The Reading Experience

Dashed to the Ground

Among those American writers who were originally identified as "minimalists," a group that would include Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ann Beattie, and Tobias Wolff, Mary Robison may have been the most minimalist of them all--or, to use the word she has said she prefers to describe the  narrative/expository strategy employed by these writers, the most radically "subtractionist."

Readers looking for an introduction to minimalism in its most rigorous form could do no better than Robison's first book, the story collection Days (1979). In the book's first story, "Kite and Paint," two men and a woman hold a mostly trivial conversation while waiting for a hurricane to arrive. At the close of the story--which has taken up only six pages--the two men are about to go outside into the increasing windstorm to fly kites. In "Sisters," a college-age woman staying with her aunt and uncle receives a visit from her sister, a nun. They all go to a spagetti dinner in the basement of the local Catholic Church. In "Widower," a recently widowed dentist and his two children are visited by the father's new girlfriend, and as the children and the girfriend are heading to the beach, the father receives a phone call from a man with a dental emergency. There are intimations of larger significance in such stories, fleeting implications of backstory or future forward movement, but mostly they seem to be fixated on the depiction of present moments.

Robison's style is as pared back as her narratives. It is essentially restricted to brief expository statements--"Guidry was in bed, tangled in the oversheet"--and seemingly insignificant details--"At the firehouse, two men in uniforms were playing pinochle and listening to Julie London on the radio." The largest part of most of the stories in Days is dialogue, and much of it works by indirection as well, except for those moments when a character suddenly blurts out some incongruous statement: During the spaghetti dinner in "Sisters," we hear the college student sister tell a priest that "I'd like to be excommunicated. . .I want the thirteen candles dashed to the ground, or whatever, and I want a letter from Rome."

What really distinguishes Robison's fiction from that of her fellow minimalists is its humor. While occasionally a grim type of humor emerges from the stories of Carver or Beattie, Robison's are more unashamedly comical, both in tone and in execution. The atrophied narrative structure of the stories itself is inherently comic, giving them a kind of absurdist feel, and the dialogue is often explicitly funny:

Leah said, "Jack is the one person who shouldn't keep a revolver."

"He's so much worse since you've been gone," Barbara said. "My dad thinks it's because Jack reads so much. You know who Jack always liked, though?" Barbara leaned over and snapped one of the buttons on her galoshes. "Your sister, Bobby."

"Yes, I think he really did," Leah said. She sighed, and turned the shard of bone with the toe of her shoe. "You can tell him Bobby's wonderful. Just remarkable. She takes a lot of speed still. She's chewed a nice hole in her lip."

"Bobby's disturbed," Barbara said. "You can tell that just from the way she walks."

Robison further developed the humor of the stories in Days into an even broader kind of comedy in her 1981 novel Oh! (described on the back cover of my copy of the book as about "a madcap Midwestern family"), but in my view the slyer, more surprising moments of humor in the stories of Days works much better and makes this, in its blending of minimalism and jokiness, one of the more significant books published by an American writer during the 1970s.

Robison largely disappeared from the literary scene after her 1991 novel Subtraction but returned in 2001 with the novel Why Did I Ever, about a Hollywood writer trying to cope with her disorganized life, and in 2009 has published One D.O.A One on the Way, set in New Orleans and the aftermath of Katrina. Both of these books employ a collage method of composition, offering snippets of action and/or dialogue that range freely over time and place. Both feature a harried female protagonist loosely tied to the film business whose unraveling lives seem well-captured through the collage strategy. Ultimately this strategy seems a more rewarding expansion of Robison's gifts into the novel (as brief and brisk as each of these two are) than the more continuous narrative structure to be found in Oh! and Subtraction.

Why Did I Ever seems to me the more successful use of the fragmented form to to portray its protagonist's attempt (mostly unsuccessful) to pull her life together. Eve Broussard, the protagonist of One D.O.A., seems more artificially the fleshing-out of the bitterly comic concept of a location scout responsible for identifying suitable spots for movie and television productions in post-Katrina New Orleans. Her conflicts with her rich parents-in-law and her affair with her husband's identical twin brother don't seem as urgent as Money Breton's relationships with her emotionally scarred children in Why Did I Ever, although they are presented with Robison's signature humor. (And Robison's humor, especially as provoked by her witty dialogue, is retained in both of these novels.) In general, her character has to compete with the novel's depiction of New Orleans in tatters for primary attention, and finally she only barely wins out.

On the other hand, Robison's collage method does prove rather effective in portraying New Orleans's agonizingly extended present moment. "Subracting" seems an appropriate strategy in representing a city from which so much has already been subtracted. Comprehending the totality of the effects of Katrina and the government's criminal inaction seems an overwhelming task, and the glimpses into the city's devastation provided by One D.O.A One on the Way perhaps add up to an overall perspective sharpened by the smaller details.

Although one might hope that Robison would again concentrate more of her attention on the short story, the form in which I believe her best work is to be found, it nevertheless will be interesting to see if she can continue to apply her miniaturist skills to compelling effect in whatever future novels she may write as well.

What Happened

In what is unfortunately one of the few available reviews of Rosalind Belben's impressive novel, Our Horses in Egypt, Stevie Davies calls it "a radical experiment in narrative." I think this is probably an overstatement, but there is certainly more going on in this novel, both structurally and stylistically, than might at first seem apparent.

Its twinning of narrative strands, one chronicling the the experiences of a literal "war horse" conscripted into cavalry service during World War, the other narrating its owner's attempt to track it down in Egypt several years after the war, is not particularly innovative, although it is brought off effectively. And while in effect assigning the role of protagonist to a horse does allow Belben to avoid several worn-out devices still being trotted out (so to speak) in so many contemporary novels, the notion of a story centered on a non-human "character" is also by no means especially "radical." However, Belben's novel does present itself in ways most readers are likely to find distinctive, even if they are otherwise primarily engaged by the emotion-laden story Belben wants to tell.

Most noticeable is Belben's prose style, especially the pervasive, staccato-like dialogue featured in the sections of the novel dedicated to the quest by Griselda Romney, whose own husband was killed in the war, to find Philomena, the horse requisitioned at the beginning of the war who apparently survived it. Here's a representative sample:

"In the old days, we managed."

"These fellows you found. . ."

"They said they knew what they were about."

"You're so gullible."

"I shan't be again. I had to chloroform myself when Georgie was born."

"It didn't put you down."

"How could it, a whiff or two! I was glad of it."

"Poor Bunny."

"Oh, oh, don't!"

It isn't that this conversation is disconnected or incoherent that makes it seem so elliptical. It undoubtedly makes perfect sense to the speakers, and careful reading can certainly establish the context in which these remarks are being offered, even if such context does become clearer and the subject of conversation somewhat more comprehensible in a retrospective reading of this passage. (In this way, Our Horses in Egypt encourages a more attentive and recursive kind of reading, which, in my view, need not be a burden and can ultimately enhance the reading experience.) The cumulative effect of this dialogue is a sense of thoroughgoing fidelity to the speech patterns of these characters as rooted in country, region, class, and time period. It is an actual example of "realism" unencumbered and applied with great rigor, and it is likely to unmoor the assumptions of those readers tied to a more conventionalized, less ascetic understanding of the role of "realistic" dialogue.

The second striking feature of Belben's novel is perhaps best illustrated in the section narrating Philomena's experiences in the Great War. While there is a narration of these events, it also comes shorn of rhetorical embellishment and narrative elaboration:

The Turkish machine-gunners played very freely across the Dorsets' front. Major Sandley wilted in the saddle. The dust raised was shot through with rosy rays of sun. Burgess sailed through the air, and was himself winged like a flapper. Riderless horses heaved themselves up, and thudded on with the rest. Philomena was so distracted (she had a curious view) she didn't hear the whump when, at four hundred yards, the files closed for impact and Corky was hit in the neck. She didn't pay any attention to his snort. But she saw the white of his eye. He was stubborn.

All of the narrative/expository passages in the novel proceed in this way, almost as if story were being built by accretion, storytelling replaced by listing: then this happened, then this, then this. Perhaps because Our Horses in Egypt is a historical novel, such a technique seems only the more appropriate, more faithful to the historical "record" (even when incidents and interactions have been imagined) as simply what happened, the essence of the historical past without the unnecessary intrusion of the storytelling gestures so many historical novelists seem to need.

Belben's listing strategy extends even to her sometimes idiosyncratic punctuation:

Nine yeomanry regiments had been withdrawn from Palestine. "The Bull" had lost, also, two infantry divisions; five and a half seige batteries; nine more British battalions and five machine-gun companies. He had been deprived of 60,00 battle-hardend troops. Infantry divisions arrived from Mesopotamia and India; and their transport drivers had to be trained. . . .

The semi-colons here seem to function not as a marker of sentence boundaries but as just one more way to extend the list of details associated with the withdrawal. Our Horses in Egypt, no matter how accurate its rendition of the British victory in Palestine, is finally still a rendition, its narrative method as much artifice as any other, but its triumph is perhaps in the way it skillfully employs its artifice while simultaneously appearing to conceal it. History seems to lie before us, however much it has been conjured up by a particular kind of verbal manipulation.

So skillful is this manipulation that, despite the deliberate poverty of means in the novel's construction, Our Horses in Egypt still tells an affecting story, both in the half concerning Griselda's finally hopeless effort to bring Philomena back alive and in that focusing on the Palestine campaign. And what could have been a smarmy resolution in which Griselda finally does find Philomena and spirits her back to England to live out her days in tranquility becomes instead a bitterly appropriate portrayal of a Philomena brought to ruin through overwork, beyond rescue and suitable only to be euthanized in a token act of pity. This is a novel that risks sentimentality at every stage in its development but that avoids it through unfaltering artistry.

ADDENDUM See also this interview with Belben by Mark Thwaite, and this post by Steve Mitchelmore.

The Realm of Elegance and Grace

Steven Millhauser is correct to defend the short story as a form of "radical exclusion" that works through "austerity" but that can also through this very austerity "body forth the whole world." However, in making his case that the short story mostly settles for "a grain of sand" and leaves the rest of the observed world as the subject of novels, I think Millhauser is exaggerating the differences between the two forms, in a way that actually does an injustice to the novel.

According to Millhauser,

Large things tend to be unwieldy, clumsy, crude; smallness is the realm of elegance and grace. It’s also the realm of perfection. The novel is exhaustive by nature; but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the novel, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains.

The most immediate overstatement here is in the association of novels with the "large" and the "exhaustive." This characterization clearly enough describes historically the practice of certain writers--Dickens, Dreiser--but not others--Hawthorne, Emily Bronte, certain novels--Moby-Dick, The Mill on the Floss--but not others--The Red Badge of Courage, The Trial. It also more accurately encompasses the Anglo-European novel than the American novel, which has always edged closer to what is generally called "romance" than to the "novel" and its inexhaustible realism. The romance, although not necessarily always "small," is nevertheless "selective," content, as Hawthorne put it, to "manage [its] atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture." Romance doesn't seek to "devour" the world but to transform a discrete portion of it into a version of the writer's own imagining.

This "tendency" in American fiction persists among contemporary writers, especially those commonly identified as "postmodern." Thus even meganovels such as Gravity's Rainbow or Infinite Jest, as "large" as they undeniably are, do not threaten to become "unwieldy, clumsy, crude." In both structure and style they bear the hallmarks of writers more interested in "hidden powers" than "things in plain view," intimate the possibility of "revelation," even if such revelation is perpetually deferred. Their "ponderous mass" belies an intensity of effect traceable in manner to Charles Brockden Brown, to Hawthorne and Melville, not to Richardson or Trollope, nor even Tolstoy. In American fiction, at least, the opposition between the hulking, indecorous novel and the delicate short story just doesn't very cogently apply.

A very good example of fiction to which this opposition decidedly does not apply can be found in the novels of Steven Millhauser himself. Edwin Mullhous, Portrait of a Romantic, and Martin Dressler require somewhat more room for their stories of obsession to be fully developed, but they are hardly recognizable as the sort of graceless beast Millhauser describes in his essay. They might be said to breathe a little more expansively, but they are otherwise as stylish and fully-shaped as any of Millhuaser's short stories (which themselves do have the kind of "completeness" Millhauser attributes to the short story.) Moreover, Millhauser has worked extensively in the novella, a form that at the very least straddles the divide between short story and novel, and as employed by Millhauser really only further undermines his own hard distinction between the two. Millhauser's novellas, collected in such books as Little Kingdoms and The King in the Tree, are just as elegant and selective as his stories (as anyone else's stories, for that matter), but they certainly do not shrink from assertions of "power," which in Millhauser's case results from the effort to encapsulate the world through fable and a twisted kind of allegory.

I think that ultimately all fiction involves a degree of "Faustian" striving, and that no fiction accomplishes "perfection." Fiction can never sufficiently "attain its desire" such that no further variations on a theme can be achieved, no additional aesthetic avenues of approach explored. And while it is possible to identify a strategy of "radical exclusion" that often does allow us to differentiate between story and novel, there is no reason why this strategy can't be practiced in those longer prose narratives we can't categorize as "short" stories and by tradition call novels. Millhauser's novels and novellas do this, as do, in different ways, the novels of Nicholson Baker, for example.If a novel has to conquer "territory" for it to be classified as a real novel, then I suppose Millhauser's taxonomy makes sense, but I don't see why this needs to be a defining feature of the novel in the first place.

The Farther Shore--A Dissenting View

I'm going to have to register a dissent from my Litblog Co-op colleagues' choice of Matthew Eck's The Farther Shore as this quarter's Read This! selection. It's not a bad book, just thoroughgoingly ordinary. (Aside from its setting in a war zone, which is the only reason I can fathom why anyone would single out the novel for special praise. It's "exotic," unfamiliar to most of us civilian readers, but, speaking for myself, this doesn't mean I'm going to give it any special dispensation when assessing its literary merits.)

In his discussion of the novel, Matt Cheney admits he initially wondered why the author hadn't recorded his wartime experiences (in the early 90s; The Farther Shore seems pretty clearly set in Somalia, although the country is never named) as a memoir rather than a novel. This seems to me a pertinent question, and I have to say I was less clear about the answer than Matt seems to have been. The Farther Shore recounts the experience of an American soldier on a "lost patrol," and although I don't know if the protagonist's journey exactly mirrors Eck's own (in an interview, the author does say that after completing the book "I felt like I owned Joshua Stantz’s experience"), the depiction of war as frightening, uncertain, repulsive, etc. is of a sort that could just have easily been conveyed in a memoir. While I didn't find that the novel descended into "politics and polemics" or into what Matt identifies as a kind of masculine "sentimentality," nevertheless, I never felt that the writer was sufficiently attuned to the formal possibilities of fiction to justify this story appearing as fiction rather than narrative nonfiction.

Anne Fernald acknowledges that the novel's story and setting are "familiar": "[they] come as much from Hemingway and Hollywood as from experience. And even the protagonist, Joshua Stantz, is a familiar type: the sensitive young man, in over his head, smarter than his sergeant and counting the days until he can go home and apply to college through the G.I. Bill." However, "The prose is so elegant and thoughtful that this very familiar structure--of soldiers cut off from the army, working their way back--seems not formulaic but classic." Unfortunately, the "very familiar structure" never reached the status of "classic" for me. It seems such an obvious invocation of The Naked and the Dead or Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato that I had to wonder if it was just a deliberate homage to such novels or whether Eck might be trying to critique the standard war narrative by hewing to it in such a conspicuous way. In the end, however, it doesn't really matter: the novel is so conventionally plotted--with all the appropriate pauses for scenes of carnage and brutality that especially horrify the protagonist's still-developing sensibilities--and its characters so utterly familiar that it can't sustain an interpretation attributing a more self-reflexive or more elaborate design to it. It simply seems to imitate war novels of the past.

I can't say I found the prose especially "elegant," either, although it is certainly competent and moves the story along at a relatively brisk pace. At times, however, I did think it strained too much for effect, for the no-bullshit honesty of tone we associate with war fiction, particularly when related in the first-person. The novel's very first paragraph, in fact, seemed to gesture after sigificance in this way:

It was dark, midnight, and heat like that should have disappeared. Then the bombing started. Those poor souls, the poor fucks of the city, had no idea we were watching from rooftop of the tallest building in town, six sets of eyes in the night, calling in rounds from the circling AC-130 Spectres. When they fired too close to the city's edge we'd make a call for them to move further out, into the unknown. When they veered too far out over the desert, and the city couldn't feel the shudders anymore, we made another call. It was a tightrope, a balancing act, a burden we adored. We were spotters on the roof, recon in a city controlled by warlords and their clans.

This sounds too much like a movie's opening voice-over, relies too much on cliche ("It was dark, midnight"; "into the unknown"; "a tightrope, a balancing act") and calcuated earthiness ("the poor fucks of the city") for me to call it either "elegant" or "thoughtful." It mostly calls out to the reader in a rather ostentatious fashion: "War story coming!"

In an interview with Levi Asher, Matthew Eck asserts that he "joined the army because I always knew that I wanted to be a writer. I’d been reading Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O’Brien and Ernest Hemingway and it just seemed like the right thing to do to gather life experience and meaning and understanding—all those clichés." I'm sorry to say that The Farther Shore reads like the product of some such pre-formulated program. Rather than letting the experience determine the form its subsequent expression might take, the form--war novel--has been imposed on the experience. The inherited conventions of the war novel have been handled with some
skill, but the book never impresses as more than an exercise in organizing those conventions. It tells us nothing new about war--although of course there may be nothing new to say--but ultimately tells us even less about what fiction might be made to do.

Life Stories

Selah Saterstrom's The Meat and Spirit Plan (Coffee House Press) and Corrina Wycoff's O Street (OV Books) both depict young women whose experience is partially determined by the unpleasant circumstances in which they are raised. Both are notably honest in their portrayal of the external influences that limit their protagonists' opportunities, but also just as honest in their implicit acknowledgement of the bad choices each has made. But ultimately they are quite different kinds of books both formally and stylistically, and, although I enjoyed reading both of them, that they are so dissimilar in method, only to stand finally as variations on a common theme and mode, seems to me their most noteworthy limitation as works of fiction.

The Meat and Spirit Plan presents us with the first-person narrative of the life of a young southern girl (unnamed) who floats through her school years in a kind of sexualized haze and ultimately winds up in a Scottish university studying in the "Postmodern Seminar for the Study of Interpretive Uses" in the religion department. There she continues to exist in a fog of misdirected energy and generalized excess, culminating in a debilitating illness that forces her to return to the United States. She recovers, and the final pages of the novel suggest she might finally be getting her life into some kind of order.

The narrator's alienation from her enervating surroundings, from the monotonous drift of her own life, is profound if not often explicitly acknowledged. It is, however, unmistakable in the affectless but cumulatively affecting chunks of prose that serially approximate the aimless, one-thing-after-another succession of experiences that make up the narrator's life. These prose pieces ultimately acquire a kind of poetic intensity of effect in their bleak circumscription of the character's experience, although they avoid self-consciously "poetic" devices:

In a motel room across from the bed I am in is another bed just like it. In in Stripper Stephanie is on top of some guy then the guy I am with pulls me out of the bed we are in. He pushes me in the bathroom, into the shower, and closes the door. Once inside the bathroom he realizes the light is off and he opens the door, turns it on, then closes the door again. I like the lights on, he says. Do it, he says. Do what, I say. It, he says. I do not know what he means. Do it, he says. Standing in the shower I make a face like I'm a girl in a horror movie.

Unfortunately, the novel's ultimate attempt to integrate the narrator's dislocated experiences into a more coherent account of a life gone wrong then recovered, which is ham-handedly reinforced by the explicit revelation that the novel we have just read has literally been written by the narrator as a capstone to that recovery, robs it of some of its accumulated force. It becomes just another version of a bildungsroman, an opportunity for its female author/protagonist to "express" herself and her newly-found sense of direction. What had been a fairly provocative portrayal of dissolution, of a young American woman giving in to her impulses on her picaresque journey into adulthood, becomes a rather conventional story of a young lady learning her lesson.

The conclusion to O Street is equally frustrating, but in this case it is not due to a weakening of poetic concentration but a kind of loss of narrative will. The book is a sequence of short stories focusing on the life of Beth Dinard, who at the beginning of the book is an adult literally returning to her hometown in New Jersey at the news of her mother's death but who appears in other stories at various stages in her life. In effect, we return with Beth to revisit her past, which is recounted in a series of discrete stories (some focusing on her mother as well). One could call the book a novel-in-stories of the kind that has become increasingly popular over the last decade or so.

Most of the stories are conventional slices-of-life revealing something essential about Beth's upbringing by a drug-addicted, borderline mentally ill mother, her attempts to cope with the miserable circumstances in which she is forced to live, her escape from those circumstances and subsequent efforts to establish some sense of normalcy for herself, etc. They are generally well done, most culminating in a moment of subtle illumination of the book's predominant themes--the search for security, the persistence of memory, leaving and being left, etc. Only one of the stories, the title story, attempts something different, and it's probably the best in the book. In it, Wycoff effectively uses second-person narration to evoke a former schoolmate of Beth's, who had abandonded the "O Street Girl" as a friend but years later is moved to call Beth on the phone to explain herself. It's a well-executed story in it own right, and it lends the book as a whole a refreshing change of approach and perspective.

Unfortunately the last two stories in the book bring it to an overly safe and predictable conclusion. The final story in particular, about the immediate aftermath of the death of Beth's mother, attempts to explicitly gather the book's otherwise implicit narrative strands but succeeds only in burdening it with too many passages of forced exposition and awkward reflection:

After she learned of her mother's death--as Beth walked block after block in the oppressively hot Chicago night air--she kept looking in ruts beside curbs, half expecting to see her glasses. Thirteen years ago, she'd fallen into disrepair when she'd thought her mother was dead. Would she do that again? She was thirty-five now, too old to lose everything a second time. She'd been at her job for ten years; she'd finally managed to move back to one of Chicago's more decent neighborhoods where an abundance of grocery stores stayed open all night, and maybe, soon, she would meet a woman to love.

The reader has to wade through too much of this sort of "summing up," and the effect is to make us feel that the author did not have enough confidence in her narrative strategy--whereby the parts add up to a whole without all connections being made overt--or in her readers' ability to assimilate that strategy so that she could in effect leave it to fend for itself. In the effort to create a novel-in-stories, Wycoff has put too much emphasis on the novelistic, with its more direct demand for coherence and closure, and not enough on the inherent capacity of her individual stories to carry the needed narrative weight.

Both of these books, then, are compelling up to a point, but at that point essentially retreat into overly familiar exercises in composing a "life story." For me, fiction has to be more than an opportunity to recount one's experience with some literary license allowed, even if that experience is rooted in difficult or colorful or unfamiliar circumstances. It has to find an aesthetic strategy that elevates the "story"--which too often is just the same old story novelists have been telling for years, if not centuries--beyond mere narrative facility through formal ingenuity and/or stylistic resourcefulness. Each of these books demonstrates admirable facility--and Saterstrom shows real skill as a stylist--but each of them pulls up short of the necessary aesthetic inspiration.

For a more enthusiastic review of The Meat and Spirit Plan, see this one by Scott Bryan Wilson in the new Quarterly Conversation.

Above Ground

If actually bringing attention to the work of "underground" writers is his goal, "King" Wenclas does a pretty poor job of it. For years his blustering and hyperbolizing have discouraged me from reading any of the writers he ostensibly champions. Now his organization, the Underground Literary Alliance, is publishing its own books, and I finally decided to drop my resistance and sample some of what they're offering.

I've recently read Security, by James Nowlan, and The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus, by "Wred Fright," and I'm here first of all to say I thought they were both pretty good.

Security is a short (96 pages), Bukowski-esque novel about an American in Paris, a down-on-his-luck security guard who drifts from temporary job to temporary job and whose marriage, which is about the only positive force in his life, is, as it finally turns out, in the process of ending as well. In addition to chronicling its protagonist's current efforts simply at surviving, the novel also relates incidents from his horrifyingly abusive childhood, abuses which, along with his subsequent failures to "make it" in mainstream society, clearly enough contributed to his tenuous mental state (which in turn has contributed to his failure to make it, etc.) "Tom knew he had become strange," we are told during his final phone conversation with his wife, "and he didn't feel like he knew himself or anyone else including Isabelle." The novel ends with what appears to be a positive change in Tom's circumstances (a job, a reunion with Isabelle) only to lead abruptly to what appears to be the character's death at the hands of terrorists/mercenaries. (We can't really be sure at this point if these events are truly happening or whether they're some manifestation of Tom's "madness.")

In his review of Security, Noah Cicero calls the novel "concentrated human suffering," which seems about right, although Cicero doesn't really offer any analysis of how the novel accomplishes such concentration, emhasizing instead how its prose is "too concrete, too direct, too straight forward" to require much "literary terminology" to describe it. "The language resembles that of a John Grishman or Steven King," he writes, "but instead of telling the story of lawyers or a horror story it is showing the life of a man who is alone, alienated, broken, has one tragedy forced upon him after another." I think this is unfair to Nowlan's prose and overstates the extent to which his novel is formless, merely "showing" us a case of alienation rather than composing the events in its protagonist's life into a coherent whole that is, to some degree, deliberately shaped.

Security presents itself as a series of mishaps, a chronicle of Tom's misfortunes related as one damn unhappy thing after another. We could take this as simple plotlesssness, a subverting of conventional norms governing "story," character development, etc. (which perhaps it is), but surely such a strategy doesn't entail a complete lack of narrative purpose, an abandonment of all form, even that minimal formal coherence contributed by "plot." Surely Nowlan's more or less picaresque approach to storytelling in Security is a strategy, used precisely to foreground Tom's plight as "alone, alienated, broken," etc. Nowlan has adopted the picaresque narrative, usually to be found in sprawling tales spread out in both time and space, to create a more foreshortened, more intensely realized, indeed more "concentrated" work of fiction that would not have the same impact had it been "shaped" in some other way, had it instead come in the form of a conventional "well-made story" employing the contemporary default mode of "psychological realism." If the novel is "a story of an alienated human struggling and struggling and struggling without getting any rewards" (Cicero), it conveys this impression only because it has found its "sufficient form," not because it rejects form in favor of "life."

By comparing Nowlan's writing to that of John Grisham or Stephen King, Cicero must be suggesting that his prose is accessible, uncomplicated, not self-consciously "literary." I would say that while it is accessible, this doesn't necessarily make it simple or artless. Grisham and King are "accessible" because their novels are written to be movies, as substitutes for movies, their prose stripped of all distinguishing characteristics, including art. Their "plain" styles are really just exercises in banality, studiously avoiding the "literary" because to attempt something other than bare proficiency would reveal the aesthetic void at the core of their work. Nowlan's relatively unadorned style, on the other hand, is restrained in its effects because this is what is needed to tell Tom's story, to evoke his character in an honest way to begin with. It even at times has its own kind of blunt lyricism:

When he got home he tried on the uniform before the mirror. He tried looking like a security guard but it wasn't convincing. Something was lacking. Then he remembered something he had read about serial killers in America being attracted to work in security. They had frequently tried to get on the police force of several cities but had been rejected as psychologically unfit so they had to settle for the rent a cop uniform. This idea made a sly smile across his lips; he tensed the muscles of his face to hide it and there it was the expression that he wanted. You see such faces and you ask yourself is this someone angry at the world because he is too stupid to understand it or perhaps because he understands it too well? His wife came in while he was getting deeper into his act. She had received the news of his new position with happiness and she had thought they could celebrate by drinking some wine and making love after a nice meal but seeing him there in his cheap uniform turned her off and he ended up drinking the wine alone.

(Although I have to say that Nowlan's disregard of the role of punctuation doesn't always work to the benefit of his prose. At times it simply impedes the forward flow of language, which, if anything, makes the book less straightforward and accessible. And what the book's back cover comment calls the "edginess" created by the frequent "raw typos" doesn't work at all. They do call attention to the text's status as text, but I don't think this kind of accidental postmodernism is what Nowlan (or the ULA) really has in mind.)

The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus is both more constrained and more exuberant than Security. It is more explicitly obedient to the dictates of form (although its formal design is relatively distinctive), but its characters and their exploits are more raucous, more overtly iconoclastic. First published as installments in a "zine," the novel focuses on a year in the life of a rock 'n roll band whose members are also college students. Their efforts to establish themselves as a successful band fail almost as resolutely as does Tom's struggle to hold himself together in Security, but whereas Tom's failure is more or less tragic, the PFE's misadventures are comedic and mostly good-natured.

The novel's chapters take the form of "A-Sides" and "B-Sides," its four main characters alternating monologues labeled "Verse," Chorus," "Coda," etc. This faux-musical structure doesn't really introduce any startlingly innovative changes into fictional form; it essentially just allows a kind of round-robin narration, one episode of which picks up on the previous and makes possible a multi-perspective chronicle of the PFE"s activities and of university life in general. Nevertheless, "Wred Fright" should be credited for an approach that avoids business-as-usual and that keeps his novel as energetic as his characters and their frenetic pursuit of rock 'n roll crediblity.

For all its emphasis on a mileu characterized by rebelliousness (however directed in recognizable channels) and noncomformity, The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus is rather well-controlled and ultimately fairly conventional in its movement toward a kind of rounded-off closure. (I don't mean this as a criticism.) The "chronicle of a year" structure allows for a plausible degree of character development, an opportunity for the reader to witness a process of expansion and maturation in the characters' assumptions and attitudes, as several of them essentially grow out of their adolescent desire to be rock stars and anarchists. In addition to providing a satiric window onto the consequences and implications of that desire, the novel also offers a convincing portrayal of American college life. It's realistic without trying too hard to "capture" the details of university towns and campuses.

Neither Security nor The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus is as revolutionary or disorderly as the ULA proclamations about its mission might suggest them to be, but I don't see why they need to be such in order to be worthwhile. They're easily as good as what is published in many other small presses, and are in fact infinitely preferable to the eye-glazing "literary fiction" shoveled out by the bigger publishers. They provide their share of readerly pleasures while also posing some welcome challenges to conventional expectations of "good fiction." After reading these two books, I can only conclude that King Wenclas would do himself and his writers more good if he stopped attacking everyone else for their sins against the Underground and more honestly promoted--without the exaggerations and the spin--the authors and books he thinks more of us ought to be reading.

They're All Wasted

John Sheppard's Small Town Punk was originally a self-published book offered through iUniverse, but even though it reportedly sold a respectable 2,000 copies in that format, it has now been republished by Ig Publishing. That a book as well-written and conceived as this one would only find a home with a "real" publisher through so circuitous a route says everything about the current clueless state of publishing in the United States. Small Town Punk is easily as "readable" as any of the story-driven fare that dominates American publishing, and it surpasses most "literary fiction" pumped out by those same publishers in the quality of its prose, the intelligence of its approach, and the soundness of its aesthetic execution.

Which is not to say it is particularly original, either in its form or, especially, in the characters and milieu it portrays. The "punk" of the title is literally one of those natives of the first punk rock generation of the late 1970s/early 1980s, as are his few friends in the "small town" of Sarasota. Florida. The novel depicts a few months in the life of the 17-year-old protagonist as he awaits graduation from high school, works part-time at Pizza Hut, and anticipates (or doesn't) whatever comes next. The episodes related are etched out in a relatively vivid way in this character's first-person account, but ultimately Small Town Punk is a portrayal of "alienated youth" of a kind that has become rather common in contemporary American (and British) fiction. In this case the novel attempts to show us "how it was" in the early Reagan era rather than posing as a sociological expose of present-day Kids In Crisis, but its status as an historical novel of sorts really only deadens its emotional effect. In some ways this is an asset to the book, since it reinforces the sense that for many young people like "Buzz" Pepper this was an emotionally dead time, but for me the alienated youth theme only seems all the more conventionalized and predictable when it's cast as the foundation of an historical re-creation, a glimpse of a previous era's teenage wasteland.

On the other hand, Small Town Punk mostly avoids melodrama, and Buzz Pepper's narration provides it with a compelling voice that raises it above a mere historical survey and allows the novel to avoid the more egregious uses of "psychological realism," which in this kind of historical narrative would no doubt become just a way of prying out "information" about how such characters percieved their situation. Although to describe Small Town Punk as either a "novel" or a "narrative" actually fails to precisely identify its formal/structural characteristics. I found the book most interesting as a kind of "in-between" work, not quite a novel if one's definition of the form requires a traceable story arc, but also not exactly a collection of stories if one expects each episode to be itself a self-contained work capable of standing alone, apart from the larger whole to which it also contributes. A few of the "stories" in Small Town Punk would stand well enough on their own, might even provide a useful condensation of the book's strategies and concerns, but ultimately they seem to be conceived as parts of a whole. They are as likely to move sideways as forward, adding to the novel's generally plotless plot through accretion, a layering effect, rather than becoming dramatic points to be marked off on Freytag's Triangle. There's plenty of "action" to be found in each of the episodes--the sort one could anticipate from titles like "Wasted" and "Hot Cars"--but it's not the kind of action to which other pleasures, pleasures of voice, character, and setting, are required to be subsumed.

Perhaps it is the lack of obvious drama, of "high concept" or the exciting "hook," that accounts for the publishing history of Small Town Punk. Perhaps not even the smaller or more adventurous presses saw much in the way of sales from a book that shows no inclination to bend to the existing commercial winds and that takes "realism" seriously as the attempt to render life as the accumulation of non-events and ordinary frustrations it sometimes (often?) turns out to be. The novel has a mildly optimistic conclusion:

I turned 18, the age of majority. One more semester, and I'd be rid of the whole lot of them. Masturbatory thoughts of the day I'd walk out the door spun in my head.

I applied to the University of Florida, and was accepted. I would put two hundred miles between them and me. Two-fucking-hundred miles.

Until then, I closed the door of my room every afternoon and blasted my music as loud as I could. Then I went to work.

But the feeling evoked in the novel is one of limited opportunity enveloped in an atmosphere of swamp-like gloom. That the novel pulls this off while remaining a more or less "entertaining" read is to me a mark of its accomplishment, and that publishers (before Ig) would stay away from it despite its manifest stylistic and formal virtues hints to me that other similarly skilled works of fiction are being written and duly shunned by our aesthetically-challenged "book business."

Relevant to Our Complicated Moment

Noting that this year's "100 Notable Books" list is balanced evenly between fiction and nonfiction, New York Times Book Review editors (i.e., Sam Tanenhaus) aver that

This indicates, most obviously, that the past 12 months have been an especially strong period for fiction. But it also suggests, perhaps, that novelists and short-story writers have begun to rediscover the uses of narrative and to find new ways of making their imagined creations more relevant to our complicated moment.

Since I haven't noticed that 2006 was "an especially strong period for fiction" (nor a particularly weak one, either), I have to conclude that this is Tanenhaus's way of encouraging novelists to "rediscover the uses of narrative" (old-fashioned storytelling = a better chance of getting a NYTBR review).

Frankly, I find this critical tic of Tanenhaus's--American fiction has abandoned narrative--rather baffling. I defy him to look at the literary fiction shelves (even allowing him to walk past the genre aisles) at Borders and Barnes and Noble and point out what books do not in fact dispense narrative in fairly heavy doses. Perhaps the powers that be in these stores occasionally set out an experimental novel or two that engage in wacky distortions of time or narrative structure, but could Tanenhaus really seriously contend that most of the displayed items do not harbor storytelling of a fairly recognizable kind behind their gaudy jackets? For most writers and readers, "story" and "novel" remain more or less synonymous terms. Perhaps Tanenhaus believes these stories are too "literary"? Too heavily concealed behind daubs of prose and a facade of "psychological realism"?

Although Tanenhaus ultimately does reveal his storytelling preference in affirming those writers who have managed the feat of "making their imagined creations more relevant to our complicated moment." This has been Tanenhaus's mantra ever since he took over the Book Review. We live in "complicated times," and only those books that contribute to the "national discussion" of our various complications are deemed worthy of inclusion in the country's ostensibly premier book review section. Never mind that this reduces the value of books--even works of fiction--to their potential role in continuing onto the book review pages the same kind of blather to be found in the rest of the New York Times, and in most of the larger American newspapers as well. (Although perhaps I shouldn't trivialize it quite so much by calling it "blather"; it's precisely this NYT-style blather that helped get us in the current "complicated" mess in Iraq.) Let's invite the same fools and charlatans who dominate the news and opinion sections over to the Book Review and make it into the same kind of intellectual sinkhole.

Thus, "imaginated creations" aren't enough. (Although there's more than enough condescension in the way that phrase is used here.) If fiction writers aren't going to stick to the facts, damn it, then they ought at least stick to the manly art of storytelling in ways we journalists can commend! Once they've turned their attention to the "relevant" subjects, and told us a nicely constructed story, we can in turn make fiction irrelevant and twist their tales into our own conventional, prefab shapes.

Staging Resistance

Recently I quoted John Hawkes's assertion that he "began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained." I thought of this statement when reading Josh Corey's discussion of the "poetic" as "the staging of resistance toward the means of narration we associate with prose and the 'true story' alike."

Josh's post is actually about the films of Terence Malick, of which Josh feels the term "poetic" is an accurate description. "This quality," he writes, "is easier to define negatively: plot, characterization, and dialogue have diminished importance in the films I've seen. . .Then there's the voice-over, which imposes a single startling subjectivity over the action and more or less substitutes for the usual through-line of fiction films, plot." Ultimately the films are poetic because they embody "a desired stance toward experience" that can't be resolved into the usual narrative conventions.

Not only do I agree that Terence Malick's films have this "poetic" quality, but I would argue further that much of the best post-World War II American fiction is similarly poetic--or, to use Hawkes's words, in this fiction "totality of vision or structure" is what remains after "plot, characterization, and dialogue" have been displaced. Hawkes's own fiction (The Lime Twig, Second Skin, The Blood Oranges) is among the best examples of such an approach (and Hawkes's work is due a revival), but the fiction of such writers as William Gaddis, Gilbert Sorrentino, Walter Abish, David Markson, Donald Barthelme, or William Gass manifest the same kind of "resistance" to conventional story-telling Josh Corey perceives in a film like Days of Heaven, although certainly each writer stages this resistance in a different way and few of their fictions seem poetic in the more or less rhapsodic and pastoral mode we find in Malick's film. Along with metafictionists such as Barth and Coover, these writers end up foregrounding "story" (either through its conspicuous absence or through the exposure of its conventionality) in such a way that the reader is encouraged to question the extent to which we associate the art of fiction with "narrative."

Litlove at Tales from the Reading Room has suggested that "Stories are how life could be if we cut all the dull bits out where nothing happens, and fast-forward the snail’s progress we make towards understanding. They are condensed, compact, sharp-edged versions of the real thing. And for what it’s worth, I do think that they are the only means we have of making sense of this crazy business of living." I agree that stories as they are customarily described (linear, or at least triangular, as in the Freytag version) produce an illusion of "how life could be if we cut all the dull bits out where nothing happens," but I don't think this necessarily commends them as the means to create literary art. Indeed, Litlove's language here--"understanding," "making sense"--stresses fiction's ability to bring us knowledge (albeit an "uncertain, enigmatic" kind of knowledge) rather than its capacity to produce aesthetic pleasure. And I'm not sure that we want our fiction writers to "cut all the dull bits" if we also want them to represent life as it's really lived rather than as "it could be" if we all lived our lives like the protagonists of "sharp-edged" novels. (I'm particularly thinking of a writer like Stephen Dixon, whose work often concentrates entirely on the "dull bits," making great art--indeed, "poetry"-- out of the most prosaic of situations and resisting the pull of narrative toward melodramatic distortion and artificial resolution.)

In my opinion, to value fiction (or film) primarily for its ability to "make sense" through story is to move it even farther away from poetry (itself the fountainhead of all literature) and to align it with--even make it subservient to--all those other areas of inquiry where "understanding" reigns, however intuitive or partial such understanding might be where literature is concerned. Casey at A Voyage Thither seems to appreciate this danger when she writes that "the most fundamental source of literature's value may stem not from its usefulness, but precisely the opposite: from it's uselessness." But he then partially retreats from this insight when he goes on to affirm for his students that a literature class "also may be the most important" class they'll take in college. Beginning to read works of literature seriously may indeed be the most important thing some (but not by any means all) students do, but to teach literature as "useless" and therefore all the more useful in a liberal arts curriculum is to restore with the right hand what the left hand is taking away: an externally grounded justification for reading literature that emphasizes why it might be good for you rather than how it works to produce a distinctive kind of experience that is its own compensation.

Undoubtedly Casey's students would find poetry the most "useless" kind of reading. Without "plot, characteriation and dialogue," perpetually staging that "resistance toward the means of narration we associate with prose and the 'true story'" to which Josh Corey refers, poetry is the purest expression of language as play, as the potential source of beauty or delight. And what is the good of that? In his insistence that "the true enemies of the novel [are] plot, character, setting and theme," John Hawkes was proposing that fiction also might exhibit such a dispostion toward language, that it might be "poetic" and thereby defiantly, exultantly useless. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Rambling Man

Andrew Palmer at the Avery blog commendably champions the work of Stephen Dixon, but I can't completely agree with this account of Dixon's fiction:

Many readers, even ones I like and respect,. . .find Dixon infuriating or at least fatiguing. I always tell these people that they haven't read enough Dixon to like him. It's precisely the "word pranks," repeating, explaining, digressing, etc.--each novel a near-infinite digression, if you'll allow me my own word prank--that makes Frog compelling--moving and hilarious in equal parts, often at the same time. Its prose attaches itself to whatever its characters' minds alight upon, and because it's so often tied to the minds of its characters, it seems to flow at the speed, and rhythm, of thought--or, because the novel is packed with extended passages of dialogue, of speech. And his characters, in thought as well as speech, tend to ramble, often about seemingly banal topics, often about their own rambling or tendency to ramble. To steal another self-descriptive from Frog, it reads like "jerky nervous diversionary chatter."

I really don't think it is accurate to describe Dixon's prose as consisting of "word pranks," unless you think its repetitions, ramblings, and digressions are unfaithful to the way human beings actually confront the world and attempt to make sense of it. Sometimes, as in Interstate or Gould, Dixon uses repetition and variation to deliberately distort "normal" reality, but even in these cases the strategy is used to intensify the reality of his characters' experiences as they perceive them. In Interstate, we can finally understand the depth and intensity of feeling the protagonist has for his children and his own role as their protector only by sorting through each of the different scenarios the novel provides. But the digressive quality in Dixon's prose style is generally an attempt, or so it seems to me, to capture the immediate, frequently dissociative nature of ordinary experience. This is not an exercise in "word pranks" but an effort to represent that experience in something other than conventionally pretty prose.

I especially question the claim that Dixon's prose "attaches itself to whatever its characters' minds alight upon, and because it's so often tied to the minds of its characters, it seems to flow at the speed, and rhythm, of thought." It is true enough that Dixon's language reflects his protagonists' perspective, their "situatedness," but that it "attaches itself" to the flow of consciousness seems to me a misperception of Dixon's approach. There is very little "probing" of Mind in his fiction, simply an attempt to render experience as it actually unfolds, in all of its contingency and specificiity. This passage from Phone Rings is illustrative of Dixon's method:

Phone rings. He's too busy with schoolwork to get up to answer it. Anyway, during the day, nine times out of ten it's for Janice. Rings twice more and stops. Minute later she raps on the bedroom door with something--probably her reacher. "Yes?" "It's for you; phone. You didn't hear me yelling?" "No, and damn, I'm very busy." "It's Manny. Want me to tell him to call back, though it sounded important." "He probably wants advice where to send his stories. He's begun writing them again, Dan said, and that he might call. Okay," and she says "And keep your door open," and he gets up and gets the receiver off the dresser and says "Manny; what's up?" "It's Dad. Something terrible's happened." "He's not dead, is he?" and Manny says "I'm sorry, Uncle Stu, he is." "Oh no, oh my God." Later--days--he thinks every time something like this happens--someone tells him such bad news--he always says "Oh no, oh my God," and in that order.

One could say that Dixon proceeds through a kind of expository shorthand--"Rings twice more and stops"--that while "attached" to the character as a frame of reference is otherwise a way of dispensing with the overscrupulous explication of consciousness that so often and so tediously passes for "psychological realism" in contemporary literary fiction. In fact, while Dixon's fiction could hardly be called plot-based in a conventional sense, most of the emphasis is on activity and behavior--characters are called to the phone, take walks, move around the house, talk to one another. Indeed, in Dixon's most recent work conversation predominates. And not only "in thought as well as speech" do Dixon's characters "tend to ramble," their rambling in speech sounds almost exactly like what we might be tempted to identify as their thought processes separate from their spoken words. "Thought" and speech are practically indistinguishable. If anything, the emphasis on dialogue (which in novels like Old Friends and Phone Rings sometimes become more like alternating monologues) beomes a way of externalizing thought (see also Heather McGowan's The Duchess of Nothing), of reuniting what we think with what we do.

(It must also be said that, more often than not, the characters in a Dixon story or novel also sound like one another--the same hesitations, digressions, and fragmentary constructions, as if he is suggesting that in most of our discourse with one another we are all equally prosaic.)

I do think Andrew is correct in advising that readers not draw conclusions about Dixon's "infuriating" refusal of conventional narrative and expository strategies before reading several of his books. In many ways, these books are really of a piece, an ongoing effort to focus on those moments in our lives that most works of fiction ignore in the name of drama and narrative efficiency. What takes place off stage in these works becomes in Dixon's fiction the whole show. It can take a while to fully appreciate Dixon's resourcefulness in presenting us with these episodes of the ordinary.

Go Your Own Way

Laura Demanski (OGIC) quotes an e-mail from a reader taking exception to criticism of writing workshops:

As a veteran of a famed MFA program in theatre directing and several playwriting workshops, I must take issue with your complaint against MFA programs. Granted, some of the craft “rules” taught there are arbitrary, based on the instructor’s whim (for example, one of my favorite playwriting teachers hated all plays set at Thanksgiving). But such “rules” are made to be broken when the artist does so for an effective artistic reason. The point is, master the form first, then learn how to bend it to your own ends.

The problem with this, at least as applied to, say, the short story, is that there is no "form" to be mastered in the first place. The short story (the novel as well) is not an identifiable entity, a vessel into which a succession of slightly modified concoctions are to be poured. It is a name for all of the various kinds of shorter fictions writers have produced, a convenience for readers that indicates the larger group of related works in the context of which the "story" at hand would like to be considered. If there are "rules," they are only those that ought not to be violated if the writer wants his work to be included in this category. (And the number of such rules continually diminishes. One could say that a short story should not look like a newspaper column, or a set of instructions for operating a DVD recorder, but it is of course entirely possible that an enterprising writer might indeed be able to make interesting stories out of such non-storylike forms. In other words: fiction is not itself a "form." It feeds on forms.)

Laura agrees that "if the 'rules' are taught with some nuance and flexibility, and as a foundation rather than an ultimatum, they should do more good than harm." Laura is right to stres "nuance and flexibiltiy," but I really can't finally accept that "rules" have anything to do with learning to write worthwhile fiction. It's not even that what workshops most often produce is "a lot of pallid if technically unimpeachable writing," as Laura further puts it. "Technically unimpeachable" in relation to what? Other workshop-derived stories obeying arbitrary rules? The point of Sam Sacks's essay, it seems to me, was precisely to protest the creation of these rules in the first place, to point out the insipidity of such formulas as "A Story, as it progresses, is counterbalanced by a Backstory, which informs the reader what of importance happened beforehand. Both Story and Backstory must have a pronounceable Why Now. . . ." Etc. This isn't just rigid, it's silly.

How might such "rules" be applied to the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne? de Maupassant? Kafka? Faulkner? Beckett? Donald Barthelme? What set of rules could be devised that would cover all of the demonstrably great fiction writers who have otherwise not just resisted the kinds of prescriptions the workshop system likes to issue but would have laughed at the idea that what they were up to had anything to do with "mastering the form" as academic Creative Writing understands it? The best thing a workshop instructor could do (and I agree with Laura that "MFA programs neither can nor should be abolished"--too many truly good writers have emerged from them to conclude that they really manage to inflict permanent harm, and the chance to read and to practice one's craft is an unqualified good) would be to familiarize students with as many of the current and past practices of fiction-writing as possible and encourage them to find their own way.

Travels With Famke

The danger of reading a novel primarily for the opportunity to "identify" with its characters--as well as to interpret their actions by judging them on moral grounds--seems well-illustrated by this guest review at The Mumpsimus of Susann Cokal's Breath and Bones (Unbridled Books). The reviewer, Catherynne M. Valente, writes of the novel's protagonist:

Famke is a horrible woman, and despite the narrative's assurances that we must love her, the reader cannot identify with such a shallow, idiotic, and careless person.

Even if it were true that this character is "a horrible woman"--deliberately portrayed as such by the author--would this be a good reason to so dislike this novel as to call it "truly, shockingly bad"? (Vallente's focus is almost entirely on the moral failings of this character, although she does pause occasionally for an ad hominem comment on the author herself, as when she wonders "if she has had any practical experience with human bodies at all.") Surely we can all think of fiction we've read in which one or more of the main characters are morally dubious, if not just plain repulsive, but which we nevertheless judge to be compelling and aesthetically powerful books. (Journey to the End of the Night? Naked Lunch? Much of Flannery O'Connor?) Shouldn't it be a critical rule of thumb that in order to fairly assess a work of literature for what it seems to be offering us we make an effort to put aside moral judgment, especially judgment of fictional characters, until we have honestly determined the role these characters play in the work's aesthetic order and in the context of its broader thematic concerns?

However, it simply is not the case that the protagonist of Breath and Bones is the "shallow, idiotic, and careless person" this reviewer takes her to be. Famke Summerfugl (or Ursula Summerfield, or Dante Castle--her identity is as quickly changed as her location as she travels across the western United States) is determined to get what she wants (a reunion with the artist for whom she has served as a model back in her native Denmark), but her very single-mindedness is at least as much the product of an uncertain sense of self as it is a more willful character flaw. Indeed, it is her lack of a truly developed personality, her ability to become the object of others' obsessions, to take on whatever attributes are required to survive in an environment she is in some ways too inexperienced to know is hostile to her presence, that really define her as a character. Famke leaves a fair amount of distress and destruction in her wake, but little of it is due to her "careless" or "idiotic" behavior. If anything she cares too much (especially in comparison to many of the people she encounters, who have more or less acceeded to their limited circumstances), as her quest is motivated by her belief in the artistic genius of Albert Castle and in her own role as his inspiration, and she is anything but an idiot. When finally she does reunite with Albert, she has been able to learn enough both about herself and human nature to recognize he's not nearly the man she had in her earlier romantic haze taken him to be.

It might be that Catherynne Valente reacted as she did to Famke because she failed to consider that Breath and Bones is essentially a picaresque novel, Famke its picaro. One doesn't normally approach a picaresque novel with an assumption that its protagonist will be a "rounded" character who will provoke either emotional attachment or moral revulsion. Since the root meaning of "picaro" is "rogue," if we were to demand of such a character that he/she be a model of propriety, we would be denying the picaresque form its motivating agency. It's the "adventures" of the picaro that solicit our attention in this kind of fiction, and whatever change or enhancement of character that emerges is secondary to the experiences to which the character is submitted, to the process by which change or growth might (or might not) occur.

Cokal has in this case herself enhanced our perception of the picaresque form by making her protagonist a woman. Famke is neither more nor less "horrible" (or desperate or confused) than most picaresque anti-heroes, but surely one of the problems Catherynne M. Valente has with her is that she's an anti-heroine, a woman taking on the role traditionally associated with misfits and outcasts, one that inherently calls for a certain amount of guile and disregard for moral niceties. One wonders if Valente would express the same contempt for a male character engaged in similarly venturesome conduct as Famke Summerfugl. Is a picaresque narrative acceptable for exploring the moral margins of male behavior, but inappropriate for depicting women who also find themselves caught in marginal circumstances? Are women, even in fiction, to be judged by different standards than men? If we find ourselves having moral qualms about a female character acting in ways that are conventional in a literary mode usually reserved for men, should we be rethinking our expectations of "female behavior" or our assumptions about those conventions? Perhaps these are questions Susann Cokal would like us to ask while reading her book.

(And I certainly don't think that Cokal's narrative insists that "we must love" Famke. It seems to me that Cokal has written the kind of novel she's written precisely to induce in us a degree of ambivalence about her main character. To engage in the kind of questioning of literary means and ends I've just outlined almost requires that we feel uneasy about our response to a character like Famke.)

At one point Valente calls Breath and Bones "a romance novel that thinks it's too good for the genre" and at another claims it falls into a certain kind of "realist trap," so it's hard to know whether she thinks it strays too far from reality or not far enough. However, it is certainly true that the kind of quest narrative the novel uses allows for a fair amount of exaggeration, coincidence, and melodrama (think of Tom Jones, of many of Dickens's novels, or, indeed, of Huckleberry Finn.) Breath and Bones incorporates its share of all of these, but never to the extent that we begin to disbelieve in its created illusion of an historical time and place. (In this regard, I actually found the historical epigraphs presented at the beginning of chapters completely superfluous. The novel's success depends on the integrity of its own narrative logic, not on the broader historical picture it presents.) Thus, although B & B is not recognizably "postmodern," it also is not simply a "realist" novel retreating into the past. (And, again, the only reason I can see to call it a "romance novel" is that its protagonist is a woman who believes herself to be in love.)

Finally, Valente says of the style of Breath and Bones that "the language of the novel was so simplistic as to give Potter and Co. a run for their broomsticks." She must have in mind a passage such as this, as Albert Castle is working on his pre-Raphaelite portrait of Famke as Nimue:

. . .He had beautiful fingers, long and bony, with a rainbow of paint always under the nails, and to Famke's mind they produced wonders. They had drawn her as an earthly Valkyrie, in a cloak made of swans' feathers (and nothing else); painted her as a nearly naked Gunnlod, the loveliest of the primordial Norse giants, watching over the three kettles of wisdom in a deep, deep cave (Albert seemed to very fond of caves.) And now this Nimue, a wizard's lover, who could be from icy Scandanavia but would be of great interest to the English critics who could make Albert's fortune. Famke had never heard of Merlin or of Nimue, but Albert was teaching her a great deal about the mythology of her people. He liked to set her lessons from the traveler's guidebooks scattered over the mantel.

There is a certain ingenuousness to a passage like this (although the novel does not stick exlusively to Famke's implied point of view), but ultimately it works as much to expose the pretensions of Albert Castle ("Albert seemed very fond of caves") as the "simplicity" of Famke's perceptions. And this clash between Famke's innocence and the rather sordid actualities she encounters (both in America and in Denmark) ultimately provides the novel with what might be its most resonant conflict.

Catherynne M. Valente and I seem to have read different books. She read a story motivated by the actions of a morally compromised romantic heroine. I read a well-executed variation on an always-renewable form that if anything explicitly challenges a reflexively "moral" response to works of literature.

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.

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?)

Ultimately Pointless

The biggest problem with Julian Evans's "The Return of Story" in the December Prospect is that its central contention, on which the burden of his anti-aesthetic argument is placed, is simply wrong. "In the cinema" Evans writes, "a core of narrative innocence survives across a spectrum of values represented by Spielberg at one end and Abbas Kiarostami at the other. In the novel, however, story has gone down in a blaze of modernist attitudes. . ." Clearly Evans doesn't really read very many of the scores of novels published every year in both Great Britain and the United State. If he did, he would certainly discover that almost all of them--perhaps not exactly 100% of them, but pretty close to that--do indeed tell stories, and almost as many (90%? 95?) tell very traditional stories of a sort Evans's most conventional "storyteller" from the past would immediately recognize and heartily endorse.

(Evans is notably reluctant to name names in his indictment against contemporary novelists for abandoning narrative, but he does cite Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie. Come again? Amis doesn't tell stories? How did I miss that? And Rushdie? Midnight's Children? Perhaps one could call this novel "magical realism," but since when has magical realism done anything but tell stories? One Hundred Years of Solitude? If Evans has indeed read these books but still would claim they don't tell stories, he's a pathetically poor reader.)

But Evans gives the game away when he praises Fitzgerald's "The Rich Boy" because it "consists of a linear narrative managed by a modern consciousness." It's not that modern/postmodern novels jettison narrative altogether, it's that they don't stick to linear narrative. One might have thought that the history of fiction in the 20th century had at least demonstrated that stories don't need to be "linear" to be stories or to engage a reader's attention, but apparently not. Apparently most of this fiction is to be dismissed as so many "literary bleeps and squeaks," although Evans is assuredly mistaken if he really thinks fiction will be returning to the practices of the past in some ingenuously earnest kind of way ("down with self-consciousness!") or that the fiction characterized by "modernist attitudes" will just disappear. It prompts one to ask: If Evans really dislikes what fiction has become, why does he bother with it all, even to deplore it? He's stuck with it, so perhaps he should just console himself with the "narrative innocence" of movies. (Except that we all know that "the cinema" at its best lost its narrative innocence a long time ago as well.)

(The bit about "modern consciousness" takes us into James Wood territory, and I have made a resolution to not go back there again, at least for a while.)

What Evans really dislikes is art itself, at least as far as it has dared to sully the innocence of fiction: "The histories of the novel and of storytelling ran together until the early 20th century; since the 1920s, that history has been one of formal drift, away from the novel as a social form that described how characters live in relation to others. . ." It's telling that, for Evans, any deviation at all from the tradition of "storytelling" must be "drift," almost literally, given the language here, some kind of ethical betrayal. To be a muddle-headed aesthete, even to be interested in the aesthetic qualities of literature at all, has long been anathema to a certain kind of critic, grounds for accusing writers of being morally deficient, but why, for example, would it probably not occur to these critics to declare, say, composers too interested in art, too attentive to the needs of form over those of morality? Even the most conventionally tonal music is by its very nature about form, about the relationships between sounds and the interaction of purely musical qualities. Is fiction not allowed to explore the possibilities of the linguistic medium in something like the way music explores the possibilities of the aural medium? Why when a fiction writer does this is he/she more likely to be considered some kind of malefactor?

Furthermore, Evans is again simply wrong in his assertion that "The histories of the novel and of stroytelling ran together until the early 20th century." This is a common, but mistaken, belief about the development of fiction even in the 19th century. Evans cites Henry James as one of his storytelling heroes, but who would say that James's real preoccupation was telling stories? That he wasn't more interested in the "how" of storytelling--point of view, style"--than in the "what"--events, narrative progression, the details of "what happens"? For some reason it is assumed that the great figures of literary realism were also tale-spinners, but who can read Chekhov and say this? His stories are about character, situation, revelatory moments. As far as narrative is concerned, in most of them almost nothing happens. The fact is, the more fiction "drifted" toward realism, the less it focused on story at all--"story" was an artificial construction that was not faithful to the way real people actually experienced their lives.

But for Evans, fiction is not about individuals at all, which is presumably also an ethical breach: "Novelists may want to write narrowly or widely; but the novel remains a social form, and our fiction should communicate that whatever identity we may have is composed not merely of ourselves but of others. The novel, in its fully realised state, exists to reflect on those links between us - on their making and breaking. How can it do that other than through stories?" Evan's assumption couldn't be clearer: novels are not about art, they're sociology. Moreover, they're a particularly smarmy form of sociology, in which we are lectured to about our duties to others. They're a handy form of indoctrination and propaganda. Stories just keep it simple. And Evans's superior insights are apparently not restricted to moral issues: He also knows what novels are really for, has somehow acquired a knowledge of what they would appropriately be like in their "fully realized state." It's always nice when a critic is able to share his god-like wisdom and set poor novelists straight about what they ought to do.

According to Evans, one of the judges of the most recent Man Booker prize has finally learned her lesson. "Reading 132 books in 147 days," she is quoted as saying, "you learn a great deal about why so many novels - even well-written, carefully crafted novels, as so many of those submitted were - are ultimately pointless." And thus we arrive at what always turns out to be the crux of the matter for people with the attitude toward fiction exemplified by someone like Julian Evans: novels must have "a point," they can just be "well-written" and "carefully crafted." For Evans, the point must be "social," but for others it need not be socially redeeming per se. It just needs to be something more than "mere" art--indeed, more than "merely literary." This attitude, while ostensibly looking out for the welfare of literature, actually couldn't be more dismissive. Who needs literature, anyway, when you can just go around making points?

Myself, I love pointless novels. They can even tell stories, but when they start to "communicate" to me about our shared identities, I stop turning the pages.

Full Stop

This essay by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in the Telegraph is really quite thoughtful about "silences" and endings in fiction. For instance:

. . .writing is always partial: it involves the choice of some words rather than others, and choice requires rejection. As Henry James observed, "Stopping, that's art": the writer must know what to shut out, when to shut up.

But even stopping need not be an imaginative curb, because alerting us to what is not being said can also remind us of how often life gives words the slip, whether through secrets, reticence or repression.

And:

Fictional endings are the moments when speech topples over into silence, so they regularly provide concentrated images of the horror of death, from the corpse-strewn scenes that conclude Shakespeare's tragedies, to the newer worry over entropy that filters into a novel such as Forster's Howards End, which begins with Mrs Wilcox looking "tired" and ends with Mr Wilcox "Eternally tired".

But endings can also be more lively and enlivening than this. "Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending": George Eliot's "Finale" to Middlemarch points out that it is no easier to tie up all loose ends in a novel than it is to draw a sharp line between one life and another life.

The insights here about the use of silence in works of serious literature are especially useful. What's not said, of course, is often as important as what is--Beckett, for example, seems to me the writer who has most profoundly understood the literary possibilities of silence, as well as the advantages of saying too little rather than saying too much. Somehow, these seem to me to be the real choices available to serious writers--either refusing to say what readers can be led to hear nevertheless, or saying so much that readers similarly come to understand what words can "say" and what they can't. (In contemporary American fiction, Carver on the one hand, Elkin on the other.) Saying just the right amount seems to me the most boring approach one can take. And it is the role of literary criticism, one it's no longer much assuming, to help readers prepare themselves to note the silences and make sense of the noise.

But I can't quite accept Douglas-Fairhurst's descriptions of the role of endings. He speaks of them as "stopping," as the final point in the narrative line a novel or play has drawn. This line, he suggests, is extended further by the reader into "life." (The final ending, of course, being the Big Ending awaiting us all.) "Above all," he writes, "good endings take us to the point where we emerge from reading better prepared to meet the challenges of the world." Perhaps some, perhaps many, readers have had this experience in reading narrative literature, but surely this can't be the more immediate purpose of endings in literature. Most writers have no better idea of how "to meet the challenges of the world" than anyone else.

Writers do, however, presumably have a somewhat better idea of how to shape works of fiction into literary art. They know how the ending relates to the other parts of the novel or story. They ought to know how they want the reader to relate the way the story ends to what has come before. In other words, an ending is more like a completion, the final piece of what should be the artistic whole, the last element in the literary design that allows the reader--perhaps forces the reader--to take a figurative step back and perceive that whole as it has now been finally presented. In this respect, it is no more--also no less--important than any of the other parts of the whole.

Douglas-Fairhurst's notion of the function of endings in fiction only reinforces the too widely-held idea that fiction is all about, is only about, "the story." Stories are a dime a dozen. There probably is some inherent fascination with stories hard-wired into the human brain, but most people would rather get their stories from movies and television. Fiction writers aren't going to get anywhere by continuing to compete with these media. The best writers stopped competing long ago. If fiction is going to survive as a vital--although not necessarily "popular"--literary art, writers will have to turn their attention away from stories in the simplisitic sense Douglas-Fairhurst's otherwise very intelligent remarks nevertheless still invoke and instead concentrate on the more dynamic possibilities of fiction as a form aside from the requirements of narrative. At the very least, they need to think through unexamined assumptions about how stories work and what they accomplish. ("Dumbing down" complex ideas or dramatizing "issues" just won't do.) Great writers have never been simply great storytellers, although some have indeed been great ones; a story may keep you reading until the end, but if you don't go back and retrace the steps that got you there it may well prove to be an "imaginative curb."

One Thing After Another

In the May/Summer issue of The Writer's Chronicle, Alice Mattison offers an interesting essay (not available online, but the issue's table of contents is available here) defending the use of coincidence in fiction. Subtitled "An Essay Against Craft," the essay commends the use of coincidence as a way of taking risk, which Mattison feels is discouraged in a literary world dominated by the workshop "rules" implicitly taught in creative writing programs. Writes Mattison: "I don't think directions or rules are available, just terms. . .that undeniably simplify discussions of writing and literature." Such simplification is at times useful, but "the problem arises when we begin to draw conclusions from succesful choices, assuming that what works once will work in every instance."

A few paragraphs after the statements just quoted, Mattison is discussing a Charles Baxter essay in which "Baxter glances at the sort [of stories] that were rejected as old-fashioned by the authors who first made stories turn on insight. He characterizes the stories that Henry James and James Joyce rejected as those with 'plot structures tending to require a set of coincidences or connivances of circumstance.'" Mattison comments: "It hadn't occured to me, before I read Baxter's sentence, that coincidence defines the type of story in which it appears. I hadn't noticed that such stories. . .were helpless without coincidence."

Although Baxter and Mattison don't use the word, what they are both describing is the influence on early novels in English of the "picaresque" narrative. The picaresque story--derived from the term identifying the protagonist of such stories, the "picaro"--was introduced by Spanish writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, and is essentially a journey narrative in which the picaro, usually a rogueish character, embarks on a journey in which, literally, one thing happens after another. There's not really a sense of progression in the picaresque narrative, just a series of episodes, and usually the protagonist remains more or less unchanged, undergoing no transformation or "epiphany." The most famous picaresque novel is undoubtedly Don Quixote, in which Cervantes alters the form by making his protagonist a deluded but not antisocial or rascally character.

The early British novelists of the 18th century were greatly influenced by the picaresque narrative, especially such writers as Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. Fielding's Tom Jones is probably the most famous of these British picaresque novels. It adopts the journey conceit, the episodic structure, and adds an element of explicit comedy that exceeds even the kind of doleful humor to be found in Don Quixote. (Tom Jones remains a tremendously readable book, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know what the picaresque form can accomplish.) Charles Dickens was in turn profoundly influenced by Smollett and Fielding, and his novels represent a further fashioning of the picaresque into a narrative technique of great flexibility and latent aesthetic potential.

But this was indeed the "old-fashioned" kind of storytelling that came to be rejected by later writers more concerned about the "craft" of fiction. Perhaps the first writer to really move away from the picaresque was Flaubert, and he may be the writer most responsible for converting fiction into a more gracefully "shaped" kind of storytelling, and therefore a form that could be taken seriously as a mode of literary art. (I greatly admire Flaubert, and nothing I say here is meant to denigrate his achievement in any way.) Mattison identifies James and Joyce as the writers who came to "shape" their stories around the occurence of an "epiphany," but it was really Flaubert who showed James and Joyce that such an aesthetically intricate effect could be brought off in fiction.

Since Flaubert, the notion of "story" in fiction is thus usually associated either specifically with the kind of dramatic narrative leading to revelation or epiphany pioneered by James and Joyce or more generally with the kind of carefully structured narrative encapsulated in "Freytag's triangle": exposition, rising action, climax, denoument, etc. Most genre fiction probably uses the latter, most "literary" fiction the former. Most best-selling potboilers are likely to use the Freytag-derived narrative filtered through Hollywood melodrama. In this context, the picaresque story almost doesn't seem like a story at all, since it doesn't arrange itself in some shaped pattern, but is instead just a series of incidents strung together.

I go over all this not to offer some kind of lesson in literary history but ultimately to suggest, with Mattison but more broadly than her advocacy of "coincidence" goes, that the picaresque ought to remain a viable option and can provide an alternative to the workshop-reinforced domination of the revalatory narrative. To some extent the picaresque style was revived by postwar American writers such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, but in my opinion it still contains much untapped potential. It can free the writer from the tyranny of story--the creation of narrative tension by which too many stories and novels are reductively judged--but at the same time allows for the depiction of external events, provides an aesthetically justified motive for abjuring the directive to probe the psychological depths, and perhaps most of all makes available all kind of other effects--satire, subplots, a larger cast of characters--that the craft-like story discourages. Of course, this is not the 18th century, and writers now would be using the picaresque form in a much more self-conscious way, but that in itself would likely give such fictions a "shape" that would rescue them from mere formlessness. (Although attempting a truly "formless" novel might be an interesting experiment in itself.)

I am not suggesting that the picaresque narrative is superior to the more conventionally shaped narrative most novels employ. The possibilities in "shaping" the latter kind of narrative have by no means been exhausted, although most published novels don't seem much interested in exploring these possibilities. A renewed interest in the picaresque might, however, help demonstrate that there is more than one way to tell a story, multiple ways to "shape" a work of fiction, without sacrificing readibility or even fiction's "entertainment" value. (Both Don Quixote and Tom Jones are nothing if not entertaining.) And in the final analyis using such a narrative strategy wouldn't really involve abandoning "craft"; ideally it would further demonstrate that craft is just as much involved in the breaking of convention as in its repetition.