A Serious Note on Fiction
How fares the novel in the modern world?

By Mark Goldblatt, a writer in New York. His novel, Africa Speaks, is due out in February.
October 27-28, 2001

he buzz of the literary world last summer is now stretching into the fall. It began with a long essay by B. R. Myers called "A Reader's Manifesto" in the July/August issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Myers charged that much of what passes for Serious Fiction nowadays is characterized by pretentious, sloppy, and just plain dull writing. He took on such darlings of the critical establishment as Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Ha Jin, Don DeLillo and Paul Auster, quoting long narrative passages, highlighting stale dialogue, mixed metaphors, and inane repetitions — and interspersing comments by critics who seemed to laud the very precision and originality that the writing so clearly lacks.

The debate was soon joined, pro and con, by critics from the Washington Post, Salon, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate; even the London Observer
and the Manchester Guardian weighed in. Finally, on September 9, Judith Shulevitz of the Sunday Times Book Review savaged Myers on decidedly ad hominem grounds, referring to him as an "unknown" who "doesn't have a sure grasp of the world he's attacking," noting incidentally that he "lives in New Mexico," (!) and thus "is not just a man without a stake in the literary establishment. He is foreign to it in every way." (Shulevitz asserts, incorrectly as it turns out, that Myers was born in South Africa. He was actually born in the United States, moved to South Africa as an adolescent and was trained as a philologist in Germany.)

Predictably, Shulevitz's essay received stinging replies from Myers himself and from a reader named Martha Bayles who adequately captures both the tone and gist of Shulevitz's case against Myers: "Gee, if we love [the writers Myers dismisses], then who is this foreign guy to knock 'em? This is American lit, pal. Love it or leave it."

If Shulevitz's attack is a cheap shot, so too, in a sense, is Myers's original essay. Judging a novelist by a weak passage here and there is like judging Sammy Sosa by a strikeout. The occasional leaden patch in DeLillo, for example, is offset by frequent jewels, as in the following description from the novel White Noise:

Babette is tall and fairly ample; there is a girth and heft to her. Her hair is a fanatical blond mop, a particular tawny hue that used to be called dirty blond. If she were a petite woman, the hair would be too cute, too mischievous and contrived. Size gives her tousled aspect a certain seriousness. Ample women do not plan such things. They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body.

On the other hand, Myers's essay touched a nerve for the very reason that reading Serious Fiction has become an undeniable chore. Whereas hackneyed, monotonous, self-conscious writing used to be a bar not only to acclaim but to publication itself, it's now taken — in many critical circles — as an artistic option, a comment upon the postmodern milieu. Senseless plots now reflect the absurdity of the times. Flat characterizations are now justified by the writer's ironic alienation from his subject.

Nonsense.

First of all, the cliché that the modern world exists in an intellectually or spiritually degraded state is a demonstrable falsehood, and the fact that so many artists have embraced it is a reminder that creativity and insight don't often travel together. Second, even if it were true, the act of reading a novel would remain unchanged. It's still a gesture of good faith in which the reader commits a portion of his finite life to the writer's thoughts. If those thoughts fail to move the reader, to arouse his emotions or instruct his prejudices, to delight or sadden him, then the writer has failed. If his excuse for failure is that fiction cannot supply what the world itself currently lacks, or that the reader should feel the alienation and confusion the writer feels, then the writer has not only failed; he's intentionally wasted the reader's time.

That much should be self-evident. It isn't because several generations of novelists and critics have been weaned on a graduate school diet of French babble which holds that the reader, rather than the writer, creates meaning; if the novel is pointless or dreary, it's because the reader reads it as such. The writer's task is to create an object into which the reader reads his own neuroses. Thus are born thousand-page monstrosities, hipper-than-thou exercises in pop-cultural ephemera, infinite jests that brim with resonance but lack any substance whatsoever. Why bother with character and plot when it's so much easier to churn out a formless heap of prose, litter it with obscure allusions and scatological asides — knowing all along that some desperate doctoral student, cowed by the prospect of trying to say something original about Hamlet, will take up the less daunting challenge of connecting the referential dots and making sense of your work?

Serious Fiction touches the heart as well as the mind. If what you're reading feels more like a crossword puzzle than a narrative, then rest assured, regardless of what the critics are saying, you're not reading Serious Fiction.