Posts Tagged ‘Jonathan Franzen’
The purity test
Earlier this week, The New York Times Magazine published a profile by Taffy Brodesser-Akner of the novelist Jonathan Franzen. It’s full of fascinating moments, including a remarkable one that seems to have happened entirely by accident—the reporter was in the room when Frazen received a pair of phone calls, including one from Daniel Craig, to inform him that production had halted on the television adaptation of his novel Purity. Brodesser-Akner writes: “Franzen sat down and blinked a few times.” That sounds about right to me. And the paragraph that follows gets at something crucial about the writing life, in which the necessity of solitary work clashes with the pressure to put its fruits at the mercy of the market:
He should have known. He should have known that the bigger the production—the more people you involve, the more hands the thing goes through—the more likely that it will never see the light of day resembling the thing you set out to make in the first place. That’s the real problem with adaptation, even once you decide you’re all in. It just involves too many people. When he writes a book, he makes sure it’s intact from his original vision of it. He sends it to his editor, and he either makes the changes that are suggested or he doesn’t. The thing that we then see on shelves is exactly the thing he set out to make. That might be the only way to do this. Yes, writing a novel—you alone in a room with your own thoughts—might be the only way to get a maximal kind of satisfaction from your creative efforts. All the other ways can break your heart.
To be fair, Franzen’s status is an unusual one, and even successful novelists aren’t always in the position of taking for granted the publication of “exactly the thing he set out to make.” (In practice, it’s close to all or nothing. In my experience, the novel that you see on store shelves mostly reflects what the writer wanted, while the ones in which the vision clashes with those of other stakeholders in the process generally doesn’t get published at all.) And I don’t think I’m alone when I say that some of the most interesting details that Brodesser-Akner provides are financial. A certain decorum still surrounds the reporting of sales figures in the literary world, so there’s a certain frisson in seeing them laid out like this:
And, well, sales of his novels have decreased since The Corrections was published in 2001. That book, about a Midwestern family enduring personal crises, has sold 1.6 million copies to date. Freedom, which was called a “masterpiece” in the first paragraph of its New York Times review, has sold 1.15 million since it was published in 2010. And 2015’s Purity, his novel about a young woman’s search for her father and the story of that father and the people he knew, has sold only 255,476.
For most writers, selling a quarter of a million copies of any book would exceed their wildest dreams. Having written one of the greatest outliers of the last twenty years, Franzen simply reverting to a very exalted mean. But there’s still a lot to unpack here.
For one thing, while Purity was a commercial disappointment, it doesn’t seem to have been an unambiguous disaster. According to Publisher’s Weekly, its first printing—which is where you can see a publisher calibrating its expectations—came to around 350,000 copies, which wasn’t even the largest print run for that month. (That honor went to David Lagercrantz’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web, which had half a million copies, while a new novel by the likes of John Grisham can run to over a million.) I don’t know what Franzen was paid in advance, but the loss must have fallen well short of a book like Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood, for which he received $7 million and sold 62,000 copies, meaning that his publisher paid over a hundred dollars for every copy that someone actually bought. And any financial hit would have been modest compared to the prestige of keeping a major novelist on one’s list, which is unquantifiable, but no less real. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned about publishing over the last decade, it’s that it’s a lot like the movie industry, in which apparently inexplicable commercial and marketing decisions are easier to understand when you consider their true audience. In many cases, when they buy or pass on a book, editors aren’t making decisions for readers, but for other editors, and they’re very conscious of what everyone in their imprint thinks. A readership is an abstraction, except when quantified in sales, but editors have their everyday judgement calls reflected back on them by the people they see every day. Giving up a writer like Franzen might make financial sense, but it would be devastating to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, to say nothing of the relationship that can grow between an editor and a prized author over time.
You find much the same dynamic in Hollywood, in which some decisions are utterly inexplicable until you see them as a manifestation of office politics. In theory, a film is made for moviegoers, but the reactions of the producer down the hall are far more concrete. The difference between publishing and the movies is that the latter publish their box office returns, often in real time, while book sales remain opaque even at the highest level. And it’s interesting to wonder how both industries might differ if their approaches were more similar. After years of work, the success of a movie can be determined by the Saturday morning after its release, while a book usually has a little more time. (The exception is when a highly anticipated title doesn’t make it onto the New York Times bestseller list, or falls off it with alarming speed. The list doesn’t disclose any sales figures, which means that success is relative, not absolute—and which may be a small part of the reason why writers seldom wish one another well.) In the absence of hard sales, writers establish the pecking order with awards, reviews, and the other signifiers that have allowed Franzen to assume what Brodesser-Akner calls the mantle of “the White Male Great American Literary Novelist.” But the real takeaway is how narrow a slice of the world this reflects. Even if we place the most generous interpretation imaginable onto Franzen’s numbers, it’s likely that well under one percent of the American population has bought or read any of his books. You’ll find roughly the same number on any given weeknight playing HQ Trivia. If we acknowledged this more widely, it might free writers to return to their proper cultural position, in which the difference between a bestseller and a disappointment fades rightly into irrelevance. Who knows? They might even be happier.
Bringing the news
“I think there is a tremendous future for a sort of novel that will be called the journalistic novel or perhaps documentary novel, novels of intense social realism based upon the same painstaking reporting that goes into the New Journalism,” the journalist Tom Wolfe wrote in Esquire in 1973. This statement is justifiably famous, and if you think that Wolfe, who passed away yesterday, was making a declaration of intent, you’d be right. In the very next sentence, however, which is quoted much less often, Wolfe added a line that I find tremendously revealing: “I see no reason why novelists who look down on Arthur Hailey’s work couldn’t do the same sort of reporting and research he does—and write it better, if they’re able.” It might seem strange for Wolfe to invoke the author of Hotel and Airport, but two years later, in a long interview with the writer and critic Joe David Bellamy, he doubled down. After Bellamy mentioned Émile Zola as a model for the kind of novel that Wolfe was advocating, the two men had the following exchange:
Wolfe: The fact that [Zola] was bringing you news was a very important thing.
Bellamy: Do you think that’s enough? Isn’t that Arthur Hailey really?
Wolfe: That’s right, it is. The best thing is to have both—to have both someone who will bring you bigger and more exciting chunks of the outside world plus a unique sensibility, or rather a unique way of looking at the world.
I’m surprised that this comparison hasn’t received greater attention, because it gets at something essential about Wolfe’s mixed legacy as a novelist. As an author, Wolfe hovered around the edges of my reading and writing life for decades. In high school, I read The Right Stuff and loved it—it’s hard for me to imagine an easier book to love. After I graduated from college, I landed a job at a financial firm in New York, and the first novel that I checked out from the library that week was The Bonfire of the Vanities. A few years later, I read A Man in Full, and not long ago, when I was thinking seriously about writing a nonfiction book about The Whole Earth Catalog, I read Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In each case, I was looking for something more than simple entertainment. I was looking for information, or, in Wolfe’s words, for “news.” It was a cultural position for which Wolfe had consciously prepared himself, as he declared in his famous essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.” Speaking of the big social novels that had supposedly failed to emerge from the sixties, Wolfe wrote:
That task, as I see it, inevitably involves reporting, which I regard as the most valuable and least understood resource available to any writer with exalted ambitions, whether the medium is print, film, tape, or the stage. Young writers are constantly told, “Write about what you know.” There is nothing wrong with that rule as a starting point, but it seems to get quickly magnified into an unspoken maxim: The only valid experience is personal experience.
As counterexamples, Wolfe cited Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Zola, and Lewis as writers who “assumed that the novelist had to go beyond his personal experience and head out into society as a reporter.” But he didn’t mention Arthur Hailey.
Yet when I think back to Wolfe’s novels, I’m left with the uncomfortable sense that when you strip away his unique voice, you’re left with something closer to Hailey or Irving Wallace—with their armfuls of facts, stock characters, and winking nods to real people and events—than to Dickens. That voice was often remarkable, of course, and to speak of removing it, as if it weren’t bound up in the trapezius muscles of the work itself, is inherently ludicrous. But it was also enough to prevent many readers from noticing Wolfe’s very real limits as an imaginative writer. When A Man in Full was greeted by dismissive comments from Norman Mailer, John Irving, and John Updike, who accurately described it as “entertainment,” Wolfe published a response, “My Three Stooges,” in which he boasted about the novel’s glowing reviews and sales figures and humbly opined that the ensuing backlash was like “nothing else…in all the annals of American literature.” He wrote of his critics:
They were shaken. It was as simple as that. A Man in Full was an example—an alarmingly visible one—of a possible, indeed, the likely new direction in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century literature: the intensely realistic novel, based upon reporting, that plunges wholeheartedly into the social reality of America today, right now—a revolution in content rather than form—that was about to sweep the arts in America, a revolution that would soon make many prestigious artists, such as our three old novelists, appear effete and irrelevant.
This is grand gossip, even if the entire controversy was swept away a year later by the reception of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, another vast social novel with an accompanying declaration of intent. But it also overlooks the fact that Wolfe’s novels are notably less valuable as reportage than even Updike’s Couples, say, or any of the last three Rabbit books, in which the author diligently left a record of his time, in the form of thousands of closely observed details from the America of the sixties, seventies, and eighties.
And the real irony is that Updike had quietly set himself to the exact task what Wolfe had attempted with much greater fanfare, as Adam Begley notes in his recent biography:
What did [Updike] know about his hero’s new job [in Rabbit is Rich]? What did he know about the business of running a Toyota dealership? As he did for The Coup, he rolled up his sleeves and hit the books. And he also enlisted outside help, hiring a researcher to untangle the arcane protocols of automobile finance and the corporate structure of a dealership—how salesmen are compensated, how many support staff work in the back office, what the salaries are for the various employees, what paperwork is involved in importing foreign cars, and so on. Updike visited showrooms in the Boston area, hunting for tips from salesmen and collecting brochures. He aimed for, and achieved, a level of detail so convincing that the publisher felt obliged to append to a legal boilerplate on the copyright page a specific disclaimer: “No actual Toyota agency in southeastern Pennsylvania is known to the author or in any way depicted herein.”
This is nothing if not reportage, six years before The Bonfire of the Vanities, and not because Updike wanted, in Wolfe’s words, “to cram the world into that novel, all of it,” but in order to tell a story about a specific, utterly ordinary human being. Automobile finance wasn’t as sexy or exotic as Wall Street, which may be why Wolfe failed to acknowledge this. (In Rabbit Redux, instead of writing about the astronauts, Updike wrote about people who seem to barely even notice the moon landing.) Wolfe’s achievements as a journalist are permanent and unquestionable. But we still need the kind of news that the novel can bring, now more than ever, and Wolfe never quite figured out how to do it—even though his gifts were undeniable. Tomorrow, I’ll be taking a closer look at his considerable strengths.
My ten great books #5: Couples
In his discussion of the aesthetic flaw of frigidity in The Art of Fiction, John Gardner says: “When a skillful writer writes a shallow, cynical, merely amusing book about extramarital affairs, he has wandered—with far more harmful effect—into the same unsavory bog.” There’s little doubt in my mind that he’s thinking of John Updike, of whom a very different author, Lawrence Block, states in Writing the Novel: “It’s probably safe to assume that John Updike wrote Couples out of comparable cupidity, but it’s hardly vintage Updike, and the author’s own detachment from it is evident throughout.” Given the fact that this novel was based so closely on the writer’s personal life that it scandalized his circle of friends in Ipswich, it might seem hard to describe it as shallow, cynical, and detached—which doesn’t mean that it can’t be all of these things as well. Couples made Updike rich and famous, and it was clearly conceived as a mainstream novel, but this was less a question of trying to write a bestseller than of shaping it for the cultural position that he hoped it would attain. Updike had already been promised the cover of Time magazine before it came out, and, as he later recalled: “Then they read the book and discovered, I think, that, the higher up it went in the Time hierarchy, the less they liked it.” As Jonathan Franzen did with The Corrections, Updike seems to have known that his next effort was positioned to break through in a huge way, and he engineered it accordingly, casting his obsessions with sex, death, and mortality into a form that would resonate with a wider audience. The back cover of my paperback copy calls it “an intellectual Peyton Place,” and I think that the quote must have pleased him.
I’ve always been fascinated by the moment in the late sixties and early seventies that made it possible for the conventions of modernist realism—particularly its attitudes toward sex—to be appropriated by bestselling writers. The early novels of Stephen King are a key text here, but so, in its way, is Couples, which shows the line of influence running in the other direction. In his determination to write a big book, Updike drew on the structural symmetries of popular fiction, and the result was his most richly organized novel of any kind. Like Mad Men, which takes place in the same era, it draws you in with its superficial pleasures and then invites you to go deeper, although many readers or viewers seem happy to stop at the surface. Gardner fretted about this possibility at length in On Moral Fiction:
[Updike is] a master of symbolic complexity, but one can’t tell his women apart in a book like Couples; his characters’ sexual preoccupations, mostly perverse, are too generously indulged; and the disparity between the surface and sub-surface of his novels is treacherous: to the naive reader (and most readers of popular bestsellers are likely to be naive), a novel like A Month of Sundays seems like a merry, bourgeois-pornographic book…while to the subtler reader, the novel may be wearily if not ambivalently satirical, a sophisticated attack on false religion…Since the irony—the presumably satiric purpose—is nowhere available on the surface…one cannot help feeling misgivings about Updike’s intent.
It’s certainly possible to read Couples, as I often do, purely for entertainment, or as a kind of gossipy cultural reportage. (No other novel tells us more about what it must have really been like to be a member of the upper middle class at the time of the Kennedy assassination.) Yet we’re also implicated by that choice. I own a copy of the first hardcover edition, which I bought, in a symbolic act that might have struck even Updike as a little too on the nose, on the morning of my wedding day. As it turns out, my life resembles it in a lot of the small ways but none of the big ones. But maybe that’s because Updike got there first.
The myth of the public novelist
Note: I’m taking a few days off, so I’ll be republishing some of my favorite posts from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a somewhat different form, on April 8, 2015.
Novelists, by nature, are neurotic types, and never more so than when they’re justifying the pursuit to which they’ve devoted their lives. Looking around at the issues that beset us—social and racial inequality, poverty, terrorism, institutionalized sexism, and much more, all arrayed like a tapestry of woe beneath the gloomy specter of climate change—it’s easy to regard writing novels as an activity of spectacular uselessness. When we do try to rationalize it, we have a few stock answers at our disposal. The art of fiction, we say, is largely the art of empathy, or of training ourselves and our readers to take an interest in the lives of others, and even if the novel has rarely, if ever, changed the course of history, it encourages a habit of thinking outside ourselves that teaches us how to walk in another person’s shoes. (In theory, anyway. But you could also argue that it provides the illusion of empathy, a way of exercising or discharging our emotions that lets us off the hook when it comes to putting those impulses to work in the real world.) And it also turns us into skeptical, even agonistic generalists, capable of grasping complex systems of cause and effect, even if in practice we spend most of our time tackling excruciatingly specific problems of narrative, which often feels like constructing a cathedral out of toothpicks.
Deep down, though, I suspect that a lot of novelists nurture a secret hope. One day, we’ll break through with a major novel or work of nonfiction that will establish us in the sphere of public intellectuals. Glossy magazines and talk shows will solicit our opinions, whatever they are, and our voices will be heard on a range of subjects simply because everything we say is deemed to be interesting. Writing a decent novel, which is undeniably one of the most challenging projects a human being can undertake, is assumed to qualify us to think about other subjects. (Literary novelists, like chess players, have a way of seeing themselves as more intellectually fit than others, as Charles Colton said of mathematicians: “He will be in argument what the ancient Romans were in the field: to them the day of battle was a day of comparative recreation because they were ever accustomed to exercise with arms much heavier than they fought.”) And it can’t be an accident that so many of our most versatile intellectuals—Norman Mailer, Edmund Wilson, Susan Sontag, Jean-Paul Sartre—either started in the novel or devoted a fair amount of attention to it. Thinking hard about reality and about problems of fiction feels like the same skill set directed into two different streams, and an accomplished writer should be able to switch effortlessly between one and the other.
A glance at recent rankings of public intellectuals suggests that this ambition, to put it mildly, is misplaced. The most widely distributed list of this kind, published annually by Foreign Policy, includes just a handful of novelists or imaginative writers: Salman Rushdie, Mario Vargas Llosa, the late Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, Gao Xingjian, and maybe Michael Ignatieff, an author better known these days as the former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. A most recent Prospect Magazine list adds a few more names to the pile: Hilary Mantel, Michel Houellebecq, Marilynne Robinson, and Arundhati Roy, who is returning to fiction after a lengthy sojourn in more political fields. For the most part, though, these lists are composed largely of academics, scientists, economists, and businessmen. You could attribute this partially to the decline of the novel as the central art form of our culture: these days, if an entertainer wanders into a position of punditry, he’s likely to look more like Russell Brand. But there’s also a real sense in which a good novelist might be less equipped than average to deal with the complicated problems of public life. Writing is so solitary, so focused on points of craft that have no application anywhere else, that it turns a serious novelist into a machine who can speak credibly on issues of fiction alone—and maybe not even then. And an ability with words only makes it easier to be convincingly wrong.
Yet the illusion persists. And it’s a useful one, at least to the extent that it allows intelligent people to stick with writing when they might have found a more acceptable outlet for their ambitions. I wouldn’t want to live in a world in which writing novels wasn’t seen as a worthwhile pursuit for raw talent. If I’m honest, though, I also find that part of the reason I was so annoyed with Jonathan Franzen’s attempt two years ago to inject himself into the climate change debate is that he’s one of the few authors who actually got the platform that every writer wants. There isn’t a novelist alive who doesn’t secretly wish that The New Yorker would give him space to speak out on whatever he perceives to be the central issue of our time. And Franzen squandered his chance on an argument that even his editors must have known was insupportable. Yet I have a hunch that most novelists would have responded in the same way. Along with being inherently neurotic, writers are often misguided, even perverse, in their social and political stances: they spend so much time willing themselves into the minds of others that they turn into creatures who aren’t like anyone else. Franzen is part of a proud tradition, stretching back through Mailer and Sontag and beyond, of novelists backing themselves into weird, indefensible positions. Writers aren’t reasonable; if they were, they wouldn’t try to be writers. And it’s good to keep this in mind whenever a writer—including this one—tries to give you advice.
A writer’s climate
Note: I’m away at the World Science Fiction Convention for the rest of the week, so I’ll be republishing a few of my favorite posts from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally ran, in a slightly different form, on April 21, 2015.
Last year, the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction was awarded to Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent, sobering book The Sixth Extinction. I had finished reading it shortly beforehand, which may be the first time I’ve ever gotten in on a Pulitzer winner on the ground floor. It was the high point of a month in which I worked my way through a stack of books on climate change, including This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, Windfall by McKenzie Funk, and Don’t Even Think About It by George Marshall. I also read Jonathan Franzen’s infamous article in The New Yorker, of course. And for a while, these works provided a lens through which I saw almost everything else. There was the New York Times piece on Royal Dutch Shell’s acquisition of BG Group, for instance, which doesn’t mention climate change once; or their writeup, a few days later, on the imposition of new rules for offshore oil and gas exploration, even as the Atlantic Coast is being opened up for drilling. The Times describes this latter development as “a decision that has infuriated environmentalists”—which, when you think about it, is an odd statement. Climate change affects everybody, and if you believe, as many do, that the problem starts at the wellhead, pigeonholing it as an environmental issue only makes it easier to ignore.
I don’t mean to turn this into a post on the problem of climate change itself, which is a topic on which my own thoughts are still evolving. But like any great social issue—and it’s hard to see it as anything else—the way in which we choose to talk about it inevitably affects our responses. Franzen touches on this in his essay, in which he contrasts the “novelistic” challenge of conservation with the tweetable logic, terrifying in its vast simplicity, of global warming. I happen to think he’s wrong, but it’s still crucial for writers in general, and journalists especially, to think hard about how to cover an issue that might be simple in its outlines but dauntingly complex in its particulars. It may be the only thing we’re qualified to do. And Kolbert’s approach feels a lot like one that both Franzen and I can agree is necessary: novelistic, detailed, with deeply reported chapters on the author’s own visits to locations from Panama to Iceland to the Great Barrier Reef. Reading her book, we’re painlessly educated and entertained on a wide range of material, and while its message may be bleak, her portraits of the scientists she encounters leave us with a sense of possibility, however qualified it may be. (It helps that Kolbert has a nice dry sense of humor, as when she describes one researcher’s work as performing “handjobs on crows.”)
And in its focus on the author’s firsthand experiences, I suspect that it will live longer in my imagination than a work like Klein’s This Changes Everything, which I read around the same time. Klein’s book is worthy and important, but it suffers a little in its determination to get everything in, sometimes to the detriment of the argument itself. Nuclear power, for instance, deserves to be at the center of any conversation about our response to climate change, whether or not you see it as a viable part of the solution, but Klein dismisses it in a footnote. And occasionally, as in her discussion of agroecology—or the use of small, diverse farms as an alternative to industrial agriculture—it feels as if she’s basing her opinion on a single article from National Geographic. (It doesn’t help that she quotes one expert as saying that the Green Revolution didn’t really save the world from hunger, since starvation still exists, which is a little like saying that modern medicine has failed because disease hasn’t been totally eradicated. There’s also no discussion of the possibility that industrial agriculture has substantially decreased greenhouse emissions by reducing the total land area that needs to be converted to farming. Whatever your feelings on the subject, these issues can’t simply be swept aside.)
But there’s no one right way to write about climate change, and Klein’s global perspective, as a means of organizing our thoughts on the subject, is useful, even if it needs to be supplemented by more nuanced takes. (I particularly loved Funk’s book Windfall, which is loaded with as many fascinating stories as Kolbert’s—and one chapter ended up inspiring my upcoming novella “The Proving Ground.”) Writers, as I’ve said elsewhere, tend to despair over how little value their work seems to hold in the face of such challenges. But if these books demonstrate one thing, it’s that the first step toward meaningful action, whatever form it assumes, lies in describing the world with the specificity, clarity, and diligence it demands. It doesn’t always call for jeremiads or grand plans, and it’s revealing that Kolbert’s book is both the best and the least political of the bunch. And it’s safe to say that talented writers will continue to be drawn to the subject: truly ambitious authors will always be tempted to tackle the largest themes possible, if only out of the “real egotism” that Albert Szent-Györgyi identifies as a chief characteristic of a great researcher. Writers, in fact, are the least likely of any of us to avoid confronting the unthinkable, simply because they have a vested interest in shaping the conversation about our most difficult issues. It’s fine for them to dream big; we need people who will. But they’ll make the greatest impact by telling one story at a time.
The two kinds of commentaries
There are two sorts of commentary tracks. The first kind is recorded shortly after a movie or television season is finished, or even while it’s still being edited or mixed, and before it comes out in theaters. Because their memories of the production are still vivid, the participants tend to be a little giddy, even punch drunk, and their feelings about the movie are raw: “The wound is still open,” as Jonathan Franzen put it to Slate. They don’t have any distance, and they remember everything, which means that they can easily get sidetracked into irrelevant detail. They don’t yet know what is and isn’t important. Most of all, they don’t know how the film did with viewers or critics, so their commentary becomes a kind of time capsule, sometimes laden with irony. The second kind of commentary is recorded long after the fact, either for a special edition, for the release of an older movie in a new format, or for a television series that is catching up with its early episodes. These tend to be less predictable in quality: while commentaries on recent work all start to sound more or less the same, the ones that reach deeper into the past are either disappointingly superficial or hugely insightful, without much room in between. Memories inevitably fade with time, but this can also allow the artist to be more honest about the result, and the knowledge of how the work was ultimately received adds another layer of interest. (For instance, one of my favorite commentaries from The Simpsons is for “The Principal and the Pauper,” with writer Ken Keeler and others ranting against the fans who declared it—preemptively, it seems safe to say—the worst episode ever.)
Perhaps most interesting of all are the audio commentaries that begin as the first kind, but end up as the second. You can hear it on the bonus features for The Lord of the Rings, in which, if memory serves, Peter Jackson and his cowriters start by talking about a movie that they finished years ago, continue by discussing a movie that they haven’t finished editing yet, and end by recording their comments for The Return of the King after it won the Oscar for Best Picture. (This leads to moments like the one for The Two Towers in which Jackson lays out his reasoning for pushing the confrontation with Saruman to the next movie—which wound up being cut for the theatrical release.) You also see it, on a more modest level, on the author’s commentaries I’ve just finished writing for my three novels. I began the commentary on The Icon Thief way back on April 30, 2012, or less than two months after the book itself came out. At the time, City of Exiles was still half a year away from being released, and I was just beginning the first draft of the novel that I still thought would be called The Scythian. I had a bit of distance from The Icon Thief, since I’d written a whole book and started another in the meantime, but I was still close enough that I remembered pretty much everything from the writing process. In my earliest posts, you can sense me trying to strike the right balance between providing specific anecdotes about the novel itself to offering more general thoughts on storytelling, while using the book mostly as a source of examples. And I eventually reached a compromise that I hoped would allow those who had actually read the book to learn something about how it was put together, while still being useful to those who hadn’t.
As a result, the commentaries began to stray further from the books themselves, usually returning to the novel under discussion only in the final paragraph. I did this partly to keep the posts accessible to nonreaders, but also because my own relationship with the material had changed. Yesterday, when I posted the last entry in my commentary on Eternal Empire, almost four years had passed since I finished the first draft of that novel. Four years is a long time, and it’s even longer in writing terms. If every new project puts a wall between you and the previous one, a series of barricades stands between these novels and me: I’ve since worked on a couple of book-length manuscripts that never got off the ground, a bunch of short stories, a lot of occasional writing, and my ongoing nonfiction project. With each new endeavor, the memory of the earlier ones grows dimmer, and when I go back to look at Eternal Empire now, not only do I barely remember writing it, but I’m often surprised by my own plot. This estrangement from a work that consumed a year of my life is a little sad, but it’s also unavoidable: you can’t keep all this information in your head and still stay sane. Amnesia is a coping strategy. We’re all programmed to forget many of our experiences—as well as our past selves—to free up capacity for the present. A novel is different, because it exists in a form outside the brain. Any book is a piece of its writer, and it can be as disorienting to revisit it as it is to read an old diary. As François Mauriac put it: “It is as painful as reading old letters…We touch it like a thing: a handful of ashes, of dust.” I’m not quite at that point with Eternal Empire, but I’ll sometimes read a whole series of chapters and think to myself, where did that come from?
Under the circumstances, I should count myself lucky that I’m still reasonably happy with how these novels turned out, since I have no choice but to be objective about it. There are things that I’d love to change, of course: sections that run too long, others that seem underdeveloped, conceits that seem too precious or farfetched or convenient. At times, I can see myself taking the easy way out, going with a shortcut or ignoring a possible implication because I lacked the time or energy to do it justice. (I don’t necessarily regret this: half of any writing project involves conserving your resources for when it really matters.) But I’m also surprised by good ideas or connections that seem to have come from outside of me, as if, to use Isaac Asimov’s phrase, I were writing over my own head. Occasionally, I’ll have trouble following my own logic, and the result is less a commentary than a forensic reconstruction of what I must have been thinking at the time. But if I find it hard to remember my reasoning today, it’s easier now than it will be next year, or after another decade. As I suspected at the time, the commentary exists more for me than for anybody else. It’s where I wrote down my feelings about a series of novels that once dominated my life, and which now seem like a distant memory. While I didn’t devote nearly as many hours to these commentaries as I did to the books themselves, they were written over a comparable stretch of time. And now that I’ve gotten to the point of writing a commentary on my commentary—well, it’s pretty clear that it’s time to stop.
Love and research
I’ve expressed mixed feelings about Jonathan Franzen before, but I don’t think there’s any doubt about his talent, or about his ability to infuriate readers in just the right way. His notorious essay on climate change in The New Yorker still irritates me, but it prompted me to think deeply on the subject, if only to articulate why I thought he was wrong. But Franzen isn’t a deliberate provocateur, like Norman Mailer was: instead, he comes across as a guy with deeply felt, often conflicted opinions, and he expresses them as earnestly as he can, even if he knows he’ll get in trouble for it. Recently, for instance, he said the following to Isaac Chotiner of Slate, in response to a question about whether he could ever write a book about race:
I have thought about it, but—this is an embarrassing confession—I don’t have very many black friends. I have never been in love with a black woman. I feel like if I had, I might dare…Didn’t marry into a black family. I write about characters, and I have to love the character to write about the character. If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person—a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people—I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.
It’s quite a statement, and it comes right at the beginning of the interview, before either Franzen or Chotiner have had a chance to properly settle in. Not surprisingly, it has already inspired a fair amount of snark online. But Franzen is being very candid here in ways that most novelists wouldn’t dare, and he deserves credit for it, even if he puts it in a way that is likely to make us uncomfortable. The question of authors writing about other races is particularly fraught, and the practical test that Franzen proposes is a better entry point than most. We shouldn’t discourage writers from imagining themselves into the lives of characters of different backgrounds, but we can insist on setting a high bar. (I’m talking mostly about literary fiction, by the way, which works hard to enter the consciousness of a protagonist or a society, and not necessarily about the ordinary diversity that I like to see in popular fiction, in which writers can—and often should—make the races of the characters an unobtrusive element in the story.) We could say, for instance, that a novel about race should be conceived from the inside out, rather than the outside in, and that it demands a certain intensity of experience and understanding to justify itself. Given the number of minority authors who are amply qualified to write about these issues firsthand, an outsider needs to earn the right to engage with the subject, and this requires something beyond well-intentioned concern. As Franzen rightly says in the same interview: “I feel it’s really dangerous, if you are a liberal white American, to presume that your good intentions are enough to embark on a work of imagination about black America.”
And Franzen’s position becomes easier to understand when framed within his larger concerns about research itself. As he once told The Guardian: “When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.” Yet like just about everything Franzen says, this seemingly straightforward rule is charged with a kind of reflexive uneasiness, because he’s among the most obsessive of researchers. His novels are full of lovingly rendered set pieces that were obviously researched with enormous diligence, and sometimes they call attention to themselves, as Norman Mailer unkindly but accurately noted of The Corrections:
Everything of novelistic use to him that came up on the Internet seems to have bypassed the higher reaches of his imagination—it is as if he offers us more human experience than he has literally mastered, and this is obvious when we come upon his set pieces on gourmet restaurants or giant cruise ships or modern Lithuania in disarray. Such sections read like first-rate magazine pieces, but no better—they stick to the surface.
For a writer like Franzen, whose novels are ambitious attempts to fit everything he can within two covers, research is part of the game. But it’s also no surprise that the novelist who has tried the hardest to bring research back into mainstream literary fiction should also be the most agonizingly aware of its limitations.
These limitations are particularly stark when it comes to race, which, more than any other theme, demands to be lived and felt before it can be written. And if Franzen shies away from it with particular force, it’s because the set of skills that he has employed so memorably elsewhere is rendered all but useless here. It’s wise of him to acknowledge this, and he sets forth a useful test for gauging a writer’s ability to engage the subject. He writes:
In the case of Purity, I had all this material on Germany. I had spent two and a half years there. I knew the literature fairly well, and I could never write about it because I didn’t have any German friends. The portal to being able to write about it was suddenly having these friends I really loved. And then I wasn’t the hostile outsider; I was the loving insider.
Research, he implies, takes you only so far, and love—defined as the love of you, the novelist, for another human being—carries you the rest of the way. Love becomes a kind of research, since it provides you with something like the painful vividness of empathy and feeling required to will yourself into the lives of others. Without talent and hard work, love isn’t enough, and it may not be enough even with talent in abundance. But it’s necessary, if not sufficient. And while it doesn’t tell us much about who ought to be writing about race, it tells us plenty about who shouldn’t.
The act of noticing
Note: I’m on vacation this week, so I’ll be republishing a few of my favorite posts from earlier in this blog’s run. This post originally appeared, in a slightly different form, on September 24, 2014.
Yesterday, while playing with my daughter at the park, I found myself oddly fascinated by the sight of a landscaping crew that was taking down a tree across the street. It’s the kind of scene you encounter on a regular basis in suburbia, but I wound up watching with unusual attention, mostly because I didn’t have much else to do. (I wasn’t alone, either. Any kind of construction work amounts to the greatest show on earth for toddlers, and there ended up being a line of tiny spectators peering through the fence.) Maybe because I’ve been in a novelistic state of mind recently, I focused on details that I’d never noticed before. There’s the way a severed tree limb dangles from the end of the crane almost exactly like a hanged man, as Eco describes it in Foucault’s Pendulum, with its heavy base tracing a second, smaller circle in the air. I noted how a chainsaw in action sprays a fan of fine particles behind it, like a peacock’s tail. And when the woodchipper shoots chips into the back of the truck, a cloud of light golden dust forms above the container, like the soul of the tree ascending.
As I watched, I had the inevitable thought: I should put this into a story. Unfortunately, nothing I’m writing at the moment includes a landscaping scene, and the easiest way to incorporate it would be through some kind of elaborate metaphor, as we often see, at its finest, in Proust. (“As he listened to her words, he found himself reminded of a landscaping crew he had once seen…”) But it made me reflect both on the act of noticing and on the role it plays, or doesn’t, in my own fiction. Most of the time, when I’m writing a story, I’m following the dictates of a carefully constructed plot, and I’ll find myself dealing with a building or a city scene that has imposed itself by necessity on the action: my characters end up at a hospital or a police station, and I strain to find a way to evoke it in a few economical lines that haven’t been written a million times before. Occasionally, this strikes me as a backward way of working. It would be better, it seems, to build the story around locations and situations that I already know I can describe—or which caught my attention in the way that landscaping crew did—rather than scrambling to push out something original under pressure.
In fact, that’s the way a lot of novelists work, particularly on the literary end. One of the striking trends in contemporary fiction is how so much of it doubles as reportage, with miniature New Yorker pieces buried like bonbons within the larger story. This isn’t exactly new: writers from Nabokov to Updike have filled their novels with set pieces that serve, in James Wood’s memorable phrase, as “propaganda on behalf of good noticing.” What sets more recent novels apart is how undigested some of it seems. At times, you can feel the narrative pausing for a page or two as the writer—invariably a talented one, or else these sections wouldn’t survive the editorial process—serves up a chunk of journalistic observation. As Norman Mailer writes, rather unkindly, of Jonathan Franzen:
Everything of novelistic use to him that came up on the Internet seems to have bypassed the higher reaches of his imagination—it is as if he offers us more human experience than he has literally mastered, and this is obvious when we come upon his set pieces on gourmet restaurants or giant cruise ships or modern Lithuania in disarray. Such sections read like first-rate magazine pieces, but no better—they stick to the surface.
This isn’t entirely fair to Franzen, a superb noticer who creates vivid characters even as he auditions for our admiration. But I thought of this again after finishing Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. It’s a novel I’d wanted to read for years, and I enjoyed it a hell of a lot, while remaining conscious of its constant shifts into what amounts to nonfiction: beautifully written and reported essays on New York, London, the Hague, India, cricket, and just about everything else. It’s a gorgeous book, but it ends up feeling more like a collection of lovingly burnished parts than a cohesive whole, and its acts of noticing occasionally interfere with its ability to invent real interactions for its characters. It was Updike himself, I think, who warned writers against mining their journals for material, and you can see why: it encourages a sort of novelistic bricolage rather than an organic discovery of the action, and the best approach lies somewhere in the middle. And there’s more than one way of telling a story. As I was studying the landscaping crew at the park, my daughter was engaged in a narrative of her own: she ran into her friend Elise, played on the seesaw, and then had to leave abruptly for a diaper change. Or, as Beatrix put it, when I asked about her day: “Park. Elyse. Say hi. Seesaw. Poop. Go home.” And I don’t think I can do better than that.
On Walden Pond
Henry David Thoreau is a public menace, and he needs to be stopped. That’s the impression, at least, that we get from the critic Kathryn Schulz’s puzzling essay in a recent issue of The New Yorker, a savage takedown with no apparent news angle aside from the author’s determination to bury, not praise, Thoreau. Schulz tackles the task with relish, pointing out that “the real Thoreau was, in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world.” Let’s set aside the point, for now, that literary masterpieces in any genre aren’t likely to emerge from any other kind of personality: Walden, Schulz writes, is the work of a misanthrope “whose deepest desire and signature act was to turn his back on the rest of us.” The article’s attitude toward Thoreau’s antisocial tendencies is indignant, even strident, and it’s even stranger when we realize that it occupies the same prominent position in the same magazine—and was presumably the product of the same editorial process—as Jonathan Franzen’s equally baffling essay on climate change, in which he more or less advised the rest of us to resign ourselves to a “human catastrophe” to make room for more deserving species. And I can’t help but feel that Schulz has chosen a peculiar target for her rage, at a time when Thoreau, for all his flaws, stands as a necessary counterexample to the unsustainable impulses that surround us on every side.
I could tell that I was going to be out of phase with Schulz almost from the beginning, when she refers to the opening chapter of Walden, “Economy,” as “one of the highest barriers to entry in the Western canon: dry, sententious, condescending, more than eighty pages long.” I’ve always found it riveting—it’s possibly the most heavily underlined section in any book I own—and I revisit it on a regular basis, while I rarely feel the need to reread Thoreau’s nature writing, which Schulz likes. But there are other early warning signs that we shouldn’t expect a fair hearing. Schulz dismisses Thoreau’s commitment to the abolitionist movement, including his work as a conductor on the underground railroad, in a single paragraph, and she concludes: “But one may reach good ends by bad means.” (If history has taught us anything, isn’t it that we need to be more concerned about the opposite?) “His moral clarity about abolition,” Schulz writes, “stemmed less from compassion or a commitment to equality than from the fact that slavery so blatantly violated his belief in self-governance.” Yet that abstract conviction led him to take positions and actions at considerable risk to his own safety, while the “compassion” of so many others, then as now, resulted in nothing more than moral self-congratulation at a comfortable remove. Walden, Schulz says, is “a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people,” but in practice, it resulted in a greater sense of obligation and responsibility than many of the social and economic platitudes with which we surround ourselves today.
Which isn’t to say that Thoreau isn’t a deeply problematic figure. The core of Schulz’s position is familiar, and basically correct: Walden is a work of imaginative literature, not reportage, since Thoreau wasn’t nearly as removed from civilization as he claimed to be, and he wasn’t able to stick for long to the mode of living that he pressed on his readers. Schulz concludes: “So perhaps a sufficient argument against Thoreau is that, although he never admitted it, the life he prescribed was not an option even for him.” (There’s also the fact that even contemplating such a retreat is a luxury afforded to very few. E.B. White’s famous quip that Thoreau wrote as if “all his readers were male, unmarried, and well-connected” carries more weight than Schulz’s essay does in its entirety.) But this also misses the point. “His behavioral prescriptions are so foolishly inconsistent as to defy all attempts at reconciliation, while his moral sensibility is so foolishly consistent as to be naive and cruel,” Schulz writes, but this is a charge that can be leveled, with just as much reason, at other moral exemplars who have manifestly asked for the impossible. Walden is less like a practical handbook than what the Jesus Seminar calls a case parody, an admonition so exaggerated—like “Turn the other cheek”—that it exists only to shock us out of our old assumptions. A more reasoned approach, of the kind that Schulz would evidently prefer, would have had about as much impact as such arguments usually do, which is to say none. Thoreau overcorrects toward an extreme vision of simplicity because so much of America, both in his time and in ours, skews just as strongly in the other direction.
And it’s only through a conversation between extremes that we get at the kind of reasonable middle ground that Schulz finds acceptable. Thoreau wrote that even owning a doormat might mean succumbing to a kind of materialist temptation, of which Schulz says: “Only those with no sense of balance must live in so much fear of the slippery slope.” But this misunderstands how balance arises in the first place. The kind of moderation that Schulz—and I—see as the best way of living doesn’t emerge from aiming constantly at the midpoint: it’s an averaging out of extremes, a pragmatic slalom that allows for a play of competing forces that otherwise would shake themselves apart. (In fact, the best defense of Schulz’s essay is that its shrill attack on Thoreau might be the corrective we need to get at a more realistic portrait, which doesn’t make it any more convincing on its own.) “Restrictions and repudiations can just as easily complicate one’s life,” Schulz writes, as if this were a flaw in Thoreau’s argument, when in fact he belongs to a long tradition of ascetics who recognize that strict rules of simplicity, requiring constant vigilance, are the only way to generate the right kind of complexity. “The hypocrisy,” Schulz says, “is that Thoreau lived a complicated life but pretended to live a simple one.” Yet I don’t think the reader comes away from Walden with any impression other than that of a man of enormous inward complexity enabled by the outward constraints on which he maddeningly insisted. Thoreau’s example, even if it was inherently unattainable, points the way forward. In the words of the man who owned the land on which that cabin was built: “We aim above the mark to hit the mark.”
“History often had plans of its own…”
Note: This post is the sixteenth installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 17. You can read the previous installments here.
“A genre is hardening,” the literary critic James Wood wrote fifteen years ago, in his enormously influential New Republic essay “Hysterical Realism.” It’s the set of conventions, he observed, that we see in so many big, ambitious novels published in the last few decades: they’re crammed with plot and information, and they often take a greater interest in how social and political systems work than in the inner lives of their own characters. Dickens provides the original model, with Pynchon setting the standard, followed by the likes of Rushdie, Wallace, and DeLillo. Woods quotes Zadie Smith, who says that she’s concerned with “ideas and themes that I can tie together—problem-solving from other places and worlds,” and who goes on to state:
[It’s not the writer’s job] to tell us how somebody feels about something, it’s to tell us how the world works…These are guys who know a great deal about the world. They understand macro-microeconomics, the way the Internet works, math, philosophy, but…they’re still people who know something about the street, about family, love, sex, whatever. That is an incredibly fruitful combination. If you can get the balance right. And I don’t think any of us have quite yet, but hopefully one of us will.
Woods, as the title of his essay implies, isn’t a fan. He notes, accurately, that this kind of “realism” can serve as an evasion of reality itself: it allows writers to retreat, fashionably, from the unglamorous consideration of the genuine emotions of real men and women. And even if you’re determined to work within that genre, the challenge, as Smith says, is balance. An ambitious literary novel these days is expected to move between two or more registers: the everyday interactions of its characters and the larger social context—meticulously researched and imagined—in which the human story takes place. Shifting between these levels is a hard technical problem, and we can feel the strain even in good novels. In Smith’s White Teeth, Woods sees “an instructive squabble…between these two literary modes,” and a book like The Corrections gains much of its interest from the tension between these kinds of storytelling. Jonathan Franzen, who is as smart a writer as they come, has as much trouble as anyone with managing those transitions: all too often, we end up with passages that read, as Norman Mailer puts it, like “first-rate magazine pieces, but no better.” But in a really fine example of the form, like Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, the social concerns emerge so organically from the story that it’s hard to tell where one leaves off and the other begins.
What’s funny, of course, is that genre novelists have been dealing with these issues for a long time, and literary fiction is only now taking up the challenge. Science fiction or fantasy, for instance, is invariably set in an unfamiliar world, the rules of which need to be conveyed seamlessly within the action, and one of the first problems any thoughtful writer confronts is how to establish this background in an unobtrusive way. It also affects historical fiction, or even suspense, which often takes place in a realm far removed from the reader’s experience. And the bad examples—in which the story grinds to a halt as the author explains the workings of interstellar travel or the political situation in his warring kingdoms—aren’t so different from the moments in which hysterical realism abandons its characters for a treatise on geopolitical trade. The difference is that it’s our own world that these novels are describing, as if the authors were alien journalists encountering it for the first time. That kind of fictional reportage can be valuable: at its best, it forces us to see the world around us with new eyes, or discloses patterns that have lurked there unseen. But literary fiction, which was able to stick to a narrowly focused register for so long, is still figuring out what the best genre novelists have been doing for decades.
So what does this have to do with Eternal Empire? Like many suspense novels, it devotes ample space to filling in background—on the British prison system, the security services, and the world of oligarchs and gangsters—that few readers could be expected to know firsthand. It also follows a template, established by the first two books in the series, of engaging with history and religion, which creates another level of story in which it has to dip from time to time. I devoted a lot of effort, possibly too much, to integrating those digressions in ways that seemed natural, and it wasn’t always easy. In Chapter 17, for instance, I include a page of material about the Khazars, the enigmatic tribe of Central Asian horsemen that disappeared shortly after their unprecedented conversion to Judaism. The Khazars aren’t essential to the story; they serve primarily as a kind of sustained analogy for Ilya’s inward journey, to a degree that isn’t clear until the end. I realized early on that it would be asking too much of the reader to deliver all of this material at once, so I carved it up into three or four shorter sections, each of which represented a self-contained stage, and inserted them at points in which Ilya’s own thoughts or situation provided a natural transition. (They also serve, more practically, to create a pause in the action where such a delay seemed useful.) The result sometimes resembles the “squabble” that Woods sees in more literary novels. But the problem of moving between two worlds is one that most writers, like Ilya, will have to confront sooner or later…
A writer’s climate
Yesterday, the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction was awarded to Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent, sobering book The Sixth Extinction. As it happens, I finished reading it the other week, and it’s lying on my desk as I write this, which may be the first time I’ve ever gotten in on a Pulitzer winner on the ground floor. Recently, I’ve worked my way through a stack of books on climate change, including This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, Windfall by McKenzie Funk, and Don’t Even Think About It by George Marshall. I also read Jonathan Franzen’s infamous article in The New Yorker, of course. And for a while, they provided a lens through which I saw almost everything else. There was the New York Times piece on Royal Dutch Shell’s acquisition of BG Group, for instance, which doesn’t mention climate change once; or their writeup, a few days later, on the imposition of new rules for offshore oil and gas exploration, even as the Atlantic Coast is being opened up for drilling. The Times describes this latter development as “a decision that has infuriated environmentalists”—which, when you think about it, is an odd statement. Climate change affects everybody, and if you believe, as many do, that the problem starts at the wellhead, pigeonholing it as an environmental issue only makes it easier to ignore.
I don’t mean to turn this into a post on the problem of climate change itself, which is a topic on which my own thoughts are still evolving. But like any great social issue—and it’s hard to see it as anything else—the way in which we choose to talk about it inevitably affects our responses. Franzen touches on this in his essay, in which he contrasts the “novelistic” challenge of conservation with the tweetable logic, terrifying in its simplicity, of global warming. I happen to think he’s wrong, but it’s still crucial for writers in general, and journalists especially, to think hard about how to cover an issue that might be simple in its outlines but dauntingly complex in its particulars. It may be the only thing we’re qualified to do. And Kolbert’s approach feels a lot like one that both Franzen and I can agree is necessary: novelistic, detailed, with deeply reported chapters on the author’s own visits to locations from Panama to Iceland to the Great Barrier Reef. Reading her book, we’re painlessly educated and entertained on a wide range of material, and while its message may be bleak, her portraits of the scientists she encounters leave us with a sense of possibility, however qualified it may be. (It helps that Kolbert has a nice dry sense of humor, as when she describes one researcher’s work as performing “handjobs on crows.”)
And in its focus on the author’s firsthand experiences, I suspect that it will live longer in my imagination than a work like Klein’s This Changes Everything, which I read around the same time. Klein’s book is worthy and important, but it suffers a little in its determination to get everything in, sometimes to the detriment of the argument itself. Nuclear power, for instance, deserves to be at the center of any conversation about our response to climate change, whether or not you see it as a viable part of the solution, but Klein dismisses it in a footnote. And occasionally, as in her discussion of agroecology—or the use of small, diverse farms as an alternative to industrial agriculture—it feels as if she’s basing her opinion on a single article from National Geographic. (It doesn’t help that she quotes one expert as saying that the Green Revolution didn’t really save the world from hunger, since starvation still exists, which is a little like saying that modern medicine has failed because disease hasn’t been totally eradicated. There’s also no discussion of the possibility that industrial agriculture has substantially decreased greenhouse emissions by reducing the total land area that needs to be converted to farming. Whatever your feelings on the subject, these issues can’t simply be swept aside.)
But there’s no one right way to write about climate change, and Klein’s global perspective, as a means of organizing our thoughts on the subject, is useful, even if it needs to be supplemented by more nuanced takes. (I particularly loved Funk’s book Windfall, which is loaded with as many fascinating stories as Kolbert’s.) Writers, as I’ve said elsewhere, tend to despair over how little value their work seems to hold in the face of such challenges. But if these books demonstrate one thing, it’s that the first step toward meaningful action, whatever form it assumes, lies in describing the world with the specificity, clarity, and diligence it demands. It doesn’t always call for jeremiads or grand plans, and it’s revealing that Kolbert’s book is both the best and the least political of the bunch. And it’s safe to say that talented writers will continue to be drawn to the subject: truly ambitious authors will always be tempted to tackle the largest themes possible, if only out of the “real egotism” that Albert Szent-Györgyi identifies as a chief characteristic of a great researcher. Writers, in fact, are the least likely of any of us to avoid confronting the unthinkable, simply because they have a vested interest in shaping the conversation about our most difficult issues. It’s fine for them to dream big; we need people who will. But they’ll make the greatest impact by telling one story at a time.
The myth of the public novelist
Novelists, by nature, are neurotic types, and never more so than when they’re justifying the pursuit to which they’ve devoted their lives. Looking around at the issues that beset us—social and racial inequality, poverty, terrorism, institutionalized sexism, and much more, all arrayed like a tapestry of woe beneath the gloomy specter of climate change—it’s easy to regard writing novels as an activity of spectacular uselessness. When we do try to rationalize it, we have a few stock answers at our disposal. The art of fiction, we say, is largely the art of empathy, or of training ourselves and our readers to take an interest in the lives of others, and even if the novel has rarely, if ever, changed the course of history, it encourages a habit of thinking outside ourselves that teaches us how to walk in another person’s shoes. (In theory, anyway. But you could also argue that it provides the illusion of empathy, a way of exercising or discharging our emotions that lets us off the hook when it comes to putting those impulses to work in the real world.) And it also turns us into skeptical, even agonistic generalists, capable of grasping complex systems of cause and effect, even if in practice we spend most of our time tackling excruciatingly specific problems of narrative, which often feels like constructing a cathedral out of toothpicks.
Deep down, though, I suspect that a lot of novelists nurture a secret hope. One day, we’ll break through with a major novel or work of nonfiction that will establish us in the sphere of public intellectuals. Glossy magazines and talk shows will solicit our opinions, whatever they are, and our voices will be heard on a range of subjects simply because everything we say is deemed to be interesting. Writing a decent novel, which is undeniably one of the most challenging projects a human being can undertake, is assumed to qualify us to think about other subjects. (Literary novelists, like chess players, have a way of seeing themselves as more intellectually fit than others, as Charles Colton said of mathematicians: “He will be in argument what the ancient Romans were in the field: to them the day of battle was a day of comparative recreation because they were ever accustomed to exercise with arms much heavier than they fought.”) And it can’t be an accident that so many of our most versatile intellectuals—Norman Mailer, Edmund Wilson, Susan Sontag, Jean-Paul Sartre—either started in the novel or devoted a fair amount of attention to it. Thinking hard about reality and about problems of fiction feels like the same skill set directed into two different streams, and an accomplished writer should be able to switch effortlessly between one and the other.
A glance at recent rankings of public intellectuals suggests that this ambition, to put it mildly, is misplaced. The most widely distributed list of this kind, published annually by Foreign Policy, includes just a handful of novelists or imaginative writers: Salman Rushdie, Mario Vargas Llosa, the late Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, Gao Xingjian, and maybe Michael Ignatieff, an author better known these days as the former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. The most recent Prospect Magazine list adds a few more names to the pile: Hilary Mantel, Michel Houellebecq, Marilynne Robinson, and Arundhati Roy, who appears to be returning to fiction after a lengthy sojourn in more political fields. For the most part, though, these lists are composed largely of academics, scientists, economists, and businessmen. You could attribute this partially to the decline of the novel as the central art form of our culture: these days, if an entertainer wanders into a position of punditry, he’s likely to look more like Russell Brand. But there’s also a real sense in which a good novelist might be less equipped than average to deal with the complicated problems of public life. Writing is so solitary, so focused on points of craft that have no application anywhere else, that it turns a serious novelist into a machine who can speak credibly on issues of fiction alone—and maybe not even then. And an ability with words only makes it easier to be convincingly wrong.
Yet the illusion persists. And it’s a useful one, at least to the extent that it allows intelligent people to stick with writing when they might have found a more acceptable outlet for their ambitions. I wouldn’t want to live in a world in which writing novels wasn’t seen as a worthwhile pursuit for raw talent. If I’m honest, though, I also find that part of the reason I’m so annoyed with Jonathan Franzen’s attempt to inject himself into the climate change debate is that he’s one of the few authors who actually got the platform that every writer wants. There isn’t a novelist alive who doesn’t secretly wish that The New Yorker would give him space to speak out on whatever he perceives to be the central issue of our time. And Franzen squandered his chance on an argument that even his editors must have known was insupportable. Yet I have a hunch that most novelists would have responded in the same way. Along with being inherently neurotic, writers are often misguided, even perverse, in their social and political stances: they spend so much time willing themselves into the minds of others that they turn into creatures who aren’t like anyone else. Franzen is part of a proud tradition, stretching back through Mailer and Sontag and beyond, of novelists backing themselves into weird, indefensible positions. Writers aren’t reasonable; if they were, they wouldn’t try to be writers. And it’s good to keep this in mind whenever a writer—including this one—tries to give you advice.
Birdman, or the unexpected virtue of ignorance
By now, many of you have probably read Jonathan Franzen’s baffling New Yorker essay on climate change, as well as the rebuttals it quickly inspired from a wide range of scientists and conservationists. Franzen opens his article by describing himself as “someone who cares more about birds than the next man,” and he argues that the issue of climate change has usurped time, money, and resources from environmental efforts focused on saving particular species. His proposed solution, if he has one, can be hard to parse in its specifics, but he seems to envision the future as a choice between two alternatives:
We can dam every river and blight every landscape with biofuel agriculture, solar farms, and wind turbines, to buy some extra years of moderated warming. Or we can settle for a shorter life of higher quality, protecting the areas where wild animals and plants are hanging on, at the cost of slightly hastening the human catastrophe.
Franzen doesn’t leave much doubt about where his sympathies lie—although we should also note the neat rhetorical trick here of referring to climate change as a “human” catastrophe, when it’s nothing if not an existential threat to countless species, birds included. And the science and politics behind the piece have already been thoroughly debunked elsewhere. (In Franzen’s insistence that all models are “fraught with uncertainties,” and that “North America’s avifauna may well become more diverse” in the wake of global warming, he verges perilously close to his own brand of denialism.)
Still, I don’t think anyone really expected Franzen to come up with startling insights on either science or public policy. What I find more interesting—and which I haven’t seen analyzed so far—are his opinions on the one subject on which he can credibly speak with authority: the way we talk, or ought to talk, about issues like climate change and conservation. He writes:
As a narrative, climate change is almost as simple as “Markets are efficient.” The story can be told in fewer than a hundred and forty characters: We’re taking carbon that used to be sequestered and putting it in the atmosphere, and unless we stop we’re fucked.
Conservation work, in contrast, is novelistic. No two places are alike, and no narrative is simple.
I think that Franzen gets this precisely wrong, and in ways that are more revealing than he intended. Both climate change and conservation are complicated subjects, but on the level that we’re discussing here—mobilizing voters or donors, raising money, and turning a scientific problem into a political one—conservation has an enormous emotional advantage. Environmental groups have long since learned the power of the flagship species, charismatic megafauna like the elephant or panda that can cement an issue in the collective imagination. It’s what climate change needs but has never had. And although the specifics of either topic may be hard to describe on Twitter, a picture of an endangered spotted owl nests easily on Instagram.
And I know for a fact that Franzen understands this point perfectly, because it parallels the circumstances of his own environmental awakening. In his essay “My Bird Problem,” he says that he first became interested in nature through birdwatching, which in turn was sparked by a confluence of personal factors, including his childlessness, a troubled romantic relationship, and the death of his mother. “Always, in the past,” he writes, “I’d felt like a failure at the task of being satisfied by nature’s beauty.” Birdwatching became his gateway into the natural world, to the point where “nature had become the place where the birds were.” (There’s also a sense in which his obsession with birdwatching was an expression—or alternative form—of his work as a novelist: he describes it as learning how to pay attention, which only meant applying the same intense degree of noticing to nature as he did to human lives.) Later, his birdwatching trips in Europe awakened him to the plight of songbirds, which were being hunted ruthlessly in countries like Malta and Albania, a subject that he’s addressed with great passion and eloquence for The New Yorker and National Geographic. Yet the connection remains indelibly emotional: few readers will ever forget the moment Franzen goes to sample ambelopoulia, or grilled songbird, at a restaurant in Cyprus, and ends by burying their two tiny bodies in the earth with his fingers.
In other words, Franzen’s interest in environmental issues, including climate change, is rooted in an irrational—but genuine—thicket of autobiographical feeling, and much of his recent New Yorker piece reads like the work of a very smart man who has already reached an intuitive conclusion and is casting about for its intellectual justification. It’s a testament to the effectiveness of emotion in motivating environmental action. And Franzen is manifestly aware of its potency: a crucial subplot in his novel Freedom involves the use of the cerulean warbler as a “poster bird” for the larger issue of overpopulation. (As Walter, the protagonist, says: “As long as we put a cerulean warbler on our literature, I can do whatever I want.”) Later, when asked why the foundation has chosen to focus on the warbler, its benefactor says: “I like the bird. It’s a pretty little bird.” Compare this with Franzen’s feelings for a yellow wagtail he saw in Cairo: “My reaction was emotional: Here was a tiny, confiding, warm-blooded, beautifully plumaged animal that had just flown several hundred miles across the desert.” The language is more elevated, but the emotion is the same. And it’s exactly what climate change has always lacked. Instead, it needs writers who can talk about systems of behavior, distill complicated issues into vivid terms, and draw a line between present action and its consequences far in the future. It needs novelists, in short, like Franzen himself. And if he really thinks that climate change is something that can be explicated on Twitter, it’s because his heart has already been captured by a different kind of tweet.
The Travolta moment
There’s a moment halfway through Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections when Enid Lambert, the matriarch of the novel’s dysfunctional Midwestern family, visits a doctor on a cruise ship. It’s an important scene—Enid leaves with a handful of antidepressants that will play a big role later in the story—and Franzen lavishes his usual amount of care on the sequence, which runs for a full nine pages. But here’s how he chooses to describe the doctor on his first appearance:
He had a large, somewhat coarse-skinned face like the face of the Italian-American actor people loved, the one who once starred as an angel and another time as a disco dancer.
I adore The Corrections, but this is an embarrassing sentence—one of the worst I’ve ever seen pass the pen of a major novelist. It’s particularly surprising coming from Franzen, who has thought as urgently and probingly as any writer alive about the problem of voice. But it’s also the kind of lapse that turns out to be unexpectedly instructive, precisely because it comes from an author who really ought to know better.
So why does this sentence grate so much? Let’s break down the reasons one at a time:
- Franzen clearly wants to tell us that the doctor looks like John Travolta, but he’s too shy to come out and say so, so he uses more than twenty words to convey what could have easily been expressed in two.
- In the process, he’s false to his character. No woman of Enid’s generation and background would have any trouble coming up with Travolta’s name, especially if she were familiar with his role in Michael, of all movies. It’s not like she’s trying to remember, say, Richard Jenkins.
- Worst of all, it takes us out of the story. Instead of focusing on the moment—which happens to be a crucial turning point for Enid’s character—we’re distracted by Franzen’s failure of style.
And the punchline here is that a lesser novelist would simply have said that the doctor looked like Travolta and been done with it. Franzen, an agonizingly smart writer, senses how lazy this is, so he backs away, but not nearly far enough. And the result reads like nothing a recognizable human being would feel or say.
I got to thinking about this after reading John McPhee’s recent New Yorker piece about frames of reference. McPhee’s pet peeve is when authors describe a person’s appearance by leaning on a perceived resemblance to a famous face, as in this example from Ian Frazier: “She looks enough like the late Bea Arthur, the star of the nineteen-seventies sitcom Maude, that it would be negligent not to say so.” Clearly, if you don’t remember how Bea Arthur looks, this description isn’t very useful. And while any such discussion tends to turn into a personal referendum on which references are obvious and which aren’t—McPhee claims he doesn’t know who Gene Wilder is, for instance—his point is a valid one:
If you say someone looks like Tom Cruise—and you let it go at that—you are asking Tom Cruise to do your writing for you. Your description will fail when your reader doesn’t know who Tom Cruise is.
And references that seem obvious now may not feel that way in twenty years. McPhee concludes, reasonably, that if you’re going to compare a character to a celebrity, you need to pay back that borrowed vividness by amplifying it with a line of description of your own, as when Joel Achenbach follows up his reference to Gene Wilder by referring to the subject’s “manic energy.”
When we evaluate Franzen’s Travolta moment in this light, it starts to look even worse. It reminds me a little of the statistician Edward Tufte, who famously declared that graphical excellence gives the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space. In his classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, he introduces the concept of the data-ink ratio, which consists of the amount of data ink divided by the total ink used to print a statistical graphic. (“Data ink” is the ink in a graph or chart that can’t be erased without a real loss of information.) Ideally, as large a proportion of the ink as possible should be devoted to the presentation of the data, rather than to redundant material. As an example of the ratio at its worst, Tufte reprints a graph from a textbook that erased all the data points while retaining the grid lines, noting drily: “The resulting figure achieves a graphical absolute zero, a null data-ink ratio.” And that’s what Franzen gives us here. In twenty words, he offers no information that the reader isn’t asked to supply on his or her own. To be fair, Franzen is usually better than this. But here, it’s like giving us a female character and saying that she looks like Adele Dazeem.
“For a moment, their eyes locked…”
Note: This post is the sixth installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 5. You can read the previous installments here.
Back when Eternal Empire was first released, I posted a timeline of the stages in the novel’s composition, from the initial premise—in the form of a single page in my notebook—to the final page proofs. When I wrote it up, the details were still fresh in my mind, although I had to go back to check a few emails and drafts to get the chronology straight. I provided this information because I hadn’t seen a similar breakdown anywhere else, and I thought readers might find it interesting. Looking back now, though, it feels more like a gift to myself. I’ve always been struck by how rapidly a novel that occupied every waking moment for a year or more falls into a kind of fog once you’ve moved on to your next project. While I won’t go as far as Stephen King, who verified a famous article in The Onion by revealing that he barely remembers writing the novel Cujo, I can say that all my novels sometimes feel as if they were written by somebody else. And one of the reasons I’m so glad this blog exists is that is serves as a record of what I was thinking and feeling at the time. I don’t keep much of a diary, and for the most part, the fullest and most accurate record of the last four years of my life is right here.
I tend to think of Eternal Empire as a novel that I wrote fairly quickly, deploying every trick I knew in order to deliver it on deadline, but really, it took up a sizable chunk of time. My first few notes on the subject are dated July 12, 2011, and the final draft of the novel—that is, the version that survived feedback from my publisher, the copy edit, and my own final read of the proofs—was complete on May 14, 2013. That’s close to two years of work, and while it wasn’t continuous, it’s still a big commitment to any one story. The amount of time a writer is willing to spend on a manuscript varies a lot from one author to the next, and this doesn’t compare with literary novelists, like Jonathan Franzen, who might take five to ten years to feel their way into a new voice. But it’s close to the limit of my own attention span: there are just too many stories I feel like telling to invest much more into a single novel. And if I’ve learned one thing about the writing process, it’s that an initial idea on its own is rarely enough to sustain my interest once I’ve lived with it for a year or so. To give the story the time and attention it deserves, I need to create additional challenges for myself that weren’t there when I came up with that rough synopsis.
There are countless ways for a writer to keep his or her manuscript alive, but they tend to fall into one of two categories: conscious omission or conscious addition. Elsewhere, I’ve said that I only outline my novels one section at a time, and that I deliberately build in problems that I don’t know how to resolve. I might have a general destination in mind, or a few big narrative beats I know I need to reach, but I’m not sure how to get there. In some cases, those story points are ones I’ve inherited from a previous book. The fact that Maya Asthana is planning her wedding was originally inserted as a minor character detail in City of Exiles, long before I knew the huge role that Asthana would play in the rest of the series, and I knew that her wedding ceremony would be a major set piece in the third book, even if I had only a vague idea of what would happen there. Conversely, I’ll also introduce details or characters that I have a hunch will pay off later on, although I don’t have any plans for them at the moment. If the former strategy involves laying in problems without a solution, the latter is more like coming up with a solution before I have a problem. And in both cases, I find myself working hard toward the end of the process—which is exactly the point when my attention is likely to flag—to come up with satisfying rationales for elements I intuitively incorporated.
In Chapter 5, for instance, I introduce three important characters, two of whom presented themselves to me without any particular agenda. Tarkovsky, the oligarch whom Maddy is approaching about a possible job, was clearly a major player, and his role in the story was worked out carefully from the start. The others are Elena Usova, Tarkovsky’s assistant, and Nina, his daughter, both of whom were brought on stage on the assumption that they’d come in handy later. Here, they’re introduced as little more than visuals. Elena emerged from a detail I’d stumbled across in a profile of another oligarch—I don’t remember who or where—that noted that his offices were staffed almost entirely by tall, intimidating blondes carrying leather folders. I liked the image, so I stuck in Elena. (She also serves an important functional role early in the story, whenever Maddy needs to talk to someone.) Nina is even less clearly seen: Maddy gets a glimpse of her riding a horse on the grounds of Tarkovsky’s estate, and the placement and tone of that moment implies that she’s a character we need to remember. But I wasn’t sure why. And it wasn’t for another two hundred pages that I figured out the answer, exactly when I was in desperate need of a push to keep myself going. I didn’t know what Elena or Nina were doing there. But in the end, they were right where I needed them…
Inventing conspiracies for fun and profit
Note: Since I’m taking a deserved break for Thanksgiving, I’m reposting a few popular posts this week from earlier in this blog’s run. This post was originally published, in a slightly different form, on December 19, 2012.
If it sometimes seems like we’re living in a golden age for conspiracy theories, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Conspiracies are ultimately about finding connections between seemingly unrelated ideas and events, and these days, it’s easier to find such connections than at any other point in human history. By now, we take it for granted, but I still remember the existential shock I received, almost ten years ago, when I found out about Amazon’s book search. I responded with a slightly hysterical blog post that was later quoted on the Volokh Conspiracy:
Their Search Inside the Book feature, which allows you to search and browse 33 million pages worth of material from 120,000 books, is just about the most intoxicating online toy I’ve ever seen. But it terrifies me at the same time. Between this monstrous djinn and Google.com, I have no excuse, no excuse whatsoever, for not writing a grand synthetic essay of everything, or a brilliant, glittering, Pynchonesque novel…because millions and millions of beautiful connections between people and ideas are already out there, at my fingertips, ready to be made without effort or erudition.
Looking back at this post, it’s easy to smile at my apocalyptic tone—not to mention my use of the phrase “Google.com,” which is a time capsule in itself—but if anything, my feelings of intoxication, and terror, have only increased. A decade ago, when I was in college, it took months of research and many hours in the library stacks to find useful connections between ideas, but now, they’re only a short query away. The trouble, of course, is that the long initial search is an inseparable part of scholarship: if you’re forced to read entire shelves of books and pursue many fruitless avenues of research before finding the connections you need, you’re better equipped to evaluate how meaningful they really are when you find them. A quick online search circumvents this process and robs the results of context, and even maturity. Research becomes a series of shortcuts, of data obtained without spiritual effort or cost, so it’s tempting to reach the same conclusion as Jonathan Franzen: “When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.”
Which is true, but only up to a point. Raw information is everywhere, but authors can still be judged by the ingenuity and originality of the connections they make. This is especially true in conspiracy fiction, in which a connection doesn’t need to be true, as long as it’s clever, reasonably novel, and superficially convincing. (Among other reasons, this is why I don’t care for the work of Dan Brown, who only repeats the labors of more diligent crackpots.) Umberto Eco, definitive here as elsewhere, laid down the rules of the game in Foucault’s Pendulum:
- Concepts are connected by analogy. There is no way to decide at once whether an analogy is good or bad, because to some degree everything is connected to everything else.
- If everything hangs together in the end, the connection works.
- The connections must not be original. They must have been made before, and the more often the better, by others. Only then do the crossings seem true, because they are obvious.
And unlike Eco’s protagonists, who had to enter scraps of information into their computer by hand, we all have free access to a machine with an infinite number of such fragments. An enterprising paranoiac just has to look for the connections. And the first step is to find out where they’ve crossed over in the past.
When the time finally came, then, to construct the Pynchonesque novel of my dreams, I decided to proceed in the most systematic way I could. I constructed a vast spreadsheet grid that paired off a variety of players and ideas that I suspected would play a role in the story—Marcel Duchamp, the Rosicrucians, Georges Bataille, the Black Dahlia murder—and spent weeks googling each pair in turn, trying to find books and other documents where two or more terms were mentioned together. Not surprisingly, many of these searches went nowhere, but I also uncovered a lot of fascinating material that I wouldn’t have found in any other way, which opened up further avenues of inquiry that I researched more deeply. I felt justified in this approach, which is the opposite of good scholarship, because I was writing a work of fiction about paranoia, overinterpretation, and the danger of taking facts out of context, which was precisely what I was doing myself. And I came away with the realization that you could do this with anything—which is something to keep in mind whenever you see similar arguments being made in earnest. There’s nothing like building a conspiracy theory yourself to make you even more skeptical than you were before. Or to quote Foucault’s Pendulum yet again: “That day, I began to be incredulous.”
The art of distraction
If you were to ask most writers what they thought of distraction, they’d probably say that they needed a lot less of it. I’ve noted elsewhere that in theory, writing a novel is easier today than ever before: whether you use Microsoft Word, Scrivener, or even WordStar, the physical act of putting words down on a page has never been more straightforward. We have software to check our spelling and help us outline our stories; the process of revision, even at the most granular level, is close to seamless; and even if we write our works by hand, the range of other conveniences at our disposal can’t be denied. Online research gives us access to information that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to find in the past, to the point where authors like Jonathan Franzen have argued that the idea of research itself has been permanently devalued. In terms of looking for inspiration, we have whole libraries of quality content available for free, with more being added every day, all of it searchable and retrievable from anywhere. If all that stands between us and decent work is a series of practical obstacles, these hurdles have been gradually filed down, until almost nothing separates us from the performance itself.
In practice, of course, that isn’t the case. A decent novel takes about the same amount of time to write today as it ever did, whether you’re an accomplished hack or a diligent artist. (Whether a novel takes six weeks or six years to complete is more a function of the author’s personality, and this fact hasn’t changed since the days of Anthony Trollope.) Elsewhere, I’ve said that this can partially be explained by a variation on Blinn’s Law, which states that the amount of time it takes to render a single frame of animation remains constant, even as technology advances. Animators have a certain baseline level of patience that doesn’t change much; if the hardware becomes faster, they simply ask their computers to do more and more. Word processing software, in turn, might seem like it saves time, but whatever a writer gains in the process is offset by the many little revisions and corrections that he or she might have skipped on a typewriter. Whether or not such infinitesimal changes make any difference is debatable—they’re often touches that even the most diligent reader wouldn’t notice—but it means that the minimum time a novel has to percolate in a writer’s head will pretty much stay the same.
Another part of the explanation lies in the increased possibility for distraction that technology affords. Writers have always found ways to procrastinate, but the temptations we have these days seem qualitatively different, thanks largely to the very same innovations that have granted us so much potential freedom. It’s often pointed out that the most successful forms of online content—Wikipedia, Reddit, Twitter, even the web itself—arose less out of an overarching vision than from a set of convenient tools that allowed users to easily shape the results from the bottom up. Publishing a picture or a comment is so effortless that it can almost be done without thinking, which turns the screen in which we spend much of our lives into a jungle of ephemera. It includes a lot of garbage, but with a few basic filtering mechanisms in place to separate the good from the bad, we end up with an incredibly seductive menu of constantly updated diversion. For writers, the process works in both directions, with the ease of generating content colliding with the ease of consuming it, and the two halves meet on the laptop. And because we spend so much time there, we’re more vulnerable to it than people whose jobs require them to occasionally get out of the house.
Writers all develop their own ways of dealing with this, often taking the form of a conscious rejection of technology itself, whether it’s Franzen’s computer with the Ethernet port glued shut or Michael Pollan’s writing shack. Most of us find ourselves somewhere in the middle, with the time we spend on actual work alternating uneasily with checking email or clicking through the newswires on The A.V. Club. And the first step to living with distraction is acknowledging that it has its place. Obsessive singlemindedness can be as dangerous to a writer as its opposite; every meaningful project includes elements of delay, avoidance, and postponement. The form it currently tends to take is a little more insidious, since it can’t be distinguished at first glance from much of what we do when we’re being productive—as any office worker knows who has ever quietly switched over from a spreadsheet to ESPN.com. But it’s impossible to cut ourselves off from it entirely without separating ourselves from the useful tools that it simultaneously provides. And if nothing else, we can take consolation in the fact that when you average out the forces of acceleration and distraction, we end up more or less where we’ve always been.
The act of noticing
Yesterday, while playing with my daughter at the park, I found myself oddly fascinated by the sight of a landscaping crew that was taking down a tree across the street. It’s the kind of scene you encounter on a regular basis in suburbia, but I wound up watching with unusual attention, mostly because I didn’t have much else to do. (I wasn’t alone, either. Any kind of construction work amounts to the greatest show on earth for toddlers, and there ended up being a line of tiny spectators peering through the fence.) Maybe because I’ve been in a novelistic state of mind recently, I focused on details that I’d never noticed before. There’s the way a severed tree limb dangles from the end of the crane almost exactly like a hanged man, as Eco describes it in Foucault’s Pendulum, with its heavy base tracing a second, smaller circle in the air. I noted how a chainsaw in action sprays a fan of fine particles behind it, like a peacock’s tail. And when the woodchipper shoots chips into the back of the truck, a cloud of light golden dust forms above the container, like the soul of the tree ascending.
As I watched, I had the inevitable thought: I should put this into a story. Unfortunately, my current novel project doesn’t include a landscaping scene, and the easiest way to incorporate it would be through some kind of elaborate metaphor, as we often see, at its finest, in Proust. (“As he listened to her words, he found himself reminded of a landscaping crew he had once seen…”) But it made me reflect both on the act of noticing and on the role it plays, or doesn’t, in my own fiction. Most of the time, when I’m writing a story, I’m following the dictates of a carefully constructed plot, and I’ll find myself confronted by a building or a city scene that has imposed itself by necessity on the action: my characters end up at a hospital or a police station, and I strain to find a way of evoking it in a few economical lines that haven’t been written a million times before. Occasionally, this strikes me as a backward way of working. It would be better, it seems, to build the story around locations and situations that I already know I can describe—or which caught my attention in the way that landscaping crew did—rather than scrambling to push out something original under pressure.
In fact, that’s the way a lot of novelists work, particularly on the literary end. One of the striking trends in contemporary fiction is how so much of it doubles as reportage, with miniature New Yorker pieces buried like bonbons within the larger story. This isn’t exactly new: writers from Nabokov to Updike have filled their novels with set pieces that serve, in James Wood’s memorable phrase, as “propaganda on behalf of good noticing.” What sets more recent novels apart is how undigested some of it seems. At times, you can feel the narrative pausing for a page or two as the writer—invariably a talented one, or else these sections wouldn’t survive the editorial process—serves up a chunk of journalistic observation. As Norman Mailer writes, unkindly, of Jonathan Franzen:
Everything of novelistic use to him that came up on the Internet seems to have bypassed the higher reaches of his imagination—it is as if he offers us more human experience than he has literally mastered, and this is obvious when we come upon his set pieces on gourmet restaurants or giant cruise ships or modern Lithuania in disarray. Such sections read like first-rate magazine pieces, but no better—they stick to the surface.
This isn’t entirely fair to Franzen, a superb noticer who creates vivid characters even as he auditions for our admiration. But I thought of this again after finishing Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland this week. It’s a novel I’d wanted to read for years, and I enjoyed it a hell of a lot, while remaining conscious of its constant shifts into what amounts to nonfiction: beautifully written and reported essays on New York, London, the Hague, India, cricket, and just about everything else. It’s a gorgeous book, but it ends up feeling more like a collection of lovingly burnished parts than a cohesive whole, and its acts of noticing occasionally interfere with its ability to invent real interactions for its characters. It was Edmund Wilson, I think, who warned writers against mining their journals for material, and you can see why: it encourages a sort of novelistic bricolage rather than an organic discovery of the action, and the best approach lies somewhere in the middle. And there’s more than one way of telling a story. As I was studying the landscaping crew at the park, my daughter was engaged in a narrative of her own: she ran into her friend Elyse, played on the seesaw, and then had to leave abruptly for a diaper change. Or, as Beatrix put it, when I asked about her day: “Park. Elyse. Say hi. Seesaw. Poop. Go home.” And I don’t think I can do better than that.
The fame monster
“Celebrity,” John Updike famously wrote, “is a mask that eats into the face.” But celebrity among writers is a strange thing. We’re long past the point where a novelist can singlehandedly turn the temper of his or her time, as Norman Mailer and others of his generation once believed was possible, but a handful of authors do become celebrities of a certain limited kind. We see short news items, as James Parker notes of Martin Amis in The Atlantic, when they change agents or apartments, and their features become reasonably familiar to us from dust jacket photos or the staged shots from the New York Times Book Review. I’ve gone through countless author headshots while preparing my Quotes of the Day, and it’s a little funny how often the same props reappear: the desk, the bookshelf, the cigarette. Photographers seem eager to pose novelists among the tools of their trade, as if in response to how opaque a writer’s work can seem from the outside; Kanye West doesn’t need to stand in front of an 808 to remind us of what he does for a living, but with most authors, we need a visual cue to let us know why this pale, pasty person is looking out at us from a magazine.
The one good thing about becoming a famous writer is that you can exist as a figure of intense importance to a wide circle of readers without being harassed on the street. John Lahr’s recent New Yorker profile of Al Pacino emphasizes how grindingly strange a life of real fame can be: “I haven’t been in a grocery store or ridden the subway in fifty years,” Pacino says. For a serious actor, this kind of alienation from ordinary life can be a handicap; if every interaction is skewed from the start, it’s hard to remember when it was ever anything else. Writers, for the most part, can go shopping or ride public transportation incognito, and even an author whose work saturates airport bookstores probably has little trouble making it onto the plane. I’m not sure I could pick John Grisham out of a crowd. The number of Americans who have finished a novel by Stephen King pales in comparison to those who watch LeBron James play basketball on any given night. We tend to compare literary success to its peers, not to the larger culture, so it’s easy to forget that 100,000 copies in hardcover—which made a phenomenon out of Jonathan Safran Foer—amounts to 0.03% of this country’s population.
Oddly, it’s the faces of literary novelists that we seem to see the most, even if their sales aren’t nearly at the level of their mainstream counterparts. More of us would recognize Jonathan Franzen at Zabar’s than James Patterson. This is partially because of the logic of a career in literary fiction, in which reviews, interviews, awards, and teaching serve to offset scanty sales, and partially thanks to the nature of that kind of writing itself, which turns the voice of the author into a selling point. I’m not particularly interested in who Thomas Harris or Frederick Forsyth “is,” as long as they write compelling stories in which the authorial viewpoint almost disappears; but the work of writers like Updike or Mailer or Bellow is inseparable from the personality it expresses. We’re more curious about the face behind a book like Infinite Jest than The Da Vinci Code, and if it’s true that we all end up with the faces we deserve, it’s no surprise that literary writers look a little more haggard and interesting. Even then, I don’t know how often they’re accosted by fans. I had my share of celebrity sightings in seven years in New York, but I don’t think I’ve ever randomly recognized an author I knew.
Yet the hunger for fame, even if it’s only within a select sliver of the reading world, still drives a lot of writers. We measure ourselves against the the outliers, forgetting all the while that we’ve only heard of them because they’re exceptional, and forget all the others toiling away in obscurity. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: writing is so punishing a profession in other ways that it takes a powerful immediate desire to carry an author with a realistic idea of his talents from one day to the next, whether it’s the promise of sexual conquest, revenge on imagined enemies, or even money. Celebrity is probably a healthier notion than most of these, especially because the version of it even a major author receives is so illusory. As I’ve said before, writing any book, even a bad one, requires that the author think that he’s a little better and more exceptional than he really is, and if most of us end up somewhere in the middle, it’s only because we aimed at a high mark and fell short. Fame, for authors, doesn’t really exist in the same way it does in other fields; it may never have existed at all. But it’s a useful fiction, and without it, we might not have other kinds of fiction at all.
Alec Nevala-Lee 
“The deckhand cut the engine…”
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Note: This post is the fifty-fourth installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 53. You can read the previous installments here.
I think it’s fair to assume that most writers these days—fiction and otherwise—do much of their research online. Yet this seems to make some people uncomfortable, as if it were a violation of the implicit contract between author and reader. One possible analogy is to hiring a consultant or an expert witness: you’d feel cheated if you paid somebody for their time and expertise, only to find that he or she was simply googling the answers to all your questions. Indeed, there’s a strong case to be made that the ease of online research circumvents the lengthy period of absorption in a subject that makes true understanding possible: when you get the answer too quickly, you run the risk that your brain won’t be ready for it. I’m willing to believe this, but I have a problem with the idea that the accessibility of so much information somehow renders the novelist less special. As Jonathan Franzen notoriously said to The Guardian: “When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.” But Franzen writes novels that all but advertise the tremendous amount of legwork they required, which implies that it isn’t whether or not you do research that matters, but what kind it is. The novelist’s role, it seems, is to add value to the data that we have at our disposal, and typing a query into a search engine doesn’t cut it.
This is true enough, but it misses the more important point, which is that a novelist can add value even to just the sort of information that we’re likely to come across on the Internet. As anyone who has spent any time researching a complicated issue online has learned, it isn’t simply a matter of clicking on the first search result that you see: you often have to pull together facts from many places, while constantly monitoring the credibility of your sources, and the result is a pattern that didn’t exist before, even though all of the pieces were theoretically available to everyone. This kind of assemblage poses problems of its own, which is part of the reason I spent so much of The Icon Thief using that process to invent a conspiracy theory: it’s what it does best. But when kept under control, and in the right context, that kind of exercise can be immensely valuable as a way of generating beautiful ideas. (Most of the fiction I’ve published in Analog wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the tools that we have for combining and associating bits of isolated data into a surprising shape.) A novelist can also perform a useful public service in the form of a deep dive—the singleminded pursuit of material to fill out a gap in the narrative. Sometimes this means spending weeks researching something that will end up as a couple of sentences, or even get cut altogether. And a writer is obsessive enough to invest that level of attention on the most trifling of details.
For instance, I spend a lot of time downloading and reading user manuals. Usually, this is because there’s an arcane piece of hardware in a story that I need to accurately describe, at least to the extent of knowing the right names for all the parts or the actions required for every step in the process. Poking around a little online, once I’ve managed to figure out which search terms to use, often yields useful technical material, especially when I add “filetype:PDF” to the query, and I’ll sometimes spend whole days poring over manuals and spec sheets to make sure I’m getting everything right. The danger, of course, is that the story can turn into a sort of user’s manual itself, in which the author is unwilling to part with any of the factual background that he has so laboriously acquired. (I’m keenly aware of this problem, because it’s particularly troublesome in science fiction and suspense, which are the two genres in which I’ve done the most work.) But it helps to keep the true purpose of this kind of research in mind. As I’ve said many times before, this isn’t about accuracy, which is an incidental benefit; it’s about providing material for dreams. The kind of step-by-step description we find in a user manual, in particular, can serve as a useful backbone or scaffold for the action. If every scene, as I’ve said elsewhere, can be structured as a series of objectives, a manual is nothing less than a one-act play with a beginning, middle, and end, and it climaxes when the user triumphantly completes the repair or installation.
Obviously, it’s possible to take this sort of thing too far, and we’ve all had the experience of reading a story that fails to keep the research where it belongs—in the background. But when properly utilized, it can give shape to the more important things taking place up front. Chapter 53 of Eternal Empire, for example, is all about the evacuation of the sinking yacht after it has been attacked by a drone, which is the kind of big set piece that can quickly degenerate into a bunch of disconnected fragments. Being able to accurately describe, say, the procedure for lowering a lifeboat was a huge deal for me. If you read the scene closely, you see that the characters are almost always doing something, even while more important narrative material receives the most emphasis. It’s a little like the bits of business, like lighting a cigarette, that actors use to do something with their hands, except that every tiny action feeds back to the throughline of the scene, which is to escape safely from the yacht. Much of it came from the lifeboat and sea safety manuals I found online, which briefed me on the vocabulary I needed to get the sequence onto the page. If the reader notices it, I haven’t done my job, but without it, the scene would just lie there. And it’s the kind of research that would be prohibitively difficult if it weren’t for the combination of easy accessibility and the writer’s willingness to spend ungodly amounts of time on it. Writers can and should read user manuals. After all, they may be the only ones who ever will…
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Written by nevalalee
May 26, 2016 at 8:48 am
Posted in Books, Writing
Tagged with Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Eternal Empire commentary, Jonathan Franzen