But Good Books Can Be Hard: A Reply To Lev Grossman

Below: a quote-and-reply format with the Lev Grossman article in the Wall Street Journal, in which I quibble with most of his assertions.

“Some of which has to do with the book business itself—sales of adult trade books declined 2.3% last year, compared with 2007. Should we still be writing difficult novels? Isn’t it time we made our peace with plot?”

I get the sense that people writing difficult novels are not exactly over concerned with the sales numbers, especially not numbers which are unequal to how much people are reading (it can’t cover used book sales, or library reads), and numbers which represent a minor fluctuation over the long term. If you write a difficult novel, it’s because you want to write it. Not all writing has to have (high) sales as its primary goal.

Furthermore, making “our peace with plot” is hardly a foolproof way to garner sales. Not many people would label Bolano’s “The Savage Detectives” and “2666” as plot-heavy novels, yet they managed to sell right off the shelves.

The “we” is a bit of an oversimplification, as well. As if there is a cohesive coterie of writers all moving in one direction like a school of fish. In my experience writers are lonely, solitary beasts, rarely running in packs. And so if one of them wants to write a difficult novel that relies on techniques other than plot (character? style? description? dialogue? innovative structures?), go right ahead. There is no we.

“The Modernists felt little obligation to entertain their readers. That was just the price you paid for your Joycean epiphany. Conversely they have trained us, Pavlovianly, to associate a crisp, dynamic, exciting plot with supermarket fiction, and cheap thrills, and embarrassment. Plot was the coward’s way out, for people who can’t deal with the real world. If you’re having too much fun, you’re doing it wrong.”

As far as the big picture, I can agree that this stereotype is wrong. I just don’t find it very often. At least not in MFA programs. Most writers I know never made their peace with plot, because they never went to war against it. It’s all the other details that make supermarket fiction — shallow canada pharmacy generic characters, cliched scenarios, lamentable dialogue and handicapped prose.

“[M]illions of adults are cheating on the literary novel with the young-adult novel, where the unblushing embrace of storytelling is allowed, even encouraged.”

Perhaps this fault is not in the writers, Dear Brutus, but the readers? In my previous post I wrote about the steadily eroding ability of college graduates to read at a post-college level — this is why they go for young-adult novels. Because it’s easier, and even though they have a college degree, they can’t handle adult books — that is, books written for educated adults. They literally don’t have the cognitive apparatus because their education has failed them.

“From a hieratic, hermetic art object the novel is blooming into something more casual and open: a literature of pleasure.”

Is it really unreasonable to assume that a great amount of pleasure could come from difficult books? Books that repay the reader for re-reading? It’s a more complex form of pleasure, but certainly pleasure, nonetheless. And there needs to be room for the pleasure of the few — that is, books written not for the pleasure of the masses but the pleasure of the educated, even if the the numbers of the educated are daily shrinking.

“To the Modernists, stories were a distortion of real life. In real life stories don’t tie up neatly. Events don’t line up in a tidy sequence and mean the same things to everybody they happen to. Ask a veteran of the Somme whether his tour of duty resembled the “Boy’s Own” war stories he grew up on. The Modernists broke the clear straight lines of causality and perception and chronological sequence, to make them look more like life as it’s actually lived.”

If we’re talking about modernity in a philosophical sense, this is exactly wrong. Modernity preferred rationality and metanarratives, hence the need for stories that encompass everything and end with finality. If Grossman is talking about modernity as a time period, then perhaps it might be better to call it late modernity, where authors reacted against more conventional forms of the novel. But if anything, the examples he cites lean more toward postmodernity (philosophically speaking) than to modernity.