Hey TC Boyle!

[yendi]

I just read your interview where you said

I don't want to diss any writers, we are all in it together, but I'm a not a genre fiction guy. I don't read it, don't like it, don't think about it. I have never read any science fiction, never read any detective novels, thrillers. I am just not interested in them because they are conventional. That's why people like them. They want the same thing, the same characters. Great writing to me is, you open the book and you are surprised each time out. That's what I want to do. That's literature. Genre writing is limited not only by the fact that is a genre and so that are certain expectations that have to be fulfilled. Like filling in the blanks. But also, the writing isn't usually as good as it is in literary fiction. And I need to read something that is as good or better than I can do or it doesn't interest me.

Drop City is now off my wishlist, asshole. And I hope every movie adaptation of your books sucks even more than The Road to Wellville did.

And for those wondering, he comes off as even more of an ignorant ass in the article itself.

Comments

Bleah.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Ignorant and proud of it, apparently.

[kellinator.livejournal.com]

What. A. Fucking. Wanker. I vomit on his shoes.

Anyway, I'm sick of these literary fiction snobs who carry on about how fucking wonderful they are. Look, most literary fiction is all the same: ponderous writing, bad things happening to unpleasant people, unhappy endings. It's just like genre fiction without the saving grace of being actually entertaining.

Shakespeare was a genre writer. So there.

[mister-wolf.livejournal.com]

Yeef. If he's never read any 'genre' fiction, how can he know all this about it?

I want to force feed him Raymond Chandler novels 'til he pukes. =:P

[yendi]

*nod* He reminds me of all the cretins who were criticizing The Last Temptation of Christ even though they'd never read it or saw the movie.

Boyle

[bookslacker.livejournal.com]

Yeah, he's always been a cocky bastard. At least he admits people will think he's a schmuck for that statement. Sometimes you just don't want to know what a writer is really like, kind of like Mark Helprin.

I used to like Boyle a lot in the 80s. I think his early novels--Water Music, Budding Prospects, and World's End--are quite good. I quit on him after The Road to Wellville, which I didn't like. Haven't seen the movie either. I've heard Drop City is sort of a return to form for him.

[redcrowstudio.livejournal.com]

Funny that he knows so much about genre fiction, never having read any. It's a shame he's going to miss out on what looks to be the next trend: "crossover lit", as exemplified most recently in the latest issues of literary fiction journals Conjunctions (guest edited by Peter Straub) and McSweeneys (guest edited by Michael Chabon, and including fiction by Gaiman, Moorcock, Ellison, Elmore Leonard, Kelly Link and more). What's unusual, to the literary world, is not that these issues feature 'genre' writers, but that they feature short fiction with (gasp!) plots. I love McSweeneys. Tearing down the wall of literary pretensions brick by brick, while still remaining 'literary'.

Re: Boyle

[yendi]

Sometimes you just don't want to know what a writer is really like, kind of like Mark Helprin.

*shudder* Too true.

[yendi]

Interestingly, I read an article a while back about Straub's daughter, who, after taking a course in which the literary merit of a genre piece was debated, polled a number of horror authors on the subject. I'll need to track that down.


I must get the latest McSweenys. I pick up issues on occasion, but money and time usually prevent me from grabbing more of them.

[redcrowstudio.livejournal.com]

I think I read about that too. Seems to me I saw it on Gaiman's blog, or a mention of it anyway...

[yendi]

Found it. Sort of. It was in The Spook, but the article isn't archived online anymore. It's at http://www.thespook.com/2002-02/index.html.

[gladstone.livejournal.com]

If he's a talented author and you enjoy reading his work, why does it matter whether he's an ignorant ass? Seriously. His job is to write, not to be charming in interviews.

[felisdemens.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of that out there. A creative writing prof once told me that I was an "amazingly gifted writer, and if I ever broke away from my genre-writing habit I could be great".

Fuck that, I WANT to write genre.

I love people who sneer at something they proudly admit to never having read, watched, experienced. Really. I do.

[terracinque.livejournal.com]

I concur. Why will Drop City be any less worthy a reading experience, just because its author is a jerk?

Hemingway was a jerk; that doesn't diminish Old Man and the Sea.