August 22nd, 2011 / 3:26 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Blake Butler—
What writers do you think are the best, or really good at all, at dialogue? And in what way?
-
Archives
- January 2023
- February 2022
- September 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- August 2017
- July 2017
- May 2017
- April 2017
- March 2017
- February 2017
- January 2017
- December 2016
- November 2016
- October 2016
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- May 2014
- April 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
-
Meta
delillo.
dennis cooper
dialogue as concept as carrying tone as everything, i guess. dialogue that says things without saying things. yup.
The first time I noticed dialogue as something more than an awkward carrier of exposition and conflict was when I read “Nine Stories.” Even Salinger’s uncollected stories have some of the most memorable, striking dialogue I’ll ever read.
richard price. shit be how people talk.
donald harington has good dialogue, for a deaf writer
donald harington has good dialogue, for a deaf writer
Lorrie Moore.
Lorrie Moore.
DIALOGUES WHAT I BRUCH MY TEEF WIF
I just finished reading Patrick Dewitt’s THE SISTERS BROTHERS last week, and I thought he did a great job with dialogue. Far better than most contemporary novelists.
Rick Barthelme, and ditto DeLillo
Henry Green (important precursor for Gaddis in this regard)
Elmore Leonard. Whatever else you think you want to say about him, the man writes people who talk like people.
Harold Pinter. Cause in his plays no one can understand each other, ever.
Second Gaddis and Cooper, would also add Cortázar and Bolaño. Also, Pynchon in V.: “”I’m sorry,” he told the alligator.” is a favorite line of mine.
love the banter between Sybil and Seymour in “APDfBananafish”
innocent, funny and ultimately heartbreaking
Samuel Beckett
Patrick White
not me
a sharp, nice line in the batting-back-and-forth
I think McCarthy is great at humor, menace, and dawning–generally and in reported speech. Not many quotation marks, though.
PG Wodehouse, and in a similar meter but transposed from an English estate to a Manhattan cube farm, Ed Park.
DeLillo in End Zone and Players (said to Thomas LeClair that he wanted to capture intimate dialogue, the secret speak of couples. Early Thomas McGuane (Sporting Club, 92 in the Shade, Bushwhacked Piano). Joyce, in his short work, and some of the later school scenes in Portrait.
GADDIS
Thief.
yah man, he shredded in JR!
Elmore Leonard. He’s got perfect pitch.
agreed on all those names. i’ve always also been a huge fan of sam lipsyte’s dialogue. it might take a little bit of yr suspension of disbelief in that his talkers are always so good at gab, but i like the fact that they often talk around or through each other, which, in some ways, feels realer to me than judging them by their slick diction.
i was thinking evelyn waugh, basically the sad/asshole wodehouse, in that no one actually talks that way, so it’s a script more than a transcript
Yoda.
McCarthy often forced with dialogue. But his books so uneven, whatever.
ALL dialogue is script
Nice Pynchon line.
I approach dialogue in fiction (as a reader, not a writer) the same way that Harmony Korine approaches dialogue in film, in that “[w]hat I remember [most]…[are] specific scenes….” It would be kind of difficult for me to state that J.D. Salinger’s “Nine Stories” contains some of the absolute best dialogue I’ve read and mean it wholeheartedly, but it’s easy for me to wholeheartedly mean what I say when I make the same statement about “Bananafish”–just because the individual moments and the individual pieces tend to click with me more and become more memorable in contrast to the dialogue from an entire short story collection or an author’s entire body of work. That of the singular piece means more to me, I guess (if this comment makes sense at all).
NO ONE
“You want it to be one way.”
“What?”
“You want it to be one way–”
“–Man, stop saying that–”
“–but it’s the other way.”
Do like the work on The Wire, and always enjoy Mamet. There are others, but those are top of mind lately.
Read plays! Glen Gary Glenross
Also: Elmore Leonard
Yes to Pynchon and Bolaño, but they do everything well.
DFW for inserting all the silences “…” of a conversation.
Donald Westlake. Elmore Leonard. For some reason crime writers seem to nail dialogue better than other genres and literary fictionists – probably because it’s so important in their stories, is my guess.
& Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Zora Neale Hurston
James Kelman
sorry, guess i should have said ‘feels like’
Fielding Dawson.
He’s probably not read as much now as he should be. But this guy who was at Black Mountain with Olson and Creeley, and who hung with Franz Kline and Pollock,and who later in life taught writing in prisons, had a terrific ear for the raw power of speech. He’s one of my candidates for best prose writer of the last century. I
Taping arguments is also good.
& I say, ALL dialogue ‘feels like’ script
my favorite in V: ‘yo, seagull.’
yes beckett yes beckett yes he the only
barthelme’s dialogue in the collection “Chroma” is crazy–cuts to the bone, the chase, the heart of it, while also making me wonder what and where these people are in life, how they got there
Yes, people in his stories sometimes speak under pressure, and the texture of the storytelling varies as the mood(s) and velocity change. Nice catch!
and tom stoppard (arcadia, etc)
dostoevsky for all those intense, rambling three-four page monologues. them russians are quaaaaazy!
The collage-y, art opening/party scenes in THE RECOGNITIONS. Everyone talking past each other in Delillo. Dow Mossman is great at building a character’s specific speech patterns, then growing them.
Raymond Carver & Lorrie Moore. I believe them.
martin amis, his buffoon-criminals and schemers and their slang and slantwise street smart chat and bloviation, as necessary. clancy martin, the chat of his salesmen.
MISS LONELYHEARTS is full of devastating writing, and Shrike’s monologues are justly famous, but nobody ever did hard-boiled dialogue like West does in that novel (and DAY OF THE LOCUST is nearly its equal.)
beckett and wodehouse for certain types of surface play. chekhov and dostoevsky for wild swings between crazed idea-making and emotional sad-sackness. carver and didion for dialogs that are opposed monologues. dennis cooper, dfw and mamet for frustrated american retards attacking one another. most of these names could be switched out for one another from category to category!
Yeah, I kind of found it funny that I immediately thought about novelists instead of playwrights. Very strange; I guess I have my biases. But Mamet definitely. I remember finding this very hilarious nugget a few months ago:
“Yes. I wrote this play called Bobby Gould in Hell.
Greg Mosher did it on a double bill with a play by Shel Silverstein
over at Lincoln Center. Bobby Gould is consigned to Hell, and he has to
be interviewed to find out how long he’s going to spend there. The
Devil is called back from a fishing trip to interview Bobby Gould. And
so the Devil is there, the Assistant Devil is there and Bobby Gould.
And the Devil finally says to Bobby Gould, “You’re a very bad man.” And
Bobby Gould says, “Nothing’s black and white.” And the Devil says,
“Nothing’s black and white, nothing’s black and white—what about a
panda? What about a panda, you dumb fuck! What about a fucking panda!”
And when Greg directed it, he had the assistant hold up a picture of a
panda, kind of pan it a hundred and eighty degrees to the audience at
the Vivian Beaumont Theater. That was the best moment I’ve ever seen in
any of my plays.”
Twain.
playwrights richard maxwell & will eno
cartoonists chris ware & ivan brunetti
coen brothers & paul thomas anderson
bret easton ellis & michel houellebecq
I’m seconding Cortazar.
Delillo always, but especially in his plays. He’s got a good ear for interruptions and exchange. And, of course, Hem. The dialogue in The Garden of Eden is perhaps some of the best I’ve ever read. I think it has to do with the complexity of thought vs the simplicity of speech.
Grace Paley. Few things sound as natural.
Lance Olsen, especially in Calendar of Regrets. Bharati Mukherjee in The Middleman and Other Stories. Also Norman Rush’s “Near Pala” in Whites is fantastic, and virtually all dialogue.
Just launched into Airships and Barry Hannah has an ear for something. I’m not from the South, but I wish I spoke like I was.
I read that short story for the first time the other month, was bored out of my mind by the dialogue in it, ended up skipping past it to the end of the story. I didn’t know what was about to happen either and wasn’t anticipating that ending, but yeah, either way, the dialogue didn’t draw me in for some reason.
Yes, totally. I can see Faulkner sitting in any of these categories, too.
Paula Fox / Desperate Characters: compelling balance there between stylistic verve and a real ear for the illogical spirals of talk and how they entwine. Also Bellow in MR. SAMMLER’S PLANET, where a dying rich man laments his daughter’s “fucked-out eyes.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_8dv-lM4ho
Sam Lipsyte. And all those crazy southerners–Crews, Hannah, Larry Brown…
Brian Evenson’s dialog in Last Days had me laughing out loud, even in dramatic scenes. In a good way.
THIS IS TRU
did someone say Salinger and then delete their comment? i don’t see it anymore.
i like Salinger’s dialogue. he has a lot of pivotal things happen in stories via dialogue, and there’s a lot of characterization and interest in his dialogue, to me.
also, in “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Seymour: An Introduction” the narrator is speaking to someone/you throughout, kind of, so it’s like all dialogue in a way.
i am interested in dialogue/voices.
i just started “Vox.”
i don’t think of Beckett in terms of dialogue, tho i love Beckett. i guess his monologue-style prose works are also narrator’s one-way dialogue in a sense. in that sense, i love him for dialogue.
barthelme.
I second Salinger.
Hillary Mantel. Every other page of her stuff has lines that just blaze. Richard Price ya, and George R.R. Martin.
they all suck. that dawg fishkind on that shit tho. rising, motherfucker