Is this guy of serious literary merit?

Better than someone like McCarthy my guy. Just because he doesn't obfuscate his thematic material behind arcane diction and sentence/narrative structure doesn't make him a less-than-worthy writer in the contemporary American canon at all.

you're probably right, but is mccarthy really that tough to read? i mean, have a dictionary open on your phone and fuck it. his narrative and sentence structure doesn't bother me much, but I'm not really keen to things like that anyhow. I think that's where the enjoyment is in mccarthy, you know, in his prose.

Roth is retired. I don't think we can count him as contemporary anymore.

That said, I do like him. And I have no idea who is the best active American author.

I don't think McCarthy is tough to read or anything, he's probably about as tough as Roth desu. I just think there's this idea pervading through most of Veeky Forums (and really internet book communities in general) that writers are only Great if they're ultra-creative with their sentence and narrative structure.

Damn I actually didnt know he retired. Thats a bummer.

wtf

How is mccarthy hard to read at all?

Back to genre fiction

The Corrections literally begins with him losing his job because he fucked some underage girl. Why does prose have to be cock-driven anyway? Sure is pseudy in here

Pynchon Gass Vollman McCarthy Roth Delillo

because everybody in contemporary America that reads is a bitchmade bourgeois? I agree entirely

hes said some questionable things and has come under fire for it.

there was a scandal about new york plays being sexist and franzen's commentary was something along the lines of the the publishing industry being much more sexist, thus making the theatrical sexism less serious.

similar to the all lives matter response to black lives matter.

im not putting a value judgement on this. its just something ive heard a while back.

what's a good book to start with Roth?

Eh, Franzen is kind of like Tennyson. A writer whose complete endorsement by the establishment, tragically in both cases, causes people to be turned off their work.

A lot of elements of Franzen's style are quite easy to make fun of, like the fact every page of the Corrections is like one of those meme threads where the name of the book is mentioned in the book ("Gary thought about the Corrections he'd made, and the Corrections his father had made, and realized he had Clinical Depression"), but he's great at characterizing, much more so than any other contemporary writer I've read.

Also I'm a sucker for literature that takes a pessimistic, tragic look at family

>The Corrections literally begins with him losing his job because he fucked some underage girl.
The scenario is irrelevant. Its presentation and language are the important things and in these Franzen consistently reveals himself as limpwristed.

>Also I'm a sucker for

is it because youre a tasteless street walking commoner

There's a good interview from right after the announcment. Think it was NPR. I feel like I heard it live, so I'm pretty sure it was on the radio.

>thinks he can judge an author's testosterone by the style of his prose
Gee, I wonder what your obsession with testosterone and projection of limpwristedness onto a writer's prose style could possibly indicate about your own personality and test-levels ?

No it's because I think all family is tragic and fucked up and anyone that pretends different is living a fantasy, which experience will eventually shatter.

And yes I do walk on streets user, because I leave the house sometimes. What else would I do? Climb across rooftops?

amerian pastoral

His latest novel, Purity, didn't do too much for me.