My Idea of a Difficult Novelist

[Mike 03]

Since there has been so much exciting and passionate discussion of novels and novelists lately, and because I confessed my difficulty with Joyce, I would love to get a better sense of which writers DUers consider "difficult," because the definition varies from genre to genre, modernist vs. post modernist, etc...

I find Joyce difficult but Pynchon comprehensible, and I bet others feel the opposite way, or find someone like Barth or Gass or Coover or William Gaddis to be impossible, opaque, cryptic and unreasonably obscure.

[Withywindle]

1. Other, I think.

I find writers like Joyce and Pynchon difficult but rewarding when I enjoy their prose as music, which is certainly is a form of, and stop trying to grasp it literally with the rational mind.

The kind of writing I find really impossible is the kind of hyper-realistic but tamely-poetic navel-gazing "literary fiction" that's mostly all about white upper-class middle-aged people nattering on about their dysfunctional families. Book-club stuff. So much technically adept prose wasted on characters I can't bring myself to give a shit about. If I want something more plot- and character-focused than experimental writing, I'll take fantasy and science fiction because at least that takes me somewhere interesting.

[JitterbugPerfume]

2. I enjoy Pynchon

but James Joyce drives me batty

[qwertyMike]

6. Drunken ravings

dictated to his codependent SO.

Fuck I could do that every Friday night.

[elshiva]

3. Other: I prefer non-fiction. I haven't read any of those authors

even though I have heard about them.

[begin_within]

4. Huh?

[TrogL]

5. I didn't understand 'Gravity's Rainbow 'until I studied Jung

[Chan790]

7. I'm an intelligent reader but find novelists like Hermann Hesse obscure.

I just can't figure out what he's getting at. Novels about philosophical concepts that fail on narrative grounds. :shrug: