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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
One of the contemporary quandaries you deal with is the relationship between identity and biology, which is a pretty thorny question these days and one that fiction seems particularly well-suited to tackling. Yet most novelists don't seem to be very interested in it.
Yeah, I'm pretty impatient with realist fiction written today that tells these stories of family conflict or bad marriages and that pretends that those conversations can now happen without a discussion of drugs or therapy. Well, there is the genre of the therapy novel or the therapy story, but it's the degree to which a conversation about mental health and mental states has infiltrated all of our interior conversations, which are about how we understand ourselves, and exterior conversations, too. If you have a fight with your girlfriend, then you say "You're the one who should be seeing a therapist, and not only that, but I have a diagnosis for you: I think you have mild OCD." The way a medical understanding has displaced the old vocabularies of love and loss is interesting to me and I wouldn't want to tell a significant story of emotional pain without alluding to it. But that's just keeping your ears open. I don't have any sense of mission about it and I don't think I'm the only person who writes in that way.
It's been nine years since your last novel, "Strong Motion," came out and some of the readers of your first two books are likely to find it a surprising departure. What was behind that change?
I don't think I ever consciously tried to change anything. I was always just trying to write a novel I could be happy with and live with. In the early years of scratching at the impenetrable surface of this new project, I kept trying to do a book that was more like the first two. By that I mean a book with a complicated, very externalized plot, a rangy story that would encompass a lot of hot zones in contemporary culture and society. I felt a sense of constraint and duty about doing that and became increasingly unhappy spending page after page attending to the story. It kept crowding out the stuff that did interest me, which were these little moments of acute discomfort or comedy or anxiety. So I think the big change was that I stopped feeling responsible for writing a social novel and began to work towards a book where I was having fun on every page and if the story wasn't fun, I got rid of it.
The first two books do place plot more in the foreground and they use more conventional storylines. What sort of things did you wind up writing about once you weren't so wedded to that approach?
I'm very fond of those first two books still, and in fairness to them, my intention was to bridge the gap between the large-scale social and the very intimately personal. Those first books are also family stories unfolding in kind of absurdist plot situations that are vaguely akin to real things happening in the world. I was trying to get at the content of my emotional life as well as do justice to the strangeness of the world we live in. I'm still trying to do that, but I found that when the big superstructure fell away, I had room to dig much deeper into the characters and began to find all the formerly externalized conflicts to be inside the characters in the form of anxieties or desires.
This idea of the "social novel" in some form or another comes up every few years in essays on the state of American fiction. You wrote one about five years ago for Harper's magazine and Tom Wolfe wrote a piece that dealt with some of the same questions for the same magazine 10 years earlier. What does the term "social novel" mean to you?
I'm not sure the "social novel" really exists. What Tom Wolfe was proposing in his essay was that the novelist has a duty to do social reportage à la "Germinal" or "Sister Carrie". But the turn of the century social realists had no competition, and ever since we've had television, the idea that the novelist had any responsibility to go out and report has been faintly ridiculous. If someone says "Here's a good social novel," that goes to the bottom of my reading pile and always has.
The essay I wrote was animated more by a concern with where the novelist today fits into the culture. I had the feeling that Fitzgerald and Hemingway and even Bellow and Roth and Updike had really spoken to the country and gotten something back and been in their not-huge but significant way celebrities. They were writers to whom people looked in order to understand their own lives and to have some sense of where we were as a country, and that role was disappearing, or had disappeared, or had shifted to a modernist fringe within the literary community that was for a tiny audience, or an academic audience. That essay was about the social novelist, more than the social novel.
