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Judging by their fulsome endorsements on the jackets of so many novels, it's apparent that some critics don't get out much. To blurb-bestowers, no work is ever just moderately entertaining. Books are "captivating," "enthralling," "sprawling," and even "festooning." Maybe I'm just naÏve, but when I read a book that's billed as "a masterpiece of savage comedy," I expect something like Wise Blood or The Loved One. "Riveting from first page to last" is a description that gets my hopes up: it promises at least the intensity of Crime and Punishment, and a lot more than Babbitt. Obviously, I deal with some disappointment. I guess honesty doesn't make good jacket copy, or we'd see more blurbs like this:
- "A dense book in which very little happens."
- "A well-written but depressing novel, lacking in excitement what it makes up for in style."
The latter especially could apply to so much "serious" modern writing. As Annie Dillard observed 20 years ago in Living by Fiction,
The serious novelist takes pains to distinguish his work from trash. If popular films and popular novels have good stories, then literary novels shall not. If despite all your precautions your novel is epic in scale, if it embodies such quaint narrative virtues as enlargement and diversity of action, forcefulness of dramatic conflict, vivid spectacle, and heart-pounding suspense, someone will accuse you of writing with an eye toward a film sale. No one will like you anymore.
Dillard describes a gradual internalizing of the action over the novel's three-century history. Eighteenth-century fiction was open and outward, and society was its stage. By the twentieth century, the theater of action (once again, in so-called "serious" writing) had moved to the mind:
at some point, the people in novels stopped galloping all over the countryside and started brooding from chairs. Everything became psychological and interiorized . …We swallowed the arena and can no longer watch the show.
One effect of this inward movement was to make the telling of the tale as important as the tale itself. The way in which a character viewed the action became part of the plot. But here lay the dilemma. In the past, readers had quietly conspired with authors to create fictional worlds. They pretended to believe the narratives, at least till they put their books down.
When narratives moved to the minds of multiple characters, the conspiracy unraveled. Actors in stories couldn't be trusted to tell the truth about themselves: they constantly tricked readers with madness, magic, miracles. Readers naturally became cynical about all this. Gone was the joy of good storytelling. The main thing left was the experience of reading: often just the beauty of pretty words. "In the contemporary modernist view," Dillard says, "the work of art is above all a chunk in the hand. It is a self-lighted opacity, not a window and not a mirror. It is a painted sphere, not a crystal ball."
I guess it's really no wonder that a lot of educated people would rather watch Trading Spaces than stare at a painted sphere. A good writer, working at a moment in history where reading literary fiction has evolved from a popular craze (like seeing Attack of the Clones) to a cultural duty (like giving to public radio), must find other ways of attracting and holding jaded readers.
One way is to tell a story in the voice of an irresistible narrator, usually someone funny and highly befriendable. That pretty much describes the heroine of Laura Zigman's Her. After years of disappointing relationships, Elise has finally met the love of her life, Donald. The problem is that Donald comes with baggage: a lovely and highly chic ex-girlfriend named Adrienne. Elise becomes sick with jealousy. Sure that Adrienne is out to get Donald back, she gradually sinks to embarrassing depths of anxiety and suspicion—even stalking Adrienne and intercepting Donald's phone calls.
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