Category: Contemporary Fiction

Meretricious

Here’s a passage from Jonathan Coe’s excellent 2004 novel, The Closed Circle.

“. . . the young couple, who had arrived just behind Paul in a white stretch limo were enjoying the attention of a crowd of journalists and photographers. This couple, whom Paul had not recognized, had last year been two of the contestants on Britain’s most popular primetime reality TV show. For weeks they had kept the public guessing as to whether or not they were going to have sex with each other on camera. The tabloid papers had devoted hundreds of column inches to the subject. Neither of them had talent, or wisdom, or education, or even much personality to speak of. But they were young and good-looking, and they dressed well, and they had been on television, and that was enough. And so the photographers kept taking pictures, and the journalists kept trying to make them say something quotable or amusing (which was difficult , because they had no wit, either). Meanwhile, Doug could not help noticing, right next to them, waiting for his wife to emerge from the ladies’, the figure of Professor John Copland, Britain’s leading geneticist, one of its best-selling science authors, and regularly mentioned as potential Nobel prizewinner. But no one was taking his photograph, or asking him to say anything. He could have been a cab driver, waiting to drive one of the guests home, as far as anybody was concerned. And for Doug this situation encapsulated so perfectly everything he wanted to say about Britain in 2002—the obscene weightlessness of its cultural life, the grotesque triumph of sheen over substance, all the clichés which were only clichés, as it happened, because they were true—that he was, perversely, pleased to be witnessing it” (275-76).

Not a good passage; usually Coe avoids editorializing like this in his novel. But I wanted to comment on it because 1) I usually, by absenting myself completely from it, avoid “weightless” culture while 2) fighting shy of the clichéd lament about its “obscenity” (laments that echo through the two hundred plus years of despair over the mediocrity of bourgeois, democratic, non-noble mores). It is interesting to see Coe feeling compelled to both make the clichéd complaint and to chide himself for making it in almost the same breath. At some level, we elites are not allowed to sound like Flaubert anymore, not allowed to express our distaste—and, yes, our contempt—for what gets dished out on reality TV shows. Perhaps Milan Kundera was the last fully self-righteous and completely un-self-aware critic of kitsch. Even as his notion of weightlessness (“the unbearable lightness of being,” such a portentous but still fantastic title/phrase) winds up being little more than the fact that men find it unbearable to be faithful to just one woman. Kundera’s petulance and (ultimately) silliness put the last stake through the heart of “high” culture’s contempt for low.

But, still. I have seen Fox news only three or four times in my life; read People magazine the same number of times, and have never seen a reality TV show. When I do encounter such things, I am (I admit) flabbergasted as well as bored. That such trash fills the channels of communication is a mystery as unfathomable to me as the idea that people buy $10,000 watches. Who would do such a thing—and for what earthly reason? I don’t even have a condescending explanation to offer. Fascination/obsession with the British royal family fits into the same category for me.

Meanwhile—and I don’t think Coe sees this—his ignored professor is a “best-selling” author and likely to win a Noble prize–so hardly universally treated like a “cab driver.” Yeats and W. B. Auden are just two among the great early 20^th century poets who lived in fairly dire poverty. Even the post World War II poets—Berryman, Jarrell, Schwartz and the like—were spared that kind of poverty by having moved into sinecures in the beefed-up post-war universities. Twenty-first century poets will complain bitterly about how few books they sell, but they are lionized within the tight confines of the “poetry world,” giving readings to robust audiences, and never threatened with the kind of poverty that Yeats took for granted. We live in a world of niches now, so that no poet today can command a nation’s attention the way Yeats did (of course, he had the advantage of writing for a very small nation, about four million people strong, half the size of today’s New York City or London), even though no poet today can be as poor as Yeats. The niches, in other words, reward well—have cultural capital in both its forms (financial and reputational) available for distribution.

All of this has to do, in very large part, with the ways that the post-war universities have become the patrons for the arts in our time. Outside of the university it is very hard to make a living by the sweat of your pen. The Grub St man of letters, writing his reviews for the papers and the weeklies, no longer exists—while no poet and very few novelists can make a living apart from teaching creative writing. But the universities do provide a structure that insures rewards.

What everyone keeps lamenting these days (instead of lambasting the meretricious glob of TV and the tabloids) is the utter lack of contact between the niches. The “culture” we teach in school is utterly divorced from the “culture” our students access outside of school. They know nothing, and care less, for the material to which we introduce them—except for the very small minority we convert over to what by now should be called “school” culture, not “high” culture.

School culture does get a boost from all those middle to upper middle class parents who, for various reasons, see fit to give their children violin, ballet, singing, and (less frequently) art and acting lessons in lieu of (or in addition to) having them play little league or soccer or join a swim team. The arts/athletics divide in American child rearing practices deserves sociological study. Both for characterizing the parents who give their children different kinds of lessons—and in a longitudinal study of what effect those lessons have on later choices in life (chances of going to art museums or to the symphony; kinds of career paths taken). And how does deep involvement in youth sports culture track to an obsession with celebrities or TV world? Not any obvious connection there.

These schisms no doubt always existed in American culture. But they didn’t used to track so directly to different political allegiances/views. My colleague Jonathan Weiler thinks he can tell your political affiliating after asking only four questions, one of which is your emotional response to Priuses. I have fear he is right.

And, as usual, most perplexing–and disheartening–to me is the deep hostility that such divides now generate. Just as I really cannot understand why the uber-rich are so discontented, so determined to increase the financial insecurity of their employees, I cannot understand why our cultural warriors are out to destroy the universities. Yes, its partly their war against all things public. UNC is in the cross-hairs in a way that Duke will never be. But it is more than that. They have some leverage over UNC; they’d go after Duke as well if they could. The need to punish one’s enemies as well as look to one’s own well-being is what I don’t get. Peaceful co-existence of the various niches, the indifference of tolerance, is off the table it seems. I keep referring back (in my mind) to a comment Gary Wills made years ago about the Republican nominating convention (of 1992 or 1996; I don’t remember what year). He reported that over 30% of the delegates were millionaires, yet they seethed with discontent and rage. What objective reason did they have to be so agitated? Life in the US had treated them damn well. The same, of course, can be said of Donald Trump in spades. What is the source of all his anger? Pretty obviously the fact that he does not feel respected by the cultural elites. So he wishes to destroy them, to cause them maximum pain.

A final question: does meretricious popular culture, all that weightless trash, always have this kind of aggression against dissenters to that culture packed within it? In other words, I am back to thinking, yet again, about resentment–about its sources and about the cultural/societal locations in which it lurks.

Despair

“This book is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth century. Though alone for much of his life, he was nonetheless occasionally in touch with other men. He lived through an age that was miserable and troubled. The country into which he was born was sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries; often haunted by misery, the men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared. The relationships between his contemporaries were at best indifferent and more often cruel.”

This is the opening paragraph of Michel Houellebecq’s novel, The Elementary Particles (1998). Let me pair it with a passage from John Berger’s Portraits, from a short piece he wrote about the Fayum portraits in 2000.

“The situation at the end of our century is different. The future has been, for the moment, downsized, and the past is being made redundant. Meanwhile the media surround people with an unprecedented number of images, many of which are faces. The faces harangue ceaselessly by provoking envy, new appetites, ambition, or, occasionally, pity combined with a sense of impotence. Further, the images of all these faces are processed and selected in order to harangue as noisily as possible, so that one appeal out-pleads and eliminates the next appeal. And people come to depend upon this impersonal noise as a proof of being alive.”

I just don’t see it. Do I live in a bubble? I read about the ravages Facebook is causing for adolescents, or the booming market in plastic surgery, or the frantic search for status and wealth among various social sub-groups. And I don’t see it in the world I inhabit. Kiernan and Siobhan’s friends and contemporaries certainly suffer the ills—and anxieties—of economic precariousness and over indebtedness. But they aren’t unstable consumers, with lives dictated by social (or any other) media.

Yes, the future has been downsized and a sense of impotence about society’s general dysfunction and sheer nastiness reigns. But the people I know feel very much alive; the scariness of a world out of control is more than enough to keep the nerve ends jangling.

And in their personal lives—their relations to family and friends and colleagues—they are not indifferent and cruel. Even out in the public spaces of the city, the vibe is infinitely better than it was in the 1970s. Conviviality is palpable—and can pretty much be counted on in most interactions with strangers. It is the disjunct between this face-to-face decency and the nastiness of our politics and the on-line shit that is most striking to me. For the most part, it seems to me people are remarkably resistant to the poison seeping through the system.

But maybe it’s the bubble I occupy, the world of the professional upper middle class. A word with very few divorces, very little domestic abuse, very little drug and alcohol abuse. Maybe under the polite veneer, chaos, anger, and horrors lurk. It would speak of an unbelievable cover-up if such were the case. I am hardly denying that the opioid epidemic or domestic violence or homophobia or racism exist.

I think what I am trying to say comes down to four claims, all of which I only advance tentatively because I am not by any means convinced I understand what is going on. Here are the claims

Our economics and our politics have become more nasty, but there are strong counter-vailing forces. Those forces widen the gap between public life (the structure of the imagined, non-face-to-face worlds of commerce and politics and the media) and the concrete face-to-face interactions of everyday life (including in the workplace to a large extent). That the strain of this gap has not, thus far, led to serious disruptions is surprising to me. By which, I guess I mean, that the disruptions have only been manifested on the personal level—in domestic violence or drug/alcohol abuse—not in much serious push-back against the inhumanity of corporations treating employees as replaceable parts and subjecting them to increasingly demeaning surveillance.
The impact of the increased nastiness has been felt very unequally. No surprise there since the increased nastiness has been accompanied by huge upsurges in economic inequality. Where people are doing quite well—as they are in Chapel Hill—the social ills of our time are not very manifest. But those class differences do not explain the convivial vibe in America’s cities or the declining crime rates. The “losers” in the next economic regime are, for the most part, still “nice” to others. It is sort of like Charlie Kruzman’s work on the “missing’ Muslim terrorists; given the hordes of losers, it is striking how few of them adopt the kind of indifference or cruelty toward others that Houellebecq claims is general.
So, one the one hand, I incline to an almost economic determinist viewpoint when it comes to domestic violence and drug/alcohol abuse, thus explaining why certain classes are more afflicted with these ills than others. (Of course, I am only talking general trends here. The economically fortunate can still be alcoholics, and domestic abusers.) But when it comes to homophobia and racism, I am inclined to say that values other than the economic remain incredibly strong—and perhaps even stronger than—economically driven beliefs and behaviors. This works both ways. Residual decency, the considerate ways we interact with others, prove resistant to the prevailing economic modes of relationship. The economic—for better and for worse—does not carry all before it.
Similarly, let’s no overestimate the effectiveness of media. People have developed all kinds of ways to shut media messages off. The overload of which Berger speaks is itself a disabling factor. Everyone has to create a filter against such bombardment. Confirmation bias suggests that we only hear the messages we are predisposed to hear—which is one way of saying that most messages don’t get through and that the power of messages to change our basic beliefs is severely limited. Conversion is an astoundingly rare experience.

In sum, I just don’t see that generalizations about the despair of our times—and how they have changed basic behaviors tout court—are credible. There is more variety out there than such pronouncements credit. And, frankly, just much more good behavior than they are willing to admit.

So Little Time

In an early David Lodge novel (I can’t recall its title), the narrator asserts that the difference between characters in novels and people in real life is that the characters have way more sex and less children.

I am hardly going to deny that contemporary novels usually feature more and better sex than most of us get to enjoy. But the more striking wish fulfillment embedded in the novels I read is the abundance of time.

In A Little Life, the main character Jude is an accomplished pianist, an astounding cook (especially of pastries), takes long walks around New York City (at least until he loses his legs), works long days and most weekends at his law firm, maintains a variety of friendships, goes to art openings, the movies and plays, and oversees the renovation of at least two apartments and one house. Not to mention the frequent trips to Europe, especially London and Paris. If only . . .

There was brief period to time in my life when I was lonely and had time on my hands, basically the first few years of graduate school. I did, in some ways, get more done in that time than I can, in memory, credit as possible. The amounts I read and wrote are staggering to recall at this late date. But even at that time I always felt pressed for time, always felt I was giving things a lick and a polish on the idea that I would return to them and give them their proper due, my full attention, at some later date.

That time in my life came to an end with the formation of some close friendships—and then my first marriage and my first job. From that day until this, I have been deeply entangled in a network of obligations and commitments that leave little time to breathe. Not that I am complaining. I wanted desperately in my “out” years to move to the center of my time (a phrase from Thomas Hardy that has always been a touchstone for me). But this busyness is always haunted by the sense of things not done, of interests left unexplored, or of tasks done in a half-assed way because of time constraints. And it is that sense of constant hurry, or a total lack of leisure, that novels fail to portray.

Like the dyer’s hand, my nature is subdued. I don’t think, at this point, that I am capable of doing something slowly, with pain-staking care. I have become habituated to doing things quickly, to an ingrained sense of what is “good enough,” thus leaving time to move on to the next thing. Just as I know that moving to the country in order to secure peace and quiet would be crazy for someone of my temperament, so the notion that I could settle into one or two activities pursued at length is most likely delusionary. My attention span might be longer than that of our perennially maligned millennials, but I don’t want to disconnect any more than they do, even if my connections are not as often virtual. I crave the constant input, the pace that is a little too fast for comfort, but frantic in ways that make me feel energized and alive. Better manic than depressed any day.

Effortless Wealth

I have recently read two long novels, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara and The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas. That I got through both of them is testament to their ability to grab a reader since, in my cranky old age, I now abandon novels sixty, eight, even a hundred twenty pages in, if I lose interest.

One striking thing in both novels is that the characters become wealthy way past ordinary dreams. A thirteen year old son in the Wolas novel starts a software company that makes him a billionaire by the age of twenty-two, while his mother, the Joan Ashby of the title, just has to have her fiction submitted anonymously to a literary agent to secure million dollar advances and two million dollar movie deals. In A Little Life the climb to fame and fortune takes a little bit longer (one of the novel’s strengths is its portrayal of young artists on the make in New York City), but the four friends at the core of the novel each succeed in ways denied to 99% of humanity, becoming a famous movie star, an acclaimed painter, a highly successful architect, and a top corporate lawyer respectively. And they have the multiple houses and fabulous vacations to show for their virtue-gotten wealth.

Yanagihara is shrewd about the moment of the “turn,” the moment when her protagonists realize that they have “made it,” that they have stepped across the line into success. But the shrewdness doesn’t extend to a realization that the “turn” happens to very few. Most people slug along, with successes here and there, but without ever crossing that line, without even securing permanent fame or security. They have “good enough” careers that are always a struggle, always retain the possibility of collapsing, don’t ever “make it” once and for all. Just like very few people attain the levels of wealth that allow all money worries to disappear entirely. Both novels do suggest that for people under forty these days, especially if your life is centered in New York City, it is obvious that being a millionaire doesn’t cut it. Only hundreds of millions reaching toward a billion register in today’s economy—or today’s dreamscape.

Does this matter? In one way, no. If an author wants to take money and career anxieties off the table in order to focus on other things, that’s OK. But in another way it does raise the question of the “realistic” novel. Both of these novels tell stories about people presented as our contemporaries. Both aspire to psychological depth and complexity. They do aspire to be reports to readers about our current physical, mental, and spiritual condition. So I can’t help but think that their wet dream visions of fame and wealth are telling in and of themselves. It seems to suggest that what the two authors truly want is fame and fortune. Even if they, F. Scott Fitzgerald fashion, must rely on sheer magic to get to that promised land. The rest be damned.

Wolas’s novel comes very, very close to making that point its main theme. Her heroine, Joan Ashby, deeply regrets having sacrificed her art to family life. Her “resurrection” comes with abandoning that family and, especially, her responsibilities as a mother. Of course, she is rewarded by writing a best-selling novel and meeting a dreamy new lover. Naturally, the new man is not just a hunk, but also a world-famous photographer. When we occupy such a blatant script of wish fulfillment, it’s hard to know how to credit the “truths” the novel clearly aspires to convey to us.

Even more confusing is the fact that the central event of the novel makes no sense at all. Joan Ashby’s son (the other one, not the computer genius) steals an unpublished novel of hers and has it published under a pseudonym. Somehow this is meant to assuage his horror at being the untalented one of the family. But how? Since the book is published under a pseudonym and he must refuse all in-person interviews or book signings in order to keep his nefarious deed a secret, what exactly did he expect to get out of this?

His mother, upon finding out, doesn’t confront him and ask why he has done this, but flees instead to India in hopes of meeting the Dalai Lama, who will bring her enlightenment. But she also nurses a sense of deep grievance. Her son has stolen her soul by stealing her novel, committing a sin that is irreparable. But the remedy lies directly to hand. Just announce to the world that the book was published under a pseudonym, but is actually the work of Joan Ashby. There are plenty of hints, although never a direct statement, that Joan craves the attention and acclaim that comes with successful authorship. It is that which the son has stolen from her since, after all, she has all the rest: the satisfaction of having written a well-received novel, the knowledge of having gained many readers, and all the money the book has earned. Yet—and this is the kicker—the novel clearly expects us to sympathize entirely with Joan, to feel as outraged as her with what has transpired, and to see her flight (and refusal to deal with either her son or her husband) as not only understandable, but as heroic and noble. The lack of any dissenting perspectives on Joan robs the book of the very depth to which it aspires. Chasing fame and fortune trumps all else—and it is just assumed that, of course, readers will agree. We will root for Joan and be thrilled when, in the end, she gets to have it all.

The Yanagihara novel is more complex. It is, as its many readers and reviewers have noted, a melodrama. Characters come in only two shades: black and white. The one exception is the painter J.B., who drops out of the novel about half-way through. But what the reviews I have read did not mention is how class-bound the melodrama is. There is a wild America out there, the America of what we now think of as Trumpland. It is a violent place, made up of sexual perverts and violent sadists. It has no redeeming qualities and can only treat an innocent like Jude (the novel’s victim) with endless abuse. But if you can sail from that hell into a liberal arts college and get taken up by the members and scions of the professional upper middle class, all will be well. These people are so well-behaved, so well-meaning, so nice. Except for one bad encounter with a violent lover, Jude is only surrounded by supportive, loving, non-violent people once he gets to college at age sixteen. Niceness can’t overcome the traumas of Jude’s horrible childhood—which is why the New Yorker review found the novel so bracing. Here was a writer brave enough to forego redemption or recovery for its victimized protagonist. But that’s not really how it happens. Jude is saved by Willhelm’s love. The author has to kill Willhelm off in a car accident to get Jude to the desired end: his suicide. Daniel Medelsohn in the New York Review of Books thus proclaims the author the true sadist of this tale—and wonders why readers have loved a book that tortures its main character over hundreds of pages.

The lesson in Wolas’s novel seems pretty clear: money and a love of art will get you through. Neither alone is enough, but if you have both, then you can survive this rough world. There is more than that to Yanagihara’s tale. What makes A Little Life such a moving novel (it is a very, very powerful melodrama, with the full Dickensian ability to make you cry) is its insistence that the real key—even though money and satisfying, well received work are essential—is friendship. Neither novel believes (if that is the right word) in romantic love. For Wolas, such love is a trap. For Yanagihara, such love is only valuable the more it resembles, shades into, friendship. Companionship is at the heart of A Little Life and the source of its emotional richness. A disdain of companionship as weakness is what finally marks the airlessness of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby.