Jane Smiley, that is. And the appellation is really unfair (although pretty cute) given what I’m about to post, because when she’s good, as in The Age of Grief, she’s among the very best representatives of a school of writing and thinking about writing that I’m going to disparage. And the truth is, I don’t actually object to this school of writing, or any school of writing. Whichever school gets your story written, well, that’s the fight song you should sing.
What I object to, always, in all creative arts, is hegemony.
And this particular hegemony has much to do, I think, with why The Book of Bunk is having a hard time finding a home during its first pass through New York.
I’m going to have to type that again, because I’m having trouble believing it. Accepting it. Because while I know that I am the last person on earth qualified to judge, I’m also right, in this case. And they’re wrong. People can argue– and I fully expect that they will, before too long– about whether I can get away with combining the elements that I combine in this novel. About whether it’s overambitious (though I think too many critics and editors have forgotten what ambitious fiction looks like). About whether all its interwoven stories finally form a cohesive tapestry. But to argue that it doesn’t deserve to be out in the world and part of the argument…I’m sorry, but it’s absurd. It will not stand. So I’ll try typing it once more:
The Book of Bunk is having a hard time finding a home in New York.
Nope. Didn’t help. Blogging about this process helps. I’ll do that.
In some later post, I may put up some of the responses I’ve gotten from editors. Not with attributions. Not to strike back. But because some of you preparing yourselves for your next submission probably need to prepare yourselves harder. Not today, though.
One of the only objections at least a couple of editors have raised– amongst many glowing, loving expressions of admiration for this book they don’t want or don’t think will sell enough– involves three short scenes in Bunk that take place during a U.S. Senate hearing. The objections run one of two ways: either the Senate scenes “aren’t realistic” or “strictly believable,” or else the fact that those scenes play out with overtly mythic overtones is problematic because Senate hearings on these subjects really did happen. Put more simply, the perceived problem is that the Senators involved seem outsized. Archetypal, even.
A few days ago, I realized I could conceivably cut those scenes. They constitute less than a 10th of the novel, and I could make the book work without them.
And then I thought about Smiley’s People.
American literary fiction, at the moment, is dominated by characters who are not only not larger-than-life, but smaller (it’s also dominated by a brand of magical realism so cold, joyless, self-consciously allegorical and/or wink-wink cute that it’s functionally neither, but that’s for another day). Striving for the ruthless realism so successfully embodied in John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, writers are redacting not just all trace of myth or uniqueness from their characters’ personalities, but also all hint of action that isn’t driven by self-interest. The thinking here goes that self-interest is the root of even the most altruistic human actions, that honesty and cynicism are the same thing, that fiction’s best goal is to confront us with characters who perfectly resemble the would-be adulterer (or child abuser, or bigot, or embezzler, or bored spouse, or exhausted parent, or entitled xenophobe, or jealous sibling, or hit-and-run driver) inside all of us.
Sometimes– in The Age of Grief, in good Carver– that so-called realism can ring with an authenticity and preciseness of insight that renders it mythic in spite of itself. And that’s when it’s great.
But I humbly submit that we don’t remember Ahab, or Bill Sykes, or Daisy Buchanan, or Bigger Thomas, or Huckleberry Finn, or Hester Prynne, or Philip Marlowe, or Aunt Sylvie in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (who is often mistaken for a Smiley’s Person), or the Misfit, or Stephen Dedalus, or Stephen King’s Carrie, or Elizabeth Bennet, or Cormac McCarthy’s towering, ruthless, sketchbook-weilding, hairless judge, or even Rabbit, because they’re so realistic, or because they remind us exactly of ourselves and neighbors. We remember them because they are us plus wonder. Us writ large. Us making sense. Us outside of our own skins, but still us. Us in the way we most dream and fear ourselves. Us collectively, as a community, a nation, a species.
I say that’s what fictional characters are all about. What they need to be about.
And damn it, my Senators are staying put.