January 13, 2012

Why Write Novels at All?

By GARTH RISK HALLBERG Last year, I found myself mildly obsessed with a cache of YouTube clips, featuring the novelists Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace and Nathan Englander at a 2006 literary conference in Italy called Le Conversazioni. Part of what interested me, in a gate-crashing kind of way, was the backdrop: midsummer on the Isle of Capri, with flora aflame and a sky the color of Chablis. Another part, inevitably, was watching Wallace with the knowledge that he would kill himself two years later. Mostly what I kept coming back to, though, was how lighthearted, how loosehow youngthese writers seemed here. Its not that they werent already an accomplished quintet, with a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award to their credit. But in 2006 the gravitational center of Anglo-American letters still lay back on U.S. soil with Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy and John Updike and Toni Morrison and Philip Roththose towering figures who, according to a Times survey released earlier that year, produced the greatest American fiction of the previous quarter-century. By comparison, Le Conversazioni might as well have been The Breakfast Club and Capri a weirdly paradisiacal high-school library. Five years later, in 2011, the islanders finally overran the mainland. Franzens Freedom was ubiquitous, and just when it threatened to drop off the best-seller lists, the posthumous Pale King by Wallace stepped up to take its place. All year long, Zadie Smith was issuing a running commentary on world letters from her post as the house critic at Harpers, and through the fall, it was hard to tune in to NPR without running into Eugenidesor to miss his giant billboard avatar looming over Times Square.

It may seem like a journalistic contrivance to read this groups collective ascent as evidence of an aesthetic trend. (If you dont hear people throwing around the term hysterical realism anymore, its because any net broad enough to catch The Virgin Suicides, The Corrections, On Beauty and Infinite Jest is going to have a hard time excluding, say, DeLillos Angel Esmerelda or much of Philip Roth.) On the other hand, several of these younger writers have actively invited us to see them as standard-bearers, holding forth in essays and interviews about todays most engaged young fiction and the novels way forward. Is there a sense, then, in which Le Conversazionis class of 06 really does represent a bona fide school? I know. < I had my doubts, too. But then I picked up Eugenidess new novel, The Marriage Plot, an exuberantly bookish book that offers the clearest account to date of his cohorts collective aspirations and anxieties. There is, it turns out, a unifying thread; its just not a matter of form. The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer How should novels be? but Why write novels at all? The roots of this question, in its contemporary incarnation, can be traced back to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who at the dawn of the 80s promulgated the notion of cultural capital: the idea that aesthetic choices are an artifact of socioeconomic position. Bourdieu documented a correlation between taste and class position: The scarcer or more difficult to access an aesthetic experience isthe novel very much includedthe greater its ability to set us apart from those further down the social ladder. This kind of value is, in his analysis, the only real value that refined tastes have. Its hard to overstate how revolutionary this riposte to the aesthetics of transcendence must have seemed 30 years ago. You dont have to subject yourself to the sweep and rigor of Bourdieus book Distinction to feel how thoroughly a lower-calorie version of its ideas has been absorbed into the cultural bloodstream. As the music critic Carl Wilson argues in Lets Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, his book on Celine Dion, In early 2

21st-century terms, for most people under 50, distinction boils down to cool. And the Internet has rendered the competition for cool more transparent than ever. We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what were doing publicly, like-ing what we like, is trying to separate ourselves from the herd. Writers of Eugenidess generation understand this, too. Not only does Bourdieus game of distinction foreground the kinds of cultural affectations that the novel of manners has always loved to skewer; now the characters themselves are hip to the game being played. We see this in the choral voice of the urban gentry that opens Franzens Freedom, and in the cavalcade of status details that voice records. We see it in the campus-centric culture clashes of Smiths On Beauty. We see it in the carefully parsed snack cakes at the center of Wallaces story Mister Squishy, which exist less as a variant on rivals Zingers, Ding Dongs, Ho Hos< than< a radical upscaling and re-visioning of same. And we see it in the vocational crisis at the center of The Marriage Plot, the novel that presents in clearest form the shared preoccupations of the Conversazioni group. As The Marriage Plot opens, our heroine, an English major named Madeleine Hanna, finds herself enrolled in a course in semiotics, where her classmates unmask the novels she loves as collections of unstable signifiers, shaky attempts to impose order on an entropic world. On one level, this provokes in Madeleine a suspicion that the careworn volumes she keeps in her bedroom are just another class-specific way of fashioning an identity. On another level, shes not so nave as not to consider the source: upper middle-class kids who wore Doc Martens and anarchist symbols. For the Conversazioni group, this game of distinction is a kind of inexhaustible comic engine. It levels whatever it touches. Curiously, though, when these writers have turned to thinking about the novel, rather than within it, attempts to modify or counteract the logic of the cultural marketplace have produced mostly vexation and muddlefor example, Franzens specious division of books

into Status and Contract camps or the inflated distinctions of Smiths Two Paths for the Novel. One reason cultural capital ties literary novelists in knots is its abolition, in Bourdieus words, of the sacred frontier which makes legitimate culture a separate universe. Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audiences defection to other forms of entertainment. But pop-Bourdieuvianism deprives them of the sense of high-canonical purity with which theyve traditionally consoled themselves. To try to reclaim either purity or audience by drawing aesthetic bright lines, as Smith and Franzen do, is to run into another problem: Bourdieus ideas arent properly aesthetic at all. Note his subtitle: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. In chalking up judgment to factors beyond the thing were judging, Distinction remains agnostic about that things internal particularities. A wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse. To hell with style, then; the novelist now has to confront the larger problem of what the novel is even forassuming its not just another cultural widget. The Marriage Plot proposes its answer in the scene where Madeleine discovers Roland Barthess Lovers Discourse: It wasnt only that this writing seemed beautiful. < What made Madeleine sit up in bed was something closer to the reason she read books in the first place. < Here was a sign that she wasnt alone. And if this last line sounds familiar, its because youve probably heard it before. The idea that the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness crops up all over the writing of the Conversazioni group: in Franzens nonfiction, and in Wallaces, and in Smiths beautiful encomium to Wallace in her book of essays, Changing My Mind. It also helps to explain these writers broad turn away from various postmodern formalisms and toward the problems of the human heart. Indeed, when we consider the web of influence that connects them to old roommates and friends and lovers and studentsa list that includes David Means, Rick Moody, Mary Karr, Donald Antrim 4

and Jonathan Safran Foerand to newer work by writers like Karen Russell or the Irish novelist Paul Murray, Here is a sign that youre not alone starts to look like the ascendant trope of and about literature today. Its problem, as a mission statement, is not that its symptomatic of our self-help culture; Aristotle saw narrative as therapeutic, too. Its that its not specific enough. Does the sign that were not alone ultimately refer back to the solitary reader, as Wallace often suggests? (If a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a characters pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own.) Or does it refer to the author, as in Franzens Why Bother? (Simply to be recognized for what I was, simply not to be misunderstood: these had revealed themselves, suddenly, as reasons to write.) Or does truly great literature point to some third thing altogether? This is where The Marriage Plots titular enjambment of literature and lovethose two beleaguered institutionsis so clarifying. Think about it: I can love you because I want to feel less alone, or I can love you because I want you to feel less alone. But only the latter requires me to imagine a consciousness independent of my own, and equally real. So far, our new leading novelists have cleared this second hurdle only intermittently. In Smiths Autograph Man, in Franzens Strong Motion, in the otherwise dazzling Mister Squishy, and, alas, in The Marriage Plot itself, we encounter characters too neatly or thinly drawn, too recognizably literary, to confront us with the fact that there are other people besides ourselves in the world, whole mysterious inner universes. These works may delight us, but they do not instruct. Im cribbing these wordsdelight, instructfrom a 2,000year-old theory about the purpose of art because they seem today more apposite than ever. Even as you read this, engineers in Silicon Valley are hard at work on new ways to delight yougathering the entire field of aesthetic experience onto a single screen youll be able to roll up like a paperback and stick in your back pocket. Its safe to say that delight wont be in short supply, and as long as theres juice 5

in the battery, we wont have to feel alone. But will we be alone? Literature, to a degree unique among the arts, has the ability both to frame the question and to affect the answer. This isnt to say that, measured in terms of cultural capital or sheer entertainment, the delights to which most contemporary literary fiction aims to treat us arent an awful lot. Its just that, if the art is to endure, they wont be quite enough.