Lit Crit: Welty, Salinger, and Lovecraft

[crabby_lioness]

My husband is continuing to catch up on his literature.  He thought Welty was nice, but she waited until her very last story to say anything substantive.  Salinger, while technically a better short story writer than Welty, bored both of us to tears.  Like far too many Modern writers, he assumes that his "universal" experiences will continue to be so for every future reader, when in fact neither of us knew what he was talking about half the time.

Needing a break he turned to Lovecraft's fantasies, which are flawed but more substantive than I first gave them credit for being.  The very first Lovecraft story you read tends to be intriguing, but unforuntely they're all just rewrites of the same story, and only a couple stand out.  There's many writers I can say that about, but Lovecraft is the only one I know where you could take entire paragraphs from one story, insert it into another story, and not even disturb the flow.

Lovecraft's stories always made me want to give the writer a good swift kick in the shins for the way he glorified the fear of "things man was not meant to know/do".  As a child growing up right after the Civil Rights Movement I heard my fill of "things man was not meant to know/do" before I learned to read.  The "don't do thats" always hid a deep well of racism, sexism, homophobia, or some related form of good old identity hate.  It was not worthy of the least amount of respect, let alone the histrionic levels of terror it was supposed to engender.

But I was wrong and Lovecraft was right.  Demolishing the old justifications for institutionalized hatred did indeed cause a grotesque, shambling monstrosity to crawl out of the sewers and threated to destroy all life on Earth if we don't immediately stop all progress and worship at it's hideous feet.

It's called the Tea Party.

Comments

[swordznsorcery.livejournal.com]

Hey! I like tea! ;)

Where do you guys stand with F Scott Fitzgerald? I adored The Great Gatsby, but got bogged down in utter boredom during The Beautiful And The Damned. I've got Tender Is The Night around here somewhere waiting to be read. Must get around to it sometime.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

I live on tea, but not the Tea Party.

I don't think he's read Gatsby yet. I kept waiting for the characters to grow up but they never did. Just because one lives in a rapidly changing world is no excuse not to have standards. Quite the opposite. The still point in all the chaos should be you.

[swordznsorcery.livejournal.com]

I don't think we're supposed to like the characters though. Certainly the ones in The Beautiful And The Damned are utterly ghastly, and in Gatsby they pretty much are too. Gatsby himself is something of a tragic character, but he digs his own grave. Brilliantly evocative settings, and characters almost like something out of reality TV.

[crabby-lioness.livejournal.com]

You're absolutely right. No doubt they would have been on reality TV given the opportunity.

And he nails descriptive writing, but it's hardly worth putting up with such boring people to read it.

[swordznsorcery.livejournal.com]

That's actually very true! As I said, I loved Gatsby, but The Beautiful... was such a struggle for precisely that reason. Such appalling people. I did finish it, but at the time I wondered why. Seems to me that, the older I get, the less patient I am about fiction. Yes, some of it is beautifully written/imaginative, etc; but if there's no enjoyment there, why bother?