Voting Authors Off the Desert Island
Adrienne Aldredge has a twist on Bookish Questions I’m herewith turning into a meme:
What authors have you given up on for good? And why?
I’m going to stick to authors who continue to produce work, and whom I used to follow eagerly, not authors I felt obligated to try and didn’t like once I did.
Dan Simmons – Hyperion was heartbreakingly, jaw-droppingly good, though more a collection of novelas than a novel in its own right. Its sequel, The Fall of Hyperion, was the sort of bad book only a very good author could write, gassy as an unpopped sperm whale’s corpse on the beach: the thin book struggling to get out of it would have been a landmark. Then came Endymion and some others. I’m pretty sure I read Endymion all the way through and started the one after that, but I noticed that they were . . . boring. I’m relieved that I dropped him from my “must follow” list before he joined the Insane GWOT Clown Posse, because it would look too much like sour grapes otherwise. That said, if anyone wants to make a case for Ilium/Olympos, I’m open.
Alan Furst – There’s no getting around it: none of the books that Furst has written since Dark Star, the second in his series of interwar-WWII espionage books, has come close to equalling the sweep or pathos of Dark Star or Night Soldiers. Those two books are absolute must reads for anyone who ever liked political fiction. None of Furst’s subsequent work is necessary to anybody. Furst started coddling his protagonists and circumscribing his ambitions. Yes, Night Soldiers and Dark Star wonderfully evoked a bygone atmosphere of gitaines and whatnot, but they did a hell of a lot more than that: they squeezed their protagonists between the thumb of Nazism and the forefinger of Stalin’s Comintern until they nearly or actually burst. The subsequent novels are set-pieces and minor variations on the two great ones, with nothing much risked and, increasingly, nothing much ventured either.
The most recent book, The Foreign Correspondent, has finally put me off Furst for good. Hardly anything happens in this title beyond retyping an Italian officer’s memoirs. There are clandestine forays into Berlin on the eve of the invasion of Poland; there’s an undercover mission into Mussolini’s Italy, but there’s no plot to speak of nor even a moment when you doubt that the protagonist will lose anything he even moderately cares about.
“IN BULGARIA, IN 1934, ON A MUDDY STREET IN THE RIVER town of Vidin, Khristo Stoianev saw his brother kicked to death by fascist militia…”
That’s one hell of an opening sentence. It’s got nothing to do with nostalgia for cafés and gitaines and whatever the hell else people talk about Furst’s books offering. It’s the first sentence of Night Soldiers, and shows what a talented writer can accomplish when he’s not being lazy.
This could be a bitter meme! Authors go bad before we’re ready to admit it. We try like hell to like tens or hundreds of thousands of words before giving up; then we resent the effort we ourselves chose to waste. We need scapegoats! Damn you, Alan Furst, for putting me through that tedious voyage with the Dutch sailors in Dark Voyage! Curse you, Dan Simmons, for whatever happened in Rise of Endymion, of which I read at least the first chapter, so far as I remember. As the Shang-Chi villain Razorfist objected while being gunned down by Carlton Velcro, “No, Master! Not when I’ve been so LOYAAALLLL!!!!!! . . . ”
Comment by Matt —
October 14, 2006 @ 3:55 pm
I’ll nominate Robert D. Kaplan, Mr. Military Insider Mucky Muck. I read Balkan Ghosts while in college and loved it, notwithstanding that Kaplan’s thesis that hatred in the Balkans is intractable influenced Clinton’s initial decision not to intervene in Bosnia. It was a fascinating account nonetheless, written with erudition and humor.
Now, I can hardly stomach his Atlantic pieces and didn’t buy his most recent book. He’s become something of an Imperial apologist and has fallen under the spell of the soldiers who have brought him into their world. His hagiographic portrayals of these men have robbed him of his journalistic integrity, as far as I’m concerned.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
October 14, 2006 @ 4:25 pm
Ilium was fun. Fluffy, not deep, but fun. Good vacation/plane reading.
Comment by Gary Farber —
October 14, 2006 @ 4:26 pm
“Authors go bad before we’re ready to admit it.”
It happens. The machine takes a bit of time to stop.
The author keeps writing; the editor keeps hoping the next one will be better; the sales people and booksellers hope so, too, and that it will sell better. And so do the readers.
And sometimes: nope.
Less attention is paid to a variant: a first novel seems promising, but the second, less, the third yet less, and by the fourth, someone has to put those who started the machine out of their misery. Embarassing all around. It helps to have a new editor, or assistant editor, come in, or even a new editorial assistant, to write a blunt report saying “this isn’t working: good try, but it didn’t fly.”
Been there, done that.
Thankfully, there’s never a shortage of good stuff coming along, if we’re ready for it.
Comment by Nicholas Weininger —
October 14, 2006 @ 4:32 pm
Me, I used to be a huge Kim Stanley Robinson fan but gave up on him years ago. The Mars trilogy follows a very similar trajectory to the Hyperion series in terms of quality decline. A lot of his early work is incredible and not nearly so well known as it should be– The Gold Coast and The Memory of Whiteness are his best novels, I think, and his ’80s and early-mid ’90s short stories are great too– but now he’s just a left-wing preacher-novelist of the peculiarly annoying Northern California type, a sort of L. Neil Smith of the left.
Comment by Avram —
October 14, 2006 @ 6:38 pm
I picked up Ilium while browsing Barnes & Noble, opened it up to a random page and read a few paragraphs, and put it down, bored. The scene was something about some guy hunting a big sea creature, a kraken maybe, and it was several paragraphs of exposition in a row, with no action, and I’m thinking if you’ve got a guy fighting a sea monster, shouldn’t it be exciting?
.
But maybe I was spoiled by The Stars My Destination, which I was re-reading at the time.
Comment by Rich Puchalsky —
October 14, 2006 @ 10:55 pm
Hyperion was good because Simmons had the idea of re-writing Chaucer. After that, he was like, hey, didn’t Chaucer write a sequel to The Canterbury Tales or something that I can copy?
I can’t really think of authors who are still writing who I used to want to read more than one book by but have given up on. Wait — perhaps Le Carre. Once the Cold War went, his books went on a downhill slide.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
October 15, 2006 @ 2:13 am
I very much enjoyed Endymion and The Rise of Endymion. They form an “arrival of the Singularity” story, a genre I like even as I believe in it less and less. It also does a neat job of adding a whole lot of complexity to AI society without invalidating anything in the Hyperion Cantos. But I bogged down in Ilium, and what I hear about Olympos didn’t move me to press on, particularly after the Insane Klown GWOT Posse thing.
I think it took Le Carre a while to find his new groove, but The Constant Gardener moved me deeply and seemed to me very much to have his classic virtues. (The film version is an extremely good adaptation, though it makes the ending less “this is out there but almost certainly won’t help” and more “this is out there and it might still not work, but the prospects are good”.)
Steven Baxter is high on my given-up-on list. He used to write intriguing alternate histories, stories working with Victorian legacies in intriguing human ways, and cool yarns. He’s settled into a rut of bleakly depressing stories that have the framework of technothrillers and are therefore neither good thrillers nor good stories of cosmic nihilism.
I’m concerned that John Keegan almost certainly belongs on this list, and for the same reason as Dan Simmons. I am deeply fond of his books on battle and command, and his account of the invasion of Normandy. But whoo boy have the clowns eaten his brain.
Clive Barker hasn’t jumped the shark, but he’s engaged in appropriately friendly synchronized swimming with it. I want to see if he can regain some focus.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
October 15, 2006 @ 2:24 am
By the way, since Our Host brought up comics…
Doug Moench. Has Moench written anything really good since his last stint on Batman? There was a time when he was blazing all kinds of interesting territory. Then there was a time when he wasn’t.
Steve Engelhart would have been on my list a year ago, but his recent series of Batman mini-series with Marshall Rogers have been jewels. Funny, action-packed, loaded with melodrama, and with strongly structured narrative. Just great stuff, from the team that produced the Batman I still prefer to take as definitive.
Frank Miller, of course.
Comment by Doug T —
October 15, 2006 @ 9:14 am
RObert Jordan is an obvious example. I liked him back when he was writing Conan novels, and the first 5 or so books of the Wheel of Time were fantastic. The however many since then have been anywhere from bad to atrocious, and have driven what could have been the best fantasy series in 30 years into the ground.
Earlier in life, I loved and then gave up on Joe Haldeman. Random trivia fact–a friend took a class on writing from him and Haldeman admitted to trying to write popular stuff in order to get a bigger payday. Because he wanted to have his head chopped off and frozen for reincarnation when he was about to die. And apparently that costs a lot of money.
Not really a time sequence issue, but I loved Blindness by Saramago but tried to read two other books by him and thought they were both pretty bad and dull, and so have given up on him.
Comment by No Nym —
October 15, 2006 @ 9:15 am
I keep meaning to put down Alan Steele. Every story starts out pretty solid. Invariably, it ens when our protagonists learn that they have secretly been manipulated by a conspiracy of shadowy other people, introduced only in the last 20 pages, thereby making their simple heroism worthless. Arrrgh. I keep hoping he’ll give up the formula, so I keep starting his books.
I’ve also put down Orson Scott Card. How much demigoddery can you take?
Comment by Steve —
October 15, 2006 @ 11:25 am
I dropped Card a long time ago, but really, when you look back, are any of his post-Ender’s Game books worth reading? And I don’t think EG has held up well at all — it’s sort of same inverted power-trip fantasy of Slan, only updated so we appreciate that weedy bookish fannish types are not just better and smarter and destined to rule, but also more sensitive as well. Totally emo, Mary Sue!
Will I sound like a prat if I throw out Pynchon? Only I’ll probably try his upcoming one, so I haven’t quite given up for good, and he doesn’t write enough to really work for this question. How about Robert Parker (the Spenser guy, not the wine critic)?
Comment by Gary Farber —
October 15, 2006 @ 11:43 am
“But maybe I was spoiled by The Stars My Destination, which I was re-reading at the time.”
If an unreasonable standard were ever established, Avram just did.
Comment by Gary Farber —
October 15, 2006 @ 11:50 am
“Earlier in life, I loved and then gave up on Joe Haldeman. Random trivia fact–a friend took a class on writing from him and Haldeman admitted to trying to write popular stuff in order to get a bigger payday. Because he wanted to have his head chopped off and frozen for reincarnation when he was about to die. And apparently that costs a lot of money.”
As a guy who has found that Joe has forgotten at least a dozen of our chats, and that was twenty years ago – sheesh, he has a bad memory, but that also comes with meeting a jillion people, I have to say that this is a really dumb comment.
Comment by Nancy Lebovitz —
October 15, 2006 @ 12:09 pm
Avram’s comment reminds me of why I gave up on Larry Niven–if you can’t make a massed vampire attack that taking place on a ringworld interesting, there’s just no hope.
Comment by Monte Davis —
October 15, 2006 @ 12:31 pm
I bailed about 2/3 of the way through Stephenson’s Quicksilver, and after sampling later bits of the trilogy kinda doubt he’ll get me back.
Steve: I couldn’t be more cranked up for the new Pynchon, but then I loved Mason & Dixon — somewhere around 100 pages in, the style became transparent an m
Comment by Monte Davis —
October 15, 2006 @ 12:43 pm
I bailed about 2/3 of the way through Stephenson’s Quicksilver, and after sampling later bits of the trilogy, kinda doubt he’ll get me back. Several prolific mystery/suspense authors (Parker, McBain et al) have lost me as their strengths came to seem tics.
Steve: I couldn’t be more eager for the new Pynchon, but then I loved Mason & Dixon — somewhere around 100 pages in, the style turned transparent and it became the best buddy movie ever. For me, P. is in the “I’d throw myself off the island first” category, but I learned long ago not to try to sell him to others.
Comment by IOZ —
October 15, 2006 @ 1:56 pm
Frank Herbert, by the time I got to Dune: What Was I Saying Again?
Thanks fer the tag ‘n ‘at.
Comment by Gary Farber —
October 15, 2006 @ 6:13 pm
See, Nancy is yet another person I miss hearing from greatly.
Comment by Mr. Obscura —
October 15, 2006 @ 7:54 pm
Monte, I adored Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, devouring each book in a couple of sittings. Although I slogged my way though Mason & Dixon the entire back half was more an exercise in dogged determination than reading enjoyment.
Back on topic, I gave up all the techno-thriller writers, starting with Tom Clancy, extending through Stephen Coonts, Larry Bond, and Dale Brown. Turns out most of those books weren’t much good after all. I always liked Harold Coyle’s work, but he was a victim of collateral damage.
Right now I feel I should give up Harry Turtledove because so many of his series are so similar in structure and content, but I simply can’t. I enjoy his storytelling too much.
Comment by (Not that) Jim —
October 15, 2006 @ 10:45 pm
I’ll second the Robert Parker and throw in Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke went from “My God, it’s full of stars,” to 3001, which can only be described as “My God, it’s full of shit.”
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
October 15, 2006 @ 10:55 pm
John Kessel wrote a really good critique of Ender’s game, which helped me clarify my lingering uncomfortableness with it.
Comment by Alan Little —
October 16, 2006 @ 6:42 am
A long time ago – like, a quarter of a century ago – I was a huge fan of up-to-and-including-Nova Samuel R. Delany. Read lots of his later stuff but never actually enjoyed it, and haven’t (re-)read anything of his for many years now.
Re: Ender’s Game – I read it shortly before I read Neuromancer, back when both were fairly recent. And while reading Neuromancer, I looked back on the old days (a few weeks previously) of reading Ender’s Game, and thinking how very quaint and old-school it suddenly seemed.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
October 16, 2006 @ 10:19 am
Comics: Frank Miller has gotten retroactively unreadable for me.
1. I really liked The Dark Knight Returns and his Born Again arc on Daredevil when I first read them.
2. I bounced off of the Sin City comics, but went to see it in the theater anyway. I laughed my head off through the whole movie. The dialogue was just so overwrought I could not listen to it without hearing it as parody.
3. When I went home, I pulled DKR off the shelf, and tried re-reading it, only I read it aloud.
4. Conclusion: Miller has always been like this. Now I can’t read anything by Miller without hearing Bruce Willis grunting, “You can’t die yet, old man!” over and over again.
Comment by Anthony Cartouche —
October 16, 2006 @ 11:58 am
I used to eagerly read every John Updike novel as soon as I could. But I think I’ve only read one of his last six or seven books, and I was none too impressed wwth that one.
Comment by A.S. —
October 16, 2006 @ 12:18 pm
While I agree with you about Furst’s decline and that he “started coddling his protagonists and circumscribing his ambitionsâ€, I would date it differently. I think that Polish Officer and Red Gold, while more narrowly focused than Night Soldiers and Dark Star, are in their way the equal of the earlier books. Where Furst goes wrong is where he starts to like his characters too much, sentimentalizes them and makes life easy for them. Serebin in Blood of Victory is the perfect example, living off his trust fund, escaping from the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s (How often did THAT happen?) and wandering around Europe without being an NKVD target. He’s just not a believable protagonist. Contrast that with Red Gold, where Casson devotes as much energy to avoiding starvation as to the resistance, and where the Viktor Serge-like character who puts him in contact with the FTP barely escapes with his life. Or contrast any of the later novels with the end of Polish Officer, where it is unspoken but obvious that in eastern Poland/western Byelorussia in early 1942, DeMilja is not going to survive the war, that if the Germans don’t kill him the NKVD will.
It’s very frustrating because Furst at his best is a treasure.
Comment by Doctor Slack —
October 16, 2006 @ 2:55 pm
Salman Rushdie. Started grating on the nerves after The Satanic Verses, but lost me entirely with the insufferable The Ground Beneath Her Feet. (Shalimar the Clown is alleged to be a return to form, but I’m not exactly rushing to find out whether that’s true.)
Michael Ondaatje, whose poetry and early novels were great but who (weirdly, or maybe not so weirdly) found fame just as his novels were deteriorating. The English Patient is one of the most overrated books ever to be made into an overrated film.
Comment by Tom Scudder —
November 20, 2006 @ 4:37 am
On Card, post-ENDER: I liked the first two or so books of his Alvin Maker series; the rest became progressively less readable.
Comment by Sebastian Holsclaw —
November 20, 2006 @ 11:59 am
Stephen R. Donaldson. I read the Mordant’s need series and thought it was pretty good. The Thomas Covenant series started off great but I almost wanted to strangle myself by the end. The “One Tree” could have been two chapters in another book instead of almost 600 or whatever pages. I barely finished the series and then swore not to read another book of his. He didn’t publish anything forever, which made it easy. Two friends really reccommended the Gap series, so I read it. Sheesh, even darker than Thomas Covenant, but much much better. Too much sexual compulsiveness, but a good series.
But I still think I’m not going back to Thomas Covenant. That well is poisoned.