'What's wrong with new novels' by BR Myers

Robert McCrum in the Observer called this 'an entertaining and passionate lament for what Myers sees as the parlous state of contemporary American literary writing,' adding: 'Myers is saying nothing that has not been said behind the hand, and out of the corner of the mouth. But in years to come, literary historians may look back on this manifesto and realise this was the moment at which, like the little boy in the fairytale, that someone dared to say out loud that the emperor has no clothes.'

Nothing gives me the feeling of having been born several decades too late quite like the modern 'literary' best seller. Give me a time-tested masterpiece or what critics patronisingly call a fun read ­ Sister Carrie or just plain Carrie. Give me anything, in fact, as long as it doesn't have a recent prize jury's seal of approval on the front and a clutch of precious raves on the back. In the bookstore I'll sometimes sample what all the fuss is about, but one glance at the affected prose ­ 'furious dabs of tulips stuttering,' say, or 'in the dark before the day yet was' and I'm hightailing it to the friendly black spines of the Penguin Classics.

I realise that such a declaration must sound perversely ungrateful to the literary establishment. For years now editors, critics, and prize jurors, not to mention novelists themselves, have been telling the rest of us how lucky we are to be alive and reading in these exciting times. The absence of a dominant school of criticism, we are told, has given rise to an extraordinary variety of styles, a smorgasbord with something for every palate. As the novelist and critic David Lodge has remarked, in summing up a lecture about the coexistence of fabulation, minimalism, and other movements, 'Everything is in and nothing is out.' Coming from insiders to whom a term like 'fabulation' actually means something, this hyperbole is excusable, even endearing; it's as if a team of hotel chefs were getting excited about their assortment of cabbages. From a reader's standpoint, however, 'variety' is the last word that comes to mind, and more appears to be 'out' than ever before.

More than half a century ago popular storytellers like Christopher Isherwood and Somerset Maugham were ranked among the finest novelists of their time, and were considered no less literary, in their own way, than Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Today any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be 'genre fiction' ­ at best an excellent 'read' or a 'page turner,' but never literature with a capital L. An author with a track record of blockbusters may find the publication of a new work treated like a pop-culture event, but most 'genre' novels are lucky to get an inch in the back pages of The New York Times Book Review. Everything written in self-conscious, writerly prose, on the other hand, is now considered to be 'literary fiction' ­ not necessarily good literary fiction, mind you, but always worthier of respectful attention than even the best-written thriller or romance.

It is these works that receive full-page critiques, often one in the Sunday book-review section and another in the same newspaper during the week. It is these works, and these works only, that make the annual short lists of award committees. The 'literary' writer need not be an intellectual one. Jeering at status-conscious consumers, bandying about words like 'ontological' and 'nominalism': this is what passes for profundity in novels these days. Even the most obvious triteness is acceptable, provided it comes with a postmodern wink. What is not tolerated is a strong element of action ­ unless, of course, the idiom is obtrusive enough to keep suspense to a minimum. (Conversely, a natural prose style can be pardoned if a novel's pace is slow enough.)

The dualism of literary versus genre has all but routed the old trinity of highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow, which was always invoked tongue-in-cheek anyway. Writers who would once have been called middlebrow are now assigned, depending solely on their degree of verbal affectation, to either the literary or the genre camp. David Guterson is thus granted Serious Writer status for having buried a murder mystery under sonorous tautologies (Snow Falling on Cedars, 1994), while Stephen King, whose Bag of Bones (1998) is a more intellectual but less pretentious novel, is still considered to be just a very talented genre storyteller. Everything is 'in,' in other words, as long as it keeps the reader at a respectfully admiring distance.

Reviewers tend to think that anyone indifferent to the latest 'smart' authors must be vegetating in front of the television, or at best silently mouthing through a Tom Clancy thriller. The truth is that a lot of us are perfectly happy with literature written before we were born ­ and why shouldn't we be? The notion that contemporary fiction possesses greater relevance for us because it talks of the Internet or supermodels or familiar brand names is ridiculous. Older fiction also serves to remind us of the power of unaffected English. In this scene from Saul Bellow's The Victim (1947) a man meets a woman at a Fourth of July picnic. 'He saw her running in the women's race, her arms close to her sides. She was among the stragglers and stopped and walked off the field, laughing and wiping her face and throat with a handkerchief of the same material as her silk summer dress. Leventhal was standing near her brother. She came up to them and said, "Well, I used to be able to run when smaller." That she was still not accustomed to thinking of herself as a woman, and a beautiful woman, made Leventhal feel very tender toward her. She was in his mind when he watched the contest-ants in the three-legged race hobbling over the meadow. He noticed one in particular, a man with red hair who struggled forward, angry with his partner, as though the race were a pain and a humiliation which he could wipe out only by winning. "What a difference," Leventhal said to himself. "What a difference in people."'

Scenes that show why a character falls in love are rarely convincing in novels. This one works beautifully, and with none of the 'evocative' metaphor-hunting or postmodern snickering that tends to accompany such scenes today. The syntax is simple but not unnaturally terse ­ a point worth emphasising to those who think that the only alternative to contemporary writerliness is the plodding style of Raymond Carver. Bellow's verbal restraint makes the unexpected repetition of 'what a difference' all the more touching. The entire novel is marked by the same quiet brilliance. As Christopher Isherwood once said to Cyril Connolly, real talent manifests itself not in a writer's affectation but 'in the exactness of his observation [and] the justice of his situations.'

It is easy to despair of ever seeing a return to that kind of prose, especially with the cultural elite doing such a quietly efficient job of maintaining the status quo. Clumsy writing begets clumsy thought, which begets even clumsier writing. The only way out is to look back to a time when authors had more to say than 'I'm a Writer!'; when the novel wasn't just a 300-page caption for the photograph on the inside jacket. A reorientation toward tradition would benefit writers no less than readers. But if our writers and critics already respect the novel's rich tradition ­ if they can honestly say they got more out of Moby Dick than just a favourite sentence ­ then why are they so contemptuous of the urge to tell an exciting story?

Small publishers are to be commended for reissuing so many older novels; it would be even more encouraging if our national newspapers devoted an occasional full-page review to one of these new editions ­ or, for that matter, to any novel that has lapsed into undeserved obscurity. And modern readers need to see that intellectual content can be reconciled with a vigorous, fast-moving plot, psychological thrillers or translated fiction. To discover Shiga Naoya's A Dark Night's Passing (1937) and Enchi Fumiko's The Waiting Years (1957), two heartbreaking classics of Japanese fiction, is to realise how little we need a white man's geisha memoirs.

Feel free to disparage these recommendations, but can anyone outside of the big publishing houses claim that the mere fact of newness should entitle a novel to more of our attention? Many readers wrestle with only one bad book before concluding that they are too dumb to enjoy anything 'challenging'. Their first foray into literature shouldn't have to end, for lack of better advice, on the third page of something like Don DeLillo's Underworld. At the very least, the critics could start toning down their hyperbole. How better to ensure that Faulkner and Melville remain unread by the young than to invoke their names in praise of some new bore every week? How better to discourage clear and honest self-expression than to call Annie Proulx ­ as Carolyn See did in the Washington Post ­ 'the best prose stylist working in English now, bar none'? Whatever happens, the old American scorn for pretension is bound to reassert itself someday ­ and dear God, let it be soon.

© 2001 BR Myers, first published The Atlantic Monthly.

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