Most of what I know about the world has been learnt through fiction. Stuff that people made up. Further, the novels that gave me the greatest insights were those that were the most deliberately difficult and obtuse, often experimental, always introspective and most consciously “literary”; those novels where truly important world events provided nothing more than background hum, like static crackling on an old radio, which impinged on the central characters only elliptically. This seems a paradox, and the sort of thing that might lead one to a flawed, haphazard understanding of the world. But when I say these books enabled me to “know about the world”, I mean that they gave me a deeper understanding than the mere nuts and bolts of historical events; that is, how undemocratically the government behaves, who invaded whom, when and where, what the labour camp was like, which calibre of bullet was used by the execution squad, and so on.
I realised all this the other day when, finally, exasperated, I threw aside my copy of John Updike’s latest novel, Terrorist, and decided instead to watch Deal or No Deal on Channel 4. I had read just 64 pages, and it had been a struggle to get that far. Not because of its “difficulty”, but because of its bovine stupidity, its desperation to explore a burning issue at the expense of its hopeless, one-dimensional characters. Believe me — and please excuse the language — Terrorist is a f***ing awful book. I can think of no better description for it. And it dawned on me, as Noel Edmonds asked some halfwit which box he wanted to open, that it wasn’t just Updike — I hadn’t actually finished a novel, any novel, for some considerable time. I couldn’t even remember the name of the last new novel I’d finished. Somehow, fiction had lost its power to enthral or inform.
I immediately assumed that I was to blame, that I had become inured to the form itself and was no longer entranced by the act of immersing myself in someone else’s imagination. But a little later, it occurred to me that, frankly, there wasn’t an awful lot of imagination kicking around in contemporary fiction. It has become so broad, so general, so eager to please, so self-satisfied, so anxious to make itself relevant and attuned to the times, so shamelessly — and again, forgive me, I can think of no better phrase — middlebrow. In other words, exactly like journalism, except with some made-up names. And we have journalists for journalism, don’t we? Literary fiction, it seemed to me, had stopped doing what literary fiction does best: getting beneath the skin of a subject, to the viscera, without even always intending to so do. It had started being like every other form of mass entertainment, aiming wide and broad, hoping to alienate nobody.
Throwing aside an Updike novel was not an easy thing to do. I’m as afflicted with the curse of brand loyalty as the next man, and it was primarily Updike, Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Upton Sinclair — along with the lesser lights of Burroughs and Kerouac and Bukowski — who educated me in what it must be like to be an American, to think like an American. Far more so than those beautiful novels of, effectively, imaginative reportage by Sinclair Lewis, Jack London and John Steinbeck. In Updike’s Couples (1968), there is a background fugue of Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, the battle for equal rights — but these phenomena merely inform the novel, rather than form the basis for its existence. You are afforded true insight, not simply an elongated snapshot.
Couples was certainly not an “experimental” novel, despite occasional passages of stream of consciousness — although, compared to the stuff on sale in Waterstone’s and WH Smith right now, it might as well be Ulysses. It sold well at the time, probably on account of all the shagging. But its resonance came not through the bravery of its subject matter, but the bravery of its writing. It was high-flown; it was pitched at an intellect that welcomed the opportunity to reappraise, to think again, an intellect that was open and willing to put in effort.
Just recently, the Irish writer John Banville put his finger on the problem with, particularly, the English modern novel. Reviewing Ian McEwan’s Saturday, he berated the western “tendency towards mellowness”. He added: “Are we in the West so shaken in our sense of ourselves and our culture, are we so disablingly terrified in the face of various fanaticisms which threaten us that we can allow ourselves to be persuaded and comforted by such a self-satisfied and in many ways ridiculous novel as this?” And you have to say, he has a point. For all its critical acclaim, is McEwan’s novel any less shallow and ridiculous than Bridget Jones’s Diary or the latest Nick Hornby? Writers should aim for more than what the audience asks for, was Banville’s point. Surprisingly, though, he did not seem to notice that those novels that do exceed the expectations of the audience begin by doing so in the way in which they are written, rather than in the subject matter. It was left to the most abstruse and difficult of all modern novelists, Ben Marcus, to do that in an ill-tempered and very funny attack on his fellow writer Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections. Franzen, a darling of American literature, is a capable, if conservative, writer. He does that old thing: he tells you a story. There is usually a socially valuable point to be made in his stories, somewhere. The words are always in the right order; there’s a beginning and a middle and an end. When I try to read Franzen’s novels, though, the lure of Noel Edmonds becomes almost irresistible. Recently, he has begun to berate experimentalism in fiction, attacking the notion demanding that “literature is horribly hard to read. And (conveys) this message to the aspiring writer: extreme difficulty is the way to earn respect. This is f***ed up. It is particularly f***ed up when the printed word is fighting other media for its very life”.
There you have it: the notion that modern fiction should drop any pretence at high seriousness, at difficulty, because it needs to battle for a square inch in the marketplace against Deal or No Deal, Grand Theft Auto and the like. As Marcus coldly averred in his elegant rebuttal, this is a preposterous and damaging thesis. What the novelist should do is stake out his territory based on a USP: difference and difficulty. It is no use competing with Noel Edmonds on Noel Edmonds’s terms, because, in the long run, Noel will assuredly win.
The publishers, of course, disagree. They want books with a big, thick, broad base and, preferably, an uplifting, aspirational motif — stuff like Brick Lane and White Teeth and Saturday. Dark themes such as suicide are okay only if they’re dealt with in the friendly, accessible prose of a colour-supplement article about interior design or colonic irrigation. Leave out the overexuberant writing, what Steinbeck called the “hoop de doodle”; leave out literary devices that might unsettle the reader. Make it general — anything else we will deem to be a bit too much, self-indulgent.
Yet following this dictum produces bad literature; great sitcoms, sure, and Hollywood blockbusters, à la the benighted Richard Curtis, but bad literature. The reason I stopped reading novels isn’t that they challenged too much and made me feel uncomfortable, but that they failed to offer anything different from what I could get on the box, or the internet, or the radio — and, frankly, it was all done much better there. Blame the market, I suppose.
The interesting corollary is that while fiction may have lowered its sights, truly great writing can be found these days just down the aisle, in nonfiction. You would be hard-pressed to find a more exquisitely crafted book than Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers, the grim story of Frederick and Rosemary West. Or, for that matter, Michael Burleigh’s Earthly Powers: The Conflict between Religion & Politics from the French Revolution to the Great War. It is a mixed-up world where the greatest literary inventiveness, the most imaginative writing, is found in matters of fact.
Really big reads
The French have remained stubbornly immune to the global dumbing-down. Michel Houellebecq, by a country mile, is the most exciting European writer of the past decade, but the god of literature might have a soft spot, too, for unadorned Gallic porno filth, rather than extraordinarily warped Gallic porno filth, and allow room for Catherine Millet and Marie Darrieussecq.
Since the disturbing brilliance of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, the Yanks seem to have fallen for the Franzen argument — even Jay McInerney and Donna Tartt have begun to write middle-market novels. Easton Ellis is still capable of frightening the horses, as he did with Lunar Park. But mostly, you need to search on the margins. Lives of the Monster Dogs, by Kirsten Bakis, was as good a novel as I have read in 20 years; and there is also Ben Marcus, with two wholly wacko and disturbing novels, The Age of Wire and String, and Notable American Women. Dennis Cooper, unless you hate homosexuals, and Daniel Evans Weiss, unless you hate cockroaches, have also delivered stuff that makes you marvel that the written word can still disturb and enlighten. And Douglas Coupland, from Canada, is treasurable, especially All Families Are Psychotic.
In Britain? Nothing much. The late WG Sebald, for Austerlitz, certainly; Liz Jensen, for The Paper Eater; Michel Faber, for The Crimson Petal and the White; Toby Litt, for Deadkidsongs; Iain Sinclair, for Radon Daughters; JG Ballard, for Super-Cannes; Matt Thorne, for Cherry; and, whisper it quietly, Martin Amis, for Yellow Dog. All, at least, made you happy the novel still exists.
