Questions About the New Fiction

Not so many years ago, what someone thought about one novel or another seemed not only a matter of intense concern but a character index; strangers at parties determined whether or not they wanted to have dinner with each other by talking about The Invisible Man or Lie Down in Darkness. Now they talk about movies. They not only talk about them but write about them, read about them, analyze them to the point of absurdity; magazines like Cinema carry articles titled “Theme vs. Character in Vincente Minelli’s The Sandpiper.” To talk about fiction is in fact to feel a little démodé, as if one had been revealed declaiming Amy Lowell’s “Patterns” with gestures.

Clearly some of this is only a manifestation of the same force that moves the art market and the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture; movies are not only more accessible than novels but somehow give the impression that they are the work of people infinitely more attractive and au fait than novelists tend to be. (“Writers are very boring company,” a New York hostess quite accurately reported not long ago in Eugenia Sheppard’s column.) But chic is only part of the answer, and perhaps it is not the answer at all among the very young, among those who once wrote “experimental” short stories and now make “experimental” eight-minute films instead.

JD

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Joan Didion

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Not so many years ago, what someone thought about one novel or another seemed not only a matter of intense concern but a character index; strangers at parties determined whether or not they wanted to have dinner with each other by talking about The Invisible Man or Lie Down in Darkness. Now they talk about movies. They not only talk about them but write about them, read about them, analyze them to the point of absurdity; magazines like Cinema carry articles titled “Theme vs. Character in Vincente Minelli’s The Sandpiper.” To talk about fiction is in fact to feel a little démodé, as if one had been revealed declaiming Amy Lowell’s “Patterns” with gestures.

Clearly some of this is only a manifestation of the same force that moves the art market and the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture; movies are not only more accessible than novels but somehow give the impression that they are the work of people infinitely more attractive and au fait than novelists tend to be. (“Writers are very boring company,” a New York hostess quite accurately reported not long ago in Eugenia Sheppard’s column.) But chic is only part of the answer, and perhaps it is not the answer at all among the very young, among those who once wrote “experimental” short stories and now make “experimental” eight-minute films instead.