as another vehicle for MacDonald’s dives into character study, something he deeply enjoyed and which would be a trademark of his writing: quote:I have experienced a partial failure of communication with Kirby’s parents. I understand why this must be, as I have seen it before. Everyone who works with criminals in any capacity is familiar with this phenomenon. It is, I suspect, a classification error. All their lives, they have been conscious of a great gulf between the mass of decent folk and that sick, savage, dangerous minority known as criminals. Thus they cannot comprehend that their son, their decent young heir, has leaped the unbridgeable gulf. They believe such a feat impossible, and thus the accusation of society must be an error. A boyish prank has been misunderstood. People have lied about him. Or he has fallen under the temporary influence of evil companions. In terms of the four accused, we have: quote:I do not know if I can put the precise flavor of the presence and personality of Robert Hernandez down on paper. He is almost a caricature of the brutishness in man. Cartoonists give him a spiked club and draw him as the god of war. He is about five ten, and weighs maybe two hundred and thirty pounds. He is excessively hirsute, thick and heavy in every dimension, with a meager shelving brow, deep-set eyes, a battered face. It is a shocking thing to realize he is not quite twenty-one years old. This atavistic brute-type character is a recurring one in MacDonald’s stories. The same type shows up in the first McGee novel, The Deep Blue Good-By. You also see him as the main antagonist in The Executioners, MacDonald’s most successful novel, which would be filmed in 1962 (with Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck) and again in 1991 (by Scorsese, with Robert De Niro and Nick Nolte), both times titled Cape Fear. Hernandez has an Of Mice and Men-type relationship with the next accused, Sander Golden: quote:Sander Golden is twenty-seven, but he looks much younger. He is five foot eight, with sharp sallow features, mousy, thinning hair, bright eyes of an intense blue behind bulky, loose-fitting spectacles which are mended, on the left bow, with a soiled winding of adhesive tape. He gives a deceptive impression of physical fragility, but there is a wiry, electrical tirelessness about him. He is a darting man, endlessly in motion, hopelessly talkative. He can apparently sustain a condition of manic frenzy indefinitely. I hasten to add that this frenzy is pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-philosophical rather than personal and emotional. Golden is the closest to your clichéd teen villain of the time, the hopped up, freaked out beatnik killer. Neither killer we’ve seen so far is a teen, though Hernandez would have just been at the time of the crime (the same as Charles Starkweather), and we’re told Golden looks “much younger”. The novel hits all the cues for teen terror, but shies away from actually making them outright highschoolers. This is fairly common in films in this subgenre (James Dean was 24 when he made Rebel Without a Cause), but I suspect that’s as much wanting a more mature actor that’s able to summon a decent emotional range on command than anything else. The initial setup, comprised of a variety of found documents, leads you to think that MacDonald is interested in rooting this in a purely realistic perspective, but from there the novel bounces around, unconcerned about how it gets its information. The next chapter is a simple third-person omniscient. The one after that is a diary entry from another of the four accused, Kirby Stassen. And so on. If Hernandez is the brute who loves violence and Golden the sadist masking his desires underneath a pseudointellectual framework, Kirby Stassen is the classic “what’s it all about, anyways” archetype, that person who realizes that the rat race he is being groomed for is ultimately hollow, but at the same time has nothing of meaning to replace it with. His jailhouse diary reminiscences give us the majority of the insight we get into the foursome’s mentality and actions: he’s by far the most important of them and the one the book focuses on the most. Stassen is hanging out with his roommate Pete on campus and looking out the window at a random girl when the realization hits: quote:And exactly at that moment is when it happened. For the first time in a long gray time there was a little queasy wiggle of excitement way down there on the floor of my soul. What the hell was keeping me there? What was the Christ name good of coasting through to a degree, which I could manage to do, and then signing up for that Executive Training Program the old man had all lined up for me? After this realization, Stassen leaves college four months from the end of his degree and drifts aimlessly, a period we eventually learn about and which leads to him meeting his other three fellow Wolf Pack killers. This is one of my favourite parts of the book, and has nothing to do with the main plot per se, though it's instrumental in shaping his character. Stassen is intelligent enough to reflect on what brought him here, unlike the others, though some answers elude him (even then, it's interesting to watch him grasp for them). His attorney, Owen, takes some time to analyze him as well, but of greater interest to me is the part where Owen brings in the analysis of “the youth today”. It’s a particularly common aspect of these books, where the adults wring their hands and wonder what has gone wrong. Here MacDonald frames it as a matter of study rather than well-meaning adults trying to rap with the kids or what have you, though it's still ultimately feeling around in the dark. quote:Some of this, of course, may be no more than the usual lack of contact between generations. It sometimes seems to me that the Great Depression marked the beginning of a special change in our culture. All young people born during or after those years seem to act toward the rest of us with a great deal more tolerant disrespect than can be accounted for merely by the difference in ages. New standards of behavior have infected the world. The divergence seems to be growing more acute rather than diminishing. There’s further reflection at the end of the chapter that is particularly intriguing. It’s a reoccurring element in arguments about "kids these days"' to bring up that fake Plato quote about how the youth of “today” are all terrible, but it is interesting to see how far back certain, more specific, elements carry: quote:In the beginning I had hoped to be able to put the Stassen boy on the stand. But the prosecutor would shred him. He wouldn’t upset Kirby. I don’t think he could dent that poise. But he would make Kirby expose himself, in his own words, as a monster. I’m not sure how much of the above is MacDonald and how much is Owen; sometimes MacDonald uses his characters as mouthpieces, other times not. Certainly the part about the pursuit of pleasure is pure MacDonald: it’s one of his major themes (for all that his books are free with sex, there’s definite Puritan overtones there, and MacDonald has nothing but contempt for what he refers to as “the Playboy Bunny set”; sex in his mind should be warm and freely given, but “should mean something”). But the “we teach our kids to act out and that there’s no morality” is such a common thing today that it’s fascinating to see it play out in 1960. I’d love to know how far back this exact line of argument goes; Dr. Spock’s 1946 book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care is doubtless relevant, but the obsession with not spoiling your kids with too much affection runs to the early part of the 20th century at least. Infant Care pamphlets distributed by the U.S. government in the 1920s warned against “excessive” affection by parents for their children; experts recommended kissing children only on the forehead and limiting hugs or other displays of affection. But Spock usually gets the blame for opening the floodgates of permissiveness. Of course, in between all this analysis and introspection and character work, a plot is unfolding. Young Helen Wister, nubile 23-year-old bride to-be, has a stalker. She attempts to reason with him, but has underestimated his irrationality, and he kidnaps her. Before we reach Owen’s analysis of Stassen, we see her dive from her kidnapper's car into the bush and be knocked unconscious by the fall. MacDonald interweaves the bits of reflection with plot. It makes certain parts of the analysis serve as effective cliffhanger elements pushing the plot forward. For example, at the end of his Stassen reflection chapter, the lawyer Owen writes: quote:One can imagine that Helen Wister made a somewhat similar error when she fell into the hands of this dangerous foursome. As an intelligent and perceptive young woman, she must have seen how great was her danger from Koslov, Hernandez and Golden. In this extremity of her terror she would have turned, quite naturally, to Kirby Stassen, sensing a kinship, hoping for protection. To her he would be the only reassuring factor in a nightmare situation, a boy like the boys she had dated. Much of what he's referring to is unclear to a reader: we have not yet seen how the characters Kemp and Crown pass by, or how Wister and the Wolf Pack meet, and we only have a vague idea of what the four have specifically done to earn a collective death penalty, though there’s been reference to the murder of one man. Helen Wister’s fate teases us throughout the book. It should be said that MacDonald’s own track record doesn't help us here. Most of his stories end relatively happily, though some, such as the Cainish Weep for Me, the bleak environmental novel Flash of Green, and the business and ultimately personal corruption of Key to the Suite all end on miserable notes. So one can’t appeal to authorial formula at this point and assume you'll know how it will all come out. The next chapter is told by Dallas Kemp, Wister’s fiancé. It reveals that Crown, Wister’s kidnapper, has been killed. Again we don’t know how; MacDonald avoids telling it linearly. But eventually it becomes clear that the Wolf Pack stumble on Crown, who has stopped to recover Wister after her dive from the car. The four kill him and run off with Wister. From here the tone of the novel is set. There’s other elements—in particular, a large portion of Stassen’s look back at how he became what he became is reflecting on a fascinating interlude when he became entangled with a dissolute New York producer and his cold, hedonist wife, travelling to Mexico with them as the driver in a miserable three-way relationship that reminded me in part of Henry Kuttner’s Man Drowning—but I don’t want to recap the whole novel. It suffices to say that MacDonald I think effectively mixes the interludes, plot progression, and character studies in the form of Owens’ recurring memoranda and personal reflection by people such as Dallas Kemp, Wister’s father, and others in such a way as to never overdo any of them, and to keep you interested in the whole. It’s non-linear, without ever really feeling fragmented or jumbled, with the possible exception of the rapid shifts of the very beginning. In terms of how he handles the violence, MacDonald doesn’t really linger on it. It’s not that he’s squeamish. I think it’s more that he knows that this isn’t what the book is really about. We see the death of a character named Becher, who's mentioned earlier in the book, but the main murder(s), “the Nashville thing” is lightly passed over: there’s no Natural Born Killers lovingly filmed massacres here. For instance, this is the most we learn about it, as told to us by Stassen: quote:I am not going to write the Nashville episode into this record. The newspaper did enough chop-licking over it. It was a sick, dirty business, pointless, cruel and bloody. This is, I suspect, as close as I can come to apology. I cannot say that the business of Horace Becher had any particular grace or style. But it had a flavor of some kind that the Nashville affair did not. The Nashville affair was symptomatic of sickness and desperation. I took part in it directly. From then on Sandy dropped the “college man” routine. He brought it up one more time after that, during the Helen Wister thing, but that was all. In Nashville I won my dirty spurs. It’s more a reflection on the nature of the four who committed the crime, rather than a killing to fill the pages with violence. As for a more formal critical analysis of the book, as I said at the start I don’t feel I’m equipped to handle that in any particularly educated fashion. I’m not attempting to be a BotL; I know what I like, and this book is one of those things. I’ve tried instead to give you a sense of what it’s like and what it’s trying to do, of the prose and construction and whatnot, and let you decide for yourself if you think it’s worth bothering with, either as an interesting historical artifact or a perfectly valid work of fiction on its own. It’s long out of print, but Gold Medal produced enormous print runs, so that a hard copy is still easy to track down 60 years later. Alternatively, it’s available on Kindle for just a few dollars. I want to close with a passage I quite like, where Stassen reflects on his upcoming execution: quote:I am very aware of another thing—and I suppose this is a very ordinary thing for all those condemned—and that is a kind of yearning for the things I will never do, a yearning with overtones of nostalgia. It is as though I can remember what it is like to be old and watch moonlight, and to hold children on my lap, and kiss the wife I have never met. It is a sadness in me. I want to apologize to her—I want to explain it to the children. I’m sorry. I’m never coming down the track of time to you. I was stopped along the way. I hope this was of some interest. Xotl fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Jun 15, 2021 |
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Mar 17, 2019 01:32
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Bilirubin posted:I'd suggest it was depth not weight, depending on how you define weight of course. Literature can take repeated passes of thought and reveal more meaning each time, but I know nothing so
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Mar 17, 2019 01:34
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Thranguy posted:But the idea that commercial value is a proxy for popular appeal should be obvious,. It isnt, that is my point. Thranguy posted:and to deny that popular appeal has a part in measuring artistic value is intolerably elitist. And here comes the classic "reject a capitalist paradigm of value and you are just elitist"
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Mar 17, 2019 01:37
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Thranguy posted:But the idea that commercial value is a proxy for popular appeal should be obvious, and to deny that popular appeal has a part in measuring artistic value is intolerably elitist. Popularity is a non-factor with regards to artistic merit. Some works of great merit are very popular. Some are not. Some works with little or no merit are very popular. Some are not.
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Mar 17, 2019 01:39
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The one criteria by which every novel should be judged... is it a "smasheroo"?
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Mar 17, 2019 01:42
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onsetOutsider posted:The one criteria by which every novel should be judged... is it a "smasheroo"? Or, if you are Eagleton, "how much does it make us want to smash the system"
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Mar 17, 2019 01:43
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onsetOutsider posted:The one criteria by which every novel should be judged... is it a "smasheroo"? dammit, beaten
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Mar 17, 2019 02:03
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Thranguy posted:But the idea that commercial value is a proxy for popular appeal should be obvious, and to deny that popular appeal has a part in measuring artistic value is intolerably elitist. Edit: Not ignoring Xotl's post, but I don't quite have the time to read it right now. Looks fantastic.
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Mar 17, 2019 02:06
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