The Reading Experience

Walbert

Kate Walbert's Our Kind is pretty obviously conceived against the grain of the typical work of American fiction published these days. Instead of focusing on the young, it features a cast of mostly elderly characters. Instead of concentrating on the experiences of a single character coming to terms with contemporary reality, it presents a collection of characters united by age and experience whose stories are related mostly through the collective "we." Instead of spinning out another version of the bildungsroman, it narrates a series of loosely-structured stories about people who have long passed their prime and who spend much of their time reflecting on what has been rather than what is to come.

Whether Our Kind was actually sold to its publisher as some such kind of "high concept" (or possibly what is coming to be called "niche") book or not, unfortunately it is finally more interesting as an idea than as a realized work of fiction. Its aging characters are depicted in various overly cute or suitably somber situations, but none of these characters impress themselves on the reader's attention very deeply and few of the situations are interesting enough to sustain the individual stories as anything other than anecdotes or vignettes. One finishes the book feeling indeed that one has been given a certain kind of "information" about the generation of women around whom the book is centered, but not provided with a compelling reading experience of the sort one wants from a well-executed novel or collection of short fictions.

Our Kind is yet another "novel in stories," a form that is becoming increasingly popular among current writers (and, one presumes, readers as well). It is a form the possibilities of which have certainly not yet been fully worked out, but it can't really be said that Walbert's book does much to contribute to the ongoing exploration of those possibilities. It is too fragmented to really cohere as a novel, although it does leave a stronger (although still disappointlingly faint) impression in aggregate than in its individual parts. There isn't a firm enough narrative thread to make the book a likely candidate for adaptation as a Lifetime movie, but unfortunatly it doesn't rise much above this sort of earnest entertainment. Walbert does bring the social and cultural expectations that shaped these women's lives under some scrutiny, but not with a hard enough edge that middlebrow readers might be offended (or even challenged) by it.

The book's second half is better than the first, the stories, among them, "Sick Chicks" and "Back When They Were Children," more substantive and more capable of standing alone as short stories. Perhaps the best story is the last, "The Beginning of the End," which tells the life story of a woman named Viv, who passes up the opportunity to become a literary scholar--at a time when few women became scholars at all--in favor of the marriage and family expected of her. The story concludes with a flashback to a moment with her soon-to-be husband, Don, at their engagement party:

She moves in closer to Don and bumps the umbrella, its slick sides dripping on their shoulders as they kisss beneath the dome, already bound. And there will never be a stepping back, nor a fork in the road, nor a deferral of what had been a clear direction. You made your bed, the women say, etcetera, et cetera.

This is how Viv would describe, if asked, the beginning of the end, but the conversation never gets around to her.

The reality of opportunity lost is conveyed very painfully here, but unfortunately some readers may have given up on the book before getting to this story. Actually, I would advise that readers skip directly to "The Beginning of the End," since it really encapsulates much of what the book has to say. If you're interested in reading additional stories about the consequences of cultural expectations on women who succumb to them, you could go back and read the rest of the book by the light provided by this concluding story. You might also just settle for it.

Keenly Observed

According to Morris Dickstein,

To understand the changes that shook the modern world, my students and colleagues have returned in recent years to long-neglected writers in the American realist tradition, including William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. For readers like me who grew up in the second half of the 20th century on the unsettling innovations of modernism, and who were attuned to its atmosphere of crisis and disillusionment, the firm social compass of these earlier writers has come as a surprise.

Dreiser, Crane, Wharton, and Cather are "long-neglected"? As far as I can tell, the latter two especially have become increasingly popular, both among academics and ordinary readers, over the past two decades. This must be just another anti-modernist rhetorical gesture--surprisingly, from someone who has in the past written insightfully about both modernism and postmodernism. (See his Gates of Eden, actually one of the very best books about American fiction in the 1960s.)

I can't really see that the "unsettling innovations of modernism" provide a very clear opposition to the "firm social compass" of the writers Dickstein lists. The modernists didn't lack a social compass, did they? Joyce? Faulkner? They simply weren't as interested in "social fiction" as Dreiser or Lewis. Their "innovations" were directed elsewhere--to the depiction of consciousness, the fragmentation of form, etc.

Dickstein continues:

Like Henry James before them, they saw themselves less as lonely romantic outposts of individual sensibility than as keen observers of society. They described the rough transition from the small town to the city, from rural life to industrial society, from a more homogeneous but racially divided population to a nation of immigrants. They recorded dramatic alterations in religious beliefs, moral values, social and sexual mores and class patterns. Novels like Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" and Wharton's "House of Mirth" showed how fiction paradoxically could serve fact and provide a more concrete sense of the real world than any other form of writing.

Were these writers really as immodest as to consider themselves "keen" observers? Isn't it only literary critics who want to confine such writers to their putative powers of observation in the first place? Did Crane or Dreiser or Wharton believe this was their primary talent as writers? Was mere "observation" all they had to offer?

The rest of Dickstein's paragraph actually does no service to any of these writers. It makes them sound like journalists or historians, but not like novelists that anybody would voluntarily read. If you want information about "the rough transition from the small town to the city" and "dramatic alterations in religious beliefs, moral values, social and sexual mores and class patterns," why not go straight to the historians? Why bother with novelists? Just for a little dramatic illustration? Is this any reason why readers interested in literature rather than history or sociology would now turn to these writers? And exactly why do we need a "concrete sense of the real world" from our writers? Don't our own eyes put us in contact with this world every day? Besides, what other world could novelists be writing about? Where else would their subjects come from?

Dickstein concludes:

This is how most readers have always read novels, not simply for escape, and certainly not mainly for art, but to get a better grasp of the world around them and the world inside them. Now that the overload of theory, like a mental fog, has begun to lift, perhaps professional readers will catch up with them.

How does Dickstein know "how most readers have always read novels"? Exactly how would he have gleaned this information? Professor Dickstein wouldn't be generalizing from his own reading habits, would he? Or those of other "professional readers"? I've known many more people who say they indeed read novels for "escape" rather than something as earnest as "a better grasp of the world around them." For that matter, if this latter were indeed the reason why most readers turn to fiction, would Lewis, Howells, et. al. be as "neglected" as Dickstein contends? Wouldn't they be the most beloved writers in the American canon?

How disdainful is that "certainly not mainly for art." Disdainful of those readers who do seek out "art," disdainful of the possibilities of fiction as art, implicitly disdainful of "most readers," who apparently couldn't appreciate it even if it were present. Unfortunately for Dickstein, it's precisely the lack of "art" in the work of writers like Howells and Lewis (and sometimes in Dreiser and Cather) that accounts for whatever "neglect" they have suffered. No matter how thoroughly the postmodern fog lifts, they're not going to be rediscovered as anything other than than the dreary documentarians they were.

The Irreplaceable Conditions of Prose

According to Andrew O'Hagan, "There may be a coming generation who will know the literary classics only from television's adaptation of them, but that knowledge is better than no knowledge at all."

This is wrong. It couldn't be more wrong. What good is it to have "knowledge" of books if they go unread? Would O'Hagan say the same thing about, say, music? Better to have "knowledge" of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, even if one never listens to them? A faint memory of the excerpt that used to be played on William Buckley's Firing Line will do?

O'Hagan continues:

I'm a novelist, so I'm hardly going to argue against the irreplaceable conditions of prose, the pattern and rhythm and truth of good writing. But literature is also about narrative and morality; if it takes a television show to get some of that over to an audience - and possibly to send them to the original source - then there are small grounds for moaning.

I haven't read any of Andrew O'Hagan's books, but if he really believes this, he can't be much of a novelist. Literature without the words is good enough? If television (or film or "graphic novels") can provide "narrative and morality" as well as fiction, which O'Hagan seems to concede here, why bother with fiction in the first place? The other forms are clearly more popular, so if "getting over" some morality to an audience is what you're after, wouldn't it make more sense to use them instead?

In saying all of this, I am not denigrating these other narrative forms. I would simply maintain that tv is tv, film is film, fiction is fiction. Indeed, I have always found television adaptations of "classic" novels to be among the least interesting uses of this form, and much more likely to frighten viewers away from the "original source" than provoke them into reading. The best film adaptations of novels tend to be of those novels less tied to notions of "literature" in the first place, leaving the filmmakers with much more freedom to alter the source in ways that emphasize the strengths of cinema without leaving the novel's fans feeling outraged. If you prefer the visual to "the irreplaceable conditions of prose," fine. But let's not pretend that tv versions of fiction manage to negotiate some blurry terrain between the two modes. It's still just television.

"My stepsons are fairly good readers," writes O'Hagan, "but, recently, they have begun to say that reading is boring":

I find it hard to imagine what they mean, except that when I see them watching stuff on television I see that their eyes are lively. In this situation, are you going to force them upstairs to read Kidnapped, or are will you guide them towards the BBC's recent adaptation of Kidnapped starring Iain Glen as Alan Breck?

I would do neither. I'd let them watch whatever television program they want to watch. I'd suggest to them that Kidnapped is a pretty good book, but I wouldn't force them to read it. If they're going to grow up to be non-readers, I guess I'd just accept it. Maybe I'd try to teach by example by skipping that night's tv lineup altogether and reading a book instead. But watching Iain Glen rather than reading about Alan Breck isn't going to make anyone a Stevenson fan.

Triangulation

Noting yesterday's post on this blog, A.C. Douglas maintains that I share with Michael Blowhard "the curious notion that the actual writing in a work of fiction is somehow separable or exists apart from the work's story." Linking to a previous post of his own, Douglas futher asserts that

There are two fundamental elements that go into making a work of prose fiction -- every work of prose fiction -- both of which are sine qua non. First and foremost, of course, is a story. No story, no work of prose fiction. Lousy story, lousy work of prose fiction. Nothing will save a work of prose fiction that's absent a first-rate story. Second, is human characters or a character (whether they take actual human form or not) through whom the story is played out.

If Douglas is suggesting that the "story" in a work of "prose fiction" can't be separated from the way in which it's told--which includes more than just "writing" per se, although finally everything in a work of literature does come down to writing, the words on the page--I entirely agree with him. I was objecting to a view of fiction that abstracts story from style or form and proclaims it to be the "real" object of interest to most casual readers. I simply want to insist that there are some readers who are more than casual in their approach to fiction and that these readers aren't just pointyheads because they sometimes do other than read for the plot.

I tend to stay away from claims about the "fundamental" elements of anything. It was once thought that among the fundamental elements of poetry were meter and rhyme, but only the most adamant anti-modernist would now deny that perfectly good poems have been written without either of these devices. And no one is saying that fiction should do without either story or character. As Jonathan Mayhew said in a comment on my original post, "Even experimental fiction tends to use proper names attached to bundles of seemingly human characteristics and move these bundles forward in some kind of narrative." I can't myself think of any fiction, experimental or otherwise, that doesn't present such bundles of "human characteristics" and have them do something or other. But of course it's a question of emphasis. Some writers want to know what the boundaries are--how much can you de-emphasize story or create less than "rounded" characters or manipulate the point of view and still engage the attentive reader's interest? There's nothing wrong with this. If some writers didn't do it, fiction as a form would simply calcify.

Douglas uses Lolita as an example of a novel that has "a great story to tell," despite what some readers and critics have had to say about Nabakov's prose style or his use of black humor. But I don't know that this book really provides such good support for Douglas's position. What exactly is the "story" Lolita has to tell? A dirty old man travels across country with his nymphet? Is it really this slender narrative thread that pulls the reader along through Nabokov's novel? Aren't there really many different stories in Lolita, most of them attached to this thread but many of them more or less self-sufficient? Are we really in reading Lolita sitting on the edge of our seats to find out what will happen to Humbert and to Lolita? Don't we know? Isn't it finally indeed Nabokov's style and wicked humor, his skill at manipulating the loose requirements of the picaresque narrative, that keep us reading?

In identifying story as the "sine qua non" of fiction, hasn't Douglas himself "separated" story from its effective embodiment and privileged narrative over all the other strategies a writer might use and all the other effects a work of fiction might create? In my view, if the words "literary fiction" have any meaning in the first place, they refer to the way in which a given writer has managed to convince us there is no such thing as a sine qua non in literature, except for the skill with which the writer is able to marshal the resources of language for whatever aesthetic purposes he/she has in mind.

Most People

According to Michael Blowhard:

. . .the interest most people have in most fiction depends on story, hook, subject matter, and character. Without the chance to relate to and enjoy these elements, 90% of people would lose their interest in fiction. They'd turn elsewhere for story-and-character satisfactions: to history, to journalism, to gossip, even to reality television. (Hey, a lot of people have already turned away from respectable fiction to these other media for their story pleasures. You don't think there's a connection, do you?) But we aren't going to live life without enjoying stories and characters, that's for sure.

Another way of putting it: while the occasional individual work of fiction may fare well enough without much in the way of story, the well-being of fiction generally depends on a shared interest (on the part of readers and writers) in characters, stories, hooks, and subject matter.

In fact, I do believe there's a connection between the popularity of such things as reality television and the relative non-popularity of literary fiction: "most people" have no interest, have never had any interest, in the sorts of things serious art and literature have to offer. For whatever reason, "most people" are incapable of paying attention to the formal and stylistic qualities that most artists seek to embody in their work, the qualities that make art art. In the case of literature, "most people" pay no attention to the "writin'" (as MB puts it) because "most people" are barely capable of using the language well enough just to get by in their own daily lives, never mind being able to appreciate the skill with which some poets and novelists can make the language say things it's never said before.

These are not "elitist" observations. They are simply facts. It is also a fact that literature has never been something of interest to "most people." But why should it be? MB seems to think he's punctured literary fiction's pretensions by asserting that "90% of people would lose their interest in fiction" if it didn't include "hooks" and other mindless devices, but why would writers want to solicit the attention of people who are more interested in Wife Swap to begin with? I don't know if 90% of us are this shallow or not, but even granting the claim, what's the problem with appealing to the 10% who want more, who are capable of paying attention? Why not just leave the "fancypants" writers to the fancypants readers and otherwise ignore them? Why MB's apparent need to denigrate the tastes of these readers even though by his own admission he has the vast majority of non-readers on his side anyway?

To be somewhat more charitable, MB apparently believes that the "well-being of fiction" can only be assured if it competes with other forms of narrative entertainment. But why should this be the case? Why should the measure of the accomplishments of literary fiction--of any form of art--be the degree to which it has appealed to a mass audience? MB clearly enough shares the tastes of this audience himself, but surely even he doesn't think that sheer popularity confers artistic success. I don't myself necessarily think it is the function of serious literature to deliberately reject success in the marketplace or to brandish its unpopularity like a rebel's sword. I think serious writers ought merely to ignore marketplace imperatives when those imperatives are at odds with their artistic integrity. If some readers find this elitist and alienating, so be it. In my opinion, it's better to have readers in sympathy with one's goals, even if this means having fewer readers, than to court readers who can't bother to question their reflexive demand for "story."

MB allows that "Writers can (and will) do as they please. Of course, readers can (and will) read to please themselves too." But he can't resist adding that "It's idiotic to think that the fundamentals of most people's interest in fiction will ever extend too far beyond storytelling, subject matter, hook, and character." Again back to "most people." As far as I'm concerned "most people" can "read to please themselves" as well. (Actually, I'm pretty sure "most people" don't read at all.) But I don't really spend that much time obsessing over their reading habits, or putting up lengthy posts explaining why they're so misguided.

Psychological Realism

Responding to Lee Siegel's assertion that "Nowadays, often even the most accomplished novels offer characters that are little more than flat, ghostly reflections of characters. The author's voice, or self-consciousness about voice, substitutes mere eccentricity for an imaginative surrender to another life," Maud Newton further describes the way in which she decided to focus her own attention on "books that delve into a character's thoughts and motivations and idiosyncratic take on the world." Both Maud and Siegel are expressing a preference for "psychological realism" (a preference also shared by the literary critic James Wood, among others), an approach to the writing of fiction that perhaps gained its initial impetus in the late work of Henry James, but that probably became most identified with the work of such modernists as Joyce or Woolf.

(I think Siegel is wrong in claiming that 19th century writers "plumbed the depths of the human mind with something on the order of clairvoyance." Before James (or Flaubert, or Chekhov), the reigning narrative model was the picaresque, which surely emphasizes event over reflection, and which generally produces characters that are flat indeed--although not necessarily without color or vibrancy. One could say that writers such as George Eliot or Hawthorne or Melville plumbed the depths of the human soul, but they did not do so using the techniques of pyschological realism as we have come to know them. It was as an addition to the strategies used by 19th century writers that stream of consciousness and what might be called psychological exposition--in which the writer describes what's going on inside a character's mind in the same way he/she might describe landscape or event--came to be identified as "modern" in the first place. And while Siegel blames Freud for the ulimate decline of "character" in fiction, he neglects to mention that the great modernist writers were partly inspired by Freud to try out the possibilities of "plumbing the depths" in the first place.)

I would argue that it is a misperception of most contemporary fiction to claim that it neglects either character or psychological "insight." Siegel identifies "postmodern and experimental novels" as the main culprits in fiction's deliberate turning-away from psychological depth, its refusal to "surrender to another life," but the vast majority of current fiction still focuses resolutely on character, and most of it uses the same strategies pioneered by Joyce and Woolf. Maud thinks that creative writing workshops put too much emphasis on "externalizing" through the "show, don't tell" rule, but most writers are neither minimalists nor postmodernists, and the chances are that if you were to pick out at random a work of literary fiction on your Borders shelf, you would find an entirely recognizable attempt both to establish character as the center of interest and to present the character's thought processes as the primary way of making him/her seem "realistic."

To this extent, Siegel's essay is just another backhanded slap at literary postmodernism (and some further by now superfluous stomping on the grave of Sigmund Freud), and in my opinion not to be taken seriously as a critique of contemporary fiction. However, Maud's concern for the "novel's pyschological possibilities" is not misguided (and to her credit she correctly identifies the temptation to "endless, largely banal psychological reflection" as one of the pitfalls of psychological realism). That the novel has "psychological possibilities" is undeniably true. Indeed, the illusion of psychological depth is something fiction can provide more thoroughly than the other narrative arts, and if you think "imaginative surrender to another life" is finally what fiction is all about, then such illusion is one of the defining features of fiction as a form. But it is an illusion, and in my view if you're going to stories and novels to acquire your understanding of human psychology, you're going to the wrong place. First of all, what gives novelists themselves a superior understanding of the psychological make-up of human beings? Isn't this like expecting them to somehow possess a special wisdom about human life simply because they're novelists? Second, is merely recording in prose what one considers to be the typical operations of thought (which can finally only be done in a kind of shorthand, anyway) really probing human consciousness in anything but the most superficial way?

Better to think of psychological realism as just another strategy a writer might use to give a work of fiction a sense of unity or purpose--another way of getting the words on the page in a way that might compel the reader's attention. This might be done through other means, including the "self-annulling irony, deliberate cartoonishness, montage-like 'cutting'" Lee Siegel disdains. Privileging "psychological realism" over all the other effects a work of fiction might convey, all the other methods of creating an aesthetically convincing work of literary art, ultimately only diminishes fiction as literary art. It perpetuates the idea that fiction is a "window"--whether on external reality or the human psyche--rather than an aesthetic creation made of words. (Perhaps some still consider fiction to be an inferior or inappropriate form for achieving this kind of creation, at least as compared to poetry, but why should those who condescend to the form get to pronounce on its possibilities to begin with?) It reduces fiction to a case study in social science just as much as the insistence that it "reflect" social and political realities. There are plenty of great novels that reveal human motive and the operations of the human mind. But their authors didn't necessarily set out to make such revelations. They set out to write good novels.

Narrative Shifts

In a review of Nicole Kraus's The History of Love, Gail Caldwell comments that "the heart of the story has been sacrificed to its pyrotechnics. Novels within novels, almost by necessity, are in competition with each other, with the reader being forced to relinquish one set of feelings for another every time the narrative shifts."

Presumably Caldwell has in mind here not just "novels within novels," but multiple narratives of all kinds, from, say, the twinned narratives in most of Richard Powers's novels to something like the exfoliating narratives of a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude, stories that require the reader to track their various "narrative shifts." Furthermore, given the language with which Caldwell describes Kraus's techniques in general--"pyrotechnics," "metafiction," "rarefied form," "artifice," "acrobatics"--one presumes that Caldwell is objecting to all fiction in which the "feelings" the reader ought to develop for the characters and their situation are being sacrificed to the intricacies of "rarefied form." (Later, Caldwell's summary judgment of The History of Love is that "What pays here is the emotional center of the novel, concealed and outshone by Krauss's shell game.")

Caldwell's complaints about Kraus's novel are probably the most common kind of complaint made against even very modestly experimental or formally adventurous fiction. Formal experiment disrupts the continuity of feeling a novel is supposed to provide, severs the emotional connection that, at least in part, works to make a particular work of fiction a "good read." Never mind that this is precisely what most experimental fiction is attempting to accomplish: to draw attention away from the immediate "content" a novel or story is expected to contain, like a vessel its liquid, and to focus some of the reader's attention on the vessel itself--better yet, to demonstrate that content only exists according to the shape of the container, the latter, after all, contributing the "art" to the art of fiction. More than anything else, experimental fiction works to remind the reader that fiction can be artful in this way, that it is more than a way to pass the time or give one's emotional receptors a little exercise.

I can't say whether Nicole Kraus in particular has succeeded in these goals or not, since I have not yet read The History of Love. (Although Caldwell's dismissive review has actually made it more likely that I will read it.) My interest here is not in Kraus's novel per se, but in the way in which Gail Caldwell's response to it exemplifies certain assumptions about what novels are supposed to do. Are they to be emotionally engaging and thus provide us with a reading experience in which "feelings" are paramount, or are they to be inventive works of art, encouraging a different kind of experience in which our ability to discern their aesthetic features plays at least as large a role as our willingness to expend emotion on what are finally made-up characters and events? Perhaps I am describing two different, and finally incompatible, sets of expectations about the nature of fiction. Perhaps those who prefer an emotional attachment to a novel's fictional world will seek out those books that enable such an attachment, while those more interested in the aesthetic possibilities of fiction will seek out those books that clearly set out to explore these possibilities. (Perhaps some novels have the dual capacity to satisfy both kinds of readers.) Still, even if this is the case, it would be nice if reviewers like Gail Caldwell, who apparently prefers the first sort of book, would refrain from passing judgment on the second kind using standards that are manifestly inappropriate to their creative ambitions.

(There's probably some overlap between this post and a recent post at Conversational Reading, in which Scott Esposito critiques Lee Siegel's claim that too many novels "substitute mere eccentricity for an imaginative surrender to another life." Scott defends postmodern/experimental fiction against the charge that "character" is underemphasized. I would myself accept that this charge is accurate enough vis-a-vis some kinds of experimental fiction, but would deny that "flat" characters are inherently a flaw. Is it not possible for fiction to appeal to us beyond its emotional qualities or its summoning of "rounded" characters?)