>"/lit/" unironically dislikes the most evocative and culturally poignant novel of the last 30 years
Lmao, what's your excuse faggots? Is it the scary, bloody stuff makes you poop your pampers or is it the sexual descriptions that trigger your bitter, virginal indignation?
And you call yourselves a literature board. You are babies.
Angry pleb
>>8041619
It's too much fun so they have to pretend it's no good.
It's in the /lit/ starter kit. People are only being contrarian if they pretend to not like it.
Brett please.
>>8041619
Films better and i aint even memeing
>>8041630
Nope, the movie fucked it up.
>>8041636
Nope, it made a shit-tier story actually interesting.
>>8041645
>story
art isn't for you, bud
>>8041649
I said story and I stand behind it. Debate me, you filthy plebian.
>>8041619
anything delillo has ever written is a thousand times better
>>8041655
There's no debate to be had. Story hasn't been imperative criteria for a novel for more than a century now, you luddite.
>>8041619
I prefer The Rules of Attraction, by a long shot. Though the 80s Wall Street thing is a bit interesting
>>8041619
>culturally poignant
lol
Is this all you look for? Bet you loved IJ too.
>muh 80s consumerist greed
lol this is a book for pseuds
>>8041669
You're wrong. Reshape me, my nigga.
>>8041683
Your assertion isn't just that I am wrong, it is that literature as a whole is wrong and that you somehow have a more worthy perspective on how it should work. I can't reshape someone that insists on being stupid.
>>8041690
What if literature is wrong though? Create me, you slammin muhammad
The reason why I dislike this book is because it is a blatantly unrealistic portrayal of mental illness.
>>8041701
What if you weren't a boring idiot who asks redundant shit on an anime board for literature on your weekends?
What if indeed, anon. What if indeed.
>>8041714
You're just mad cause I roasted you
>>8041719
You must be a real hoot among your friends if that's your idea of roasting.
Oh wait.....
>>8041712
It isn't supposed to be a portrayal of mental illness. Fuckin' pleb.
>>8041726
Yup. Diagnosis: more roasted than my coffee beans. Sorry for assblasting you, my mean john green.
>>8041739
>projecting
>>8041754
FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>>8041619
For good reasons:
exiledonline com/david-foster-wallace-portrait-of-an-infinitely-limited-mind/
>The current generation of “avant garde” drug-horror writers started popping up in the 80s and 90s. The prototypical example is Bret Easton Ellis, lamenting how hard it is for rich people to communicate because of their sheer self-absorbtion. Like most young 90s Puritans, Ellis is just rehashing a very old Christian theme – Augustine’s idea that fallen man is incurvatus in se or “turned in on oneself” – with secular postmodernish jargon. And while Augustine should probably be credited for inventing the basic structure of half the titles in your local bookshop’s biography section, there’s a crucial difference between his Confessions and books like Less than Zero. To Augustine, character flaws aren’t just a cause for moping and generational angst, but sins that could affect whether or not he goes to Hell, which, unlike Ellis, he strongly believes in. It’s not pear tree theft or whether his motives are impure that Augustine’s worried about, but the fact that those things put him in danger of burning forever in a lake of fire.
>The Augustinian structure flops immediately without eternal torment as a conceit. Sure these jaded Los Angeles kids are a “lost” generation, but why’s it so bad that they’re “lost”? They have plenty of sex, drugs, threads, cars and cash. Lacking a Christian Hell, the writer needs an equally powerful lie to prop up the narrative – either they pretend that insincerity is an emotional hell no amount of money can make up for, OR, they pretend that members of the Hollywood brat pack have the same life expectancy as Ethiopians, dropping like flies from an endless parade of overdoses and Lamborghini accidents, rarely hitting 30. The second option usually requires the writer to massively exaggerate the dangers of drugs, since they’re the easiest way to kill off rich characters without using your imagination too much. Naturally, this has lead to lots of books portraying your Ellis-Frey type as the sole survivor emerging from the wreckage. In the end, this is worse than if these brat pack authors were openly Christian – Augustine’s Catholic Hell would be just as scary if sex and drugs had no material consequences at all. It’s the terror of the hereafter that counts, not the pain of the present. Ellis can’t grasp this. He begins American Psycho with the words “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE,” but can’t find anything fearful enough to keep that promise. All his supposedly damned narrator can do is assure us that “there are no drugs, no food, no liquor that can appease the forcefulness of this greedy pain.” Pain which Ellis pulls out of nowhere.
>>8041789
Who is this faggot and why are you assuming that his opinion is infallible?
>>8041789
>pretend that insincerity is an emotional hell no amount of money can make up for
So maybe it is? Prove it's not. That's a pretty fair case to make, and is in fact what Ellis is after. The rest of this article is just Cracked-tier blowhardery if you have enough empathy to consider that maybe Eliis's characters are as miserable as they say they are.
>>8041795
DEEEELLLLLEEEETTEEEE THIS
>>8041813
Can't delete the truth, famalam.
Of all the things in it did you really think sex and violence is what people can't handle on 4chan of all places?
>>8041803
>>8041806
It makes sense. Ellis' characters are as believable as vegetarian vampires. Plausible on paper, but takes a great suspension of disbelief.
Most who dies in overdoses are the poor junkies. Not only because they buy bad drugs, but also because they are poor and has no one that misses nor takes care of them. So being a recreational drug user in the 80s wasn't a bad thing.
I didn't finish Huysmans Against Nature yet, but I read up on him and I've read Houllebecq's Submission, and the life trajectory of Huysmans is an interesting path of the revelry and emptiness of decadence/vice with an eventual salvation, but it seems like people are more impressed with the decadence than the salvation.
I think Ellis is a shit, but he captures the emptiness of vice rather well, and Imperial Bedrooms is one of his lesser works, but there's a self awareness to it that's intriguing.
I think it's possible that whatever he comes out with in the future, and particularly when he gets closer to the end of his life, could potentially recontextualize his career in an interesting way.
None of his novels are masterpieces, but they're so indicative of certain facets of our times, I think they have some cultural/historical significance.
>>8041619
>>8041623
>>8041626
>>8041649
>>8041690
If you don't like the Korn or the Insane Clown Posse, don't listen to these morons.
American Psycho is awful. It's worse than reddit. It's funnyjunk.
I read Less Than Zero. and enjoyed it, so i picked up American Psycho because morons like these recommended it. It's the worst book I've read in my adult life.
It was so bad that I lost all interest in satire as a genre.
If you've ever read a good book in your life, you'll hate American Psycho. If you're not the embodiment of a jean-shorts-wearing-juggalo who believes himself to have a "totally sarcastic" sense of humor, you'll hate it.
If you like it, you probably thought people in highschool didn't like you because they didn't "get" you. The reality is you fucking stink because you don't shower, you fucking morons.
>>8041881
I guess you've never spent much time around rich kids. I've seen a girl OD (not fatally, but she was out hard) on blow in a frat house, and a guy from my rugby team was ordered to go to rehab by my alma mater as a condition for his return after he got suspended. A kid from my private high school just got arrested for running from the cops and assaulting an officer while high.
Rich people do stupid, stupid shit when drugs are part of the picture.
>>8041904
true, that doesn't make it at all interesting though
>>8041912
I thought it wasn't believable, but now it has to be interesting too.
If you aren't interested in people who aren't like you, then I guess that's sad for you.
>>8041900
Someone has some deep seated issues with Juggalos
Did one steal your girl, cuck?
>>8041922
who said these people aren't like me or are unfamiliar to me?
>>8041900
>If you don't like the Korn or the Insane Clown Posse, don't listen to these morons.
>If you're not the embodiment of a jean-shorts-wearing-juggalo who believes himself to have a "totally sarcastic" sense of humor, you'll hate it.
>If you like it, you probably thought people in highschool didn't like you because they didn't "get" you. The reality is you fucking stink because you don't shower, you fucking morons
Bruh.....
It's not even that interesting it's boring in a weird cathartic way, I enjoyed it but I wouldn't call it entertaining.
>>8041931
I just don't like ugly poor people, actually. Nothing specific to Juggalos.
>>8041904
Both kids was saved in time and wasn't discovered the morning after in a restroom stall by a janitor. Thank you for proving my point.
And then there's this dirtbag:
>And yet despite selling himself as a near-asexual White Knight who only hires hookers for deep literary reasons, Vollmann’s just as prone to cheap sadism as Selby. This is how he opens his novel, Whores for Gloria:
>>We all know the story of the whore who, finding her China white to be less and less reliable a friend no matter how much of it she injected into her arm, recalled in desperation the phrase ‘shooting the shit,’ and so she filled the needle with her own watery excrement and pumped it in, producing magnificent abscesses.
>In other words: “Heh, heh, heh! Those junkies’ll do anything!”
>Not only is Vollmann happy to insult his subjects’ intelligence just to titillate a few sheltered readers but he tries to excuse his stupid little 2-girls-1-cup fantasy by pretending it’s a well-known urban legend. (So well-known, he has to recount it in full.) If Whores for Gloria began with a story about a lush who drank his own urine, after “recall[ing] in desperation” that alcohol is sometimes called “piss,” Vollmann’s fawning reviewers would laugh him out of the house. But no one thinks about it when it’s a frightening, unknown, “hard” drug.
>A section of The Atlas (“The Best Way to Shoot H”) is more-or-less the same. For some icky reason, Vollmann likes to have his whores give themselves vaginal injections. And do it to each other, with a bit of lesbianism tossed in. He likes to describe the abscesses that result, too. Oh, and he persistently refers to one woman as “the whore who’d been raped with a vacuum cleaner.” (I dunno, maybe she doesn’t have a first name.) Far from being “experimental” fiction, this is just the same old formula as all those Narco Nympho paperbacks from the 50s and 60s. You’ll notice on the covers of those books that female junkies are always shown posing in their lingerie, next to tag-lines like: “Pitilessly exposes the depravity of the true addict, who takes lovers without number, performs every heinous vice, in order to embrace her one true love… the Needle!”
And so fucking on...
>>8041669
The novel is most successful when used as a storytelling medium. Any offerings that eschew this simple fact have been doomed to irrelevance, outside of a small group of similarly irrelevant people.
Name a widely-read novel that doesn't tell a story. They're all vanity projects. Art attracts a lot of tremendously vain people that can't be a link in a chain. They have to plant a flag so they can see their name in lights. Meanwhile, ironically, nobody ever reads the products of these experiments.
Yeah, you can insist that I'm wrong and you're right. That's the beauty of literature, it can be whatever the fuck you want it to be. Like all art, it's subjective. But personally, I'd find it extremely unfulfilling to have my work championed by a tiny group of contrarians who have nothing to say about it beside "it's brilliant" and "it's new" and "you just don't understand it".
To me, fiction is about relating the subjective experience that life is. What's it like to be someone else? What's it like to feel something you might never feel otherwise? What's it like to be a mother, or to live in another part of the planet? What's it like to be alive right now, and what's it going to feel like to be alive in the future? A novel lives or dies by the experience it provides. Craft isn't an experience, it's simply the means to provide an experience. Playing with the medium isn't an experience.
Meanwhile you got all these i'm writer types trying to "advance the form" of something that has been the same for centuries, something we've been equally capable of advancing for centuries. It's not like some new technology is going to appear to redefine what fiction is. Ignoring the basic elements of storytelling is just naked vanity at best, and at worst, a complete failure to understand why people read fiction. It's not for an aesthetic experience; that's poetry. It's not to be informed or persuaded with speeches; that's an essay. You can try and provide these things, again, because a novel can be whatever you want it to be, but people aren't going to remember it.
>>8041904
>i've seen a girl OD at a frat house
>my rugby team
>my private highschool
normies please leave
>>8041961
>The novel is most successful when used as a storytelling medium.
Stopped reading. Your whole wall of text obviously operates under the assumption that AP has no story, which is untrue. It's just a loose story, which you do not like. That's your own problem.
>>8041960
>replying to a shitpost
>not knowing the juggalo posts are from two different people, the first one being copied from a neil stephenson thread
not everybody gets as emotionally invested on an anime image board as you kid. go back to your Chuck Palahniuk book or whatever
>>8041972
I wasn't talking about AP, just this idea that novels need to 'advance' from the storytelling tradition.
AP was an okay story. BEE did a good job folding social commentary into the experience of being Bateman. It was too narrow an experience for my liking, though. He never left his Manhattan bubble. He wasted a lot of time repeating his concepts. It could have been a better novel.
>>8042009
Cry more cuck
BRO American Psycho was totally fucked up! It reminded me of that movie Fight Club where it turned out Tyler Durden was in Edward Nortans head the whole time! I like fucked up and twisted shit like the Insane Clown Posse and Monster Energy Drink, have any more recommendations?
>>8042009
>memorizes and recognizes an obscure shitpost from a literally who thread
>calls others emotionally invested
You are pathetic buddy.
>>8042041
I'm not white so I can't be a cuck, jokes on you
>>8042018
>He never left his Manhattan bubble. He wasted a lot of time repeating his concepts.
I think changing either of these would dilute the message unnecessarily along with the impact that it has.
>>8042044
try Ovid or Homer
>>8042051
>what is copy and pasting
>>8042064
If you're the one that posted it, why are you taking the disparaging replies so personally? Are you new or are you actually as much of a projecting loser as the original author?
>>8042051
>memorizes
>>8041900
This is the third time I've seen this pasta in one day, and it's quite impressive how many people it manages to get each time it's posted. Congrats, you earned those (you)s.
>>8041619
>Lmao, what's your excuse faggots? Is it the scary, bloody stuff makes you poop your pampers or is it the sexual descriptions that trigger your bitter, virginal indignation?
OP probably loves Rob Zombie movies
>>8042060
Yeah, probably. I can't help but view AP through the lens of a 'social commentary' novel, though. It's great at getting inside the head of the Bateman, but I have so many unanswered questions about that lifestyle and what it means to humanity. Did history have its American Psychos? Do we rely on Batemans to enjoy our relative security and wealth against the rest of the world? I don't think BEE had anything to say past "capitalism and consumerism can erode empathy and social cohesion", which I think most people instinctively understood anyway. Mister Scrooge exemplifies this well.
Cringiest thread around here in a coon's age.
Well done OP
>>8041789
Thank you for this post. Ive always appreciated the type of work being criticizef here but now I can finally ser why theyre seen as shallow.
>>8041619
It's literally just 50 shades of grey for mid-tier plebs
>>8042302
Hi virgin
>>8042134
Ellis got Bono down pat, though
>>8041619
Why would I read the book after having watched the movie? It possibly can't be better.
>all these assblasted morons defending AP, a novel written for an extremely small subset of an aging elite, but latched onto by a generation of edgemasters.
Its the same shit as how gays think A Little Life is the best book ever.
>>8041619
The book made me realize how petty and pathetic of a genre satire is
>>8041649
Are you implying that storytelling isn't a part of the art form, or that it's somehow a less valid use of the medium?
>>8042726
Neither.
>>8042656
Yep. It's defeatist and facile.
>>8041619
its just a fun bit of book to read
i also liked the torture scenes probably because of some deeply ingrained fucked up sexual mothering issues
>>8041789
wow this really fucked with me. never read any dfw and american psycho is my favourite book, but this actually makes tons of sense
>evocative and culturally poignant
the book is comprised of the sort of commentary on greed and self absorption you would get from a stoned highschooler
>>8043075
I loved his shit as a stoned high schooler
>>8041619
Fuck off Bret
>>8041900
Do people actually like this pasta, or is the same person posting it over and over again? It isn't funny or anything.
