Category: Contemporary Fiction

Ben Lerner’s Novels

I recently read both 10:04 and The Topeka School, Ben Lerner’s second and third novels. I read his first one, Leaving the Atocha Station, last fall.

Leaving the Atocha Station is a quick, light read, but its neurotic, inept, hipster narrator is so fey, so self-involved, and so irresponsible that he is hard to keep in the reader’s good graces. The plot is as aimless as the narrator, but the book is blessedly brief, often witty, and always well written. Geoff Dyer does this thing rather better—and Paris Trance seems the obvious forerunner, maybe even the direct model, for Lerner’s novel.

10:04 is a big step forward, although we still get the bumbling, self-absorbed narrator whose charm Lerner seems to overestimate drastically. There is also the rather annoying fancy footwork between fact and fiction—so that novel (in Paul Auster fashion) is “about” writing this novel we are reading. Too cute by half in my opinion. But there is a lot more to chew on here, especially the narrator’s (Lerner’s?) reflections on various art works (most particularly, Donald Judd’s sculptures) and about the insane New York art market more generally. The format allows for these mini-essays embedded in the story—and they enliven the book instead of detracting from it (mostly because “the story” is mostly negligible).

It turns out that Lerner just doesn’t do human relationships very well. His characters interact to some extent, but he never really succeeds in getting the reader to “feel” the emotional struggles that he announces exist between his various characters. In that sense, the novels are rather diagrammatic, not “realized” in the ways you would expect from the “thick” portraits of character and of its unfolding that we traditionally receive from realistic fiction. (Rachel Cusk’s trilogy—Outlines, Transit, and Kudos—is similarly “thin,” a series of monologues that give us vignettes but no revelatory action or character development over time.)

The Topeka School is both more and less interesting than the reviews had led me to believe. Less interesting insofar as it is not a novel that has much to say about contemporary American society; more interesting in that its ideas (as expressed by a number of intellectual characters who narrate different sections of the novel) are consistently thought-provoking.

The reviews had claimed that Lerner (from Kansas) was, in this novel, giving us an insight into middle America in general and the Trump phenomenon in particular. In fact, the novel only addresses that complex territory obliquely. Instead, we get a fairly intricate plot, dotted with interesting characters—a much more diverse tapestry of human types than offered by the first two novels. Once again, however, the characters are mostly static, interesting because of their idiosyncratic views about a whole range of topics. There is almost nothing in the novel—despite its framework of intense familial, friendship, and romantic relationships—that immerses the reader in the nitty-gritty of that intensity.

I guess the old saw about showing, not telling, is apposite here. The analysis of what lies behind how people speak to and act toward others is so forefronted that we are very rarely given the concrete actions themselves or the raw feelings that interactions generate. (There are some exceptions, like an intense interaction among parents in a New York City playground, but that is an isolated incident with no connection to anything else in the novel, and ends completely inconclusively with no aftereffects.) That analysis predominates “fits” in the sense that the novel is preoccupied with psychoanalysis; the main character’s parents and his parents’ best friends are all psychoanalysts.

Lerner and Cusk are tremendous talents. Neither writes a word that is not eminently readable. But they are “cold” writers even as they write in the “warm” mode of the realist novel. Both of them are self-consciously re-crafting the novel as a genre, but eschewing at the same time the irrealism of 1960s “experimental fiction.” Their “meta-fictional” touches are light (heavier in Lerner than in Cusk) and it is not clear to me just what work those touches are meant to be doing. Postmodernism as parlor tricks, I am tempted to conclude. Meta-fiction is cute, but trivial, just another trick that can be pulled out of the bag.

Both writers are so intelligent, such interesting observers of contemporary life, that it’s the ideas they offer in novel form, rather than plot or character, that keeps me reading. Cusk’s insights are almost all relationship-based, and almost exclusively focused on the romantic relations between men and women (with some side glances to parent-child and friendship relations). That focus does begin to look like a limitation after three novels. No one in her world has any money worries, or has anything that looks like a serious or troubled relationship to their work. All the action takes place on airplanes or in comfortable restaurants, coffee shops, or hotels. The not-so-discreet (given her characters’ propensity to spill their souls) life of the bourgeoisie. Her novels have no urgent news to offer; they begin to seem fairly frivolous by the end.

Lerner engages a wider range of concerns, but barely wanders outside the realm of bohemia. Even his Topeka novel deals with an intelligentsia that has landed in Topeka because of the famous clinic there. They live in Topeka, but are not really of that place. The novel features three of four native-born Topekans at the most. Which is why it was so odd that the reviewers thought they were getting some kind of insight into middle America.

The novel does offer one rich insight into America’s current mess. I was a high school debater—and the novel’s main character is as well. Apparently (I have no way of knowing if this is actually true, but the novel reports it as being the case), basic debate technique was altered dramatically sometime in the 1990s. The new technique is called “the spread.” The idea is to (rapid-fire) present as many possible arguments for your side in your opening speech—so many that your opponents cannot possibly respond to (refute) them in their rebuttal round. Then in your closing summary, you can claim victory by referring to all the arguments your opponent did not contest.

“The spread” is a perfect description of Trump’s Twitter feed. He floods the public sphere with so much stuff—and his opponents are driven to distraction thinking they must respond to every one of his tweets. To leave even one of those tweets uncontested looks like conceding that point to him, while responding to every one of them drives the opponent crazy. Futility either way. The spread cannot be beaten precisely because it so fiendishly beats the opponent down. It is impossible to ever raise one’s head above water as this flood of assertion, misinformation, outright lies, and outrageous proposals comes pouring down. Because there is no filter, no way to decide what is newsworthy or not, there is no way to keep Trump from flooding the channels of information/communication. And we are all drowning in that flood.

I will write another post where I take up some ideas found in 10:24.

Rachel Cusk, Kudos

Rachel Cusk’s most recent novel, Kudos (2019), is a great read. It is also an odd book. Basically, it is a series of conversations between the narrator (a novelist on her way to and then attending a literary conference in an unnamed southern European city) and people she encounters over three days. And they aren’t really conversations; the narrator/novelist says almost nothing as she is subjected to monologues from the people—none of them intimates, some of them total strangers—she meets. There is no plot, no character development, no dominating point of view. The monologues are offered without authorial (or even narrator) comment.

But the stories and ideas each monologist offers are almost all enthralling; one only wishes that the people one sat next to on an airplane where one-fifth as interesting.

I guess this could be called a “novel of ideas” (Nick and I just recently read together Sianne Ngai’s recent piece in the Paris Review—an excerpt from her book on “gimmicks”—about the novel of ideas.) But Cusk doesn’t seem to have any stake in any of the ideas expressed. The narrator just records what is said to her. About the only concrete take-away from the book is that family life generates tremendous hurt and resentment. And that it is the rare couple indeed that can avoid divorce.

In any case, I wanted to capture two passages from the book that relate to my earlier post about the banishment of hope, of anything looking remotely like a happy ending, from novels that aspire to be considered “literature” or “serious fiction.”

The first passage is one of the few places where the narrator speaks in her own voice:

“Suffering has always appeared to me as an opportunity, I said, and I wasn’t sure I would ever discover this was true and if so why it was, because so far I had failed to understand what it might be an opportunity for. All I knew was that it carried a kind of honor, if you survived it, and left you in a relationship to the truth that seemed closer, but that in fact might have been identical to the truthfulness of staying in one place.” (Read book on Kindle, so can only say this passage occurs 27% of the way in.)

I like this because it suggests how we want to face the fact of suffering squarely, not denying its existence. And how we also long to find a way to make suffering meaningful, even productive, but can’t find that way—and, in fact, suspect any way of garnering a “return” on suffering as full of bad faith, and morally suspect. Suffering is evil and should be denounced as evil. No fortunate falls. And yet. . . we do keep trying to convert suffering into something else—if only the “honor” of survival. “Survivor” has become a laudatory term in our day and age.

The second passage is much longer, but also addresses the grim world of serious fiction. I don’t feel any need to comment on the passage.

The speaker is a young literary critic.

“He had always been compelled by provocative and difficult writing, he went on, because this at least proved the author had the wit to unshackle himself from convention, but he found that in works of extreme negativity—the writings of Thomas Berhard were an example he had been considering lately—one nevertheless eventually hit an impasse. A work of art could not, ultimately, be negative: its material existence, its status as an object, could not help but be positive, a gain, an addition to the sum of what was. The self-destructive novel, like the self-destructive person, was something from which in the end you remained helplessly separated, forced to watch a spectacle—the soul turning on itself—in which you were powerless to intervene. Great art was very often brought to the service of this self-immolation, as great intelligence and sensitivity often characterized those who found the world an impossible place to live in; yet the spectre of madness was so discomfiting that it made surrender to the writing unfeasible; one stayed on one’s guard, as a child might stay on its guard against a mad parent, knowing itself ultimately alone. Negative literature, he had noticed, got much of its power through the fearless use of honesty: a person with no interest in living and hence no investment in the future can afford to be honest, he said, and the same dubious privilege was extended to the negative writer. Yet their honesty, as he had said, was of an unpalatable kind: in a sense it went to waste, perhaps because no one cared for the honesty of someone who was jumping the ship the rest of us were stuck in. The real honesty, of course, was that of the person who remained on board and endeavored to tell the truth about it, or so we were led to believe. If I agreed that literature was a form that took its life-blood from social and material constructs, the writer could do no more than stay within those constructs, buried in bourgeois life—and he had recently read it described somewhere—like a tick in an animal’s fur” (77-78% of the way through).

Sentimentality and Apocalypse

Despite the effort of feminist critics, Eve Sedgwick most notable among them, fear of sentimentality (one of the most persistent hallmarks of a modernist mindset) still rules the roost in almost all “serious” fiction. I remember figuring out around age 14, when I first started reading classics like Hemingway, Joyce, and Hardy, that I could be sure that I was reading the “good stuff” if it all ends badly. “Poetic justice” and “happy endings” belong to the Victorians and Hollywood. They were banished in any fiction post 1890 that aspired to “high” status—and such seems to still be the case. Bad things happening to good people is the rule.

One reason for abandoning sentimentality, one I find myself very much in tune with, is the determination to avoid any hint that suffering pays dividends. The classic Christian plot, of course, reveals how redemption is won through suffering. And classic fictional plots offer all kinds of variants on the ways that characters grow in wisdom or strength or sympathy through various trials, physical and/or mental. Not to mention suffering that serves as atonement for various faults, thus washing them clean and making the character “worthy of” a happy ending.

The modernist sensibility is that suffering is meaningless. It does not make people better—and it does not make the world better. Suffering is just outrageous, all too common, and offering nothing but the cup of bitterness. In fact, there is something obscene about all efforts to turn suffering to account, to make it serve some purpose. One must resolutely turn one’s back on any sentimental way enlisted to make suffering pay dividends.

The sentimentalist, in other words, lies. He makes the world out to be better than it really is because he takes suffering, which is inevitable, and makes it palatable.

Anti-sentimentalism, as many have pointed out, comes with a kind of machismo pride: I am man enough to face up to the harsh truth that others try to shirk. My objection is that manning up seems to also entail admitting there is nothing that can be done about it. It becomes sentimental to think there are ways toward a more just world.

Anti-sentimentalism also alters the form of narratives. Traditional plots often turn on character development. To put it most simply: they show characters learning from and being changed by experience. As Aristotle put it way back when: characters are shown as moving from good fortune to bad, or the reverse. It doesn’t have to be that schematic, but the point is that experience matters, that neither character nor the world are eternally the same. Things and people change—and plots are ways of registering and accounting for those changes. The anti-sentimentalist view tends toward stagnant, determinist, fatalism. Things are always just about the same: the good suffer, injustice prevails, there is nothing much in the way of improvement to expect or hope for.

It’s this hopelessness that makes me like the John Dewey quote about sentimentalism that I offered a few posts back. Here it is again: “Education and morals will begin to find themselves on the same road of advance that say chemical industry and medicine have found for themselves when they too learn fully the lesson of whole-hearted and unremitting attention to means and conditions—that is, to what mankind so long despised as material and mechanical. When we take means for ends we indeed fall into moral materialism. But when we take ends without regards to means we degenerate into sentimentalism. In the name of the ideal we fall back upon mere luck and chance and magic or exhortation and preaching; or else upon a fanaticism that will force the realization of preconceived ends at any cost”(Reconstruction in Philosophy, 73).

No surprise, of course, that Dewey, optimist that he is, believes change for the better is possible. But I want to take up two different thoughts prompted by his statement.

First, that grand ideals like “justice” and “equality” are sentimental if unmoored from concrete ideas about how to put them into practice. And such sentimentalism leads directly to preaching and exhortation, along with fuzzy thinking that avoids all consideration of means. I have no more to say on that score. If the shoe fits . . .

Second, if one has no concrete steps to be taken, I think the form “magical thinking” takes is apocalyptic. The writer cannot imagine how to transform the world of injustice and suffering he presents. But the writer also declares this state of affairs is unsustainable and, therefore, will come down with a crash at some unspecified point in the future through some unspecified chain of events. This is the dream of revolution, but it has become the garden variety claim that current levels of inequality must lead to drastic political upheavals, that current levels of greenhouse gases must lead to transformative environmental disaster, and (of course) to the well-worn belief that economic crisis must lead to the collapse of capitalism.

Waiting for the apocalypse is not a politics. “To profess to have an aim and then neglect the means of its execution is self-delusion of the most dangerous sort” (Reconstruction in Philosophy, 72-73). Kant’s categorical imperative gets all the attention, but I have always preferred the “hypothetical imperative” myself. Basically, Kant says we fail one test of reason when we don’t will the means toward an end. As I explain it to my students, if your goal is to pass the test on Friday morning, the hypothetical imperative says you must study on Thursday night. If you go out to the bars, you are being irrational by Kant’s account.

Now, it is true, neither Kant nor Dewey pay enough attention to the case where one wills the means (after having thought carefully about them) but is powerless to put those means into action. Apocalyptic thinking is a delightful refuge for the powerless, for those who can’t make their desired courses of action a reality.

But there is no reason for such powerlessness to rule supreme in fiction. We seem to be suffering from a debilitating case of fatalism (suffering and disaster are inevitable and there is nothing we can do about it) combined with a severe lack of imagination (an inability to entertain, at least in thought, pathways toward a better future). The only means of transformation we seem currently able to credit is catastrophe. And Dewey would claim that predilection is every bit as sentimental as an Austen or Dickens novel that offers its characters a happy ending.

A Diminished Thing

Robert Frost’s sonnet, “The Oven Bird.”

There is a singer everyone has heard,

Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past

When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

On sunny days a moment overcast;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds

But that he knows in singing not to sing.

The question that he frames in all but words

Is what to make of a diminished thing.

The fit is hardly exact, but the phrase “what to make of a diminished thing” echoes in my head far too often these days. The leftist dreams of a communist utopia died a slow and very painful death from 1920 to 1989. But who would have predicted, as the Berlin Wall came down, that allegiance to and belief in “social democracy” would be on life support in 2020? Among the kinds of intellectuals I hang around with, Elizabeth Warren is a sell-out and Bernie Sanders a tolerable compromise, but just barely. All the talk—as in the novels I considered in the last post—is about the injustice and cruelty of capitalism, and the implacable racism of the United States. That injustice and cruelty is endlessly documented; everywhere you scratch the surface, you find perfidy. Corruption, betrayal, cover-ups, outright theft, and endless, ruthless exploitation. Even worse: the almost invisible “structural racism” that infects everything. It all must go. Only wiping the slate entirely clean will create a world we can affirm.

I can’t help but think that John Dewey nails it when he calls this kind of political rhetoric sentimental. “[W]hen we take ends without regard to means we degenerate into sentimentalism. In the name of the ideal we fall back upon mere luck and chance and magic or exhortation and preaching; or else upon a fanaticism that will force the realization of preconceived ends at any cost” (Reconstruction in Philosophy, 73). No one is offering anything remotely like a blueprint for how to get from here to there. We just get endless denunciations of here coupled with (in some cases) the vaguest gestures toward there. Analyses of how fucked up everything is, coupled with stories of outrageous maltreatment, are a dime a dozen.

Recently there has been a revival of a cultural studies move familiar in the 1980s. Basically the idea is to show that people are not passive victims and to celebrate their ways of resisting—or, if “resisting” is too strong a word, their way of surviving, of carving out a life under bad conditions. Two fairly recent books, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) and Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) exemplify this trend. Tsing’s book is wonderful in every way, an exhilarating read for its introduction of the reader into a sub-culture far from the mainstream and for its intellectual force and clarity. I found Hartman’s book a harder go. Hartman works diligently to find the “beauty” in the “wayward” lives that she tries to reconstruct from very scanty historical traces. Her subjects are black women in northern US cities between 1890 and 1915. For me, the lives she describes are unutterably sad; I just can’t see the beauty as they are ground down by relentless racism and inescapable poverty. Let me hasten to add that it is not Hartman’s job to make me feel good. The point, instead, is that she aims to present these tales as providing some grounds for affirmation—and I just don’t find those grounds as I read her narratives.

I don’t want to try a full engagement with Tsing’s book here. (I am late to this party; her book, like Hartman’s work, has been much celebrated.) The very short summary: she tracks the matsutake mushroom from its being picked in Oregon, Finland, Japan, and China to its ending up as a treasured (and expensive) delicacy in Japan. The ins-and-outs of this story, from the mushrooms own complicated biology (it cannot be cultivated by humans and only flourishes in “ruined” forests, ones that have been discombobulated by extensive logging) to the long human “supply chain” that renders the mushroom a commodity, offer Tsing the occasion to meditate on ecology, human migration, the US wars in Southeast Asia, and global neo-liberalism.

But for my purposes, I simply want to record that Tsing is interested in how people cope in the “ruins” that the contemporary world offers. The “ruins” of decimated, over-logged forests. The “ruins” of lives by the American war in Vietnam (spilling over into Laos and Cambodia). The “ruins” of a neoliberal capitalism that has made traditional jobs (with security, benefits, a visible line of command) obsolete. The “ruin” of all narratives of progress, of all notions that technology or politics is moving us toward a batter future.

For Tsing, at least in this book, there is no idea that this ruination can be reversed, or that there are political models (like social democracy), that might address these hardships and try to ameliorate them. Only someone hopelessly naive or delusional would credit any notion of possible progress. Instead, we just need to be getting on with the hard task of finding a niche in the interstices of this cruel world, whose mechanisms of grinding people and the environment to ruin will continue unimpeded. She isn’t even indulging some kind of 1960s dream of “dropping out.” We are all in the belly of the whale, so whatever expedients can be adopted to make the best of it are to be celebrated.

Here is Tsing’s summation of her vision, the last paragraph before her epilogue:

“Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscape—the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons—and the elusive autumn aroma” (282).

Back to autumn, to the oven-bird with its determination to sing even as summer fades away, and we are left with “a diminished thing.”