28 November 04
Whither American Fiction?
One of the things my mother does when we meet up, here or in Bodega Bay, is that she (messily) unloads a pile of things she wants me to see that she’s been saving up since last time. One of these latest unpackings was some excerpts from the current issue of the Antioch Review, a piece called “The Writing Life: Envy and Editing” by Daniel Harris. In this he wrings his hands about the state of American letters, where creative writing programs mass-produce out-of-work MFAs, all of whom are first in line to nab spots at prestigious art colonies and write stuff that is read only by others like them. Whom they envy and take delight when some small failure or other befalls them. It’s a shrinking pool, he says, one that despises the mass-market authors but secretly envies them more than anyone else.
I’m not sure I follow the entire drift, not having the article to hand, but this section (as quoted by my mother) caught my eye: “The five best books I’ve read in the last couple of years have been Harry Mulisch’s Siegried, Amin Maalouf’s Balthasar’s Odyssey, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time... Not a single American author alive today … is capable of writing a novel like one of these. Because they dare to take on the big issues of life and death (because they’re presented without chilling effects), knowledge and meaning, learning and forgetting, without shame, without fear, without self-doubt…”
Is this because American writers are too geared toward publication, or getting on Oprah, or receiving kind notice by the New York Review of Books? (Or that they are too weighed down by Hemingway or even Faulkner?) What would happen if someone quietly writing away in the backwaters, away from writing groups and even bookstores, produced something like G. B. Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer LePage, the most quirky novel I’ve read in over a decade? Is it just not now culturally possible for this to happen in the United States? Or to write a highbrow novel that doesn’t, somewhere deep within, have an unpunctuated stream of consciousness that mimics the Hot Thing passage in Toni Morisson’s Beloved?
To all of you who’ve been working hard on your fifty thousand words for the month of November (and even those who haven’t), I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Me, I’d settle for an American version of Terry Pratchett. We’re ripe for some serious satire.
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I honestly think it lies less with the writers themselves (though Harris seems to lay it at their feet) but more with how Americans as a whole seem to see the world: The Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue shows, for example, are powerful pictures of how people in America speak of themselves and deal with difficult problems. Everything is a debate, everything has an excuse, everything revolves around rights and retaining one’s personal stakes, even if it means compromising the dignity and integrity of the society in general. The reaction to the Abu Ghraib atrocities is a case in point; instead of becoming a national shame that ought to have brought the present American leadership down, it diffused into shakings of heads and mumbled recriminations, with nothing much happening at all. There seemed to be no moral doubt whatsoever, everyone telling themselves that it was “the others’ ” problem, instead of recognizing that it was a symptom of all Americans. Today it is back to business, with no hands slapped or important people convicted.
In this kind of accepted environment how can writers, who are the voice of that society, but who at the same time acquiesce to such a society, possibly write anything asking the hard questions? Good novels are not about getting the Pulitzer or arranging pretty words; they are about the choices we make for living in the societies we inhabit. If you don’t write about real life and ask the excrutiating questions, then you are just painting decals on the furniture.
The writers who I think are at the forefront of American and world literature in America are the nature writers, writers like Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams, John Hay, and Gretel Ehrlich. They face the real threat to our world and ask the hardest, most relevant and deeply felt questions. Most of them go against the general tide and question even the very assumed appropriateness of the American lifestyle. Often they look where no one else wants to look.
But it is troubling when the storytellers no longer stand side-by-sde with the watchers. America is in grievous denial. The populace doesn’t want to talk out in the open and personally take and own up to responsiblity for making and receiving heavy criticism. Even in the blogs it is too often “criticism-lite”, without the necessary bite for the truth to sink in and change the status quo. It is why Bush was re-elected into power, in spite of all the evidence of his crimes, and in spite of all those who voted against him. In spite of the absolute moral wrongs that were witnessed, the people acquiesced to a compromise, when in truth no compromise should have been accepted. I believe that if a government gets away with such crimes as were committed by the Bush administration and the people who believed that what he did was morally wrong, then that government is no longer legitimate and should be fundamentally changed.
Many of the writers whom Daniel Harris quotes have witnessed firsthand the tragedies caused by their own governments or cultures, and they have been courageous enough to risk everything to tell it how it is. American writers need to do the same, especially now when so much is at stake.
But I’m sympathetic, having dropped out of a couple writers’ groups before my prose got watered down, and having never set foot anywhere near an American MFA program. With a few exceptions of genre, most published writing in the US is vetted for profitability. The result is a Nation of Eggerses, latter-day Catulli capering to amuse the bored, jaded populace.
Of course I agree with Miguel that the writers most connected to the earth are the most authentic ones.
Chris: latter-day Catulli sounds perfect, but isn’t he the guy on TV? getting people to read anything, even airplane novels, seems to be a feat these days….
It’s really often not healthy for a literary form to become the dominant literary form, as the novel has for us. Far too many of them are written. People who are really suited to other genres write them, and the sheer output of mediocre stuff makes the good stuff hard to find, and the burden of “the anxiety of influence”—worrying whether what you’re doing has already been done—gets heavier and heavier.
It’s like what had happened to the sonnet by the late 17th Century.
So it’s not surprising to me that people from the margins of literature in English (people who aren’t Harvard/Oxbridge New York/London) would be writing more of the good ones. They’re not quite so smothered in novels from their own place.