Reading Wednesday
Aug. 5th, 2020 10:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabby Just finished: Nothing, this current one is a tome.
Currently reading: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, Holy shit is this novel just 600 pages of torture porn? Like...it started out being about these four friends in New York City who were arty and vaguely dissatisfied with life and then hoo boy does it take a turn into hardcore trauma. I'm almost done and at this point, the author seems to have lost all interest in all of the characters except Jude. Which is understandable as he is essentially a walking Victorian novel. With all of these literary types around, it's a disappointment that no one has yet commented that his cartoonishly awful life is a Victorian novel. I mean [spoilers and also big trigger warnings] he is abandoned in a garbage can as a baby, raised in a monastery where they regularly beat and rape him, then he's kidnapped by one of the monks who forces him into sex slavery, where he contracts all of the mysterious venereal diseases and starts self-harming, then he escapes and he's sent to a foster care home, where guess what, he's raped and beaten a bunch more, then he runs away and is found by a psychiatrist who keeps him locked in the basement and you may see a pattern here, then the psychiatrist gets sick of him and runs him over with a car, then he's rescued by a nice lesbian social worker who dies of cancer, then he secretly self-harms for hundreds of pages, then gets into an abusive relationship with a dude who beats and rapes him some more and almost kills him, then he attempts suicide, and his heretofore heterosexual best friend realizes he's in love with him and they hook up, but he can't enjoy sex on account of the aforementioned, so they eventually settle into a sexless relationship that's kind of good, but his legs keep getting infected because of being run over by a car and eventually he has to have them amputated, and then his partner and one of his other friends die in a car accident.[/spoilers] Is there a point to this? I still have about 70 pages left so I'll let you know. Anyway plot-wise, it feels a bit like super melodramatic fanfic, in the sense that the author seems to take an almost erotic interest in describing his horrific suffering and how pretty he is, and also that we are presumably supposed to care about these characters for some other reason besides their lives being awful. Except it's written in very lovely, very haunting prose.
I had a weird conversation about it, because I started out really liking it and enjoying the characters, but I'm in a Discord group and it was brought up as an example of why straight women writing gay men is Problematic. I had only just started and the most prominent gay character at the beginning is JB (everyone else's sexuality is ambiguous), and I'm like, uhhh? He's obviously not Perfect Representation but I don't see a problem and his sexuality doesn't feel fetishy, plus there is a long tradition of men of all sexualities writing women of all sexualities in problematic ways, and they don't get half the crap for it that straight women who write m/m fanfic seem to get in the Discourse. And besides Brokeback Mountain and, like, BL and yaoi, I couldn't think of any examples outside of fandom, and I wouldn't say any of those are major social problems. Also criticizing a WOC for how she depicts wealthy (primarily) white dudes is a bit ehhhh. I was actually going to give the author some points for not making the main queer character a perfect cinnamon roll solely defined by his sexual orientation, but...turns out 1) he's not actually the main queer character they were talking about, and 2) hoo-boy Good Representation is not the major problem here. I may have to admit that the #Woke Kids are correct.
Anyway obviously if it wasn't well-written, I wouldn't have read 500 pages of it. But I dearly hope the author is coming to a point.
Currently reading: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, Holy shit is this novel just 600 pages of torture porn? Like...it started out being about these four friends in New York City who were arty and vaguely dissatisfied with life and then hoo boy does it take a turn into hardcore trauma. I'm almost done and at this point, the author seems to have lost all interest in all of the characters except Jude. Which is understandable as he is essentially a walking Victorian novel. With all of these literary types around, it's a disappointment that no one has yet commented that his cartoonishly awful life is a Victorian novel. I mean [spoilers and also big trigger warnings] he is abandoned in a garbage can as a baby, raised in a monastery where they regularly beat and rape him, then he's kidnapped by one of the monks who forces him into sex slavery, where he contracts all of the mysterious venereal diseases and starts self-harming, then he escapes and he's sent to a foster care home, where guess what, he's raped and beaten a bunch more, then he runs away and is found by a psychiatrist who keeps him locked in the basement and you may see a pattern here, then the psychiatrist gets sick of him and runs him over with a car, then he's rescued by a nice lesbian social worker who dies of cancer, then he secretly self-harms for hundreds of pages, then gets into an abusive relationship with a dude who beats and rapes him some more and almost kills him, then he attempts suicide, and his heretofore heterosexual best friend realizes he's in love with him and they hook up, but he can't enjoy sex on account of the aforementioned, so they eventually settle into a sexless relationship that's kind of good, but his legs keep getting infected because of being run over by a car and eventually he has to have them amputated, and then his partner and one of his other friends die in a car accident.[/spoilers] Is there a point to this? I still have about 70 pages left so I'll let you know. Anyway plot-wise, it feels a bit like super melodramatic fanfic, in the sense that the author seems to take an almost erotic interest in describing his horrific suffering and how pretty he is, and also that we are presumably supposed to care about these characters for some other reason besides their lives being awful. Except it's written in very lovely, very haunting prose.
I had a weird conversation about it, because I started out really liking it and enjoying the characters, but I'm in a Discord group and it was brought up as an example of why straight women writing gay men is Problematic. I had only just started and the most prominent gay character at the beginning is JB (everyone else's sexuality is ambiguous), and I'm like, uhhh? He's obviously not Perfect Representation but I don't see a problem and his sexuality doesn't feel fetishy, plus there is a long tradition of men of all sexualities writing women of all sexualities in problematic ways, and they don't get half the crap for it that straight women who write m/m fanfic seem to get in the Discourse. And besides Brokeback Mountain and, like, BL and yaoi, I couldn't think of any examples outside of fandom, and I wouldn't say any of those are major social problems. Also criticizing a WOC for how she depicts wealthy (primarily) white dudes is a bit ehhhh. I was actually going to give the author some points for not making the main queer character a perfect cinnamon roll solely defined by his sexual orientation, but...turns out 1) he's not actually the main queer character they were talking about, and 2) hoo-boy Good Representation is not the major problem here. I may have to admit that the #Woke Kids are correct.
Anyway obviously if it wasn't well-written, I wouldn't have read 500 pages of it. But I dearly hope the author is coming to a point.
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Date: 2020-08-05 09:55 pm (UTC)LOLOLOLOL YUP
It is one of those books that if you summarize it, like the Twilight saga or some of the infamous crappy sff novels, you can just see people making the 0.0 face even right through the internet. It's amazing.
Garth Greenwell called it the Great American Gay Novel or something and Daniel Mendelsohn threw an absolute shitfit about that and this person wrote a hilarious piece about how she never would read this book but then couldn't stop reading it -- I mean it's hilarious that she published it in the NYorker, because it's absolutely the kind of thing that someone who writes for the NYorker would write about that book, down to the hyperspecific details about moving apartments in New York, which is like the most traumatizing thing that ever happens to New Yorkers lol. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/hanya-yanagiharas-sex-city Equally fucking hilariously, some jackass who went to the Iowa Writer's Workshop (yes) wrote about it "extensively" for their MFA thesis essay exam (YES) and they also wrote for the Paris Review blog about Remus/Sirius fanfiction, I mean is that not the ideal reader for the fucking 700 page misery porn + furniture porn basically whump fanfic taking to such extremes the reader is also getting whumped or fucking what?
What interests me about it (call me, Paris Review! I'm broke and have nowhere to use my useless degrees!) is she's nearly like a kind of high-toned version of JT Leroy, remember him? The hook for JT Leroy was that this was stuff he had really experienced and it was agreed that his "fiction" was basically autobiography and all these terrible things had made him into a kind of writing savant. He was made into diamond by the horrible pressure of his hellish experiences. But this writer is up front that she's a woman and has pretty much nothing in common with her main whumptastic creation (in one interview she was asked if she did research and she was like "No, he came to me fully formed, right in my head") and it's all completely iddy fantasy, and she got even more acclaim than when people thought the JT Leroy construct was real, back in the day. It's basically like, this person took her personal idtastic OMC fanfic and instead of posting it to AO3, had enough social capital that she made it into a best-selling award-winning cultural touchstone instead? That's really wild. I have to imagine somewhere out there Laura Albert is clenching her fists and screaming at the heavens, "This should have been MINE! I thought of it FIRST!"
tl;dr I'm probably never reading this thing (700 fucking pages? I also don't read fanfic that's like longer than 200K, it's just, life's too short) but I find all the cultural discussions and reflections on it fascinating
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Date: 2020-08-05 10:08 pm (UTC)OMFG hahahaha this is the greatest line of literary criticism ever written
Like I tend to not pay attention to Depressing Serious Literature That Is Good For You so I'd never heard of it. But anyway. This is not that. This is absolutely Remus/Sirius whumpfic with the serial numbers filed off. Which—I'm kinda like good for her??? Because that's hilarious? But I'm also jealous.
Once for some reason I was reading this Phantom of the Opera prequel fanfic that was approximately a gazillion words, 90% of which were Erik getting tortured, and every so often I'd stop and ask myself what had gone so wrong in my life and/or psyche that I was reading this, except like, I couldn't stop. And this is exactly the same feeling.
I feel perhaps this is implanted in us at a young age when we are told by well-meaning but not very bright English teachers that Go Ask Alice is a true authentic narrative and is what will happen to us if we smoke the marijuana.
ANYWAY you should read it please read it I am DESPERATE for your take and it is super long but it's not actually taking me that long to read it.
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Date: 2020-08-05 10:23 pm (UTC)I FUCKING KNOW RIGHT
Like I tend to not pay attention to Depressing Serious Literature That Is Good For You so I'd never heard of it. But anyway. This is not that. This is absolutely Remus/Sirius whumpfic with the serial numbers filed off. Which—I'm kinda like good for her??? Because that's hilarious? But I'm also jealous.
OMFG I was trying to sound like all adult or whatever but yes! This puts the people who can self-publish their whumpfic for like ten figures a month in the SHADE! We're all jealous of HH!
Once for some reason I was reading this Phantom of the Opera prequel fanfic that was approximately a gazillion words, 90% of which were Erik getting tortured, and every so often I'd stop and ask myself what had gone so wrong in my life and/or psyche that I was reading this, except like, I couldn't stop. And this is exactly the same feeling.
....okay there was a TRULY terrible Willow/Angelus (yes) fic on elljay wayyyy back in the day and the writer kept holding her tiny but helpless audience hostage by doling it out every couple of weeks, so I totally know what you mean.
I feel perhaps this is implanted in us at a young age when we are told by well-meaning but not very bright English teachers that Go Ask Alice is a true authentic narrative and is what will happen to us if we smoke the marijuana.
//cackles like a freaking witch
ANYWAY you should read it please read it I am DESPERATE for your take and it is super long but it's not actually taking me that long to read it.
aaaaaaaaahahaha omfg I really was convinced I would like NEVER read this book but you know what, Sabs, I would do it for you
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Date: 2020-08-05 10:32 pm (UTC)I'm like...well, the characters in my novel suffer a lot.
....okay there was a TRULY terrible Willow/Angelus (yes) fic on elljay wayyyy back in the day and the writer kept holding her tiny but helpless audience hostage by doling it out every couple of weeks, so I totally know what you mean.
I feel like I remember that one. Or at least hearing people be very upset about it.
aaaaaaaaahahaha omfg I really was convinced I would like NEVER read this book but you know what, Sabs, I would do it for you
READ IT AND LIVEBLOG IT c'mon you know your take would be 1000x better than mine.
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Date: 2020-08-05 10:47 pm (UTC)LOL omg I'm not sure I have the mental stamina to liveblog anything anymore! ("Chapter 20: ....became overwhelmed by world situation and retreated to reread Terry Pratchett book for 20th time.") But you have totally piqued my interest tho. I think I have an ACTUAL JT Leroy book in my library (along with the memoir by the person who played JT Leroy), so I should at least check this out....LOL yes I even have the ebook in my "pirated books to be read someday if I ever run out of other stuff to read" folder. How explicit are the scenes of CSA? That's what is likely to be a dealbreaker for me, altho I could probably just skim.
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Date: 2020-08-06 12:21 am (UTC)Uh. Really bad? Except that it's so ludicrously over the top that after a certain point you're like...again? Normally that is a huge trigger for me but it ends up crossing the line twice, if that makes sense.
All the trigger warnings for sure.
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Date: 2020-08-09 10:55 pm (UTC)WHAT.
I now feel inclined to read this
I still have a soft spot in my heart for Remus/Sirius, R/S taught me what love is
But is it more glorious than the shoebox project? or this one fic I read this one time where they were into glam rock and boned on a bed full of glitter? probably not
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Date: 2020-08-09 11:00 pm (UTC)I never read the Shoebox Project but like...I'm into R/S as a ship and I hate what she did to both characters because I really like stories where people have suffered and misunderstood each other and basically go through hell and find each other again, and that happens in Azkaban only to get undone in Order.
This left me with a similar level of disappointment.
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Date: 2020-08-05 10:07 pm (UTC)I was trying to think of examples of this, other than stuff like self-published fanfic with the serial numbers filed off on Kindle Unlimited by women, because that's a relatively recent phenomenon. Josh Lanyon famously pretended to be a man writing about Real Manly Men fucking like Real Manly Men do (no rly, he self-published one book called Man, Oh, Man! Writing M/M Fiction for Kinks and Ca$h) until he was revealed to be, well, a woman. There are a couple of other cases like that. I think the readership for those novels is still pretty much women? like with slash. Becky Albertalli wrote the book Love, Simon was based on apparently, and apparently YA Book twitter blew up recently about a book deal a woman had for writing about a gay male teenager in New York during the AIDS years. But YA is pretty different, and there's that whole #ownvoices thing. I know there are probably a lot of books written by women authors about gay men that aren't self-pub erotica! I just can't think of some right now (need more coffee, also need take pills).
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Date: 2020-08-05 10:12 pm (UTC)Which is not to say that the Tragic Gay Trope isn't incredibly culturally harmful to queer people in general, but I wouldn't say that women are particular drivers of this phenomenon. I'm open to being wrong about this.
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Date: 2020-08-05 10:38 pm (UTC)I don't remember The Goldfinch getting that kind of criticism, altho maybe I just missed it because I was too busy hiding my deep and abiding envy of Donna Fucking Tartt, and Goldfinch is also way more highbrow (but hitting the same kind of "well written but trashily plotted" mark, just like Secret History did) and also was about high art and addiction and whatever. I do think I remember some criticism like that around when the movie came out, tho. (With CMBYN the Woke criticism was much more about the age gap. Hoo boy remember the original UK Queer as Folk series? Or some of the CLASSIC coming out novels about young boys and older men, some of which were consciously modelled on Plato? ANYWAY....)
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Date: 2020-08-06 12:48 am (UTC)I'm honestly fine with both. I'll only mock it if it's bad writing.
I thought The Goldfinch was boring af and I don't know why people got so excited about it. But I don't remember any criticism of it at all.
(With CMBYN the Woke criticism was much more about the age gap. Hoo boy remember the original UK Queer as Folk series? Or some of the CLASSIC coming out novels about young boys and older men, some of which were consciously modelled on Plato? ANYWAY....)
This just rolls back to my primary issue with #Woke Kids. I know they grew up with all media being wholesome and educational and primarily meant to instruct them on correct ways of being, but when you become an adult, *stage whisper* not all fictional relationships portrayed need to be healthy or acceptable by contemporary standards.
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Date: 2020-08-09 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-09 11:03 pm (UTC)But yeah you can't have an age gap or power dynamics or anything. The only acceptable relationships are soft and cute uwu
This said I checked and Tumblr fuckin' loooooves this book.
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Date: 2020-08-11 03:51 pm (UTC)Yup. And that fanfic writers consistently make characters who are decidedly not this into this, has made me so meh on fanfic. All the edges are sanded off and you end up with...the most boring fucking story imaginable. It happens with Gen stories too!
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Date: 2020-08-11 03:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-09 10:52 pm (UTC)I think this does get attention paid to it (volumes and volumes of attention) but I feel like it's ok, because explicitly writing about men being into men back then was way more difficult. It's less horrifying to me than the way so many straight men write women. Especially when they describe their "bouncing breasts" or something
I remember The Goldfinch getting trashed for being poorly-written. I dunno, I haven't read it. The Secret History seems to be considered her best and I only mildly liked it so I don't think I'd like the rest.
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Date: 2020-08-05 10:14 pm (UTC)We'll see if my thoughts change upon completion.
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Date: 2020-08-09 10:49 pm (UTC)I can't speak about this particular author but lol the whining about straight women writing m/m is so over-the-top. I don't have a dog in that fight but I'll probably care more when f/f movies directed by men stop being considered ~representation. Also, some men (like Ryan Murphy) are SO BAD at gay male characters.
That and I hate the assumption that women and girls who like m/m are misguided straight women. I loved m/m media when I was teenager, largely because it was more varied and more available than f/f media, so it was like a safe port of queerness.
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Date: 2020-08-09 11:09 pm (UTC)There's also just not that many women writing queer men outside of fandom spaces and maaaaybe self-published erotica, which is one degree removed from fandom spaces.
I guess with this book it's mainly a problem because of the romanticization of gay male suffering that plays into the Bury Your Gay trope, and also because the way she writes men bears zero resemblance to actual men. The former is, I guess, a cultural problem in aggregate, in that there are still not that many serious stories where queer characters get to survive and be happy. The latter is either a stylistic choice or bad characterization and I can't tell which, but I don't think there's an epidemic of women writing men in ways that men don't behave in society as a whole.
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Date: 2020-08-11 03:31 pm (UTC)I've never read it, but I read a lot about it when deciding whether or not to, heh. It's most definitely not my thing, being full of the fanfic tropes I don't like (hurt/comfort ramped up to eleventy!1!). But the phenomenon of it is fascinating.
I must admit I was little :O when you said you were tackling it, but am happy you did so I could have your take on it.
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Date: 2020-08-11 03:36 pm (UTC)I am all about the hurt/comfort and my own writing is full of it, but it's basically hurt without any of the payoff. Like it's too depressing to feel cathartic at any point.