Literary cliches and overused themes

[holyzombiejesus]

Currently reading The Mating Habits of Stages by Ray Robinson and whilst I'm really really enjoying it, I can't help thinking that I've read this type of book so many times before. It's about an old farmer who is nearing the end of his life in North Yorkshire and traversing the harsh Northern landscape and.... well, basically, it's an excuse for the author to get gritty. Describing the shit and the phlegm and the mud and the hacked up blood and the rain. The dirty house that he lives in and the drunken men at his local. The bodily functions and the decay and death. As I said, it's a dead good book, beautifully written and I'd definitely recommend it but I've read it so many times, often written by the inexplicably lauded Ben Myers.

[Doomy Dwyer]

A depressingly large amount of the canonical post WWII Great American Novel lot are all basically interchangeable in terms of themes and plots, aren't they? Mid-life crisis disillusioned alcoholic academic with shrew wife bangs student who secretly despises him life implodes probably a closeted homosexual oh god the war, the war log cabin in Utah/suicide denouement. Bellow, Updike, Yates, Roth, Ford, probably Cheever, etc, etc. I'm not saying the books are universally awful but these men are whining pricks who deserve all they get (usually fawning praise and half arsed imitation from their even duller English counterparts).

[Doomy Dwyer]

I'm not implying that WWII wasn't stressful, btw.

[mr. logic]

I know the type of books you mean, but I don't think they're written by the writers you've named, all of whom deserve the high praise they get. (With the possible exception of Bellow, whom I've never read.)

[Twit 2]

I've read a lot of criticisms of TGAN that are similar in spirit to what Doomy says there, naming all the same writers. I thought the tide had turned on cunts writing about cunts.

[mr. logic]

They tend to get lumped in together as the Old White Men of letters, and obviously there's a discussion to be had about the problematic sexism that pervades a lot of the work. But from a plotting point of view, even a cursory look at, say, Roth's work provides a neat rebuttal to the idea that he was fixated on the same drab story about college lecturers. His mind was a marvel. 

[Urinal Cake]

There was this thing, I think perpetuated by Franzen and co that novels had to be epics to counter the instant gratification of the Internet. Of course G R R Martin proved epics do fine.  I hope they got rid of that.

[Doomy Dwyer]

They tend to get lumped in together as the Old White Men of letters, and obviously there's a discussion to be had about the problematic sexism that pervades a lot of the work. But from a plotting point of view, even a cursory look at, say, Roth's work provides a neat rebuttal to the idea that he was fixated on the same drab story about college lecturers. His mind was a marvel.

I'd agree that Roth shouldn't be lumped in with this cavalcade of spite and invective. I got carried away a bit there. And I'd just like to say that I'm a great admirer of Yates. And I must confess to never having read Cheever. I may have been drunk when I wrote my original post, although I wasn't. And, of course, it was a joke. Although, it wasn't. But and however; the mid-life crisis trope did seem to feature very heavily in American literature amongst the Old White Men and perpetuates to this day, David Gates being an example of it being done extremely well and Franzen merely being an example. And of course, it's a theme worth exploring but perhaps not exploring endlessly as seemed to be the case for a while.

[Mister Six]

This chat reminds me of A Reader's Manifesto, which echoed with me when I read it (although I'll admit to rather liking "furious dabs of tulips stuttering").

[Famous Mortimer]

I'd agree that Roth shouldn't be lumped in with this cavalcade of spite and invective. I got carried away a bit there. And I'd just like to say that I'm a great admirer of Yates. And I must confess to never having read Cheever. I may have been drunk when I wrote my original post, although I wasn't. And, of course, it was a joke. Although, it wasn't. But and however; the mid-life crisis trope did seem to feature very heavily in American literature amongst the Old White Men and perpetuates to this day, David Gates being an example of it being done extremely well and Franzen merely being an example. And of course, it's a theme worth exploring but perhaps not exploring endlessly as seemed to be the case for a while.

You're right, I think - there are vast swathes of TGAN-style fiction that is middle-aged white male authors writing about being a middle-aged white male author. Obviously some people like that, but I could live without it.

I was trying to formulate a post about why those early post-modernist novels by people like John Barth and Robert Coover are super-irritating, but thinking back I hate them all for different reasons.

[gilbertharding]

I'm aware of the cliche, but I've not read many of 'those' books.

The ones I have read (and which put me off reading more) were the first Rabbit book and Revolutionary Road - which don't quite fit the stereotype described above, having been written when the authors were only just in their 30s, and both of them were about crises which weren't so much 'mid-life'... more kind of delayed coming of age.

I didn't mind Revolutionary Road - I think you were supposed to hate the main couple. Are you supposed to hate Rabbit?

[Pingers]

Multi-generational family sagas, usually but not exclusively American. Stuff like Anne Tyler and a whole host of others telling us things we already know about families. I do get the point of having some level of universality in fiction, but to me that should be a way in to also tell you something true about life that you hadn't thought of yet. I don't see the point of books that exclusively tell you what you already knew, like people having wildly differing experiences of what were ostensibly very similar childhoods, or that families have secrets. Even otherwise very good writers fall prey to this - I really like Thomas Mann for example, but Buddenbrooks is turgid.

Completely separately, if I ever read again that someone has 'gunned the engine' I shall get very batey. Surely this is a phrase that no-one uses it in real life, yet it's everywhere in fiction.

[Pink Gregory]

"John turned the ignition on his motorcycle, made it go vrrr vrrr vrrr and rode off, flipping the bird to the man."

[Icehaven]

Anything set around WWII. You could probably go into the fiction section of any library or bookshop in the UK right now and find at least one book on each shelf at least partly set between 1939 and 1945. Yes it was obviously the main event that's shaped the last 70 odd years of history but ffs, other eras are available.

[Jerzy Bondov]

I don't know why, and it's not really a cliche, but I really hate reading about characters 'padding' around their house. 'She padded down the hallway', 'she padded over to the window', 'she padded into the kitchen'. I refuse to pad anywhere. Fuck that.