Reader's Manifesto (repost)
asha_anderson
An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose
BY B. R. MYERS
As printed in The Atlantic Monthly; July/August 2001; A Reader's
Manifesto; Volume 288, No. 1; 104-122
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/07/myers.htm
.....
Nothing gives me the feeling of having been born several decades too
late quite like the modern "literary" best seller. Give me a
time-tested masterpiece or what critics patronizingly call a fun
read-Sister Carrie or just plain Carrie. Give me anything, in fact, as
long as it doesn't have a recent prize jury's seal of approval on the
front and a clutch of precious raves on the back. In the bookstore
I'll sometimes sample what all the fuss is about, but one glance at
the affected prose-"furious dabs of tulips stuttering," say, or "in
the dark before the day yet was"-and I'm hightailing it to the
friendly black spines of the Penguin Classics.
I realize that such a declaration must sound perversely ungrateful to
the literary establishment. For years now editors, critics, and prize
jurors, not to mention novelists themselves, have been telling the
rest of us how lucky we are to be alive and reading in these exciting
times. The absence of a dominant school of criticism, we are told, has
given rise to an extraordinary variety of styles, a smorgasbord with
something for every palate. As the novelist and critic David Lodge has
remarked, in summing up a lecture about the coexistence of fabulation,
minimalism, and other movements, "Everything is in and nothing is
out." Coming from insiders to whom a term like "fabulation" actually
means something, this hyperbole is excusable, even endearing; it's as
if a team of hotel chefs were getting excited about their assortment
of cabbages. From a reader's standpoint, however, "variety" is the
last word that comes to mind, and more appears to be "out" than ever
before. More than half a century ago popular storytellers like
Christopher Isherwood and Somerset Maugham were ranked among the
finest novelists of their time, and were considered no less literary,
in their own way, than Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Today any
accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to
be "genre fiction"-at best an excellent "read" or a "page turner," but
never literature with a capital L. An author with a track record of
blockbusters may find the publication of a new work treated like a
pop-culture event, but most "genre" novels are lucky to get an inch in
the back pages of The New York Times Book Review.
Everything written in self-conscious, writerly prose, on the other
hand, is now considered to be "literary fiction"-not necessarily good
literary fiction, mind you, but always worthier of respectful
attention than even the best-written thriller or romance. It is these
works that receive full-page critiques, often one in the Sunday
book-review section and another in the same newspaper during the week.
It is these works, and these works only, that make the annual short
lists of award committees. The "literary" writer need not be an
intellectual one. Jeering at status-conscious consumers, bandying
about words like "ontological" and "nominalism," chanting Red River
hokum as if it were from a lost book of the Old Testament: this is
what passes for profundity in novels these days. Even the most obvious
triteness is acceptable, provided it comes with a postmodern wink.
What is not tolerated is a strong element of action-unless, of course,
the idiom is obtrusive enough to keep suspense to a minimum.
Conversely, a natural prose style can be pardoned if a novel's pace is
slow enough, as was the case with Ha Jin's aptly titled Waiting, which
won the National Book Award (1999) and the PEN/Faulkner Award (2000).
The dualism of literary versus genre has all but routed the old
trinity of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow, which was always invoked
tongue-in-cheek anyway. Writers who would once have been called
middlebrow are now assigned, depending solely on their degree of
verbal affectation, to either the literary or the genre camp. David
Guterson is thus granted Serious Writer status for having buried a
murder mystery under sonorous tautologies (Snow Falling on Cedars,
1994), while Stephen King, whose Bag of Bones (1998) is a more
intellectual but less pretentious novel, is still considered to be
just a very talented genre storyteller.
Everything is "in," in other words, as long as it keeps the reader at
a respectfully admiring distance. This may seem an odd trend when one
considers that the reading skills of American college students, who go
on to form the main audience for contemporary Serious Fiction, have
declined markedly since the 1970s. Shouldn't a dumbed-down America be
more willing to confer literary status on straightforward prose,
instead of encouraging affectation and obscurity?
Not necessarily. In Aldous Huxley's Those Barren Leaves (1925) a
character named Mr. Cardan makes a point that may explain today's
state of affairs.
Really simple, primitive people like their poetry to be as ...
artificial and remote from the language of everyday affairs as
possible. We reproach the eighteenth century with its artificiality.
But the fact is that Beowulf is couched in a diction fifty times more
complicated and unnatural than that of [Pope's poem] Essay on Man.
Mr. Cardan comes off in the novel as a bit of a windbag, but there is
at least anecdotal evidence to back up his observation. We know, for
example, that European peasants were far from pleased when their
clergy stopped mystifying them with Latin. Edward Pococke (1604-1691)
was an English preacher and linguist whose sermons, according to the
Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, "were always composed in a plain
style upon practical subjects, carefully avoiding all show and
ostentation of learning."
But from this very exemplary caution not to amuse his hearers
(contrary to the common method then in vogue) with what they could not
understand, some of them took occasion to entertain very contemptible
thoughts of his learning ... So that one of his Oxford friends, as he
traveled through Childrey, inquiring for his diversion of some of the
people, Who was their minister, and how they liked him? received this
answer: "Our parson is one Mr. Pococke, a plain honest man. But
Master," said they, "he is no Latiner."
Don't get me wrong-I'm not comparing anyone to a peasant. But neither
am I prepared to believe that the decline of American literacy has
affected everyone but fans of Serious Fiction. When reviewers and
prize jurors tout a repetitive style as "the last word in gnomic
control," or a jumble of unsustained metaphor as "lyrical" writing, it
is obvious that they, too, are having difficulty understanding what
they read. Would Mr. Cardan be puzzled to find them in the thrall of
writers who are deliberately obscure, or who chant in strange
cadences? I doubt it. And what could be more natural than that the
same elite should scorn unaffected English as "workmanlike prose"-an
idiom incompatible with real literature? Stephen King's a plain,
honest man, just the author to read on the subway. But Master, he is
no Latiner.
If the new dispensation were to revive good "Mandarin" writing-to use
the term coined by the British critic Cyril Connolly for the prose of
writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce-then I would be the last
to complain. But what we are getting today is a remarkably crude form
of affectation: a prose so repetitive, so elementary in its syntax,
and so numbing in its overuse of wordplay that it often demands less
concentration than the average "genre" novel. Even today's obscurity
is easy-the sort of gibberish that stops all thought dead in its
tracks. The best way to demonstrate this in the space at hand is to
take a look at some of the most highly acclaimed styles of
contemporary writing.
"EVOCATIVE" PROSE
t has become fashionable, especially among female novelists, to
exploit the license of poetry while claiming exemption from poetry's
rigorous standards of precision and polish. Edna O'Brien is one of the
writers who do this, but Annie Proulx is better known, thanks in large
part to her best seller The Shipping News (1993). In 1999 Proulx
wrapped up the acknowledgments in a short-story anthology titled Close
Range by thanking her children, in characteristic prose, "for putting
up with my strangled, work-driven ways."
From Atlantic Unbound:
Interviews: "Passion's Progress" (April 20, 2000)
Edna O'Brien talks about how her new book, Wild Decembers-in which
heartache is prefigured by a tractor-fits in with her own "inner
gnaw."
Interviews: "Imagination Is Everything" (November 12, 1997)
A Conversation with E. Annie Proulx.
That's right: "strangled, work-driven ways." Work-driven is fine, of
course, except for its note of self-approval, but strangled ways makes
no sense on any level. Besides, how can anything, no matter how
abstract, be strangled and work-driven at the same time? Maybe the
author was referring to something along the lines of a nightly
smackdown with the Muse, but only she knows for sure. Luckily for
Proulx, many readers today expect literary language to be so remote
from normal speech as to be routinely incomprehensible. "Strangled
ways," they murmur to themselves in baffled admiration. "Now who but a
Writer would think of that!"
The short stories in Close Range are full of this kind of writing.
"The Half-Skinned Steer" (which first appeared in The Atlantic
Monthly, in November of 1997), starts with this sentence:
In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a
wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this
spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he
began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the
Big Horns.
Like so much modern prose, this demands to be read quickly, with just
enough attention to register the bold use of words. Slow down, and
things fall apart. Proulx seems to have intended a unified conceit,
but unfurling, or spreading out, as of a flag or an umbrella, clashes
disastrously with the images of thread that follow. (Maybe
"unraveling" didn't sound fancy enough.) A life is unfurled, a hustler
is wound tight, a year is spooled out, and still the metaphors
continue, with kicked down-which might work in less crowded
surroundings, though I doubt it-and hinge, which is cute if you've
never seen a hinge or a map of the Big Horns. And this is just the
first sentence!
Proulx once acknowledged that she tends to "compress" too much into
short stories, but her wordplay is just as relentless in her novels;
she seems unaware that all innovative language derives its impact from
the contrast to straightforward English. It is common to find her
devoting more than one metaphor or simile to the same image. "Furious
dabs of tulips stuttering in gardens." "An apron of sound lapped out
of each dive." "The ice mass leaned as though to admire its reflection
in the waves, leaned until the southern tower was at the angle of a
pencil in a writing hand, the northern tower reared over it like a
lover." "The children rushed at Quoyle, gripped him as a falling man
clutches the window ledge, as a stream of electric particles arcs a
gap and completes a circuit." In one brief paragraph in The Shipping
News a man's body is likened to a loaf of bread, his flesh to a
casement, his head to a melon, his facial features to fingertips, his
eyes to the color of plastic, and his chin to a shelf.
This isn't all bad, of course; the bit about the ice mass admiring its
reflection is effective. And every so often Proulx lets a really good
image stand alone: "The dining room, crowded with men, was lit by red
bulbs that gave them a look of being roasted alive in their chairs."
Such hits are so rare, however, that after a while the reader stops
trying to think about what the metaphors mean. Maybe this is the
effect that Proulx is aiming for; she seems to want to keep us on the
surface of the text at all times, as if she were afraid that we might
forget her quirky narratorial presence for even a line or two.
The decline of American prose since the 1950s is nowhere more apparent
than in the decline of the long sentence. Today anything longer than
two or three lines is likely to be a simple list of attributes or
images. Proulx relies heavily on such sentences, which often call to
mind a bad photographer hurrying through a slide show. In this scene
from Accordion Crimes (1996) a woman has just had her arms sliced off
by a piece of sheet metal.
She stood there, amazed, rooted, seeing the grain of the wood of the
barn clapboards, paint jawed away by sleet and driven sand, the
unconcerned swallows darting and reappearing with insects clasped in
their beaks looking like mustaches, the wind-ripped sky, the blank
windows of the house, the old glass casting blue swirled reflections
at her, the fountains of blood leaping from her stumped arms, even, in
the first moment, hearing the wet thuds of her forearms against the
barn and the bright sound of the metal striking.
The last thing Proulx wants is for you to start wondering whether
someone with blood spurting from severed arms is going to stand rooted
long enough to see more than one bird disappear, catch an insect, and
reappear, or whether the whole scene is not in bad taste of the
juvenile variety. Instead you are meant to read the sentence in one
mental breath and succumb, under the sheer accumulation of words, to a
spurious impression of what Walter Kendrick, in an otherwise mixed
review in The New York Times, called "brilliant prose" (and in
reference to this very excerpt, besides).
Another example:
Partridge black, small, a restless traveler across the slope of life,
an all-night talker; Mercalia, second wife of Partridge and the color
of a brown feather on dark water, a hot intelligence; Quoyle large,
white, stumbling along, going nowhere.
Black, small, large, white: these are lazy, inexpressive adjectives.
For all its faux precision, that feather simile is ultimately
meaningless: there are too many possible browns for it to evoke
whatever shade Proulx had in mind (even with dark water involved). A
more concise syntax would show up the poverty of this description at
once, but by stringing a dozen attributes together she ensures that
each is seen only in the context of a dazzlingly "pyrotechnic" whole.
Since Proulx is a novelist and not a poet, her need to draw attention
to her presence throughout the text poses certain challenges. How can
she keep the focus on her style even during the nuts-and-bolts work of
exposition? How can she get to the next purple passage as fast as
possible without resorting to straightforwardness, that dreaded idiom
of the genre hack? Her solution: an obtrusive-and therefore
"literary"-telegraphese: "Made a show of taking Quoyle back as a
special favor. Temporary ... Fired, car wash attendant, rehired.
Fired, cabdriver, rehired." Not even Proulx's fans will go so far as
to praise this aspect of her writing, but they probably share her
impatience to cut to the "lyrical" chase.
Many of Proulx's characters are described almost exclusively in terms
of regional or ethnic origin. From Accordion Crimes:
[Chris] wore a pair of dark glasses and began to run with a bunch of
cholos, especially with a rough called "Venas," a black mole on his
left nostril, someone who poured money into his white Buick with the
crushed velvet upholstery, whose father, Paco Robelo, the whole Robelo
family, were rumored to be connected with narcotraficantes.
Venas is one of many characters to be introduced in a flurry of words
and then dropped from the narrative. We hear no more of this Latin
stereotype until several years and pages later, when the author, as if
realizing she didn't need him in the first place, notes in an offhand
sentence that he was found clubbed to death. We are not meant to care
who did it or why, or how the death affects Chris. So why did we need
to know the exact location of the man's mole, or his father's first
name? If the lapping aprons are fake Dylan Thomas, an effort to
mystify readers into thinking they are reading poetry, then this is
fake Dos Passos, easy detail flung in for the illusion of panoramic
sweep. Alas, Proulx is only cheating herself. By putting everything in
sharp focus she lessens the impact of her vivid sense of locale. Some
of the personal details, too, especially in The Shipping News, are so
brilliant that they cry out for more breathing room-such as the
information, which is somehow both funny and sad at the same time,
that a man's cheap wet socks have dyed his toenails blue.
Of course, one can hardly blame Proulx for thinking, "If it ain't
broke, why fix it?" Her novel Postcards (1992) received the
PEN/Faulkner Award; The Shipping News won both the National Book Award
and a Pulitzer Prize. Her writing, like that of so many other
novelists today, is touted as "evocative" and "compelling." The reason
these vague attributes have become the literary catchwords of our
time, even more popular than "raw" and "angry" were in the 1950s, is
that they allow critics to praise a writer's prose without considering
its effect on the reader. It is easier to call writing like Proulx's
lyrically evocative or poetically compelling than to figure out what
it evokes, or what it compels the reader to think and feel. How can
Close Range really impart a sense of life in Wyoming when
everything-from the loneliness of the plains to the grisly violence it
actuates-is described in the same razzle-dazzle style, the same jumpy
rhythms? And why should we care about characters whose gruesome deaths
and injuries are treated only as a pretext for more wordplay?
The critics' admiration for Proulx reflects a growing consensus that
the best prose is that which yields the greatest number of standout
sentences, regardless of whether or not they fit the context. (In The
New York Times the critic Richard Eder quoted with approval a flashy
excerpt from Close Range about a car trip that the characters
themselves do not appear to find remarkable at all.) Proulx's
sentences are often praised for having a life of their own: they
"dance and coil, slither and pounce" (K. Francis Tanabe, The
Washington Post), "every single sentence surprises and delights and
just bowls you over" (Carolyn See, The Washington Post), a Proulx
sentence "whistles and snaps" (Dan Cryer, Newsday). In 1999 Tanabe
kicked off the Post's online discussion of Proulx's work by asking
participants to join him in "choosing your favorite sentence(s) from
any of the stories in Close Range." I doubt that any reviewer in our
more literate past would have expected people to have favorite
sentences from a work of prose fiction. A favorite character or scene,
sure; a favorite line of dialogue, maybe; but not a favorite sentence.
We have to read a great book more than once to realize how
consistently good the prose is, because the first time around, and
often even the second, we're too involved in the story to notice. If
Proulx's fiction is so compelling, why are its fans more impressed by
individual sentences than by the whole?
"MUSCULAR" PROSE
he masculine counterpart to the ladies' prose poetry is a bold,
Melvillean stiltedness, better known to readers of book reviews as
"muscular" prose. Charles Frazier, Frederick Busch, and many other
novelists write in this idiom, but the acknowledged granddaddy of them
all is Cormac McCarthy. In fairness, it must be said that McCarthy's
style was once very different. The Orchard Keeper (1965), his debut
novel, is a masterpiece of careful and restrained writing. An excerpt
from the first page:
Far down the blazing strip of concrete a small shapeless mass had
emerged and was struggling toward him. It loomed steadily, weaving and
grotesque like something seen through bad glass, gained briefly the
form and solidity of a pickup truck, whipped past and receded into the
same liquid shape by which it came.
There's not a word too many in there, and although the tone is hardly
conversational, the reader is addressed as the writer's equal, in a
natural cadence and vocabulary. Note also how the figurative language
(like something seen through bad glass) is fresh and vivid without
seeming to strain for originality.
Now read this from McCarthy's The Crossing (1994), part of the
acclaimed Border Trilogy: "He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the
plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the
coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her."
Thriller writers know enough to save this kind of syntax for
fast-moving scenes: "... and his shout of fear came as a bloody gurgle
and he died, and Wolff felt nothing" (Ken Follett, The Key to Rebecca,
1980). In McCarthy's sentence the unpunctuated flow of words bears no
relation to the slow, methodical nature of what is being described.
And why repeat tortilla? When Hemingway wrote "small birds blew in the
wind and the wind turned their feathers" ("In Another Country," 1927),
he was, as David Lodge points out in The Art of Fiction (1992),
creating two sharp images in the simplest way he could. The repetition
of wind, in subtly different senses, heightens the immediacy of the
referent while echoing other reminders of Milan's windiness in the
fall. McCarthy's second tortilla, in contrast, is there, like the
syntax, to draw attention to the writer himself. For all the sentence
tells us, it might as well be this: "He ate the last of the eggs. He
wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate it. He drank the last of the
coffee and wiped his mouth. He looked up and thanked her." Had
McCarthy written that, the critics would have taken him to task for
his "workmanlike" prose. But the first version is no more informative
or pleasing to the ear than the second, which can at least be read
aloud in a natural fashion. (McCarthy is famously averse to public
readings.) All the original does is say, "I express myself differently
from you, therefore I am a Writer."
The same message is conveyed by the stern biblical tone that runs
through all of McCarthy's recent novels. Parallelisms and
pseudo-archaic formulations abound: "They caught up and set out each
day in the dark before the day yet was and they ate cold meat and
biscuit and made no fire"; "and they would always be so and never be
otherwise"; "the captain wrote on nor did he look up"; "there rode no
soul save he," and so forth.
The reader is meant to be carried along on the stream of language. In
the New York Times review of The Crossing, Robert Hass praised the
effect: "It is a matter of straight-on writing, a veering accumulation
of compound sentences, stinginess with commas, and a witching
repetition of words ... Once this style is established, firm, faintly
hypnotic, the crispness and sinuousness of the sentences ... gather to
a magic." The key word here is "accumulation." Like Proulx and so many
others today, McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit-and-miss
verbiage than on careful use of just the right words.
While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly
meated heart pumped of who's will and the blood pulsed and the bowels
shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who's will and the stout
thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers
that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations of
who's will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that
stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to
side and the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes
of his eyes where the world burned. (All the Pretty Horses, 1992)
This may get Hass's darkly meated heart pumping, but it's really just
bad poetry formatted to exploit the lenient standards of modern prose.
The obscurity of who's will, which has an unfortunate Dr. Seussian
ring to it, is meant to bully readers into thinking that the author's
mind operates on a plane higher than their own-a plane where it isn't
ridiculous to eulogize the shifts in a horse's bowels.
As a fan of movie westerns, I refuse to quibble with the myth that a
wild landscape can bestow epic significance on the lives of its
inhabitants. But novels tolerate epic language only in moderation. To
record with the same somber majesty every aspect of a cowboy's life,
from a knife fight to his lunchtime burrito, is to create what can
only be described as kitsch. Here we learn that out west even a
hangover is something special.
[They] walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to
stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing
horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they'd ever heard
before. In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the
calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste.
Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A
thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an
autumn pool. (All the Pretty Horses)
It is a rare passage that can make you look up, wherever you may be,
and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough
Candid Camera prank. I can just go along with the idea that horses
might mistake human retching for the call of wild animals. But "wild
animals" isn't epic enough: McCarthy must blow smoke about some rude
provisional species, as if your average quadruped had impeccable table
manners and a pension plan. Then he switches from the horses'
perspective to the narrator's, though just what something imperfect
and malformed refers to is unclear. The last half sentence only
deepens the confusion. Is the thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace
the same thing that is lodged in the heart of being? And what is a
gorgon doing in a pool? Or is it peering into it? And why an autumn
pool? I doubt if McCarthy can explain any of this; he probably just
likes the way it sounds.
No novelist with a sense of the ridiculous would write such nonsense.
Although his characters sometimes rib one another, McCarthy is among
the most humorless writers in American history. In this excerpt the
subject is horses.
He said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely
than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only
learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart
has no shape to hold ... Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of
horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could
be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse
because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only
forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal ... Finally John Grady
asked him if it were not true that should all horses vanish from the
face of the earth the soul of the horse would not also perish for
there would be nothing out of which to replenish it but the old man
only said that it was pointless to speak of there being no horses in
the world for God would not permit such a thing. (All the Pretty
Horses)
The further we get from our cowboy past, the loonier becomes the
hippophilia we attribute to it. More to the point, especially
considering The New York Times's praise of All the Pretty Horses for
its "realistic dialogue," is the stiltedness with which the
conversation is reproduced. The cowboys are supposed to be talking to
a Mexican in Spanish, which is a stretch to begin with, but from the
tone in which the conversation is set down you'd think it was ancient
Hebrew. And shouldn't Grady satisfy our curiosity by finding out what
a horse's soul looks like, instead of pursuing a hypothetical point of
equine theology? You half expect him to ask how many horses' souls can
fit on the head of a pin.
All the Pretty Horses received the National Book Award in 1992. "Not
until now," the judges wrote in their fatuous citation, "has the
unhuman world been given its own holy canon." What a difference a
pseudo-biblical style makes; this so-called canon has little more to
offer than the conventional belief that horses, like dogs, serve us
well enough to merit exemption from an otherwise sweeping disregard
for animal life. (No one ever sees a cow's soul.) McCarthy's fiction
may be less fun than the "genre" western, but its world view is much
the same. So is the cast of characters: the quiet cowboys, the women
who "like to see a man eat," the howling savages. (In fairness to the
western: McCarthy's depiction of Native Americans in Blood Meridian
[1985] is far more offensive than anything in Louis L' Amour.) The
critics, however, are too much impressed by the muscles of his prose
to care about the heart underneath. Even The Village Voice has called
McCarthy "a master stylist, perhaps without equal in American
letters." Robert Hass wrote much of his review of The Crossing in an
earnest imitation of McCarthy's style:
The boys travel through this world, tipping their hats, saying
"yessir" and "nosir" and "si" and "es verdad" and "claro" to all its
potential malice, its half-mad philosophers, as the world washes over
and around them, and the brothers themselves come to be as much
arrested by the gesture of the quest as the old are by their stores of
bitter wisdom and the other travelers, in the middle of life, in
various stages of the arc between innocence and experience, by
whatever impulses have placed them on the road.
The vagueness of that encomium must annoy McCarthy, who prides himself
on the way he tackles "issues of life and death" head on. In
interviews he presents himself as a man's man with no time for
pansified intellectuals-a literary version, if you will, of Dave
Thomas, the smugly parochial old-timer in the Wendy's commercials. It
would be both unfair and a little too charitable to suggest that this
is just a pose. When McCarthy says of Marcel Proust and Henry James,
"I don't understand them. To me, that's not literature," I have a
sinking feeling he's telling the truth.
"EDGY" PROSE
ot all contemporary writing is marked by the Proulx-McCarthy brand of
obscurity. Many novels intimidate readers by making them wonder not
what the writer is saying but why he is saying it. Here, for example,
is the opener to Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985).
The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed
through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange
I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the
station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full
of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes,
stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and
sleeping bags, with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western
saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped,
students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the
objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small
refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and
cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets,
soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the
controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk
food still in shopping bags-onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins,
peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee
popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.
This is the sort of writing, full of brand names and wardrobe
inventories, that critics like to praise as an "edgy" take on the
insanity of modern American life. It's hard to see what is so edgy
about describing suburbia as a wasteland of stupefied shoppers, which
is something left-leaning social critics have been doing since the
1950s. Still, this is foolproof subject matter for a novelist of
limited gifts. If you find the above shopping list fascinating, then
DeLillo's your man. If you complain that it's just dull, and that you
got the message about a quarter of the way through, he can always
counter by saying, "Hey, I don't make the all-inclusive,
consumption-mad society. I just report on it."
Of course the narrator, a professor called Jack Gladney, can't
actually see what's inside the students' bags; he's just trying to be
funny. So is there really a caravan of station wagons, or is that also
a joke? How much of the above passage, for that matter, are we even
supposed to bother visualizing? Similar questions nag at the reader
throughout White Noise. We are no sooner introduced to Jack and his
wife than their conversation marks them as paper-flat contrivances.
"It's the day of the station wagons." ...
"It's not the station wagons I wanted to see. What are the people
like? Do the women wear plaid skirts, cable-knit sweaters? Are the men
in hacking jackets? What's a hacking jacket?"
No real person would utter those last two questions in sequence.
DeLillo's characters talk and act like the aliens in 3rd Rock From the
Sun, which would be fine if we weren't supposed to accept them as
dead-on satires of the way we live now. The American supermarket is
presented as a haven of womblike contentment, a place where people go
to satisfy deep emotional needs. (In a New York Times interview after
the novel's publication DeLillo elaborated on the theme by comparing
supermarkets to churches.) This sort of patronizing nonsense is
typical of Consumerland writers; someone should break the news to them
that the average shopper feels nothing in a supermarket but the strong
urge to get out again. White Noise also continues a long intellectual
tradition of exaggerating the effects of advertising. Here Steffie,
the narrator's young daughter, talks in her sleep.
She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the
same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a
verbal spell or ecstatic chant.
Toyota Celica.
A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an
automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful
and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of
an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform ... Whatever
its source, the utterance struck me with the impact of a moment of
splendid transcendence.
DeLillo has said that he wants to impart a sense of the "magic and
dread" lurking in our consumer culture, but what a poor job he does of
this! There is so little apparent wonder in the girl's words that only
a metaphor drawn from recognizable human experience could induce us to
share Jack's excitement. Instead we are told of an un-named name
carved on a tablet in the sky, and in cuneiform to boot. The effect of
all this is so uninvolving, so downright silly, that it baffles even
sympathetic readers. It is left to real-life professors to explain the
passage in light of what DeLillo has said in interviews and other
novels about how people use words to assuage a fear of death. Cornel
Bonca, of California State University, writes, "If we see Steffie's
outburst as an example of the death-fear speaking through consumer
jargon, then Jack's wondrous awe will strike us, strange as it may
seem, as absolutely appropriate." A good novelist, of course, would
have written the scene more persuasively in the first place. Far
stranger things happen in Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls (1842), but we
don't need an academic intermediary to argue their plausibility or to
explain what Gogol was getting at.
In this excerpt from White Noise, Jack and his family go shopping.
In the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those
crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar
package designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family
bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of
replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and
contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls-it
seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people
who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks
in the evening.
Could the irony be any less subtle? And the tautology: mass,
plenitude, number; well-being, contentment! The clumsy echoes: size,
sizes; familiar, family; sense of, sense of; well-being, being! I
wouldn't put it past DeLillo's apologists to claim that this
repetition is meant to underscore the superfluity of goods in the
supermarket. The fact remains that here, as in the Toyota Celica
scene, the novel tries to convey the magical appeal of consumerism in
prose that is simply flat and tiresome.
At least that paragraph is coherent. Most of the author's thoughts,
regardless of which character is speaking them, take the form of
disjointed strings of elliptical statements. This must be what
satisfies critics that they are in the presence of a challenging
writer-but more often than not "the dry shrivelled kernel," to borrow
a line from Anne Brontė, "scarcely compensates for the trouble of
cracking the nut." Here, for example, Jack Gladney tells a woman why
he gave his child the name Heinrich.
"I thought it was forceful and impressive ... There's something about
German names, the German language, German things. I don't know what it
is exactly. It's just there. In the middle of it all is Hitler, of
course."
"He was on again last night."
"He's always on. We couldn't have television without him."
"They lost the war," she said. "How great could they be?"
"A valid point. But it's not a question of greatness. It's not a
question of good and evil. I don't know what it is. Look at it this
way. Some people always wear a favorite color. Some people carry a
gun. Some people put on a uniform and feel bigger, stronger, safer.
It's in this area that my obsessions dwell."
So Gladney thinks there is something forceful about German names. This
is such a familiar idea that we naturally assume DeLillo is going to
do more with it. Instead he gives us a frivolous non sequitur about
television, followed by a clumsy rehashing of the first point. If the
narrator's obsessions dwell "in this area," shouldn't he be able to
tell us something we don't know, instead of "Some people put on a
uniform and feel bigger, stronger, safer"?
From the archives:
"An Urban History of Mid-Century America" (October 1997)
A Dantean Novel, to be talked about for years to come. (A review of
Don Delillo's Underworld.) By Tom LeClair
Another source of spurious profundity is DeLillo's constant allusions
to momentous feelings and portents-allusions that are either left
hanging in the air or are conveniently cut short by a narrative
pretext. Jack ponders the clutter in his house: "Why do these
possessions carry such sorrowful weight? There is a darkness attached
to them, a foreboding. They make me wary not of personal failure and
defeat but of something more general, something large in scope and
content." What is this something large in scope and content ? We are
never told. Later Jack registers "floating nuances of being" between
him and his stepdaughter. Similar phrases turn up throughout DeLillo's
novels; they are perhaps the most consistent element of his style. In
Underworld (1997) a man's mouth fills with "the foretaste of massive
inner shiftings"; another character senses "some essential streak of
self"; the air has "the feel of some auspicious design"; and so on.
This is the safe, catchall vagueness of astrologists and palm readers.
DeLillo also adds rhetorical questions or other disclaimers to throw
his meaning out of focus. Here, to return to White Noise, is another
of Jack's musings.
"We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that
all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of
the plot."
Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?
The first and third of those questions are easily answered; after all,
we edge nearer death every time we do anything. So why, indeed, does
Jack say this? Because DeLillo knew it would seem profoundly original
to most of his readers. Then he added those questions to keep the
critical minority from charging him with banality.
Interspersed with these ruminations we get long conversations of the
who's-on-first? variety. These only highlight the sameness of the
characters' speech. Young and old, male and female, all sound alike.
"What do you want to do?" she said.
"Whatever you want to do."
"I want to do whatever's best for you."
"What's best for me is to please you," I said.
"I want to make you happy, Jack."
"I'm happy when I'm pleasing you."
"I just want to do what you want to do."
"I want to do whatever's best for you."
And so on. To anyone who calls that excruciating, DeLillo might well
respond, "That's my whole point! This is communication in
Consumerland!" It isn't unlikely, considering how the dialogue loses
its logic halfway through, that the whole thing was written only to be
skimmed anyway. Like the bursts of brand names that occur throughout
the text ("Tegrin, Denorex, Selsun Blue"), this is more evidence of
DeLillo's belief-apparently shared by Mark Leyner, Brett Easton Ellis,
and others-that writing trite and diffuse prose is a brilliant way to
capture the trite and diffuse nature of modern life.
But why should we bother with Consumerland fiction at all, if the
effect of reading it is the same queasy fatigue we can get from an
evening of channel-surfing? Do we need writers like DeLillo for their
insight, which rarely rises above the level of "some people put on a
uniform and feel bigger"? Or do we need them for an ironic perspective
that most of us acquired in childhood, when we first started sneering
at commercials? Yes on both counts, according to the jurors of the
National Book Award, who gave White Noise the nod in 1985. The novel's
inflated reputation remains a clear signal that we should expect less
from contemporary fiction than from books written in our grandparents'
day. Just as it is now enough for a prose poet to be vaguely
"evocative," it is enough for an intellectual writer to point our
thoughts in a familiar direction. Jayne Anne Phillips praised White
Noise in The New York Times in 1985 for choosing to "offer no answers"
and instead posing "inescapable questions with consummate skill." She
also said, "[The narrator of White Noise] is one of the most ironic,
intelligent, grimly funny voices yet to comment on life in present-day
America. This is an America where no one is responsible or in control;
all are receptors, receivers of stimuli, consumers." In other words,
this is an America that Andy Warhol began commenting on in the 1960s,
and in far more coherent fashion. Warhol even wrote better, for God's
sake. But then, where would Notable New Fiction be without the willing
suspension of cultural literacy?
Most of DeLillo's admirers hedge their bets by praising his style-or,
my favorite, his "analytic rigor" (Jay McInerney)-while offering only
a phrase or two of textual evidence. Phillips at least had the guts to
quote a lengthy excerpt from White Noise in which a character holds
forth on the semiotics of-what else?-the supermarket.
"Everything is concealed in symbolism ... The large doors slide open,
they close unbidden. Energy waves, incident radiation ... code words
and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering ... Not
that we would want to ... This is not Tibet ... Tibetans try to see
death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. This
simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can
proceed calmly to die ... We don't have to cling to life artificially,
or to death ... We simply walk toward the sliding doors ... Look how
well-lighted everything is ... sealed off ... timeless. Another reason
why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet ... Chants, numerology,
horoscopes, recitations. Here we don't die, we shop. But the
difference is less marked than you think."
That couldn't be rendered any less coherent if the sentences were
mixed up in a hat and pulled out again at random. I hasten to add that
Phillips made those ellipses herself, in a brave attempt to isolate a
logical thought from the original mess. All the same, she presented
the above as evidence of DeLillo's "understanding and perception of
America's soundtrack." This is the irony of Consumerland fiction: its
fans are even more helpless in the presence of authoritative
posturing, and even more terrified of saying "I don't understand,"
than the shoppers they feel so superior to.
Throughout DeLillo's career critics have called his work funny:
"absurdly comic ... laugh-out-loud funny" (Michiko Kakutani), "grimly
funny" (Phillips). And most seem to agree with Christopher
Lehmann-Haupt that White Noise is "one of Don DeLillo's funniest." At
the same time, they refuse to furnish examples of what they find so
amusing. I have a notion it's things like "Are the men in hacking
jackets? What's a hacking jacket?" but it would be unfair to assert
this without evidence. Luckily for our purposes, Mark Osteen, in an
introduction to a recent edition of the novel, singles out the
following conversation as one of the best bits of "sparkling dialogue"
in this "very funny" book. It is telling that the same cultural elite
that never quite "got" the British comic novel should split its sides
at this.
"I will read," she said. "But I don't want you to choose anything that
has men inside women, quote-quote, or men entering women. 'I entered
her.' 'He entered me.' We're not lobbies or elevators. 'I wanted him
inside me,' as if he could crawl completely in, sign the register,
sleep, eat, so forth. Can we agree on that? I don't care what these
people do as long as they don't enter or get entered."
"Agreed."
"'I entered her and began to thrust.'"
"I'm in total agreement," I said.
"'Enter me, enter me, yes, yes.'"
"Silly usage, absolutely."
"'Insert yourself, Rex. I want you inside me, entering hard ...'"
And so on. Osteen would probably have groaned at that exchange if it
had turned up on Sex and the City. The fuss he makes over it in this
context is a good example of how pathetically grateful readers can be
when they discover-lo and behold!-that a "literary" author is actually
trying to entertain them for a change.
"SPARE" PROSE
nyone who doubts the declining literacy of book reviewers need only
consider how the gabbiest of all prose styles is invariably praised as
"lean," "spare," even "minimalist." I am referring, of course, to the
Paul Auster School of Writing.
It was dark in the room when he woke up. Quinn could not be sure how
much time had passed-whether it was the night of that day or the night
of the next. It was even possible, he thought, that it was not night
at all. Perhaps it was merely dark inside the room, and outside,
beyond the window, the sun was shining. For several moments he
considered getting up and going to the window to see, but then he
decided it did not matter. If it was not night now, he thought, then
night would come later. That was certain, and whether he looked out
the window or not, the answer would be the same. On the other hand, if
it was in fact night here in New York, then surely the sun was shining
somewhere else. In China, for example, it was no doubt mid-afternoon,
and the rice farmers were mopping sweat from their brows. Night and
day were no more than relative terms; they did not refer to an
absolute condition. At any given moment it was always both. The only
reason we did not know it was because we could not be in two places at
the same time. (City of Glass, 1985)
This could be said in half as many words, but then we might feel even
more inclined to ask why it needs to be said at all. (Who ever thought
of night and day as an absolute condition anyway?) The flat, laborious
wordiness signals that this is avant-garde stuff, to miss the point of
which would put us on the level of the morons who booed Le Sacre du
Printemps. But what is the point? Is the passage meant to be banal, in
order to trap philistines into complaining about it, thereby leaving
the cognoscenti to relish the irony on some postmodern level? Or is
there really some hidden significance to all this time-zone business?
The point, as Auster's fans will tell you, is that there can be no
clear answers to such questions; fiction like City of Glass urges us
to embrace the intriguing ambiguities that fall outside the framework
of the conventional novel. All interpretations of the above passage
are allowed, even encouraged-except, of course, for the most obvious
one: that Auster is simply wasting our time.
This is another example of what passes for thought in his fiction.
"Remember what happened to the father of our country. He chopped down
the cherry tree, and then he said to his father, 'I cannot tell a
lie.' Soon thereafter, he threw the coin across the river. These two
stories are crucial events in American history. George Washington
chopped down the tree and then he threw away the money. Do you
understand? He was telling us an essential truth. Namely, that money
doesn't grow on trees." (City of Glass)
It's always risky to identify a novelist's thoughts with his
characters', but the prevalence of these free-associative parlor games
in Auster's fiction suggests that he finds them either amusing or
profound. This is from Moon Palace (1989).
One thought kept giving way to another, spiraling into ever larger
masses of connectedness. The idea of voyaging into the unknown, for
example, and the parallels between Columbus and the astronauts. The
discovery of America as a failure to reach China; Chinese food and my
empty stomach; thought, as in food for thought, and the head as a
palace of dreams. I would think: the Apollo Project; Apollo, the god
of music ... It went on and on like that, and the more I opened myself
to these secret correspondences, the closer I felt to understanding
some fundamental truth about the world. I was going mad, perhaps, but
I nevertheless felt a tremendous power surging through me, a gnostic
joy that penetrated deep into the heart of things. Then, very
suddenly, as suddenly as I had gained this power, I lost it.
That talk of secret correspondences and gnostic joy appears aimed at
making trusting readers think there must be some insight here that
they are too dim to grasp. For the rest of us the narrator includes a
disclaimer: "I was going mad, perhaps." Like DeLillo, Auster knows the
prime rule of pseudo-intellectual writing: the harder it is to be
pinned down on any idea, the easier it is to conceal that one has no
ideas at all.
What gives Auster away is his weakness for facetious displays of
erudition. In passages like the following it becomes so clear what
Nabokovian effect he is trying for, and so clear that he can't pull it
off, that the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
When I met Kitty Wu, she called me by several other names ... Foggy,
for example, which was used only on special occasions, and Cyrano,
which developed for reasons that will become clear later. Had Uncle
Victor lived to meet her, I'm sure he would have appreciated the fact
that Marco, in his own small way, had at last set foot in China. (Moon
Palace)
By falling in love with a Chinese woman, the narrator can perhaps be
said to have "discovered" China, though God knows that's awful enough,
but set foot in it? It is no mean feat to be precious and clumsy at
the same time. More examples:
[At school the name] Fogg lent itself to a host of spontaneous
mutilations: Fag and Frog, for example, along with countless
meteorological references: Snowball Head, Slush Man, Drizzle Mouth.
(Moon Palace)
... a new tonality had crept into the bronchial music-something tight
and flinty and percussive- ... (Timbuktu, 1999)
Was Mr. Bones an angel trapped in the flesh of a dog? Willy thought so
... How else to interpret the celestial pun that echoed in his mind
night and day? To decode the message, all you had to do was hold it up
to a mirror. Could anything be more obvious? Just turn around the
letters of the word dog, and what did you have? The truth, that's
what. (Timbuktu)
Nobody's perfect. But why should we forgive a writer for trying to
pass off a schoolboy anagram as a celestial pun, or snowball as a
meteorological reference, or tonality as a synonym for "tone," when he
himself is trying so hard to draw attention to his fancy-pants
language? Even worse is the way he abuses philosophical terms.
According to him, [the name Marco Stanley Fogg] proved that travel was
in my blood, that life would carry me to places where no man had ever
been before. Marco, naturally enough, was for Marco Polo, the first
European to visit China; Stanley was for the American journalist who
had tracked down Dr. Livingstone "in the heart of darkest Africa"; and
Fogg was for Phileas, the man who had stormed around the globe in less
than three months ... In the short run, Victor's nominalism helped me
to survive the difficult first few weeks in my new school. (Moon
Palace)
This is for people who know only that nominalism has something to do
with names. In fact the nominalists argued that just because words
exist for generalities like humanity doesn't mean that these
generalities exist. What does that have to do with Uncle Victor's
talk?
Another hallmark of Auster's style, and of contemporary American prose
in general, is tautology. Swing the hammer often enough, and you're
bound to hit the nail on the head-or so the logic seems to run.
His body burst into dozens of small pieces, and fragments of his
corpse were found ... (Leviathan, 1992)
Blue can only surmise what the case is not. To say what it is,
however, is completely beyond him. (Ghosts, 1986)
My father was tight; my mother was extravagant. She spent; he didn't.
(Hand to Mouth, 1997)
Inexpressible desires, intangible needs, and unarticulated longings
all passed through the money box and came out as real things, palpable
objects you could hold in your hand. (Hand to Mouth)
Still and all, Mr. Bones was a dog. From the tip of his tail to the
end of his snout, he was a pure example of Canis familiaris, and
whatever divine presence he might have harbored within his skin, he
was first and foremost the thing he appeared to be. Mr. Bow Wow,
Monsieur Woof Woof, Sir Cur. (Timbuktu)
This sort of thing is everywhere, and yet the relative shortness of
Auster's sentences has always fooled critics into thinking that he
never wastes a word. His style has been praised as "brisk, precise"
(The New York Times) and "straightforward, almost invisible" (The
Village Voice). Dennis Drabelle, in The Washington Post, called it
"always economical-clipped, precise, the last word in gnomic control,"
which looks like something Auster wrote himself.
The creator of Monsieur Woof Woof has also received the Morton Dauwen
Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and
Letters. (Why he still hasn't received the National Book Award I
cannot imagine.) Critics compare him to Kafka, but it is from Borges
that Auster borrows his allegories (detective work, biographical
research) and his favorite theme: the impossibility of ever really
knowing anything. This is an unwise choice of material, because he is
not enough of a thinker to convey the fun that makes intellectual
exercise worthwhile after all. The gnostic correspondences between
Chinese food and food for thought; dog spelled backwards is god-this
is philosophical writing?
Then again, Auster is commercially successful precisely because he
offers so much cachet in return for so little concentration. Whole
chapters can be skimmed with impunity. He creates a dog that
understands English perfectly, only to describe how it likes to sniff
excrement. He christens his hero Marco Stanley Fogg, a name portending
lots of onomastic exposition and tales of playground cruelty, and then
spends pages giving us just that. A man counts his books (why?) and
finds that there are precisely 1,492 of them, and his nephew is going
to a certain university in New York City. "A propitious number, I
think, since it evokes ..." Go on. Take a wild guess.
GENERIC "LITERARY" PROSE
thriller must thrill or it is worthless; this is as true now as it
ever was. Today's "literary" novel, on the other hand, need only
evince a few quotable passages to be guaranteed at least a lukewarm
review. This reflects both the growing influence of the sentence cult
and a desire to reward novelists for aiming high. It is perhaps
natural, therefore, that the "literary" camp now attracts a type of
risk-averse writer who, under different circumstances, might never
have strayed from the safest thriller or romance formulae. Many
critically acclaimed novels today are no more than mediocre "genre"
stories told in a conformist amalgam of approved "literary" styles.
Every amalgam is a little different, of course; what unites these
writers and separates them from the rest of the "literary" camp is the
determinedly slow tempo of their prose. They seem to know that in
leaner and livelier form their courtroom dramas, geisha memoirs, and
horse-whisperer romances would not be taken seriously, and that it is
precisely the lack of genre-ish suspense that elevates them to the
status of prize-worthy "tales of loss and redemption."
The most successful of these writers is David Guterson, who was
recently named by the tony journal Granta as one of America's twenty
best young novelists. This is from Snow Falling on Cedars (1994),
which won the PEN/Faulkner and spent more than a year on the New York
Times best-seller list.
He didn't like very many people anymore or very many things, either.
He preferred not to be this way, but there it was, he was like that.
His cynicism-a veteran's cynicism-was a thing that disturbed him all
the time ... It was not even a thing you could explain to anybody, why
it was that everything was folly. People appeared enormously foolish
to him. He understood that they were only animated cavities full of
jelly and strings and liquids. He had seen the insides of jaggedly
ripped-open dead people. He knew, for instance, what brains looked
like spilling out of somebody's head. In the context of this, much of
what went on in normal life seemed wholly and disturbingly ridiculous
... He sensed [people's] need to extend sympathy to him, and this
irritated him even more. The arm was a grim enough thing without that,
and he felt sure it was entirely disgusting. He could repel people if
he chose by wearing to class a short-sleeved shirt that revealed the
scar tissue on his stump. He never did this, however. He didn't
exactly want to repel people. Anyway, he had this view of things-that
most human activity was utter folly, his own included, and that his
existence in the world made others nervous. He could not help but
possess this unhappy perspective, no matter how much he might not want
it. It was his and he suffered from it numbly.
I apologize for the length of that excerpt, but it takes more than a
few sentences to demonstrate the repetitive sluggishness of Guterson's
prose. Michael Crichton could have given us the same stock character
of the Alienated Veteran in one of those thumbnail descriptions he's
always getting slammed for, but Guterson seems intent on dragging
everything out.
The word thing is used to add bulk. "You could not explain to anybody
why everything was folly" becomes It was not even a thing you could
explain to anybody, why it was that everything was folly. "His
cynicism disturbed him" becomes His cynicism ... was a thing that
disturbed him. "He believed that" becomes he had this view of
things-that. There is plenty of unnecessary emphasis, the classic sign
of a writer who lacks confidence: "enormously foolish," "wholly ...
ridiculous," "entirely disgusting." There are sentences that seem to
serve no purpose at all: "He could repel people if he chose by wearing
to class a short-sleeved shirt that revealed the scar tissue on his
stump. He never did this, however. He didn't exactly want to repel
people. Anyway ..." Almost every thought is echoed: "He preferred not
to be this way, but there it was, he was like that ... He could not
help but possess this unhappy perspective, no matter how much he might
not want it." And "... everything was folly. People appeared
enormously foolish to him ... In the context of this, much of what
went on in normal life seemed wholly and disturbingly ridiculous ...
Anyway, he had this view of things-that most human activity was utter
folly ..." You could study that passage all day and find no trace of a
flair for words. Many readers, however, including the folks at Granta,
are willing to buy into the scam that anything this dull must be
Serious and therefore Fine and therefore Beautiful Writing.
Like Cormac McCarthy, to whom he is occasionally compared, Guterson
thinks it more important to sound literary than to make sense. This is
the oft-quoted opening to East of the Mountains (1999).
On the night he had appointed his last among the living, Dr. Ben
Givens did not dream, for his sleep was restless and visited by
phantoms who guarded the portal to the world of dreams by speaking
relentlessly of this world. They spoke of his wife-now dead-and of his
daughter, of silent canyons where he had hunted birds, of august peaks
he had once ascended, of apples newly plucked from trees, and of
vineyards in the foothills of the Apennines. They spoke of rows of
campanino apples near Monte Della Torraccia; they spoke of cherry
trees on river slopes and of pear blossoms in May sunlight.
Now, if the doctor's sleep was visited by phantoms (visited, mind you,
not "interrupted"), then surely he was dreaming after all? Or were the
phantoms keeping him awake? But isn't restless sleep still sleep? The
answer, of course, is that it doesn't matter one way or the other:
Guterson is just swinging a pocket watch in front of our eyes. "You're
in professional hands," he's saying, "for only a Serious Writer would
express himself so sonorously. Now read on, and remember, the mood's
the thing."
What follows is a Proulx-style succession of images. By the end of the
third sentence, with its cherry trees, pear blossoms, and still more
apples, the accumulation of pedestrian phrases is supposed to have
fooled the reader into thinking that a lyrical effect has been
created. The ruse is painfully obvious here. Proulx would at least
have drawn the line at something as stale as august peaks-especially
in an opening paragraph. (She would also have avoided the clumsy echo
of restless and relentlessly.)
It is from Auster, however, that Guterson seems to have learned how to
create writerly cadences through tautology: "a clash of sound,
discordant," "an immediate blunder, a faux pas," "Wyman was gay, a
homosexual," "She could see that he was angry, that he was holding it
in, not exposing his rage."
On the positive side, Guterson has more of a storytelling instinct
than many novelists today. Beneath all the verbal rubble in Cedars is
a good murder mystery crying out to be heard-feebly, to be sure, but
still loud enough for The New York Times to have denied the book its
"non-genre" bonus of a second review. Guterson also knows that he has
no gift for figurative language; outbursts like "a labyrinth of
runners as intricate as a network of arteries feeding" are mercifully
rare. As a result he sinks below mediocrity as rarely as he rises
above it. Only the sex scenes, which even his fans lament, are
laughably bad.
"Have you ever done this before?" he whispered.
"Never," answered Hatsue. "You're my only."
The head of his penis found the place it wanted. For a moment he
waited there, poised, and kissed her-he took her lower lip between his
lips and gently held it there. Then with his hands he pulled her to
him and at the same time entered her so that she felt his scrotum slap
against her skin. Her entire body felt the rightness of it, her entire
body was seized to it. Hatsue arched her shoulder blades-her breasts
pressed themselves against his chest-and a slow shudder ran through
her.
"It's right," she remembered whispering. "It feels so right, Kabuo."
"Tadaima aware ga wakatta," he had answered. "I understand just now
the deepest beauty."
If Jackie Collins had written that, reviewers would have had a field
day with You're my only, the searching penis, the shudder's slow run.
Thanks to that scrotum slap, which makes you wonder just what Hatsue's
body felt the rightness of, the passage fails even on a Harlequin
Romance level. But critics gamely overlook the whole mess, because by
this point in the book Guterson has already established himself as a
Serious Writer-mainly by length and somberness, but also by all those
Japanese words.
Almost every fourth amateur reviewer on Amazon.com complains about the
repetitiveness of Snow Falling on Cedars. Kirkus Reviews, on the other
hand, called the 345-page novel "as compact as haiku," and Susan
Kenney, in The New York Times, praised it as "finely wrought and
flawlessly written." The novel is required reading in some college
English classes, and even history students are being urged to read it,
as a source of information about the internment of Japanese-Americans
during World War II. So much, I suppose, for Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
and James D. Houston's Farewell to Manzanar (1973), another good book
displaced from the school canon by a bad one.
NO WAY OUT?
t the 1999 National Book Awards ceremony Oprah Winfrey told of calling
Toni Morrison to say that she had had to puzzle over many of the
latter's sentences. According to Oprah, Morrison's reply was "That, my
dear, is called reading." Sorry, my dear Toni, but it's actually
called bad writing. Great prose isn't always easy, but it's always
lucid; no one of Oprah's intelligence ever had to wonder what Joseph
Conrad was trying to say in a particular sentence. This didn't stop
the talk-show host from quoting her friend's words with approval. In
similar fashion, an amateur reviewer on Amazon.com admitted to having
had trouble with Guterson's short stories: "The fault is largely mine.
I had been reading so many escape novels that I wasn't in shape to
contend with stories full of real thought written in challenging
style."
This is what the cultural elite wants us to believe: if our writers
don't make sense, or bore us to tears, that can only mean that we
aren't worthy of them. In July of last year Bill Goldstein, in The New
York Times, wrote an article putting the blame for the proliferation
of unread best sellers on readers who bite off more "intellectually
intimidating" fare than they can chew. Vince Passaro, writing for
Harper's in 1999, attributed the unpopularity of new short fiction
primarily to the fact that it is "smart"-in contrast (he claimed) to
the short stories of Hemingway's day. Passaro named Rick Moody as a
young talent to watch, and offered this excerpt from "perhaps the best
thing he's written," a short story called "Demonology" (1996).
They came in twos and threes, dressed in the fashionable Disney
costumes of the year, Lion King, Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, or
in the costumes of televised superheroes, Protean, shape-shifting,
thus arrayed, in twos and threes, complaining it was too hot with the
mask on, Hey, I'm really hot!, lugging those orange plastic buckets,
bartering, haggling with one another, Gimme your Smarties, please? as
their parents tarried behind, grownups following after, grownups
bantering about the schools, or about movies, about local sports,
about their marriages, about the difficulties of long marriages; kids
sprinting up the next driveway, kids decked out as demons or
superheroes or dinosaurs or as advertisements for our multinational
entertainment-providers, beating back the restless souls of the dead,
in search of sweets.
By the third line you realize you're back in Consumerland. (Moody says
he was "utterly blown away" by White Noise.) Far from evincing any
challenging content, unless you count those feeble jabs at Disney,
this passage offers a good example of how little concentration is
required by modern "literary" prose. You don't need to remember how
that long, chanting sentence began in order to finish it; after all,
Moody doesn't seem clear on who is beating back the restless souls of
the dead either. (The metaphorical verb implies more awareness of the
dead than can be attributed to either the excited children or their
chattering parents.) You don't even need to read each word, because
everything comes around twice anyway: "Protean, shape-shifting"; "in
twos and threes ... in twos and threes"; "complaining it was too hot
with the mask on, Hey, I'm really hot!"; "as their parents tarried
behind, grownups following after"; "in the costumes of televised
superheroes ... kids decked out as ... superheroes." None of this can
hide Moody's tin ear (Hey, I'm really hot!), his unfamiliarity with
the world of children (who haggle after they get home-and over less
humdrum treats), and the complete absence of sharply observed detail.
All Passaro said to justify quoting that passage was that it combines
"autobiography, story, social commentary, and the irony to see them
all as a single source of pain." (I think I got the pain part.) This
is typical of today's reviewers, who shy away from discussing prose
style at length, even when they are praising it as the main reason to
buy a book. The reader is either told some nonsense about sentences
that "slither and pounce" or given an excerpt in its own graphic box,
with no commentary at all. The critic's implication: "If you can't see
why that's great writing, I'm not going to waste my time trying to
explain." This must succeed in bullying some people, or else all the
purveyors of what the critic Paul Fussell calls the "unreadable
second-rate pretentious" would have been forced to find honest work
long ago. Still, I'll bet that for every three readers who finished
Passaro's article, two made a mental note to avoid new short fiction
like the plague. Even a nation brainwashed to equate artsiness with
art knows when its eyelids are drooping.
People like Passaro, of course, tend to think that anyone indifferent
to the latest "smart" authors must be vegetating in front of the
television, or at best silently mouthing through a Tom Clancy
thriller. The truth is that a lot of us are perfectly happy with
literature written before we were born-and why shouldn't we be? The
notion that contemporary fiction possesses greater relevance for us
because it talks of the Internet or supermodels or familiar brand
names is ridiculous. We can see ourselves reflected more clearly in
Balzac's Parisians than in a modern American who goes into raptures
when his daughter says "Toyota Celica" in her sleep. This is not to
say that traditional realism is the only valid approach to fiction.
But today's Serious Writers fail even on their own postmodern terms.
They urge us to move beyond our old-fashioned preoccupation with
content and plot, to focus on form instead-and then they subject us to
the least-expressive form, the least-expressive sentences, in the
history of the American novel. Time wasted on these books is time that
could be spent reading something fun. When DeLillo describes a man's
walk as a "sort of explanatory shuffle ... a comment on the literature
of shuffles" (Underworld), I feel nothing; the wordplay is just too
insincere, too patently meaningless. But when Vladimir Nabokov talks
of midges "continuously darning the air in one spot," or the "square
echo" of a car door slamming, I feel what Philip Larkin wanted readers
of his poetry to feel: "Yes, I've never thought of it that way, but
that's how it is." The pleasure that accompanies this sensation is
almost addictive; for many, myself included, it's the most important
reason to read both poetry and prose.
Older fiction also serves to remind us of the power of unaffected
English. In this scene from Saul Bellow's The Victim (1947) a man
meets a woman at a Fourth of July picnic.
He saw her running in the women's race, her arms close to her sides.
She was among the stragglers and stopped and walked off the field,
laughing and wiping her face and throat with a handkerchief of the
same material as her silk summer dress. Leventhal was standing near
her brother. She came up to them and said, "Well, I used to be able to
run when I was smaller." That she was still not accustomed to thinking
of herself as a woman, and a beautiful woman, made Leventhal feel very
tender toward her. She was in his mind when he watched the contestants
in the three-legged race hobbling over the meadow. He noticed one in
particular, a man with red hair who struggled forward, angry with his
partner, as though the race were a pain and a humiliation which he
could wipe out only by winning. "What a difference," Leventhal said to
himself. "What a difference in people."
Scenes that show why a character falls in love are rarely convincing
in novels. This one works beautifully, and with none of the
"evocative" metaphor hunting or postmodern snickering that tends to
accompany such scenes today. The syntax is simple but not unnaturally
terse-a point worth emphasizing to those who think that the only
alternative to contemporary writerliness is the plodding style of
Raymond Carver. Bellow's verbal restraint makes the unexpected
repetition of what a difference all the more touching. The entire
novel is marked by the same quiet brilliance. As Christopher Isherwood
once said to Cyril Connolly, real talent manifests itself not in a
writer's affectation but "in the exactness of his observation [and]
the justice of his situations."
It's easy to despair of ever seeing a return to that kind of prose,
especially with the cultural elite doing such a quietly efficient job
of maintaining the status quo. (Rick Moody received an O. Henry Award
for "Demonology" in 1997, whereupon he was made an O. Henry juror
himself. And so it goes.) But the paper chain of mediocrity would
probably perpetuate itself anyway. Clumsy writing begets clumsy
thought, which begets even clumsier writing. The only way out is to
look back to a time when authors had more to say than "I'm a Writer!";
when the novel wasn't just a 300-page caption for the photograph on
the inside jacket. A reorientation toward tradition would benefit
writers no less than readers. In the early twentieth century it was
fashionable in Britain to claim that only a completely new style of
writing could address a world undergoing an unprecedented
transformation-just as the critic Sven Birkerts claimed in a recent
Atlantic Unbound that only the new "aesthetic of exploratory excess"
can address a world undergoing ... well, you know. For all that
Georgian talk of modernity, it was T. S. Eliot, a man fascinated by
the "presence" of the past, who wrote the most-innovative poetry of
his time. The lesson for today's literary community is so obvious that
it may seem patronizing to bring it up. But if our writers and critics
already respect the novel's rich tradition-if they can honestly say
they got more out of Moby-Dick than just a favorite sentence-then why
are they so contemptuous of the urge to tell an exciting story?
Moyer Bell and other small publishers are to be commended for
reissuing so many older novels. It would be even more encouraging if
our national newspapers devoted an occasional full-page review to one
of these new editions-or, for that matter, to any novel that has
lapsed into undeserved obscurity. And modern readers need to see that
intellectual content can be reconciled with a vigorous, fast-moving
plot, as in Budd Schulberg's novel What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) or
John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra (1934). Patrick Hamilton's
Hangover Square (1941) and Roy Fuller's The Second Curtain (1953) are
British psychological thrillers written in careful, unaffectedly
poetic prose; both could appeal to a wide readership here. By the same
token, many of the adults who enjoy Harry Potter would be even happier
with Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy (1946-1959) if they only knew
about it. Suspense fans would be surprised to find how readable
William Godwin's The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) is. Americans
should also be encouraged to overcome their growing aversion to
translated fiction. To discover Shiga Naoya's A Dark Night's Passing
(1937) and Enchi Fumiko's The Waiting Years (1957), two heartbreaking
classics of Japanese fiction, is to realize how little we need a white
man's geisha memoirs.
Feel free to disparage these recommendations, but can anyone outside
of the big publishing houses claim that the mere fact of newness
should entitle a novel to more of our attention? Many readers wrestle
with only one bad book before concluding that they are too dumb to
enjoy anything "challenging." Their first foray into literature
shouldn't have to end, for lack of better advice, on the third page of
something like Underworld. At the very least, the critics could start
toning down their hyperbole. How better to ensure that Faulkner and
Melville remain unread by the young than to invoke their names in
praise of some new bore every week? How better to discourage clear and
honest self-expression than to call Annie Proulx-as Carolyn See did in
The Washington Post-"the best prose stylist working in English now,
bar none"?
Whatever happens, the old American scorn for pretension is bound to
reassert itself someday, and dear God, let it be soon. In the
meantime, I'll be reading the kinds of books that Cormac McCarthy
doesn't understand.
What do you think? Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.
Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; July/August 2001; A Reader's Manifesto; Volume
288, No. 1; 104-122."
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