Jude has something fairy-tale-like about it. To Denise, Alfred and Enid and the house have remained frozen in time. Throughout the novel, the narrator hints that staring at things for too long or too often might turn out to be harmful. Do you mean to imply that in order to preserve the vision, or the memory, of an object, the object itself has to be kept at bay? We can start by agreeing that Proust was right: what matters is not the real thing but what the mind makes of it.
One way of looking at a novel is as a supplier of artificial memories. A novel activates the same part of your brain that memory activates. If I say there was a red Volkswagen parked in the street, the reader may call to mind a bright red Volkswagen parked in a street. But what does that mean? Picture me sitting in my office. The entire process takes place at a remove from real objects. JF: Absolutely. A memory of something was implanted in my brain as if I had experienced it myself.
Our brains are fundamentally cartoonists. We retain essences, not replicas. JP: It strikes me that there are a great many Promethean figures in your novels. In The Corrections , Chip edits a script that he has put together, Enid is metaphorically linked to an alchemist, Alfred is of course an inventor tinkering with a variety of materials, while Denise is a food artist.
In Freedom , Patty writes her autobiography, which, revealingly enough, is both framed within the main narrative and read by two characters. There are other examples in your novels. Does this mean that we all invent our own version of reality, tinkering with fragments of the sensible world? JF: I vowed as a young novelist that I would never write a novel that contains a novelist as a character.
In Purity , there are print journalists, a dissident poet, and another autobiographer. Intertextuality is another dimension of novelistic meaning. The story of Pamela in Pamela is also the story of those letters, of where and how and why they were written, how they were delivered or not delivered, and where and how they were received.
To make it happen, Richardson had to do without certain other dimensions of textual meaning, most notably the flexibility of tone and perspective that you get with free indirect third-person discourse, which later novelists developed into the crowning achievement of the novel. You can use both text within text and free indirect discourse.
JP: There is arguably another form of text within the text near the end of The Corrections. The inscription is the mark of both a secret and a fault, which can readily evoke The Scarlet Letter. Paradoxically, then, what validates the existence of the fault turns out to be symbolic of a respect for privacy. Privacy and secrets, concealment and revelation are strong undercurrents in your work, especially, of course, in Purity ….
JP: In Freedom , a central concern repeatedly voiced by the character of Walter is the notion that the American Continent is finite. Urban sprawl is thought of as a force that paradoxically both fragments and creates a sense of homogeneity, posing a threat to diversity, and indeed to biodiversity.
As a novelist, what is your reaction to this metamorphosis of the American landscape? JF: I have a stronger reaction as somebody who cares about birds. Instead, various political and economic currents in America have resulted in the opposite, this horrible sprawl, which is long-term unsustainable and short-term incredibly destructive of the natural world. But as a novelist? Already, when I was 21, I was worried about cultural entropy.
I was looking for ways to combat it and seeing novels as my way of doing that. My literary and environmental wish to compress things, and to maximize the voltage between differences , was part of my long love affair with cities. I now feel actively repelled by Manhattan, which has been taken over almost entirely by banks and mega-rich foreigners.
It has been argued that one way of looking at contemporary literature is to think of it as a medium whereby a struggle against inattention can be enacted. Fiction involves a process of selection. It follows that what the author decides to be worthy of representation is necessarily a commitment of sorts, the expression of a form of ethical positioning. In the novel, the mere act of naming a specific bird—the Cerulean Warbler—strikes me as a form of commitment. The endangered bird now belongs to the world of the readers of Freedom.
Would you agree that the powers of naming can be linked to ethics in such a way? JF: Maybe. I do think that most ethical systems try to promote attentiveness. So inattention has always had a negative moral connotation. The central goal of certain strains of Buddhism is simply to pay attention, and my favorite Christian, St.
To ignore it is to court nostalgia. To engage with it, however, is to risk writing fiction that makes the same point over and over: technological consumerism is an infernal machine, technological consumerism is an infernal machine. Rudeness, irresponsibility, duplicity, and stupidity are hallmarks of real human interaction: the stuff of conversation, the cause of sleepless nights.
But in the world of consumer advertising and consumer purchasing, no evil is moral. The evils consist of high prices, inconvenience, lack of choice, lack of privacy, heartburn, hair loss, slippery roads. This is no surprise, since the only problems worth advertising solutions for are problems treatable through the spending of money. But money cannot solve the problem of bad manners — the chatterer in the darkened movie theater, the patronizing sister-in-law, the selfish sex partner — except by offering refuge in an atomized privacy.
And such privacy is exactly what the American Century has tended toward. First there was mass suburbanization, then the perfection of at-home entertainment, and finally the creation of virtual communities whose most striking feature is that interaction within them is entirely optional — terminable the instant the experience ceases to gratify the user.
That all these trends are infantilizing has been widely noted. Less often remarked is the way in which they are changing both our expectations of entertainment the book must bring something to us, rather than our bringing something to the book and the very content of that entertainment.
Here, indeed, we are up against what truly seems like the obsolescence of serious art in general. Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them. If we see religion and art as the historically preferred methods of coming to terms with this Ache, then what happens to art when our technological and economic systems and even our commercialized religions become sufficiently sophisticated to make each of us the center of our own universe of choices and gratifications?
The reader laughs with the writer, feels less alone with the sting. This is a delicate transaction, and it takes some work. How can it compete with a system — screen your calls; go out by modem; acquire the money to deal exclusively with the privatized world, where workers must be courteous or lose their jobs — that spares you the sting in the first place?
In the long run, the breakdown of communitarianism is likely to have all sorts of nasty consequences. In the short run, however, in this century of amazing prosperity and health, the breakdown takes a heavy toll on the ancient methods of dealing with the Ache. A disease has causes: abnormal brain chemistry, childhood sexual abuse, welfare queens, the patriarchy, social dysfunction. A partial cure, or better yet, an endless succession of partial cures, but failing that, even just the consolation of knowing you have a disease — anything is better than mystery.
Science attacked religious mystery a long time ago. But it was not until applied science, in the form of technology, changed both the demand for fiction and the social context in which fiction is written that we novelists fully felt its effects. For people as protective of their privacy and as fiercely competitive as writers are, mute suffering would seem to be the safest course. Even harder to admit is how depressed I was. As the social stigma of depression dwindles, the aesthetic stigma increases.
Where, where is the mortal who wins more of happiness than just the seeming, and, after the semblance, a falling away? The invitation to leave your depression behind, whether through medication or therapy or effort of will, seems like an invitation to turn your back on all your dark insights into the corruption and infantilism and self-delusion of the brave new McWorld.
And these insights are the sole legacy of the social novelist who desires to represent the world not simply in its detail but in its essence, to shine light on the morally blind eye of the virtual whirlwind, and who believes that human beings deserve better than the future of attractively priced electronic panderings that is even now being conspired for them.
Instead of saying I am depressed, you want to say I am right! And as you increasingly feel, as a novelist, that you are one of the last remaining repositories of depressive realism and of the radical critique of the therapeutic society that it represents, the burden of news-bringing that is placed on your art becomes overwhelming.
You ask yourself, why am I bothering to write these books? But every apology and every defense seems to dissolve in the sugar water of contemporary culture, and before long it becomes difficult indeed to get out of bed in the morning. How awkward, then, that for me the beacon in the murk — the person who inadvertently did the most to get me back on track as a writer — should have been a social scientist who was studying the audience for serious fiction in America.
She rode public transportation in twenty-seven different cities. She lurked in airports at least before the arrival of CNN. She took her notebook into bookstores and seaside resorts. She interviewed novelists. Three years ago she interviewed me, and last summer I had lunch with her in Palo Alto.
We do our best not to notice that, among adults with similar educations and similarly complicated lives, some read a lot of novels while others read few or none.
Heath has noticed this circumstance, and although she emphasized to me that she has not polled everybody in America, her research effectively demolishes the myth of the general audience.
For a person to sustain an interest in literature, she told me, two things have to be in place. In other words, one or both of the parents must have been reading serious books and must have encouraged the child to do the same. On the East Coast, Heath found a strong element of class in this.
Class matters less in other parts of the country, especially in the Protestant Midwest, where literature is seen as a way to exercise the mind. You have to be able to account for yourself through the work ethic and through the wise use of your leisure time.
Simply having a parent who reads is not enough, however, to produce a lifelong dedicated reader. According to Heath, young readers also need to find a person with whom they can share their interest. Finding a peer can take place as late as college.
I was also considering that for me, today, there is nothing sexier than a reader. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read.
Pride compels me, here, to draw a distinction between young fiction readers and young nerds. The classic nerd, who finds a home in facts or technology or numbers, is marked not by a displaced sociability but by an antisociability.
In fact, it can make you hypersocial. If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness. Nevertheless, I felt as if she were looking straight into my soul. Simply to be recognized for what I was, simply not to be misunderstood: these had revealed themselves, suddenly, as reasons to write.
By the spring of I was a socially isolated individual whose desperate wish was mainly to make some money. After my wife and I separated for the last time, I took a job teaching undergraduate fiction-writing at a small liberal arts college, and although I spent way too much time on it, I loved the work.
I was depressed, though, to learn that several of my best writers had vowed never to take a literature class again. One evening a student reported that his contemporary fiction class had been encouraged to spend an entire hour debating whether the novelist Leslie Marmon Silko was a homophobe. Another evening, when I came to class, three women students were hooting with laughter at the utopian-feminist novel they were being forced to read for an honors seminar in Women and Fiction.
The therapeutic optimism now raging in English literature departments insists that novels be sorted into two boxes: Symptoms of Disease canonical work from the Dark Ages before and Medicine for a Happier and Healthier World the work of women and of people from nonwhite or nonhetero cultures. But the contemporary fiction writers whose work is being put to such optimistic use in the Academy are seldom, themselves, to blame. The current flourishing of novels by women and cultural minorities shows the chauvinism of judging the vitality of American letters by the fortunes of the traditional social novel.
And the problem is aggravated when fiction writers take refuge in university creative-writing programs. I mourn the retreat into the Self and the decline of the broad-canvas novel for the same reason I mourn the rise of suburbs: I like maximum diversity and contrast packed into a single exciting experience.
We just happen to belong to a rather strange kind of community. She arrived at this definition after discovering that most of the hundreds of serious readers she interviewed have had to deal, one way or another, with personal unpredictability.
Therapists and ministers who counsel troubled people tend to read the hard stuff. Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email Address never made public. Previous Previous post: Remembrance of Love Past. Next Next post: A Hole in the World. Joseph Suglia. Past the Isle of Dogs My adventures in self-publishing and other gibberish. Defeat Despair In this world you will have trouble.
The Misanthropologist. Follow Following. A Commonplace for the Uncommon. Sign me up. Already have a WordPress. Log in now. Is the literary trend toward passive women progress? Leave the acute depiction of individual human consciousness to the post-Franzen vanguard: Lerner, Cusk, Knausgaard. Franzen, meanwhile, has always been thought of as a throwback — but to whom or when, I can never quite place. Dickens is too busy, Faulkner much more difficult; Roth, Updike and Bellow all seem less interested in women.
The books can feel as pointedly political as DeLillo, but pre-Oprah novels aside Franzen is no systems novelist. Two influences Franzen claims are Paula Fox and Penelope Fitzgerald — two of my favorite writers — but their brilliance is tied up not only in precision and verisimilitude but also in their brevity.
Yet the sentences can get sloppy, attention lags. One wonders, why these seven good-to-great sentences, when one or two sharper ones could have held them all? By the end, it felt like the story was just barely getting off the ground.
Bigness can create a feeling of fullness, but also exhaustion. Unfair as it may be to once again subject his persona to review, it would be absurd not to admit that I have a complicated relationship with the idea of him, as a female novelist who feels sometimes as if the only way to get any traction as a female novelist is to cultivate a certain cold detachment that Franzen gets to disavow. Review: Author Karl Ove Knausgaard, famously extreme realist, goes supernatural. It is also true that his relationship to the world is inseparable from his flaws as a novelist.
He is, has been his whole career, to use an awful capitalist term, too big to fail.
0コメント