o o o o those sprawling big ambitious novels – they’re so elegant, so intellegent

It’s common for me to feel a strong compulsion to finish things, especially books. In fact, when affiliated with the literary realms, these compulsions gain a great amount of momentum from the double-headed heft of guilt and shame, feelings I think (hope) most regular readers have had, at the very least, when struggling page-after-page with books they think or feel they should be reading. I’ve struggled with these feelings in the past, but for the most part they don’t bother me much anymore, or so I thought until I came to Broom Of The System, a book by David Foster Wallace that I really, really wanted to like. But, after more than 200 pages in, I hit a wall. I couldn’t take it anymore. So I quit.

I put down Broom for reasons best explained by James Wood in his review of White Teeth, “Human, All Too Inhuman.” Quote:

“The big contemporary novel is a perpetual-motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence…Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, as these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion. Inseparable from this culture of permanent storytelling is the pursuit of vitality oat all costs. Indeed, vitality is storytelling, as far as these books are concerned…[This is] hysterical realism. Storytelling has become a king of grammar in thee novels; it is how they structure and drive themselves on. The conventions of realism are not being abolished but, on the contrary, exhausted, and overworked. Appropriately, then, objections are not made at the level of verisimilitude, but at the level of morality: this style of writing is not to be faulted because it lacks reality–the usual charge against botched realism–but because it seems evasive of reality while borrowing from the realism itself. It is not a cock-up, but a cover-up.”

So just what is it in “reality” that these stories are so desperate to avoid? Several paragraphs later, Wood gives us the answer:

An excess of storytelling has become the contemporary way of shrouding, in majesty, a lack; it is the Sun King principle. That lack is the human. All these contemporary deformations flow from a crisis that is not only the fault of the writers concerned, but is now of some lineage: the crisis of character, and how to represent it in fiction. Since modernism, many of the finest writers have been offering critique and parody of the idea of character, in the absence of convincing ways to return to an innocent mimesis. Certainly, the characters who inhabit the big, ambitious contemporary novels have a showy liveliness, a theatricality, that almost succeeds in hiding the fact that they are without life: liveliness hangs off them like jewelry.

Broom committed the cardinal sin of being boring. It was interesting, at first, and it was certainly lively. There were even parts that flew in the face of everything I’ve just quoted, that had pathos and character and life. It was these bits that kept me going as long as I did, but the further I pushed into the novel the less and less they popped up, and eventually I lost the patience necessary to wait for them — I read without investing anything of myself. There was nothing pulling me forward.

I still admire Broom, and I appreciate what Wallace was doing with the story, though I use that word loosely. In fact, I think in this case perhaps “structural exercise” would be a more appropriate choice. I’m tempted to talk specifics, but there’s really nothing too distinguishing to detail, or rather there’s too much to detail — everything is saturated with the most precise and exacting details, and none of it satisfies. It’s like drinking sugary soda when you’re thirsty. You keep drinking and drinking but your thirst never abates, and eventually you just go and get a glass of water.

Structurally it’s good, but dated. Wallace makes a conscious effort to be postmodern, with non-traditional narrative forms and more meta than a grad school student can shake a heavily underlined volume of Lyotard at, but what once was new and exciting is now old-hat and dated. Too many people in the intervening years since Broom was published have used similar tricks of play to attempt at serious meaning or literature without having the actual talent or skill to do so, and the results have been a mixed bag of scrambling authors and watered-down novels, some successful and most quickly forgotten. I liken these writers to the Wizard of Oz, with his curtain and machine, or perhaps the vain Emperor who’s new clothes are fit to be seen by only the worthy (enter: the literary industrial complex).

There are some readers out there (evidenced by sales figures) who enjoy these books for themselves (Amazon’s user reviews are evidence that Broom has a large following of ardent fans), and I think that’s great. Everybody reads for different reasons and everybody has different things that keep them reading. Structural play is, however, insufficient to maintain my interest when it isn’t new, and nothing in Broom is new.

I’ve heard that Infinite Jest is a quite different beast from Broom altogether, and I really hope so. I’m still planning on reading it soon, but after Broom I needed a break from Mr.Wallace, and I found my much needed respite in the arms of Mr. Javier Marias and his novel Your Face Tomorrow. It was great, but not genius, though I feel I should read the other two volumes before I allow my opinions to solidify. I’ll write about it then.

brain pot stew

I finished Olive Kitteridge last night, and I was a little underwhelmed by the ending. All in all it’s  still a great collection of stories featuring amazingly rendered and memorable characters, but I feel like Elizabeth Stroud missed an opportunity to do something more. There is a chance that I was just so impressed by the heart exhibited through her writing that my expectations were raised to unrealistic heights, but I don’t think so. One of the most interesting things about the book is its structure, and in regards to that things do come a little unwound at the end, and what the reader is left with is just a great collection of short stories. Which is totally fine.

I guess.

To be honest, though, I’m not a big fan of short stories. I find them to be the literary equivalent off popcorn — though I admit this is not always the case. I’ve ready many short stories that are absolutely amazing, and in terms of meaning and complexity on par with the best of novels. I’m just so much more interested in the form of the novel and what you can do with it — and that’s because there is so much more that you can do with it. In order for me to engage with what I’m reading I need a certain level of depth that comes from more than well written characters and beautiful prose, and in my reading experience it takes an extremely high level of skill to do that with short stories (e.g., David Foster Wallace), much more so than the novel.

I’ve been working through these thoughts today, and I’m continuing to do so even as I write this. What I need to do is read more short story collections (I’ve added Runaway to my queue.) and short form fiction (I’m also hoping to read We Don’t Live Here Anymore very soon.) and let it all stew together in my brain. I’m sure I’ll get back to this topic in a month or two.