The shrinking of American fiction

Anis Shivani

On the surface, things appear impressive: the sheer deluge of novels and collections of stories, neatly packaged and ardently publicized, healthy sales, profitability prodding consolidation, a general sense delivered by the reviewing community that a tremendous amount of worthy output continues pouring forth, despite fears about the excessive commercialization of the leading publishing houses. Even first fiction, notoriously difficult to get published, keeps making its regular mark on the general readership's awareness. Critics are generally kindly, and one gets the impression that on the whole American fiction is experiencing boom times. In the overwhelming diversity of American fiction, from Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace on the one hand, to Jonathan Franzen and Anne Tyler on the other, surely there is something for everyone to be proud of, writing you can live by when the hallucinatory entertainments of popular culture have long faded from memory.

You'd be wrong to think all this. Behind the publicity and glitter, and the consistent drumbeat of generous mutual appraisal, there is a sickness, a pervasive unease, and its name is self-involvement. Great fiction takes you from a world you're familiar with to new ones, those that writers offer up as sacrifices to the collective imagination, which must be occasionally placated and refreshed or the gods of dullness and melancholy will exact everlasting revenge on us all. Your own world is defamiliarized. You're unsettled, left questioning the compass points you use to perceive reality, the very nature of reality itself. Great fiction transposes you to realms that you perceive as existing on the borderlines of your imagination, not entirely unbelievable or outrageous, but not part of your normal experience either. Or rather, you didn't perceive the fantastic elements of your ordinary experience until fiction pointed out what was truly worth noting about life itself.

You'll find none of these things, as a general principle, in contemporary American fiction. Obviously, the conditions of production and dissemination, from the time of such life-giving writers as Flannery O'Connor (she played the game well, too, but she had talent to burn) and Richard Yates, have changed drastically in favor of the mild-mannered and fussily polite. The engine of growth in the publishing industry has for some time been the scores of MFA programs--more precisely, the handful of them that disproportionately generate the vast number of new writers, such as the Columbia MFA program, due no doubt to its location in the center of the publishing world--and the writing as a result is bland, uniform, and unappetizing in precisely the way we might expect from such an assembly-line product. Writers in America are no longer part of the ordinary fabric of life; like gigantically sprouting, chemically showered and screened, greenhouse-swamping plants, they've been pulled away from the dirt and soil and filth that nourishes workaday vegetation. These new writers do not understand truck drivers, janitors, salesmen, uneducated housewives, con men, politicians, small-town reporters, violent criminals, and inarticulate teenagers. They do give the impression of being familiar with college professors, suburban adulterers, glitzy yuppie up-and-comers, chicks on the hunt and guys on the run (in New York and L.A.), therapists and counselors, graduate students and hyper-expressive teenagers, and television personalities and writing celebrities.

But they dish their and our familiarity with these types right back to us, without fantastic embellishment. They're realist about these characters in the most regurgitative sense. They accept our ways of perceiving these standard, respectable characters around us, and they reinforce our feelings of self-esteem and conviction, because they dutifully share our mannerisms of knowing and learning. When it appears that some regional fiction is bucking the trend by delving into the minds of characters the typical upper-middle-class reader is not likely to encounter in ordinary life, we discover upon inspection that the whole setup is compromised by a fatal penetration of the psychologies donated to us by popular culture--cheap therapy, cheaper wisdom, and a comfortable complicity with our lack of judgmentalism. Behind the new Southern grotesquerie is a placating middle-class value system. And when writers like George Saunders handle office workers and other deflated species of the post-industrial era, the weirdness hides behind a screen of surreality so thick that the reader feels permitted to observe the apocalyptic spectacle from an armchair distance. The new fiction is inferior because it refuses to strike a superior posture not as a matter of compassion, largeness of spirit, and generosity of mind, but because of the writer's smallness of imagination.

And so, unable to rely on his own sources of wisdom, which may have been left shredded somewhere in the literature seminar or writing workshop or therapist's office, the writer shows us our faces in the mirror of popular culture, with no outside reference point to check its insularity and bleakness. If there is pessimism in this fiction, it is not in the vein of the moral magnificence of Dostoevsky or Beckett; it is that of a tawdry character within Pirandello who is uninformed about his true status as the observed and mistreated, rather than agent of his own belief and action. Even when writers are not being flashily self-conscious, unlike Dave Eggers and Donald Antrim, they always are, for this is the only acceptable mode of being for an American writer in the first years of the twenty-first century. You are always self-conscious of how far you've deviated from the gentleness of conducting your affairs in the style of the vast, undifferentiated mass of people. You harbor from this sense of acquired difference a conviction of territorial or physical, but not spiritual or intellectual, advantage. And you connect with your reading public by offering them the same, tidily familiar and worn-out, intuition of segregation by iterating the material and physical. To the extent that you characterize the obvious, paint pretty descriptive pictures, and never venture into the inner motivations and drives of your borrowed types, you perpetuate the illusion of saying something new, when in fact you're only repeating in more bite-sized measures what the mass media put out by the tonful. You're not only derivative of and dependent on popular culture, but you're worse than it because your rendition isn't even the real thing, in all its lovable lack of self-justification.

There is much discussion these days of the obscurity afflicting literary criticism since it was taken over by theory, and of the pseudo-empirical guise of the social sciences that makes them impenetrable to all but higher specialists, but what about the particular strain of obfuscation affecting literary production? A protection racket exists that doesn't allow the truth to get out. American literary journals explicitly refuse to publish negative reviews for the most part; the whole exercise is one of back-scratching, novelists and story writers favorably reviewing their friends' work. From the New York Times down to the obscurest little magazine, the iconic writers of the age remain immune from lethal criticism. Literary magazines also often explicitly forbid writing about "controversial" subjects, which include politics, economics, race, and sexuality--that is to say, anything of a truly provocative nature--framed in language the genteel writing community is not used to hearing. The reigning dictum of non-controversiality would have excluded most of the great literature of the ages from ever having been published. The stories literary journals publish are usually minimalist nostalgia pieces deriving from Hemingway and Carver--or, in a pinch, Barthelme. And what about the strange creature known as the personal essay, another staple of the American literary journal? This unreadable, pseudo-lyrical form of writing only affirms establishment politeness. The writing retreats, grants, awards, and contests are part of a self-perpetuating mechanism, where only a certain type of writing qualifies as publishable fiction or poetry, and friends are always there to recognize the telltale signs of kindred spirits who have gone through the same rigorous debriefing programs, known as MFA degrees. The incestuous circles that exist for mutual back-patting evoke claustrophobia if pursued to their sources. Dave Eggers is married to Vendela Vida who's part of the Believer circle whose Heidi Julavits wrote a novel that Dave Eggers--you get the point. Because every American who has the time, energy, and money to go through an MFA program possesses the inalienable right to write and publish, the participants must all make nice to each other, and as long as they do that, things will be just fine in the literary world.

This broad explanation offers many clues about the specific content of contemporary American fiction. Have you ever wondered why American literary fiction seems to borrow more and more of its plots from the Lifetime movie channel, even when the originators are acclaimed, prize-winning authors we're assured are in the front ranks of the profession? In collection after collection of stories, and in the vast majority of novels, it seems now that accidents, catastrophic illness (cancer and Alzheimer's being the favorite ones, of course), mental illness, acts of nature (it used to be God), in short, events beyond the control of ordinary mortals (precisely the preoccupations of video spectacle), determine the very shape and structure of the narrative. The characters, despite being trendy cosmopolitan types, are acted upon rather than acting. In some senses, this is analogous to middle-class viewers watching trashy talk shows like Jerry Springer, and doing so with great indulgence because--so the psychologists tell us--it makes us feel superior to the utterly pathetic characters on daily afternoon display. You may have a job that sucks and a spouse that maddens, but at least you have these concrete things to lay claim to, unlike the true losers.

And this is not the only similarity of current American fiction with network television--really, network television of a passe age, before 24/7 cable screamfests and pseudo-news and reality shows. In the age of cloning and artificial intelligence, time stopped somewhere around 1973 for today's American fiction writers.

The pervasive atmosphere in American literary fiction is of an era where the middle class is dominant (it started going into decline after the early seventies, of course, with the oil embargo and stagflation putting into motion a decisive downsliding into permanently declining real wages and insecure entitlements in the limited welfare state), where parents and children visit each other for Thanksgiving and Christmas (and feel upset if they can't make it), where government is of the New Deal, benevolent, unintrusive variety, taking care of you when you fall sick or lose your job (if you have Down's syndrome or Lou Gehrig's disease in an American novel, it won't be the heartless HMO dissing you, but limitless government funds seeing you to melodramatic death), and where the corruption of politics by money, the loss of jobs to globalization, and the passing of a relatively homogenous belief system do not yet seem to have occurred.

The very brand names (and if there is anything defining the tenor of American fiction today, it is the proliferation of product labels to indicate, quickly and cheaply, what we are to take as the foundations of character) seem to predate the frantic age of globalization, when Procter and Gamble might have exercised hegemony over American hearts and minds. Even when middle-class families are falling apart, they seem to do so with consideration for the norms established by polite network television and mainstream Hollywood movies in the era before globalization. The apparent violence is only superficial; it has no internal, inherent sources.

If you go to university in these stories and novels it's as if you were still in a time when financial help was relatively cheap and accessible, when colleges hadn't swung over to the vocational ethic, and when all you had to do to succeed was have a reasonable enough mind to be among those graduates who would assume at least middle-management positions steering America. If you go to elementary and middle and high school, teachers care beyond the call of duty, your strongest and most nostalgic memories have to do with your kind school teachers, and your school friends are for life.

The American writer today puts himself in the position of therapist analyzing himself as deputy for the reader, equally in need of therapy. More than anything, it is the language of therapy that shapes the evolution of plots, leading them to conclusions that one expects in a therapist's office. Thus, if you are an estranged child, it must be due to half-perceived ill gestures of your parents, and your hunt to solve the mystery can never be fully successful. If you are a spouse seemingly inhabiting a prosperous and content life but bent on having an affair, it must be because your spouse commits hurtful actions toward you that are beyond his own capacity to grasp or explain. You cannot look for meaning in philosophy and art; meaning is self-contained in the detritus of your ordinary life, and there is no escape from it. In the most essential sense, a new fatalism is being propounded from the bully pulpits of Random House and Simon & Schuster day in and day out, and one suspects that it is not entirely unintentional on the part of publishers. For this is a philosophy of the strong acting as the weak, and it sits well with those who consume fiction as an act of collective self-propitiation. There cannot be outside reference points, and those that do exist must be severely circumscribed. After a while you come to rely on the codes and signs taking you always back to your own enclosed experience. Isn't it wonderful that the writer, far away in New York or L.A., happens to exactly share those vague half-perceptions of yours, to inhabit the same eternal pool of memories wherein friendship and love retain their old meanings?

A new metaphysical meaning is emerging to the term victim. Victimhood is of the essence of existence itself; it is where art is supposed to find its highest expression. It is no longer something to get over, something to climb out of, but something to hide into, somewhere to roost in the shadow of the real world, and not as a matter of shame but honor. Vendela Vida's And Now You Can Go (Knopf, 2003) enshrines the victim principle as the art of existence, by way of least resistance and Ground-Zero emotion. The lead character, a graduate student in art history at Columbia, is held up at gunpoint by a man in Riverside Park, although she is able to get rid of him without harm to herself when she asks him if he wants to go to a bookstore (somehow, one doesn't imagine writers of the grittier twenties and thirties coming up with a character who'd think of that, at the moment of truth). From then on, the character doesn't so much disintegrate as go through life like a zombie; she lets weird men fuck her, visits alienated parents in San Francisco for Thanksgiving, and embarks on the obligatory cure-all trip to the third world, in this case the Philippines. The character is absolutely emotionless throughout, and yet the writer obviously expects us to empathize with her, or there would be no need to write the novel. The character has no motivation, inner life, even outer life, beyond her permanent status as victim.

The conclusion to this trend of self-therapy is the reduction of plot and story to therapist and patient, and the course of therapy itself. Narrative and treatment must, and have often, become identical, as is evident in novel after novel, story after story, over the last few years. Why not go all the way and institute the therapist himself as the lead character, the mentally ill as constituting the boundaries of the psychic panorama, and have the stories read as case notes taken by the therapist (or sometimes the smarter patient)? Amy Bloom, practicing therapist, has turned this into an art form. Adam Haslett, National Book Award finalist, follows the same procedure in You Are Not a Stranger Here (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2002). We're definitely not strangers here, this is familiar territory. There are bleak case histories of depression, megalomania, obsession, and schizophrenia, several of them having to do with unrelenting guilt about homosexuality, compounded by the sweet agony of loved ones dying from AIDS. The megalomaniac in the first story, "Notes to My Biographer," preempts the wary reader from venturing into the mentally ill's sacred territory. He claims to be "perfectly lucid" and on to the tricks of the "mental health establishment." Haslett is insulating himself, his characters, and his readers from the charge of self-obsession to the point of self-satisfaction. See, Haslett is saying, I know that my maddest character knows about the abuse of Ritalin and other pacifiers. The first act of the astute therapist is to deny omnipotence.

The biggest media event of the summer of 2002 (other than shark attacks) was teen girl abductions, a trumped-up hysteria to fill in the dog days of summer to boost cable ratings. The biggest literary surprise of that year was Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones (Little Brown, 2002), set revealingly in the early seventies as if to sweetly taint that period by the present's obsessions, narrated by a raped and murdered fourteen-year-old from her own private heaven. Critics praised Sebold, the author of a memoir, Lucky, about being raped as a college freshman, for having taken on such a gory subject without letting the story degenerate into sentimental mush. But they missed the point. The pure contentment of the dead girl--if you must know, she is able to return to earth just long enough to lose her virginity, in the body of Ruth, the girl who most cared for her--is beyond cheap sentiment, anything mere popular media are capable of. After first making us scared, as nightly news is apt to, that there are rapists and serial killers lurking around every harmless corner, we're being told that in the end there's nothing to worry about. The prematurely dead do not resent being so. Each person gets to work out unfinished business, and meanwhile inhabit a custom-made heaven. America was primed to hear this message the last couple of years; something about the novel pulled at suburban families' heartstrings, making it sell and sell and sell. Two things are going on simultaneously: a steady build-up of uncontrolled hysteria about barely perceptible fears, and a markdown of the threat (hey, even if you lose your loved one, she's happier in heaven than she could be on earth), bringing you back to earth, so to speak, minus the baggage. Isn't that parallel to the exaggeration, mystification, threat-escalation, pacification, and threat-management that we have seen in the war on terror?

Middle-class life (of the kind that really went out of existence circa Watergate and the Vietnam pullout) may be under assault from external threats, but precise recollection of it in good spirit can make us feel better. (My guess is that this rationale is why it's difficult not to be tempted by this fiction.) A. M. Homes is a typical purveyor of this atmosphere. In The End of Alice, Homes treated a murderous child molester, and in In a Country of Mothers, she chose a therapist as the lead character. In Things You Should Know (HarperCollins, 2002), Homes cautiously brings us face-to-face with suburban nightmares: the Chinese mother-in-law who wanders off and is traced by the global positioning device (surveillance technology in the service of family values); the father who runs over a child in the neighborhood, leading his little boy to attempt suicide; the woman who hunts for used condoms on the beach to inseminate herself with the sperm of fresh young men; and the meditation on Nancy Reagan taking care of her Alzheimer's-inflicted, football-hero husband--acts of sadism and masochism presented flatly, without literary varnishing. Yes, we do know these things, from the nightly news and reality television, but thanks for telling us that even if we undergo the worst horrors it's not really that horrible.

After two hundred-plus years of leveling out, in which period of time Tocqueville and Trollope and others uttered some nasty sentiments about drastic egalitarianism, we have finally reached the epoch of strictly uniform novels for strictly uniform readers, especially novels that lay claim to high culture. The New York Times reviewer of Ann Packer's The Dive from Clausen's Pier (Knopf, 2002) tells us that with its elements of "emergency rooms, wheelchairs and disability," the novel could "easily have congealed into a daytime television mess of syrupy sentiment." Note how often reviewers utter that preemptive sentiment; they do that because the plots are directly borrowed from mass media, and the reviewers are grateful that the stories have been elevated to the extent that a $50,000 MFA allows you to engineer. In Packer's novel, the precipitating event is the boyfriend Mike jumping off the pier, in an act of bravado, making him a quadriplegic. The novel's hook for the middle-class reader is that it gives the impression that the hard-edged feminism of the early seventies never happened. It's the kind of feminism, easy on the rhetoric, keen on the self-sacrifice, that a brand-conscious but responsible female citizen might want to pretend was the only kind on offer. There are in this novel extensive and overlapping modes of community (Robert Putnam, take notes), again as if the narcissistic side of the seventies was nothing but a bad memory.

One of the more capable new American writers, Maile Meloy, in her collection of stories Half in Love (Scribner, 2002), a New York Times Notable Book, resorts to car accidents, drownings, and mental illness as plot movers. Often, the substance of the story is the characters' stoic response to the tragedy (this, of course, is abuse of the word tragedy, used in precisely the opposite of its historical meaning). The characters are not moved, nor are we meant to be. There is death, but no real death. Read a funeral scene in Meloy's books, or in one of her fellow MFA-writers', and it's as if you were reading about going to an ice-cream parlor. It has that flimsy sense of weight and reality. To compensate for this lightness, there's a transparent attempt to try to anchor the reader in the familiar comforts of a world that has gone by. In All is Vanity (Doubleday, 2003), Christina Schwartz's novel about a desperate Manhattan writer (bored teacher and housewife would be a more accurate description) who deals with her lack of talent by turning her Los Angeles friend's spending frenzy into a stolen narrative, there are pages and pages of description of the California housewife's shopping expeditions, and pages and pages of description of both characters in childhood classroom situations. Notice how common the latter subject is in American fiction today; instead of writing about how people really think, what pushes them over the edge, what keeps them sane, we get telescoped confirmations of our immortality through characters' rose-tinted school experiences: education substituting for education. At the end, we remain clueless about the stealing novelist and her friend's motivation, their inner lives absolute blanks after hundreds of pages of descriptive prose.

The five best books I've read in the last couple of years have been Harry Mulisch's Siegfried, Amin Maalouf's Balthasar's Odyssey, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Not a single American author alive today--not even a reliable old-timer like Updike or Roth, in his current state of gripe and sloth--is capable of writing a novel like one of these. Because what is different about these novels, compared to American fiction, is that they dare to take on the big issues of life and death (yes, death is always excluded from American fiction, even when the subject itself is death, because it is presented without its chilling effects), knowledge and meaning, learning and forgetting, without shame, without fear, without self-doubt. The authors, one knows from the get-go, have something to offer beyond telling us how adorably weak we are in our small tragedies, countable on the fingers of each hand, immediately recognizable to our equally suffering fellow beings for their erasability and oldness.

Haddon's book, in the hands of an American author, would have turned into a mushy rendering of some ray of hope (or is it point of light?) to derive from the condition of the autistic protagonist. Not only does Haddon leave us without any rope to hang on to--since the adults in the novel are the ones to fear more than the autistic character--he makes the situation tragic by suggesting that the very linearity and closed logic of the autistic mind is as believable and valid as the normally non-linear way of thinking that we take for granted. If there is no handle on the right way of knowing, the whole project of consciousness lies in ruins. Curiously, Haddon, in a recent interview, expressed envy toward American writers who he thinks (as British writers have thought for a good many years) have a much larger canvas to work with and whose novels show this expanded scope. Specifically mentioning A. M. Homes, Haddon presumably also had in mind something like Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude (Doubleday, 2003). But Lethem hides behind a sociological catalogue of the progress of discrete types one might have expected to find in the gentrifying Brooklyn of his time; again, we have here characters futilely in search of a god interested enough in their condition to give them an inner life independent of coded events and branded names.

The well-made little novel is nearly extinct in America. What ignorance and blindness are writers trying to hide with their ocean of words? It seems to be an act of desperation for those unable to come to terms with the reality beyond the remediated self to engage in such voluble merrymaking of trivial descriptive feats. When we read the fiction of those who do seem to have a grasp on the reality outside the walk-up studio or suburban bordello--the Richard Powers and other MacArthur winners of our time--our hearts are never moved, our ways of knowing and perceiving never seriously threatened, even if we may be impressed by the author's claim to polymath "genius" status.

There is little of the fabulist, allegorical, or mystical in today's American fiction (Toni Morrison doesn't do allegory; she does therapy). This is impoverished literature for an age of false prosperity. In truth, there is only one subject for the American writer who hopes to be published: himself, standing in for the common reader, pitying the pitilessness of self-consciousness. America would be a heavenly place if the president could only adopt the calm, soothing tones of the narrator in The Lovely Bones.

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