And the crazy thing is that this kind of weird discursive book has been done well before. I’m mainly thinking here of The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, such a wonderful short read and it so happens to spend three or four pages musing over bendy straws,—but the differences are stark in that the mezzanine is a short 100-something pages with fantastically weird prose and, most importantly, it’s “musings” are not vague platitudes but deeply strange approaches to everyday objects that make them into something fundamentally alien.
The same could be said for Knausgaard and Proust too, and i wonder if a big part of the rave reviews for this book come from the fact that it’s all so very on the surface and can be easily skimmed and reviewed without the need to really dig in
I’d also add that in The Mezzanine, these long, detailed digressions are important in terms of what is essentially the book’s plot, which is the narrator coming to the realization that he focuses so obsessively over all these mundane things because his own life is not very meaningful.
It was both depressing and oddly cheering when I finally realized how many working book critics don't have the capacity to discriminate between actually good books and books that are supposed to be good or present themselves as good. Depressing because it's not good for culture and all that, but cheering because I felt much better about myself by comparison.
Same! At some point I was like wait a second, I'm not the problem here! I mean i feel for critiques, it must be hard to feel like you can't really say bad things about a book without experiencing a lot of blowback. And i think since their incentive is to love a book, they somehow convince themselves thay they actually do. But lots of jobs are terrible :) I'm just glad self censorship is not a problem i have to deal with
I think it’s just her style, when she likes something she talks about what she thinks the book accomplishes, but never actually instructs readers to read. And she’s not one to fear the blowback from a pan—her review of Sarah Manguso’s latest was scathing and at odds with the critical consensus, as she expertly documents all that that book fails to do.
My problem is that as an occasional freelance critic I've been comfortable saying bad things about books but I haven't done ruthless pans. I just soberly point out the ways in which a given book is mediocre. Who wants to read that?
Most books are medicore. It's weird that so many of them get reviewed, and even weirder that they mostly get treated as though they're not utterly mediocre and should never have been written.
A lot of it has to do with marketing (design of book cover, who writes the blurbs, how it's pitched, even what the author photo looks like). It's pretty clear when you pick up a lot of books that they're being offered to you as serious literary fiction. And then authors also acquire that kind of aura. It's well known at this point that, say, Garth Greenwell is "good."
Often it’s just the authorial voice and/or literary tricks (e.g. narrative meandering, hyper-self-awareness) that sound good but are “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.
The quote from the reviewer is so funny - “Where another writer might place a period, Greenwell uses a comma, creating an unfamiliar pattern by prolonging the sentence a little further than we might expect” - it's so hard for me not to think - isn't that called a run-on sentence? I know that makes me so hopelessly uncool. I'll just keep quietly teaching writing over here.
Excellent. This is happening across the board. I suspect so many are in fear of actually offering a critique lest they be accused of something. That’s why it’s all cheerleading and we are left with a sense that we are being lied to or manipulated into reading work that wasn’t ready for publication or might never have been ready.
I haven’t read Greenwell’s latest yet. He’s a very talented writer and brilliant thinker. The essays he’s written, even the ones he publishes on his Substack, are excellent. But that doesn’t mean his work is above criticism and I would like to think that he’d agree.
Wow! You’ve started a great discussion here. I’ve never read Greenwell but from the descriptions of Small Rain that I’ve read elsewhere I was thinking I might give it a try. This is my kind of book, and I see people have mentioned Knausgaard and Nicholson Baker who are two authors I really like. The thing is, though, this kind of book is tough to pull off. Baker’s “The Mezzanine” works because the narrator is incredibly perceptive, he makes us see the ordinary, mundane world in new ways. Same with Knausgaard, and there’s a deeper structure too with Knausgaard that can be easy to miss. He’s really good at tricking us into thinking he’s just describing his day to day experience! But there’s more going on, as you note in the connection to Hitler.
Greenwell is clearly going for the same sort of thing in the snickers anecdote. Does he pull it off? I thought there was some promise there. I could definitely keep reading. But I hear what you’re saying, too, we’re gonna need a bit more than that, it’s going to have to coalesce into something bigger and deeper. So much of this depends on the perceptiveness of the writer. I think I’m gonna start it and see what happens…I’ll try to remember to come back here with an update!
These digressions remind me of a sci-fi author who is too enamored with their own worldbuilding, only instead of worldbuilding it's just random commonplaces that everyone already knows. Instead of irrelevant information, no information at all.
Though the quotation about the Snickers Bar is kind of dull, I can sense an intention in it to try to demystify or at least draw attention to the phenomenon Marx called the commodity fetish whereby we see commodities just as things that exist and don't consider the whole process of labour and production that went into it. In that way it does have a point beyond the idle meditations of a humdum whitterer, but there are better (the 1981 near-horror story by Charles Johnson "Exchange Value" does similar but wraps it up in a crime/ghetto/ghostish tale that adds a lot of interest).
However, even though the intention may be interesting, the execution surely is not and I would agree that the prose is leaden and uninteresting.
Today two separate people have sent me passages from Lerner and from Rooney that do the same thing tho (in less words). In each case the protagonist meditates on the amount of labor that’s gone into producing some mundane object—seems like this discursive move might not really be the most revelatory. Fine to do if it’s in-character, but to put so much weight on it is just begging the reader to ask if this idea is really fresh enough to merit so many words
My own feeling is that if you're doing a Bernhard thing you have to exponentiate him in narrator eccentricity. You can't just do the usual tepid contemporary narrator but with on-and-on sentences. I made a note on this when I read Jen Craig's Panthers and the Museum of Fire, which at least tries for a strange narrator, though (imo) with only intermittent success.
EDIT: Looking back I realise I'm making it sound like my observation was somehow utterly distinct from yours, but of course that's not the case.
Lol I kind of agree! The temptation is always to have a regular guy narrator and be like what's inside a regular guys head? But the answer unfortunately is regular guys don't really think that hard!
Haven’t read Small Rain (or anything by Garth Greenwell) but I very much felt this way about Ducks Newburyport. Fiction should be fun! And it can also be challenging. David Foster Wallace (and plenty others) do both
Never heard of this guy cause I'm not a super avid reader, but sounds super boring from the excerpts you mentioned in this piece. It reminded me of the feeling I had when I watched the series Ted Lasso. Everyone loved it, and I still don't know why: it's bland and dull, it has no conflict whatsoever, the music is corny AF.... I don't know, I felt like a joke I don't get but everyone is so fond of... Even I saw the series full! Every episode more and more angry about spending my precious time on it, unable to quit... Not because it's addictive it means it's good, I guess. I won't read this guy. But I'm surprised David Hockney gave his image to decorate his cover 🤷♀️
Thanks so much for your generous recommendation, Naomi! And good stuff on Greenwell...I wonder if this kind of ditheringly discursive narrative voice is what's replacing the old MFA lyricism as the new go-to. (I just published a review of Honor Levy, who has nothing in common in any way with Greenwell, and she does it too.)
I wondered that too. I personally cannot imagine that anyone wants to read even one, much less two, books like this. It's funny bc my experience with literary publishing is there is relentless pressure to be commercial and have a plot, have conflict, be relevant, etc. I think there's just a very narrow lane for aesthetes, and only one author can fill it at a time.
I had a different reaction to the candy bar passage. I love your observation that our relationship to cheap candy is what matters. The very human aspect of eating something we know is bad for us. But what I took from the rumination you quoted was the sense of alienation I feel from living in a world so technologically advanced that I can't even understand anything around me. Food is so essential, and yet, the "food" like candy is the product of such abstruse methods and supply chains that I'm completely alientated from it. If I had any criticism, I think overthinking felt constricted to me, like the author was so enmeshed in his thoughts about it that his feelings were innaccessible. That's what made it turn tedious.
Yeah I think the aim is to evoke some very complex feeling of confusion through all this verbiage. Kinda like Proust tries to hold the complexity of a human being in place by describing them in radically different ways at different times. But I think this writing just doesn't slow down enough to hold onto any one image, so it's very hard to feel anything
Good writing. Good review. But the cliche at the heart of it is distracting. It's not just a cliche, it's unprovable. I know for a fact that I've enjoyed many things that people claim are unenjoyable. I can't prove this to you either. The idea of collective unlikability is a cliche, unprovable, and ungenerous. It costs you little to suppose that people are honest about their tastes--even if sometimes they aren't--and what you gain is not having to negotiate the insides of someone else's head. Look forward to reading more of your stuff.
Thanks for your response! That assertion though is ultimately why you read the review, no? That's the reason it got shared widely. If it wasn't for that assertion nobody would've cared about my opinion.
I mostly agree with Joseph... I think the key here is the point you make about how authors like Proust, etc., received *mixed* reviews, and that unanimous or nearly unanimous praise for work of this kind is the sign of an unhealthy literary ecosystem (a sentiment with which I wholly agree). But saying that *no one* enjoys the new Greenwall book is probably untrue and certainly unprovable, and makes it easier to dismiss the interesting stuff you're saying here.
I enjoyed reading this quite a bit, particularly because I'm about 120 pages into Small Rain and have also quite enjoyed it thus far. Maybe I'm a dupe, but I like to think I've managed to cultivate my own taste over the years. I don't read any reviews of books I'm going to read before I read them and I've never read anything by Greenwell before. I wouldn't say I'm any better than lukewarm towards autofiction as a form either. I see where all these criticisms come from, and taking out of context some of the passages seem silly, but I don't know what to say other than it's working on me thus far.
I had an extremely long airport layover and cracked it open to pass them time and found myself very involved.
And the crazy thing is that this kind of weird discursive book has been done well before. I’m mainly thinking here of The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, such a wonderful short read and it so happens to spend three or four pages musing over bendy straws,—but the differences are stark in that the mezzanine is a short 100-something pages with fantastically weird prose and, most importantly, it’s “musings” are not vague platitudes but deeply strange approaches to everyday objects that make them into something fundamentally alien.
The same could be said for Knausgaard and Proust too, and i wonder if a big part of the rave reviews for this book come from the fact that it’s all so very on the surface and can be easily skimmed and reviewed without the need to really dig in
i came here to comment about the mezzanine and you beat me to it…..
I’d also add that in The Mezzanine, these long, detailed digressions are important in terms of what is essentially the book’s plot, which is the narrator coming to the realization that he focuses so obsessively over all these mundane things because his own life is not very meaningful.
The Mezzanine is definitely a book i have meant to read for over a decade now:) Maybe I actually should!
It’s a funny book, too, which is pretty important if you want to make this sort of approach work.
Nicholson Baker is the real thing.
It was both depressing and oddly cheering when I finally realized how many working book critics don't have the capacity to discriminate between actually good books and books that are supposed to be good or present themselves as good. Depressing because it's not good for culture and all that, but cheering because I felt much better about myself by comparison.
Same! At some point I was like wait a second, I'm not the problem here! I mean i feel for critiques, it must be hard to feel like you can't really say bad things about a book without experiencing a lot of blowback. And i think since their incentive is to love a book, they somehow convince themselves thay they actually do. But lots of jobs are terrible :) I'm just glad self censorship is not a problem i have to deal with
I think it’s just her style, when she likes something she talks about what she thinks the book accomplishes, but never actually instructs readers to read. And she’s not one to fear the blowback from a pan—her review of Sarah Manguso’s latest was scathing and at odds with the critical consensus, as she expertly documents all that that book fails to do.
Who are you referring to?
My problem is that as an occasional freelance critic I've been comfortable saying bad things about books but I haven't done ruthless pans. I just soberly point out the ways in which a given book is mediocre. Who wants to read that?
Most books are medicore. It's weird that so many of them get reviewed, and even weirder that they mostly get treated as though they're not utterly mediocre and should never have been written.
What does it mean for a book to “present itself as good”?
A lot of it has to do with marketing (design of book cover, who writes the blurbs, how it's pitched, even what the author photo looks like). It's pretty clear when you pick up a lot of books that they're being offered to you as serious literary fiction. And then authors also acquire that kind of aura. It's well known at this point that, say, Garth Greenwell is "good."
Often it’s just the authorial voice and/or literary tricks (e.g. narrative meandering, hyper-self-awareness) that sound good but are “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.
The quote from the reviewer is so funny - “Where another writer might place a period, Greenwell uses a comma, creating an unfamiliar pattern by prolonging the sentence a little further than we might expect” - it's so hard for me not to think - isn't that called a run-on sentence? I know that makes me so hopelessly uncool. I'll just keep quietly teaching writing over here.
This is splendid stuff
Excellent. This is happening across the board. I suspect so many are in fear of actually offering a critique lest they be accused of something. That’s why it’s all cheerleading and we are left with a sense that we are being lied to or manipulated into reading work that wasn’t ready for publication or might never have been ready.
I haven’t read Greenwell’s latest yet. He’s a very talented writer and brilliant thinker. The essays he’s written, even the ones he publishes on his Substack, are excellent. But that doesn’t mean his work is above criticism and I would like to think that he’d agree.
Wow! You’ve started a great discussion here. I’ve never read Greenwell but from the descriptions of Small Rain that I’ve read elsewhere I was thinking I might give it a try. This is my kind of book, and I see people have mentioned Knausgaard and Nicholson Baker who are two authors I really like. The thing is, though, this kind of book is tough to pull off. Baker’s “The Mezzanine” works because the narrator is incredibly perceptive, he makes us see the ordinary, mundane world in new ways. Same with Knausgaard, and there’s a deeper structure too with Knausgaard that can be easy to miss. He’s really good at tricking us into thinking he’s just describing his day to day experience! But there’s more going on, as you note in the connection to Hitler.
Greenwell is clearly going for the same sort of thing in the snickers anecdote. Does he pull it off? I thought there was some promise there. I could definitely keep reading. But I hear what you’re saying, too, we’re gonna need a bit more than that, it’s going to have to coalesce into something bigger and deeper. So much of this depends on the perceptiveness of the writer. I think I’m gonna start it and see what happens…I’ll try to remember to come back here with an update!
These digressions remind me of a sci-fi author who is too enamored with their own worldbuilding, only instead of worldbuilding it's just random commonplaces that everyone already knows. Instead of irrelevant information, no information at all.
Though the quotation about the Snickers Bar is kind of dull, I can sense an intention in it to try to demystify or at least draw attention to the phenomenon Marx called the commodity fetish whereby we see commodities just as things that exist and don't consider the whole process of labour and production that went into it. In that way it does have a point beyond the idle meditations of a humdum whitterer, but there are better (the 1981 near-horror story by Charles Johnson "Exchange Value" does similar but wraps it up in a crime/ghetto/ghostish tale that adds a lot of interest).
However, even though the intention may be interesting, the execution surely is not and I would agree that the prose is leaden and uninteresting.
Today two separate people have sent me passages from Lerner and from Rooney that do the same thing tho (in less words). In each case the protagonist meditates on the amount of labor that’s gone into producing some mundane object—seems like this discursive move might not really be the most revelatory. Fine to do if it’s in-character, but to put so much weight on it is just begging the reader to ask if this idea is really fresh enough to merit so many words
I couldn’t get past the first chapter of Intermezzo.
My own feeling is that if you're doing a Bernhard thing you have to exponentiate him in narrator eccentricity. You can't just do the usual tepid contemporary narrator but with on-and-on sentences. I made a note on this when I read Jen Craig's Panthers and the Museum of Fire, which at least tries for a strange narrator, though (imo) with only intermittent success.
EDIT: Looking back I realise I'm making it sound like my observation was somehow utterly distinct from yours, but of course that's not the case.
Lol I kind of agree! The temptation is always to have a regular guy narrator and be like what's inside a regular guys head? But the answer unfortunately is regular guys don't really think that hard!
Love this! Glad to have discovered you.
Haven’t read Small Rain (or anything by Garth Greenwell) but I very much felt this way about Ducks Newburyport. Fiction should be fun! And it can also be challenging. David Foster Wallace (and plenty others) do both
Never heard of this guy cause I'm not a super avid reader, but sounds super boring from the excerpts you mentioned in this piece. It reminded me of the feeling I had when I watched the series Ted Lasso. Everyone loved it, and I still don't know why: it's bland and dull, it has no conflict whatsoever, the music is corny AF.... I don't know, I felt like a joke I don't get but everyone is so fond of... Even I saw the series full! Every episode more and more angry about spending my precious time on it, unable to quit... Not because it's addictive it means it's good, I guess. I won't read this guy. But I'm surprised David Hockney gave his image to decorate his cover 🤷♀️
Thanks so much for your generous recommendation, Naomi! And good stuff on Greenwell...I wonder if this kind of ditheringly discursive narrative voice is what's replacing the old MFA lyricism as the new go-to. (I just published a review of Honor Levy, who has nothing in common in any way with Greenwell, and she does it too.)
I wondered that too. I personally cannot imagine that anyone wants to read even one, much less two, books like this. It's funny bc my experience with literary publishing is there is relentless pressure to be commercial and have a plot, have conflict, be relevant, etc. I think there's just a very narrow lane for aesthetes, and only one author can fill it at a time.
Twittery realism...
I had a different reaction to the candy bar passage. I love your observation that our relationship to cheap candy is what matters. The very human aspect of eating something we know is bad for us. But what I took from the rumination you quoted was the sense of alienation I feel from living in a world so technologically advanced that I can't even understand anything around me. Food is so essential, and yet, the "food" like candy is the product of such abstruse methods and supply chains that I'm completely alientated from it. If I had any criticism, I think overthinking felt constricted to me, like the author was so enmeshed in his thoughts about it that his feelings were innaccessible. That's what made it turn tedious.
Yeah I think the aim is to evoke some very complex feeling of confusion through all this verbiage. Kinda like Proust tries to hold the complexity of a human being in place by describing them in radically different ways at different times. But I think this writing just doesn't slow down enough to hold onto any one image, so it's very hard to feel anything
Agreed. It's sterile.
Good writing. Good review. But the cliche at the heart of it is distracting. It's not just a cliche, it's unprovable. I know for a fact that I've enjoyed many things that people claim are unenjoyable. I can't prove this to you either. The idea of collective unlikability is a cliche, unprovable, and ungenerous. It costs you little to suppose that people are honest about their tastes--even if sometimes they aren't--and what you gain is not having to negotiate the insides of someone else's head. Look forward to reading more of your stuff.
Thanks for your response! That assertion though is ultimately why you read the review, no? That's the reason it got shared widely. If it wasn't for that assertion nobody would've cared about my opinion.
I mostly agree with Joseph... I think the key here is the point you make about how authors like Proust, etc., received *mixed* reviews, and that unanimous or nearly unanimous praise for work of this kind is the sign of an unhealthy literary ecosystem (a sentiment with which I wholly agree). But saying that *no one* enjoys the new Greenwall book is probably untrue and certainly unprovable, and makes it easier to dismiss the interesting stuff you're saying here.
It's not why I read it. It's almost why I stopped reading it. But if it works for you, and for some (or most) of your readers, carry on.
I enjoyed reading this quite a bit, particularly because I'm about 120 pages into Small Rain and have also quite enjoyed it thus far. Maybe I'm a dupe, but I like to think I've managed to cultivate my own taste over the years. I don't read any reviews of books I'm going to read before I read them and I've never read anything by Greenwell before. I wouldn't say I'm any better than lukewarm towards autofiction as a form either. I see where all these criticisms come from, and taking out of context some of the passages seem silly, but I don't know what to say other than it's working on me thus far.
I had an extremely long airport layover and cracked it open to pass them time and found myself very involved.
I am very impressed! Personally, I like autofiction--I just didn't like this book.