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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
In the December 2001 issue of the Writer, you were quoted as saying, "Our 'serious fiction' has not been serious for decades. Fiction has become a succession of literary games that amuse other game-playing writers and the reviewers who scamper to catch up to the game-playing and help create the arcane rules of 'excellence,' to applaud every self-serving, self-absorbed new piece of useless fantasy. But it's not serious fiction." Care to elaborate further?
There's a wonderful war going on within the world of "serious fiction" today that's germane to my suggestion that too much of mainstream writing has become precious and irrelevant. I'm referring, of course, to the knock-down, drag-out hissy-fit bitch brawl between Tom Wolfe and his detractors -- primarily John Irving, John Updike and Norman Mailer (with Saul Bellow limping along to get in the fight). Both Bellow and Updike have been important voices to me over the decades -- writers I truly love -- but they may well be on the wrong side of this argument. (Irving is a writer who has underwhelmed me for years, so I take it as a sign that he is the most apoplectic of Wolfe's attackers.)
Way back in the late '80s, Wolfe had written an article in Harper's entitled "Stalking the Billion-footed Beast" in which, in his own words, "I argued that the American novel had deteriorated into a 'weak, pale, tabescent' condition so grave, its very survival depended on somehow sending 'a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas ... out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping baroque country of ours to reclaim it as a literary property." Wolfe, of course, sees himself as the Zola of our age. Interesting, since he's written only two novels so far -- "Bonfire of the Vanities" and "A Man in Full."
What drives Irving, Updike, Mailer, et al. (and the galloping-lemming herd of their adoring critics and reviewers) off the cliff is Wolfe's suggestion that in their self-satisfied dominance of the serious fiction universe -- in that New Yorker world of fiction that Updike admits to have worked so hard getting "small enough and inky enough" to join so many decades ago -- these writers have forgotten to tell us anything relevant about today's world. Perhaps worse, they seem to have forgotten how to learn from the world.
So you obviously take Wolfe's side in the argument.
I think Tom Wolfe is onto something here. The John Irvings and Salman Rushdies dominate the ranks of "popular but serious writers," and their work is -- by their own admission -- largely nonsense: metafictional games, self-indulgent fantasies, joyless magical realism devoid of both magic and realism, seasoned by a growing narcissism and antagonism toward women that remains like a sour undertaste in so much of their fiction.
To be fair (and I speak from some experience here), it's hard to keep churning out novels year after year, decade after decade. Plus, there's the sad fact that -- like a star that uses up its hydrogen and begins burning the heavier gasses of its own waste byproducts, bloating and cooling and dying as it does so -- writers whose early books are full of energy and human experience inevitably run out of material. (Unless, like Charles Dickens, they constantly throw themselves into the "Great Oven" of the London night, observing the ongoing human condition.) Or perhaps they have a lifetime of material, but it's mired in the issues and sensibilities of a long dead decade. (Kurt Vonnegut did the unthinkable and admitted as much, saying that he was a writer for the '70s -- but then he wrote more books anyway.)
Sven Birkerts wrote about just this problem of writing after one runs out of new things to say in his 1997 New York Observer article "Running Out of Gas." He makes the point that some of his favorite authors -- Updike, Mailer, Philip Roth, even Saul Bellow -- while publishing regularly, are producing weaker and weaker novels. He suggests that it has something to do with the obsession with self that has powered each of the novelists' works and careers -- "Narcissism, it would appear, does not slacken with the years, it only grows. Only there is a problem ... The self, however grandiose, is finite; the wells do dry up."
The very word "novel" comes from the French word for "new" -- new visions, new information, news from the world (so terribly important in the age before telecommunications). But the masters of "serious fiction" in America have brought us precious little news from the world in recent decades. Does Updike's metafictional game playing in "Gertrude and Claudius" or Irving's endless childishness in "The Fourth Hand" or Mailer's bizarre Egyptian nastiness in "Ancient Evenings" or Rushdie's "daring" exposé of crass materialism in New York City in "Fury" add anything new to our understanding of the workings of the world -- and the people in it -- at the beginning of this new century? Reading the fiction of these aging masters is depressing in the way that listening to elderly Uncle Earl complain about his bowels is depressing.
