Vonnegut's place in your personal heirarchy

Re: Vonnegut's standing

Poe is in the top five, hands down. It has nothing to do with "preference."

The guy wrote a book about molluscs just for drinking money and it was a smash hit and critical success.

 

Re: Vonnegut's standing


Well, sure, who doesn't want to read about mollusks?

 

Re: Vonnegut's standing

I think, 100 years from now, literary critics are going to be high not only on King, but on Grisham as well, as writers of popular fiction.

 

Re: Vonnegut's standing

There's such a difference between a novel like 'Player Piano' and the later stuff like 'Breakfast of Champions' or 'Hocus Pocus.'

 

Re: Vonnegut's standing

King is an interesting one. Grisham I don't know. He's more of a guilty pleasure.

 

Re: Vonnegut's standing

I've never had any interest in Grisham.
I've read quite a lot of King and enjoyed most of it, but there are always obscenely purple or clunky passages, a problem that was compounded when he became to big to edit.

 

Re: Vonnegut's standing

Buck is bang on about "too big to edit"

I like King but his books share a problem with those of lot of successful commercial writers: an editor has barely touched them--for two reasons.

Successfull superstar writers like King won't allow their prose to be sullied by an editor. "Goddammit, I wrote a 840 page book and although an editor worth his salt could create a better book by cutting it down to 400 pages, I'll have no one screwing with my artistic integrity".

Secondly, in the world of commercial fiction, the perception is that the bigger the book, the bigger the bang for the bunk.

I'm a big Vonnegut fan but I'm not sure he's even in the top ten in the American literary universe.

I think of him as a 20 goal second line centre. Good player but not in the elite.

 

Re: Vonnegut's standing

I can understand that assessment.
I think he definitely falls within the club (Chris the bastard seems to be afraid of the word 'pantheon') of great American novelists. 'Slaughterhouse Five' still enjoys strong critical and general recognition. 'Mother Night,' 'Sirens of Titans' and 'Breakfast of Champions' to a lesser extent.
That's why I was curious where people rate him. I can understand if people consider him second-echelon and not one of the greats.
I disagree, but I understand it.

 

Re: Vonnegut's standing

Steinbeck is indeed sneered at, long and often, in the academy. But I think a lot of that is because his writing doesn't give many theory-sniffing doctoral candidates something obscure to piddle about. Steinbeck's writing is simple. The academy worships complexity. The academy lifts someone like Donald Barthleme to demigod status mainly just because he's difficult. Steinbeck is out of step with just about every prevailing trend in literary thinking these days. He's straight-up in a world that's all about irony. He's sentimental, and these days, that's a one-way ticket to Scornville, with a layover in Scoffsburg. And he writes about working-class topics...never a point of interest for the academy, no matter how "leftist" they or others think they are.

 

Re: Vonnegut's standing

I thought "shitstew" was a breed of dog.

 

Re: Vonnegut's standing

Are you pro-Steinbeck or anti-academia?

 

Re: Vonnegut's standing

All of the above.