The Reading Experience

Forget Fiction

Lee Siegel recently opined that "fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers. For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the nonfiction writers":

You want to read a great story about American politics today, overflowing with sharp character portraits, and keen evocations of American places, and a ripping narrative? Read Mr. Remnick's book on Obama, because you won't find it in American fiction. Looking to immerse yourself in a fascinating tale of contemporary finance? Forget fiction. Pick up Michael Lewis' latest book-not to mention his earlier ones. Yearning for a saga of American money and class? Well, Dreiser is dead, and there sure isn't anyone to take his place, so go out and get T.J. Stiles' The First Tycoon, an epic telling of the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

No doubt if you think fiction ought to be "about American politics today," or provide a "fascinating tale of contemporary finance" or a "saga of American money and class," you might agree with Siegel's claim that contemporary fiction doesn't measure up. On the other hand, Siegel doesn't really establish that in the "Golden Age" of American fiction many writers did these things, either. He rattles off a list of names, but among them--"Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Cheever, Malamud"--I can't identify one who will be remembered for writing novels about "American politics today" or "contemporary finance." I suppose a couple of them might be said to have written loosely about "money and class," but the best ones weren't directly considering money and class but were writing fiction in which "class" was tangentially involved. (Or if they did write directly about "money and class" --Rabbit is Rich comes to mind--this work was minor at best.) Those of us who cringe at the idea of novels about contemporary finance can only be thankful that neither these writers nor most current writers find it a fit subject for fiction regarded as literary art.

Siegel's displeasure doesn't really seem to be with fiction writers, anyway. He's lamenting that there aren't enough literary critics of the old school around, critics like Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin, who focused not on art but on "questions of life and society that a particular novel evoked." Siegel is himself a critic of this sort, and I'm sure if he really put his mind to it he could take almost any work of fiction and, ignoring its aesthetic qualities, belabor these "questions of life and society" to death. I assume that either he no longer wants to do this (diminishing returns) or contemporary fiction really has moved away from the need to "say something" about political and social affairs. I myself come across enough works of fiction that pretty clearly haven't renounced the effort of saying something that I can't really agree there's no longer enough grist for the cultural critic's mill, but if the embrace of nonfiction by people like Lee Siegel means they will henceforth just leave fiction and fiction writers alone, I heartily endorse it.

I am left with a similar feeling about Terry Teachout's recent assertion that "Reading demands a greater investment of time than looking at a complicated painting, and the average reader is not prepared to invest that much time in a book, no matter what critics say about it. I feel the same way. I suppose I could get to the bottom of "Finnegans Wake" if I worked at it—but would it be worth the trouble?" As with Siegel, I think Teachout is both correct and deeply wrong. It is probably true that "the average reader" is not going to devote much time to "difficult" books, but literature-as-art necessarily isn't much interested in the "average reader." Average readers can no longer summon up much patience with Shakespeare, or with Dickens or Melville or Henry James, or most poetry. These writers, as well as Joyce in Finnegans Wake, assumed that most of their readers (or, with Shakespeare, their listeners) would make the effort needed to appreciate their work on its own terms or else leave it alone. I can't see there's anything untoward about this arrangement. That some readers might find the work excessively difficult certainly isn't an argument that writers ought to avoid alienating such readers.

If Terry Teachout thinks Finnegans Wake wouldn't reward his effort, so be it. Many others find its singular kind of difficulty especially rewards the attempt to "get to the bottom of" it (and it would be the attempt that matters, since no one will ever really get to the "bottom"--something that is true of all great literature). Should serious fiction ultimately have to do without Terry Teachout (or Lee Siegel) as audience members, I don't think their absence will be registered that keenly.

A Change in the Whole Publishing Climate

Apparently the James Frey "kerfuffle" has yet to have much of a dampening effect on the production of memoirs:

Literary agents say they're seeing more memoir manuscripts and proposals than ever. Lee Gutkind, founder of the literary journal Creative Nonfiction and a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, says he gets 300-400 memoir submissions each month unsolicited, for his publication, which comes out three times a year. This reflects a change in the whole publishing climate, Mr. Gutkind says. In the past, writers would break into the business with autobiographical novels, and move on to other sorts of fiction. Now, "the novel's not hot anymore, and the autobiographical novel has been replaced by the memoir." Memoirs have become "the new door opening for first-time writers, young and old," he says. . . .

Gutkind's comment (and the article as a whole) does perhaps help explain the popularity of memoir. It appeals to the sort of reader and, more importantly, the sort of writer for whom writing is primarily a mode of "expression," a way to affirm the self, draw attention to one's own "life story." (Which is not to say that the memoir is inherently an inferior form or to deny that some writers have produced very fine books using the form.) For those perhaps too modest to push themselves onto tv directly ("Several trends are driving the popularity of the memoir today," this article goes on to say. "One is the public's continuing fascination with reality TV"), memoir is perhaps a somewhat more respectable substitute. And if in addition it lands you an appearance on Oprah, all the better.

That "In the past, writers would break into the business with autobiographical novels" is undoubtedly an accurate statement (especially if your goal is to "break into the business," rather than, say, create an accomplished work of fiction), and futher reminds us that even among those authors ostensibly writing fiction, depicting one's life story has always been perhaps the most immediate impulse motivating many, if not most, "first-time writers." An interest in peeking in on such stories is probably the motivating impulse for most readers of fiction as well (at least those readers interested in what is called "literary fiction"). Except now they have books that can satisfy that interest more directly, without the intervening demands of fiction (although apparently these books can make a few things up), and undoubtedly such books will continue to attract readers, as well as writers, for whom emotional directness (through vicarious drama) is the preeminent value, while those of us more interested in fiction as aesthetic invention will watch as books written to embody this value go on losing their market share.

Which might not be such a bad thing. Readers who want their books to be continuous with their television habits will get what they want and will presumably put less pressure on fiction writers to obsess over personal dramas. Writers who feel the need to "express themselves" can do so without restraint; those who really are interested in fiction as a literary form that transcends preoccupation with self and provides a kind of pleasure separate from the voyeurism encouraged by memoir might be able to pursue this interest with a clearer sense of their actual audience. In other words, those of us who prefer serious fiction, tiny remnant though we might be, would be able to indulge our vice without all of the interference and distraction brought to bear by the "book business."

Cavalier Assertions

Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, January 17:

Mr. Frey's embellishments of the truth, his cavalier assertion that the "writer of a memoir is retailing a subjective story," his casual attitude about how people remember the past - all stand in shocking contrast to the apprehension of memory as a sacred act that is embodied in Oprah Winfrey's new selection for her book club, announced yesterday: "Night," Elie Wiesel's devastating 1960 account of his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

New York Times, January 19:

The publisher and the translator of a new English-language edition of "Night," Elie Wiesel's harrowing account of life in the Nazi death camps, said yesterday that the new edition corrects several small factual errors in the previous translation, including a reference to the author's age when he entered the camps.

Oprah Winfrey's choice of "Night" as the next selection for her television book club on Monday immediately sent the book to the top of national best-seller lists.

But it also revived questions about "Night," one of the first autobiographical accounts of the death camps and a book that changed modern American understanding of the Holocaust. At times over the last 45 years it has been classified as a novel on some high-school reading lists, in some libraries and in bookstores.

Some scholars who have studied Holocaust memoirs have also raised questions about how much of the book can be verified.

Mr. Wiesel and his literary agent, Georges Borchardt, said in interviews this week that the book was factual and that they had never portrayed it as a novel. They said the differences in the new edition are not significant enough to justify the kind of questions raised about Ms. Winfrey's last book club selection, the memoir "A Million Little Pieces" by James Frey

Just a suggestion: "Nonfiction narrative" is inherently a genre in which facts are going to be shaded and embellished in the name of story. In demanding that our "nonfiction" also be "narrative," let's not pretend that it is as well providing us with "the truth." Frey's embellishments may or may not have been warranted, but if we stopped fetishizing "story" as embodying some kind of transcendent value, he may not have resorted to them in the first place.

A Newsy Time

In Rachel Donadio's August 7 New York Times article on the purported eclipse of fiction by nonfiction, she asserts that "the novel isn't dead; it just isn't as central to the culture as it once was."

The article itself really proceeds from this assumption--that novels used to be "central to the culture" but are not so now. My immediate response to this rather peculiar notion is to ask just when this fiction-friendly era occurred. It must have been before my time; for as long as I've been reading novels, in fact, I've also been reading essays and articles similar to this one announcing that the novel is passe, that fiction no longer engages with society at large, that film or television or some other medium has stolen fiction's audience, that, indeed, readers prefer nonfiction because, as Cullen Murphy puts it, "certain traits that used to be standard in fiction, like a strong sense of plot and memorable characters in the service of important and morally charged subject matter, are today as reliably found in narrative nonfiction as they are in literary fiction." At what point in the recent past did fiction really have the "cultural currency" Adrienne Miller thinks it's lost? When have we not been, in Philip Gourevitch's words, "living in a newsy time"?

The deck is stacked even more heavily against the efficacy of fiction when Donadio declares that fiction is losing out to nonfiction at the task of "illuminating today's world most vividly." Statements like this (as well as Murphy's rehearsal of those hardy conventions fiction has abandoned) really do seem to indicate that in the minds of certain editors and journalists, at least, fiction is still associated with social realism and the well-constructed narrative. Or at least that it's currently failing to live up to these established responsibilites, thus allowing nonfiction to take over the job of "making sense of a complicated and fractious world." But has it ever really been the role of fiction, of literature more generally, to "make sense" of the world, fractious or not? Doesn't literature help us to understand that the world is a complicated place, not always amenable to straightforward description and simple explanation? Can't it "illuminate" reality not by claiming to represent "today's world" but by delineating smaller pieces of it, or even by simply illustrating the power of human imagination and letting the "world" take care of itself?

If the editors of publications like Atlantic Monthly, Esquire (or, as far as I'm concerned, The New Yorker) want to deemphasize fiction in favor of "long-form narrative reporting," I say they should just go ahead and do it without any fol-de-rol about how they still respect fiction and might get back to it later. None of these publications has done very much for the cause of fiction, anyway, at least not recently. Most of what they publish is safe and pre-digested, altogether reflective of the condescending attitude toward the value of fiction on display in Donadio's article. Serious fiction will survive their disdain for the merely literary, even while it's dismissed by those who can find "important and morally charged subject matter" only in "topical" nonfiction. In fact, without their leaden sensibilities determining what gets published and what doesn't, it might even flourish.

Telling Stories

This Boston Globe article about Charles Hoffer's book decrying the current state of history writing doesn't really provide any fresh insights about the plagiarism scandals involving Goodwin et al, but this description of Hoffer's thesis does put the conflict between popular and academic history into useful relief:

"American history," he writes, "is two-faced" -- split between celebratory popularizers who often value rousing narrative over scholarly rigor and academic specialists whose jargon-riddled, often dour monographs ignore the ordinary reader. Meanwhile, Hoffer accuses the American Historical Association (AHA), where he has served as an adviser on plagiarism and a member of its professional standards division, of abdicating its responsibility to enforce basic scholarly principles in both realms.

It is often said that such "celebratory popularizers" as Goodwin, Ambrose, and McCullough apply "literary" techniques to the writing of history, but essentially all this means is that their books indeed seek to present history though "rousing narrative." What is most objectionable about this formulation is its implicit denigration of what literature is really all about. The kind of transparent, "rousing" narrative to be found in the books of these history writers has nothing to do, at least as far as I can tell, with even the most conventional narrative strategies employed by 19th century novelists. (At least the 19th century novelists we still read; sometimes it is claimed that certain kinds of stories, both fiction and nonfiction, are "Dickensian," but as The Little Professor likes to point out, those who use this term usually reveal only how little they know about Dickens.) Serious writers of fiction use narrative to get at the sort of truth that the simple recitation of facts overlooks. Writers like Ambrose and McCullough use narrative as a way of whitewashing these truths in a smooth, even coat of received wisdom.

In my opinion, Hoffer (or at least the author of this article, Matthew Price) exaggerates the extent to which academic historians have "retreated behind a wall of footnotes and obscure jargon." Some of the very academics cited in the article as defenders of academic history--Eric Foner, for example--also write history as a form of narrative. Perhaps the scholarly journals print their share of data-oriented papers, but most books by academic historians that get any kind of coverage in mainstream book reviews seem to proceed through at best a more muted form of "rousing narrative." Gordon Wood, one of the more esteemed historians in the United States, is quoted in the article as defending McCullough.

Is it really true that readers of history can only be led to take it seriously through the distortions of narrative most simplistically conceived? Is it really the case that human beings can make sense of what's happening to them, and what has happened, only through the imposition of "story" onto reality? Are we really that feeble-minded? Over the course of the 20th century, most serious writers of fiction--presumably the natural home of "story'--have come to see the limitations of stories as understood in such reductive terms as are frequently used to define them. Will journalists and historians ever come to see these limitations as well?

Serious Fiction, R.I.P.

Unhappily, I am inclined to agree with the Literary Saloon's rather gloomy preliminary assessment of NY Times Book Review editor-select Sam Tanenhaus based on this profile. The Saloon has also picked out the quote that should cause the most alarm:

And while he has no plans to abandon fiction -- contrary to the fears of many in the publishing world -- his enthusiasms seem to lie more in nonfiction. "We’re living in really an exemplary age of nonfiction narrative, and to some extent nonfiction has taken over some of the earlier attributes of the novel, which is story-telling," he said. "Nonfiction writers have inherited the classic technique of fiction. That’s what I tried to do in my biography, I tried to write it as if it were a novel."

I have in a previous post expatiated on my views of memoir and most biograpy ("nonfiction narrative"), so I'll try not to repeat myself too extensively. However, there is much to disagree with in Mr. Tanenhaus's statement. First of all, it is an entirely open question whether we do in fact live in "an exemplary age of nonfiction narrative." We live in age where much of it is being done, but this may prove to be all that can be said for it. In fact, most of the nonfiction narrative I sample is characterized primarily by formula, simplistic imitation of "the classic technique of fiction," and, unfortunately, much tedium.

Second , Tanenhaus correctly states that a certain kind of nonfiction has appropriated "earlier attributes" of fiction, but he then pronounces these attributes to be indeed the classic qualities of fiction. What Tanenhaus is identifying as "classic" has not been the norm in serious fiction for about 150 years. One could say that the kind of "traditional" storytelling Tanenhaus almost certainly has in mind dominated serious fiction for only its first 75-100 years. If we take Tanenhaus's own biography of Whittaker Chambers as an exemplum of what he's describing, he probably is thinking of something like the Victorian "triple-decker." I like these books a lot, but it can't seriously be proposed that the narrative conventions of Victorian England are the appropriate standards for twenty-first century America. To this extent, Tanenhaus is advancing a model that is retrogressive indeed.

Having said that, I'm not even sure Tanenhaus's Chambers biography works in the way he implies here. It tells the story of Chambers's life all right (this is still the very definition of "biography"), but it doesn't settle for mere "nonfiction narrative." There's plenty of analysis, social, political, even literary, as well as a good deal of psychological probing of the mindsets of both Chambers and Alger Hiss. In my opinion, it doesn' read like a "novel" of the period at all.

Finally, Tanenhaus's glorification of all things nonfiction is fairly obviously a way of belittling the practices of current novelists, who no longer--not even the remaining "realists"--respect the "classic technique of fiction." Probably behind this is the belief that contemporary writers of fiction are too artsy for their own good and don't understand that fiction writers ought to do their duty to the great sociopolital "conversation" that journalists like Bill Keller--and regrettably even Sam Tanenhaus--take for serious discourse. (There's almost no mention of poetry in this profile. It's probably a goner.) To judge by the quality of such conversation in the current configuration of the NYTBR (as well as other book reviews), it's all going to be pretty insipid.

In a comment I posted at another blog on the announcement of Tanenhaus's ascension to the Book Review throne, I said that since Tanenhaus was himself a good writer, I was "mildly optimistic" about his administration of the New York Times Book Review. I still think he's a good writer, but I can't say I'm now very optimistic, mildly or otherwise. As the Saloon puts it, this early declaration of the new editor's reigning assumptions "doesn't sound good at all."

Postscript (March 20): Agni editor Sven Birkerts examines this whole mess here. I've just discovered this piece. Everyone should read it.

Life's the Thing

I read few memoirs and biographies, perhaps as a reaction against the trendy popularity of both forms over the past 10-15 years, but more significantly because of my sense of the ultimate limitations of the conventional sort of "life writing" represented by memoir and biography as they now exist. I can't really remember the last memoir I was able to read all the way through, and I generally read biographies only of literary and historical figures in whom I already have an interest and even then only after I have become familiar with the writer or thinker's work and have read most of the important commentary on that work.

In a January 11 column posted at Triangle.com , the online site of The News and Observer (link originally found at Arts & Letters Daily), J. Peder Zane criticizes the contemporary memoir for its superficiality and misunderstanding of the possibilities of the memoir. According to Zane, current memoirists

want the best of both worlds: fiction's flexibility and nonfiction's oomph. Their efforts do not represent a moral failure because they think they are pushing the envelope, not breaking the rules. Instead, they signify a failure of the imagination, a lack of the talent or courage required to make their own lives -- their real lives -- compelling.

This is an insightful comment, and I would take it further. It is not only fiction's "flexibility" memoirists seem to be after, but the form and feel of fiction, at least in its conventional, pre-modern/postmodern manifestation. The specific memoir Zane discusses, for example, Susan Shapiro's Five Men Who Broke My Heart, does indeed seem inspired by an idea--the narrator finds five old boyfriends in an attempt to "find out what went wrong"--that could have been transformed into a novel if the author had more trust in and commitment to the literary imagination. That Shapiro further chose to alter the "facts" in her treatment of the subject nevertheless only reinforces the sense that she wanted the narrative economy of fiction but thought that "real life" was preferable to made-up stories. Memoirists seem to occupy a half-world of actual experience only partially submitted to narrative transformation.

If memoirs could be said to now substitute for traditional 1st-person confessional fiction, biographies seem to satisfy the need for the kind of 3rd-person omniscience associated with much 19th century fiction. Many current biographies even replicate the density and the heft of the Victorian "triple-decker." If the memoir provides the intimacy of the 1st-person narrative, perhaps the biography provides a corresponding need for some perspective and dispassionate reflection. In my experience, however, this sort of biography produces (with some exceptions) mostly tedium. A relatively recent biography of Emily Dickinson, for example, which I went to out of the preexisting interest mentioned above, barely got me past the first few pages, which clearly indicated the book was going to go into exhaustive detail about the Dickinson family, in the style of a historical novel, when I was looking for useful information about Dickinson and her work.

Maybe this sort of clutching onto the conventions of realistic narrative should only be expected when serious literary fiction has in many ways abandoned those conventions. (Even minimalism and contemporary neorealism seem blanched and attenuated in comparison to the novels of Hardy or Dickens or Steinbeck.) Memoir and biography keep them alive for some readers, readers who apparently still want them alive. I think it just as plausible, however, to consider the real "failure of imagination" to be among those who retreat from the challenges of imaginative fiction, especially in its more innovative forms, for the established safety of the familiar and the traditional. Certainly the memoir especially should not be taken as a "literary" form simply because it imitates literary forms of the past. Perhaps the more challenging styles of contemporary fiction will inevitably attract a smaller audience (although this need not be the case), but I can't think of it as a service to literature to settle for the tried and true merely because it's more popular.