The Reading Experience

The M Word

I am sympathetic to most of what Joanna Walsh says about unconventional fiction in her recent Irish Times article, "The N Word: Against the Novel." Her question, "why not many novels, not all of which suit everyone; instead of novels that strive to create a world, why not novels that highlight their own artificiality, stretching the seams at which language is stitched to meaning, shuffling experience as it is shuffled in memory?" is entirely apropos, and her general call for works of fiction that break whatever rules they wish, that alter or invert any of the currently established practices of "literary fiction," is one I profoundly hope other writers hear.

Additionally, she is completely justified in asking why "so many contemporary novels continue to be encumbered by the realist demands of plot, character, place. . less able to make less room. . .for the truly 'novel' varieties of language" the novelist might employ. However, I think her answer to her own question is mistaken, or at least incomplete: "what many a novel most closely resembles is… another novel," she asserts.

It is indeed quite puzzling that, in American fiction at least, post-modernism and post-postmodernism, so many novels (and short stories) adhere to the familiar conventions of plot, character, and setting. Judging from the books that are most prominently reviewed and that win most of the prestigious awards, and from the kind of fiction published in most literary magazines (especially in print), it is almost as if Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner, Beckett, Borges, and Barth never existed, the primary line of influence bypassing them and their alternative strategies in favor of the narrative conventions associated with "the great tradition" inaugurated in the 19th century. (There are exceptions of course. However, that they are usually explicitly noted by reviewers and readers as exceptional, out of the mainstream of establishment-authorized fiction, only reinforces the impression that the alternative tradition of literary experiment has largely been forgotten--to the extent it ever became familiar.)

But I don't think that the cause of such reflexive, and regressive, fealty to the old narrative verities is the kind of insular preoccupation with other novels that Walsh describes. I believe that the greatest influence on these kinds of novels is not fiction at all, but movies, which have never stopped favoring the 19th century narrative conventions. Writers both appropriate these conventions as borrowed by the more popular form and write stories they think could be adapted to film. (I do not include here such books as John Domini's Movieola or Robert Coover's A Night at the Movies, which parody, contort, and transform the plot conventions of movies to create an altered form of fiction.) This is the only conclusion I can come to when so many of the literary novels I try to read seem so obviously trying to be a movie in words, not so much the script for a movie, but a facsimile of one with words only, absent the equipment necessary to make an actual movie. I love movies, but in reading or choosing fiction I'm not really interested in a film simulacrum in place of an attempt to fashion a distinctive work of verbal art.

The  novel is a "self-referential and self-affirming form" only in that novels always have some relation to the literary history that has made them identifiable as novels in the first place. Something so idiosyncratic or "new" that it doesn't apparently have a connection to that history would no longer be a novel but literally a new form. There's nothing wrong with that, but if this new form proves compelling enough, others will want to try it out as well, and a new kind of history begins to unfold, to which new works in the form will become unavoidably "self-referential." If it isn't compelling, it may eventually be considered just a curiosity.

My review of A.O. Scott's Better Living Through Criticism at Review 31:

It is as if Scott can’t abandon the conventional journalistic imperative to ‘cover’ a subject by reporting on both sides of disputes about it, without interceding to provide some normative appraisal. But Scott seems to experience this obligation as a struggle, not between the points of view surveyed but within himself, represented most obviously in the inter-chapters included in the book, presented in the form of a dialogue between the two sides of critic AO Scott. These dialogues ultimately leave the book even more rhetorically fragmented, as even the disconnected points Scott does make in the other chapters prove debatable to his skeptical questioner, the ultimate effect of whose questions is essentially to chastise Scott for his presumptions and pretensions in making those points to begin with. . . .

 

My essay on the fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman is available in the new issue of The Quarterly Conversation:

Friedman’s work is most often considered as a contribution to the emergence of “black humor” in American fiction, but his first novel, Stern (1962), could at the time have easily enough been regarded as absurdist, an existential comedy about the angst of Jewish assimilation. The novel’s title character finds himself in alien territory—the American suburbs—confused and beset by a series of humiliations he struggles to understand. The story of his misadventures is funny, but in the way the plays of Beckett and Ionesco are funny, in a detached and deadpan manner that can also be disconcerting

 

The Importance of Positive Reviews

In a riposte to Jessa Crispin's recent complaint that  a besieged literary culture has been too quick to "close ranks," leading some review editors to prefer only positive reviews, Bethanne Patrick wants to remind us that "Positive reviews, well-written and carefully thought out, certainly are part of criticism." This is, of course, correct, and Patrick does not suggest that, conversely, negative reviews are somehow not part of criticism. Indeed, she confesses to engaging in excessive "boosterism" in her own efforts as editor and book reviewer, ultimately declining the role of "book cheerleader," an inclination to which does indeed characterize a great deal of what is called "literary journalism," and the performance of which too often substitutes for actual literary criticism in both print and online publications.

A positive review does not have to be merely an instance of book cheerleading, however. I would argue that a genuinely "carefully thought out" positive review can be harder to do well than a negative review, since writing a review of a book one finds disappointing, or even actively dislikes, focuses a critic's attention in a way that can be more difficult when trying to account for what one likes in a good book. Those qualities that contribute to a work's failure of interest are likely to make themselves felt distinctly over the duration of the reading experience, leaving the critic with a fairly acute perception of what went wrong in the work. A successful book, a book that consistently engages attention and fulfills its aesthetic ambitions, can challenge the critic to go beyond generic praise and empty accolades, to summon a critical language that doesn't simply repeat, in different variations, "This is a good book."

The most common type of positive review, to be found across the spectrum of available critical opinion, from personal blogs to front page reviews in the New York Times Book Review, employs the rhetoric of extravagant, hyperbolic acclamation, usually leaning heavily on a few all-purpose terms of fulsome praise: "astonishing;" "incandescent;" "rapturous;" "stunning." Most of these terms are more or less interchangeable, and are used so frequently in so many different contexts that they have essentially become meaningless. Unfortunately, most reviews that use such language rely on it as their primary mode of appraisal, at most adding further plot summary, as if reminding us of the story or summing up characters will suffice as illustration of the pertinence of these hopelessly nebulous adjectives as applied to the book at hand.

This sort of review implicitly accepts the conception of reviews as consumer guides, advice to the reader about whether a book is worth his/her time and money. It affirms the evaluative function of criticism (as, of course, does the negative review as well) at the expense of the descriptive function, at least if "description" means more than highlighting and recapitulating narrative content. If newspaper book reviews--to the extent they survive--are not likely to ever abandon this model, reviews in cultural magazines, literary journals, and online generally have no particular reason to embrace it, and thus we could expect reviews from these sources to more often incorporate the descriptive function of criticism, to more fully convey to the reader an impression of the critic's own experience of reading. In this context, a positive review doesn't just commend a book to its potential readers or offer praise and approval to the author (although it could do both of these things), but tries to make manifest the "imaginative qualities" the critic has fathomed in that actual thing--the literary work--readers now and in the future might more fruitfully appreciate.

This means the most valuable skill the critic can bring to the consideration of books, specifically poetry or fiction, is the ability to pay close but also receptive attention--receptive especially to goals and strategies that might seem unfamiliar or unorthodox. Simply calling such a strategy "incandescent" without explaining how it works (or why it prompts a metaphor that invokes giving off light rather than, say, an auditory metaphor) doesn't really help us assimilate its intention or effect. Similarly, a negative review that dismisses an unfamiliar strategy simply because it is unfamiliar does no service either to the book in question or to the efficacy of literary criticism. This sort of reflexively dismissive negative review is arguably even more useless as criticism than the cheerleading panegyric. An enthusiastic but opaque positive review can be correct in its judgment if inadequate in its justification; an uncomprehending negative review provides no reason to take it seriously to begin with.

A well-executed positive review performs an entirely legitimate function of literary criticism. It offers a sort of baseline affirmative analysis that other reviews or critical essays might need to challenge, although not necessarily in an explicit way. To the extent that an intelligent contemporaneous review of a novel that continues to attract readers and critical attention into the future forms a part of the lasting critical discourse about that novel, criticism later readers might consider, a "carefully thought out" positive review would play its part in the study, formal or informal, of the work. Less tangibly, a convincing positive review partly determines the tenor of the conversation about a new book, in some cases no doubt directly affecting the consensus of opinion about it. Negative reviews do this as well, of course, but this is most likely with a prominent "takedown" kind of review. Since positive reviews of fiction usually outnumber negative reviews, a good one needs to be especially good to stand out.