Any current books you think will become lasting literature?

Diana Wynne Jones. her books may be rare, but they had a steady following throughout her life. And unlike a lot of fantasy, character was very important, and all the magic helped to develop character. The best fantasy doesn't make the hero gape at the magic he is newly-introduced to, but takes everything in a matter-of-fact way. Magic is an ordinary way of life, and if it is a novelty, it is still something that everyone knows about. A whole set of norms and culture is already there. And it has to have a certain sort of logic and intuition to it, like the way the characters in Wynne Jones can feel magic. Very convincing - I was nearly convinced of the reality of magic years ago when I read it.

JK Rowling may be better at constructing worlds and suspense, but in terms of character development and novel ideas Wynne Jones wins hands down.

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Originally Posted by Drkshadow03

What do you like about DeLillo?

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I have, personally, never encountered an author of our age that appears to be as aware of the institutional framework, social context, artistic movement in which he produces his art (admittedly, my scope is limited). I think that it is this deplorable awareness, so characteristic of "our age", which I hope people in future generations will find interesting. Also, he captures it damn well with a perceptiveness that is uncanny, carried forth by a distinct style that deviates from the norm (how he gets published is baffling, although this can be considered refutable to what I just mentioned about institutional awareness). Even when he seemingly strays from embellished fictional form and takes a turn for a style more akin to academic writing, I find his wording of concepts infinitely satisfying.

Or something along those lines.

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Originally Posted by the facade

I have, personally, never encountered an author of our age that appears to be as aware of the institutional framework, social context, artistic movement in which he produces his art (admittedly, my scope is limited). I think that it is this deplorable awareness, so characteristic of "our age", which I hope people in future generations will find interesting. Also, he captures it damn well with a perceptiveness that is uncanny, carried forth by a distinct style that deviates from the norm (how he gets published is baffling, although this can be considered refutable to what I just mentioned about institutional awareness). Even when he seemingly strays from embellished fictional form and takes a turn for a style more akin to academic writing, I find his wording of concepts infinitely satisfying.

Or something along those lines.

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I agree with some points, but I just happen to feel the American landscapes he creates are limited in reflecting more a time of composition than an enduring condition.

What I mean is, we have a floating landscape that is shifting constantly, especially as an interior within fiction. The major cities of the United States are incredibly diverse, and incredibly interesting in their mix and crosses and fusions.

It is in that sense that I think John Updike killed himself, in that his white trash America has ceased to be as interesting as people originally thought. Likewise the cold war interiors and irony of something like underworld seems to reflect something that, though shadowed still today, as become meshed within a more complex and rich fabric of fictional diegesis.

He seems very Barthes, which worked for a while, but even that seemed to have become conflated with a wider tradition of American letters.

It's interesting, I look into the interior both being born after the cold war, and born outside of the US, and it seems so foreign to me, and the prose almost insulting to the reader.

I find that similar in much of post-modern fiction, that it alienates the reader while professing this grand condition of human alienation in the post modern world (Lyotard mixed with Baudrillard on ice), but the condition seems to have more resonance in the scholarly framework that besets the informed conditions of the authors than in any sense of reality I have found from within the real world. It is as if they are commenting on a condition highlighted but not ever defined, existent only in the imaginations of people who are trying to find what is peculiar about a time period that is working to divorce itself of notions that this is the great moment of change or some other such nonsense.

It is a difficult literature, that deliberately tries to alienate the reader, and I am not quite sure what I make of it. IT is unsettling, sure, but also unsettled. I do not know whether to call this post-modern stuff genius or gimmick, dark truth or constructed bullshit. Likewise I do not know if this is some sort of American thing or not, that is, whether this anxiety actually does reflect a cold-war American persona, or whether it is just a manufactured landscape out of the academy. Our novels here seem to have what people have called "post-modern", but for the most part lack the grimmness and absurdity that marks much of American post-modernism. I am not sure what exactly to make of it.