The Problem with Fiction

I often disagree with the opinions of Rod Liddle, who writes about books for the London Times. But his extensive piece last weekend on the problems with literary fiction did strike a chord with me. Liddle argues that generation fiction might once have a source of brain fuel, but--at least for him--it now seldom fires the imagination:

Most of what I know about the world has been learnt through fiction. Stuff that people made up. Further, the novels that gave me the greatest insights were those that were the most deliberately difficult and obtuse, often experimental, always introspective and most consciously “literary”; those novels where truly important world events provided nothing more than background hum, like static crackling on an old radio, which impinged on the central characters only elliptically. This seems a paradox, and the sort of thing that might lead one to a flawed, haphazard understanding of the world. But when I say these books enabled me to “know about the world”, I mean that they gave me a deeper understanding than the mere nuts and bolts of historical events; that is, how undemocratically the government behaves, who invaded whom, when and where, what the labour camp was like, which calibre of bullet was used by the execution squad, and so on.

I realised all this the other day when, finally, exasperated, I threw aside my copy of John Updike’s latest novel, Terrorist, and decided instead to watch Deal or No Deal on Channel 4. I had read just 64 pages, and it had been a struggle to get that far. Not because of its “difficulty”, but because of its bovine stupidity, its desperation to explore a burning issue at the expense of its hopeless, one-dimensional characters. Believe me--and please excuse the language--Terrorist is a f***ing awful book. I can think of no better description for it. And it dawned on me, as Noel Edmonds asked some halfwit which box he wanted to open, that it wasn’t just Updike--I hadn’t actually finished a novel, any novel, for some considerable time. I couldn’t even remember the name of the last new novel I’d finished. Somehow, fiction had lost its power to enthrall or inform.

I might suggest that Liddle venture more toward the genre side of fiction, as opposed to the literary middle-ground where, in my opinion, less-interesting work is now being published. I guess my own reading has moved with each passing year more to the genres, as opposed to general fiction; however, I do agree with some of Liddle’s selections of what are the most interesting works, in terms of contemporary literary fiction:

The French have remained stubbornly immune to the global dumbing-down. Michel Houellebecq, by a country mile, is the most exciting European writer of the past decade, but the god of literature might have a soft spot, too, for unadorned Gallic porno filth, rather than extraordinarily warped Gallic porno filth, and allow room for Catherine Millet and Marie Darrieussecq.

Since the disturbing brilliance of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, the Yanks seem to have fallen for the Franzen argument--even Jay McInerney and Donna Tartt have begun to write middle-market novels. Easton Ellis is still capable of frightening the horses, as he did with Lunar Park. But mostly, you need to search on the margins. Lives of the Monster Dogs, by Kirsten Bakis, was as good a novel as I have read in 20 years; and there is also Ben Marcus, with two wholly wacko and disturbing novels, The Age of Wire and String, and Notable American Women. Dennis Cooper, unless you hate homosexuals, and Daniel Evans Weiss, unless you hate cockroaches, have also delivered stuff that makes you marvel that the written word can still disturb and enlighten. And Douglas Coupland, from Canada, is treasurable, especially All Families Are Psychotic.

In Britain? Nothing much. The late W.G. Sebald, for Austerlitz, certainly; Liz Jensen, for The Paper Eater; Michel Faber, for The Crimson Petal and the White; Toby Litt, for Deadkidsongs; Iain Sinclair, for Radon Daughters; J.G. Ballard, for Super-Cannes; Matt Thorne, for Cherry; and, whisper it quietly, Martin Amis, for Yellow Dog. All, at least, made you happy the novel still exists.

To follow my theory that literary fiction is losing ground to genre works, you need only check out the most recent list of UK hardback fiction bestsellers. It sure looks like thrillers and crime fiction are making bookstore cash registers sing.

Meanwhile, writing for The Guardian, Zadie Smith (White Teeth, On Beauty) ploughs a quite similar furrow as she looks at the relationship between writers and readers and considers why most books fail:

It’s my experience that when a writer meets other writers and the conversation turns to the fault lines of their various prose styles, then you hear a slightly different language than the critic’s language. Writers do not say, “My research wasn’t sufficiently thorough” or “I thought Casablanca was in Tunisia” or “I seem to reify the idea of femininity”--at least, they don’t consider problems like these to be central. They are concerned with the ways in which what they have written reveals or betrays their best or worst selves. Writers feel, for example, that what appear to be bad aesthetic choices very often have an ethical dimension. Writers know that between the platonic ideal of the novel and the actual novel there is always the pesky self--vain, deluded, myopic, cowardly, compromised. That’s why writing is the craft that defies craftsmanship: craftsmanship alone will not make a novel great.

One point Smith makes excellently is that readers have a big role to play in “writing,” and that is often why readers differ in their opinions of the same book, because they bring their own baggage to the work--certain books strike a specific resonance in me, while others leave me cold. Smith concurs in the conclusion of her newspaper essay:

A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing--I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play. She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her.

This is a conception of “reading” we rarely hear now. And yet, when you practise reading, when you spend time with a book, the old moral of effort and reward is undeniable. Reading is a skill and an art and readers should take pride in their abilities and have no shame in cultivating them if for no other reason than the fact that writers need you. To respond to the ideal writer takes an ideal reader, the type of reader who is open enough to allow into their own mind a picture of human consciousness so radically different from their own as to be almost offensive to reason. The ideal reader steps up to the plate of the writer’s style so that together writer and reader might hit the ball out of the park.

What I’m saying is, a reader must have talent. Quite a lot of talent, actually, because even the most talented reader will find much of the land of literature tricky terrain. For how many of us feel the world to be as Kafka felt it, too impossibly foreshortened to ride from one village to the next? Or can imagine a world without nouns, as Borges did? How many are willing to be as emotionally generous as Dickens, or to take religious faith as seriously as did Graham Greene? Who among us have Zora Neale Hurston’s capacity for joy or Douglas Coupland’s strong stomach for the future? Who has the delicacy to tease out Flaubert’s faintest nuance, or the patience and the will to follow David Foster Wallace down his intricate recursive spirals of thought? The skills that it takes to write it are required to read it. Readers fail writers just as often as writers fail readers. Readers fail when they allow themselves to believe the old mantra that fiction is the thing you relate to and writers the amenable people you seek out when you want to have your own version of the world confirmed and reinforced. That is certainly one of the many things fiction can do, but it’s a conjurer’s trick within a far deeper magic. To become better readers and writers we have to ask of each other a little bit more.

Those of us who review fiction for a living are in the position of trying to weed out what we consider the publishing dross, and serve up to thoughtful buyers those books we believe are worthy of their attention--without overselling those fewer works. It’s a harder task than the uninitiated might presume, and it often means that we don’t have the pleasure of reading only what we want to read. On our behalf, Sarah Burnett of The Guardian makes this modest proposal:

There’s a theoretical day each year called Tax Freedom Day. It marks the day when the average UK taxpayer stops working for the government and begins earning money for him or herself. It usually falls in late May or early June.

I’m thinking of introducing a similar day in my own diary this year. Its working title--until I come up with something more inventive--is Book Freedom Day. It will mark the day in the year when I start reading books for myself, rather than for other people.

Read the whole of Burnett’s short piece here.