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Sunday, Nov 23, 2008
A brash band of young writers issues a screed against "dinosaur" authors and calls for a return to storytelling.
Nov 2, 2000 | Old "Doonesbury" cartoon. Bernie (the chemistry geek) comes up with a magic formula that whisks Mike back in time to his favorite historical literary milieu: a cafe on the French Riviera of the '20s. Dos Passos, the Fitzgeralds, Valentino. The punch line is that Fitzgerald sticks Mike with the tab, but what it makes me think of is the fact that nobody in the future, given the opportunity, would ever want themselves whisked back to our particular moment in literary history.
Literature has hit a dull patch. You'd think the turn of the millennium would have lit a fire under us, prompting a slew of gorgeously decadent works of louche brilliance -- but no. Literary fiction would be in crisis if we only had the energy to manage a proper crisis. Either it has lost the ability to excite us or we've lost the ability to be excited by it, either of which pretty much comes to the same thing, and all of which accounts for the sense of relief I felt when I heard that there was a literary manifesto afoot.
A bunch of young English writers, led by the novelists Matt Thorne and Nicholas Blincoe (whose name sounds like it should belong to a scary clown), have banded together under the name the New Puritans and produced both a manifesto and an anthology of short stories to back it up.
Blincoe, born in 1965, is the author of four novels, most recently "The Dope Priest." Thorne, who's only 26, terrifyingly enough, has written three; his latest, "Dreaming of Strangers," was published this year. Together they've issued a 10-point manifesto, and they've gotten 15 writers to contribute to a book entitled "All Hail the New Puritans" (a reference to a song by the Fall; I guess it's a British thing), which came out in England a couple of weeks ago. The youngest contributor is 20, the oldest in his early 40s. Some of them are famous (Alex Garland, author of "The Beach," is part of the club), some not so much, but as the glittering author bios in the back indicate, they're not exactly a salon des refusis; of the 15 contributors, 12 already have two or more published novels under their belts. "It could be the beginning of a new wave," the book's introduction thunders. "A chance to blow the dinosaurs out of the water."
As Thorne tells it, the idea came about after Blincoe went to see a film by one of the Dogme 95 filmmakers -- the group of directors, including Lars von Trier and Harmony Korine, famous for forgoing such technical frippery as artificial lighting and non-handheld cameras. Blincoe had the idea of "doing something similar for writers," says Thorne. Fair enough. After all, one misses them, manifestoes, in the current apathetic literary climate. What manifestoes has Updike signed? Or Joyce Carol Oates? They'd never have the moxie! Of course, it's desperately out of fashion, in this gloriously polymorphous day and age, to tell other people how they should write, but it's refreshing that somebody cares enough about fiction to try it.
So what are these New Puritans pushing? At first glance they seem to know more about what they aren't than what they are. The introduction to "All Hail the New Puritans" calls upon writers everywhere to "strip their fiction down to the basics, and see if something exciting emerges." According to the manifesto's 10 rules, New Puritans "shun poetry," "avoid all devices of voice," including "rhetoric" and "authorial asides," "eschew flashbacks, dual temporal narratives and foreshadowing," and "avoid any elaborate punctuation" (?!) and "all improbable or unknowable speculation about the past or the future."
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