we don’t live here anymore

I finished We Don’t Live Here Anymore last week, and though I didn’t spend too much time thinking about it, I have been thinking about the things it made me think about a great deal, especially yesterday.

Overall I found the book (a collection of three novellas about two young couples and their relationships) very enjoyable, the first (“We Don’t Live Here Anymore”) being easily the strongest of the three. The story was engaging and the prose excellent, and the characters all came through very vividly. Dubus can be a bit heavy-handed sometimes, especially with his figures of speech, but the emotional intensity was so high in the first novella that it worked – very well, in fact. The other two (“Adultery” and “Finding a Girl in America”), not so much. Dubus spent a little too much time in the details, and I found myself wondering why I should care about some of the characters, especially Joe and Edith in “Adultery.” I don’t know if “character” is even the right word for Joe, who functioned more as a densely packed symbol than an actual person. He was boring, and his Catholicism was distracting and (from what I know about Dubus) self-aggrandizing. It was fun to see things from Hank’s point of view in the final section, and though the narrative structure came a little loose towards the end, the my interest in Hank more or less held everything together.

This is not the type of book that I would ever write, and the more I think about it (see first paragraph) the less interested I am in reading books like We Don’t Live Here Anymore. There’s something about how Dubus describes the world, and how he writes his characters in that world that rubs me the wrong way — I don’t find it pertinent to the present. There’s something illusory about it, something that fails to relate to or convey the experience of being an individual that turns me off in a big way. Realism in fiction always leaves a sort of unbelievable, uninteresting, and pretentious taste in my mouth, and what I’m feeling has some of that in it, but there’s something more as well.

More thinking required.

old new pork

I was having a conversation with a buddy several days ago about place in writing and the predominance of New York City as the setting for much of the literary fiction in America, specifically fiction “we” hold in high esteem, and by “we” I mean the literary industrial complex, which is — of course — centered in NYC. Of course not all great fiction is written or takes place in NYC, but there is definitely a biased drift towards the eastern seaboard.

Here’s what David Simon, creator of the television show The Wire thinks about that:

Inflamed rhetoric aside, I like what he has to say. New York City is seen as a synecdoche for America, and novels about life in the City are seen as novels about the American experience. But, as Simon points out, this is no longer the case. As I said in an earlier entry, the age of the Great American Novel is over because of the increasingly fractured and heterogeneous nature of our culture. It’s becoming impossible for one novel to engage every sort of American experience in the same way it’s becoming impossible to see those experiences through the lens of a single city. Our mono-culture (read: educated white [male] culture) is losing ground to a plurality of cultures from all walks of life and from all ends of the globe that don’t identify with the New York City idea of urban America, and what these people want is a literature that speaks to them, that speaks to their realities and lives.

negatoro

B.R. Myers has reviewed Franzen’s latest for The Atlantic, and it’s a doozy. My favorite part:

Franzen does not take his story very seriously, but the irony is indiscriminate and directionless; he hints at no frame of reference from which we are to judge his prose critically. Nor are we to imagine that a fool or semiliterate is addressing us. The same narrator who gives us “sucked” and “very into” also deploys compound adjectives, bursts of journalese, and long if syntactically crude sentences. An idiosyncratic mix? Far from it. We find the same insecure style on The Daily Show and in the blogosphere; we overhear it on the subway. It is the style of all who think highly enough of their own brains to worry about being thought “elitist,” not one of the gang. The reassuring vulgarity follows the flight of pseudo-eloquence as the night the day. Like the rest of these people, Franzen should relax. We don’t need to find a naughty word on every page to know that he is one very regular Joe.

But if Freedom is middlebrow, it is so in the sacrosanct Don DeLillo tradition, which our critical establishment considers central to literature today. The apparent logic is that the novel can lure Americans away from their media and entertainment buffet only by becoming more “social,” broader in scope, more up-to-date in focus. This may be the reason we get such boring characters. Instead of portraying an interesting individual or two, and trusting in realism to embed their story naturally in contemporary life, the Social Writer thinks of all the relevant issues he has to stuff in, then conceives a family “typical” enough to hold everything together. The more aspects of our society he can fit between the book’s covers, the more ambitious he is considered to be.

I’m a fan of Myers and I respect him as a critic, and (from what I know about Franzen’s idea of “fiction” and the “novel”) I think he’s written a very good review here. I’ll be picking up my copy of Freedom on Friday.

If you’re interested in reading more by Myers, I recommend his “Manifesto” against contemporary literary fiction. It’s been about a year since I read it last, and I’m very curious to revisit it– especially the section on Auster, now that I’m reading him myself. (If I recall Myers was/is not a fan.) My progress through New York Trilogy has slowed greatly, unfortunately, and I can’t seem to motivate myself to start the second part. I was in the end underwhelmed by City of Glass, and felt the whole thing was rather contrived. There are a few excellent passages (really good, actually), but they do little to buoy the rest of his sagging narrative. I’m hoping the second and third parts can change my mind, but I think my reluctance to begin them evidences my lack of hope that they will succeed.

free franzen or fight

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom is out, and so far most of the reviews I’ve read seem to be rather positive. I’m not a very big fan of reading book reviews (or any reviews, for that matter), but it’s fun seeing how various critics frame a books release in order to fit it into the cultural narrative. Time does a light-hearted and enjoyable job of it — they even gave Franzen the front cover. Sam Tanenhaus works a lot harder to show how Freedom and Franzen are just what this country (and by proxy, the world) needs right now. As NPR points out, however, not everybody is ready to accept such patriarchal standards for literature (and more power to them). I like to imagine what Mr. Franzen thinks of all this. Personally, I’m very much looking forward to reading the book, as I greatly enjoyed The Corrections. I find Franzen to be a very interesting guy, though I hesitate to have too solid an idea of him based solely on his reviews. Sometimes I think it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the majority of book reviews tell us more about the reviewer than the reviewee.

look i wrote my own bloated essay about novels

Writers love big essays about novels by novelists. Or at least I do, and the more theoretically bloated and complex and ego driven they are, the better. Lee Siegel published a piece in the New York Observer a few months ago, and though it was pretty straightforward — major themes: things aren’t like they used to be in the world of letters, and this is bad; we need more authors like we used to have; non-fiction is where all the talented kids are nowadays; the novel is dead (for now) — the brouhaha it caused was much more exciting.

In my mind Siegel’s “Mailer” article should take it’s place in the long string of essays written about the state of the novel (Some of my favorites include: Tom Wolfe, Lev Grossman, Johnathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, B.R. Meyers, and James Wood.), even though I find it a little lacking in the substance department. Most essays of this type strive to become part of an ongoing conversation between creators about what they’re creating, about what the novel as an artistic form should be and do. And I know I’m not the only one to say it, but Siegal comes off a little like an old man complaining on his front porch. “Kids today,” he thinks. “Harrumph.”

Perhaps the problem for me about Siegel is that he’s too focussed on the past. He’s looking at American Letters as it has been and then insisting that’s how it should be, and he’s far from the only one. Authors, editors, agents, publishers — the majority of the American literati seems to be in denial about the fact that currently our culture is undergoing a great and rapid change at a very deep structural level — and it’s all technology’s fault. The depth and breadth of this denial reminds me very much of the music and film industries from the late 90s and early 2000s, and when it’s all said and done, it’s going to be just as catastrophic.

The reason? With the advent of internet technologies we no longer need big publishing houses to take on the risk of finding and developing new talent and covering the cost of printing books. I hate to admit, but for the majority of people on this planet electronic books will become the means by which they consume literature. It’s inevitable when the cost of reproduction becomes zero, ad infinitum. I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight, and I don’t think physical books will ever go away, but the book as a technology is now outdated. In a few generations it will seem just as antiquated and nostalgic as vinyl records or classic cars.

So what does this mean for the author? I think the time of Super Writers and Great American Novels is over. Our culture is simply too fractured and heterogeneous for one product or voice to appeal to us enmasse, and we have our parents and technology to thank for it. Individuality is the name of the game, and for the consumer in our society, individuality is defined through choice. Down with monobeer and hooray for craft breweries! “Boo!” on formulaic, big budget summer blockbusters and “yay!” for independent films with story and character! Kill radio and long live Indie music! Sure people still drink Coors and watch MTV, but not like they used to. This is a big country we live in, and to get something to appeal to all those people and disparate interests  it usually ends up watered down or generic or formulaic. Art becomes an industry, a business, and innovation and risk or anything new stops making sense because it’s bad business.

This is ultimately what I think is wrong with American Literature. Books aren’t losing popularity, it’s that the wrong kinds of books are no longer popular — but “wrong” only according to the various tastemakers. The audience for literary fiction has continued to shrink, and in an attempt to appeal to more a larger audience authors have become generic and formulaic, the flavor equivalent of taking out all the hops.

I hear and read so many authors and critics bemoaning an end to the Golden Age of letters, and that’s wrong. If anything I think we’re on the cusp of a Golden Age, only it’s going to be different than anything people could have imagined. Again, look at the music industry. Thanks to the internet artists can write, record and distribute all their music on their own — they don’t need the giant publishing houses. New business models are being invented, and musicians are making a living doing what they want to do: play music. On the flip side, people can now find and listen to music that specifically caters to their own personal taste. Bands don’t need hundreds of thousands of fans to support them (and  in turn the giant publishing machine that controlled the bottleneck of distribution) and people aren’t limited to listening to music that caters to the least common denominator.

So what does this mean for the novelist? Writers should take a page about of the musicians playbook: get online, connect with people, give some stuff away for free and sell the rest. You may not have as many readers as you would have had, but you don’t need them — there’s a lot more room at the table, now. Self-publishing is no longer anathematic, and in time I see it becoming prerequisite to any sort of publishing deal. It’s important to remember that publishers aren’t going to go away, they’re just going to get smaller and there will be a lot more of them catering to all different kinds of tastes and interests.

In the end authors will still be writing, publishers will still be distributing, and people will still be reading, and that’s what’s important.