The Great Nabacocoa
THE GREAT AMERICAN
BOONDOGGLE
(The Sad State of the
American Short Story)
The situation has been the same for years. Nothing ever
seems to change and practically no one deems it necessary even to talk about
it. Almost forty years ago a colleague at the university where I taught, a
lifelong reader of The New Yorker and
a person whose intelligence I respect, said to me, “I love The New Yorker, but I never read the fiction. ‘The New Yorker story’ does not appeal to
me.” In a visit to my general practitioner a month ago, the doctor, an avid
reader of classical literary fiction—the canonical literary works of the world—remarked,
“I love the articles in The New Yorker,
but I never read the fiction. Most of it is a total bore.” Over a period of forty
years how many other intelligent readers of fiction have said the same thing? Repeatedly.
Why is nobody listening?
Over the past ten years I have subscribed to a variety of
American literary journals. Someone advised me to try reading Agni, where, so they said, some of the
best fiction in the country was being published. I subscribed to Agni for two years and never found a
single short story of genuine literary merit. With few exceptions the same was
true of the other “literary” journals I read.
At times I was simply astonished by the winners of literary
prizes. I would read the whole story and gasp with amazement. That story won a prize? That’s a story not even worth publishing. I also
subscribed to One Story for a couple
of years. Here, once again, since they publish only one story in each issue,
you’d think their standards for what they accept would be high. Alas, their
standards are low, and most of what they publish is hardly worth reading.
Sometimes I thought that part of the problem was me. I
taught Russian literature for thirty years, so I cut my literary teeth on some
of the best fiction ever published. Do modern writers publishing in the U.S.
today simply have lower standards? Is it no longer cool to be ambitious, to
want to write fiction with verve and panache, to aim for something entirely new
and unique?
The standard pedestrian story, the kind of thing I cannot
stand, is in the genre of what has come to be called “domestic literary
fiction.” The characters are often middle-class Americans, caught up in their
daily dramas of adultery or psychological trauma. The style is bland, straight
realism, with few or no stylistic embellishments. The structure is often lax,
with few narrative arcs, without a clear beginning, middle and end. There is no
LITERATURE in these stories, and maybe I would be less offended by their
omnipresence in every American journal I come across if they would just change
the name: domestic fiction. Leave the
‘literary’ out. The stories would still be as egregiously dull and unimaginative,
but at least they would no longer pretend to be literature.
I have subscribed to The
New Yorker for forty years. I have not done a survey, but I suspect that at
least half the stories published there are in the category of “domestic
literary fiction.” Maybe it’s more like two thirds. In other words, the
magazine widely considered the best repository of quality fiction in the whole
country is publishing more dreck than good fiction. How many different fiction
editors has the magazine gone through over that long time period? Wasn’t there
a single one of them who could read fiction creatively? Lovers of literature
should be up in arms and marching on New York, but nobody is. WHY NOT?
In the late eighties or early nineties The New Yorker started coming out with an annual “fiction edition.”
For the first couple of times the yearly issue was wonderful, packed with
interesting creative writing. John Updike, a survivor from the time period
before the mass deterioration in fictional quality, was still publishing his
stuff back then. But quite rapidly the business of the “fiction edition” went
into decline. Look at this year’s offerings and you’ll find very little
fiction. In lieu of fiction the regular contributors now write little autobiographical
pieces about how they spent their vacations on beaches catching crabs as
children.
Let’s take a couple of concrete examples to illustrate my
point. Here is the beginning of a recent story in The New Yorker: “Close to five hours on the train. And then twenty
minutes by taxi from the station to the school. He would have time to call the
lawyer, work through the options. He had the number of a consultant, in case
Rowan needed to apply somewhere else. Maybe the school legally had to contact the
college he’d got into, but Richard wasn’t sure. And maybe it wouldn’t come to
that. The school wouldn’t want to make anything public. The thought calmed
him—good, good. They were on his side, even if they had not said so in so many
words: they weren’t stupid.”
Is there anything about this lead paragraph that makes the
reader want to read on? I see practically nothing. Is there even a faint taint
of literature here? None. So where
was the appeal for the fiction editor of The
New Yorker who decided to publish this? Does the story get better later on?
Hardly. This is exactly the kind of fiction that my literature- loving doctor
is not going to read.
In recent years foreign writers of English-language fiction have
been frequently published in American literary journals. These are sometimes
persons born abroad, sometimes persons born in the U.S. of recently immigrated
parents. You might think, Well wonderful. Stories set in other countries, based
on exotic foreign cultures, will bring novel and exiting verve to the American
short story. Alas, it appears that large numbers of such writers have bought
into the gruesome American tradition of mediocrity. Their characters may be
African or Indonesian, but they are fully as humdrum as the American characters
mired in “domestic literary fiction.”
Another recent story in The
New Yorker, written by a Chinese-American writer, is set in China. It
begins with three Americans, Adrian, Peter (Adrian’s boyfriend) and Bella
standing outside a restaurant “famous for its Peking duck.” We have the
beginnings of a story in which, perhaps, something will happen. Then nothing
does. Adrian and Peter fly back to the States, and for the whole rest of the
story the Chinese-American Bella agonizes over her past. As if creative writing
courses have neglected altogether the idea of STRUCTURE in short fiction, the
whole first page of the story goes wandering around in the pluperfect tense.
“Bella had known Peter for twenty-five years. They had
shared a place with two other housemates in Boston when they were in law
school, and for as long as they had been friends they had been talking about
visiting China together.” Why bother telling us this, since the visit to China
together is already done (Peter has flown back to the U.S.)? The story is not about
him; it is solely about hangdog Bella.
“Adrian was a writer, and he was working on ‘a
multigenerational and intercontinental epic,’ based on his family history, and
during the past two weeks the three of them had toured a number of towns on the
East China Sea, sifting through local archives, tracing the untraceable.” Once
again, if we are to have a story with Adrian in it, then write that story. As
it is, all of this pluperfect summing up of things about Adrian serves no
purpose. If you want a story about Bella’s tribulations why not just eliminate
the whole first page? Thank God that at least we the readers are not forced to
delve into Adrian’s “intercontinental epic.” This story about the divagations
of Bella’s mind, however—even after we get rid of Peter and Adrian—goes nowhere
and does nothing. Why did The New Yorker
publish it?
And mind you, The New
Yorker publishes fiction only from agented writers. If Lev Tolstoy or Anton
Chekhov sent in their very best fiction unsolicited, it would receive zero consideration.
So behind these writers and these stories there are literary agents, there is a
history of grooming in some creative writing program at a university. You check
out the author’s website on the internet, and, sure enough, she has a
background in a creative writing program, in fact one of the most famous; she
is a highly regarded writer who has won
awards for her fiction.
Why does this not surprise me? Well, it would have,
back before I was aware of the present-day standards in mediocrity that are
widely accepted all over the publishing world. All along the line there must be
people who have encouraged and continue to encourage this kind of stagnant,
dead writing. But WHY?
Once at a public reading a few
years ago, a successful writer of short stories, quite well known, remarked,
“When I was in an MFA program the only thing they allowed us to write was
‘domestic literary fiction.’” When I heard him say this I nearly rose up in
rebellion and marched upon the proscenium where he stood. I cannot prove it,
but I suspect that the problem of the American short story has its origins
largely in the creative writing racket that flourishes all over American
universities.
Instructors in creative writing programs must publish their
fiction in order to perpetuate their careers. Many of them write in the
gruesome and unforgivable genre of “domestic literary fiction.” They make
names for themselves, they publish their stuff in the “literary” journals. They
win awards for the dreck they publish. Even worse, they perpetuate the problem
by encouraging their creative writing students to write the same way. How did
they win the awards? Because the prizes are given out by other hopelessly
mind-numbing writer/judges who write the same crap.
In other words, everyone—creative writing instructors,
agents, publishers, arbiters of literary taste, and most readers—everyone has
agreed to look at the king with no clothes on and not notice his nakedness.
Why, I keep asking why, and I have already provided a few answers. Here is another:
publishers still want to make money, and High Art has never been much for
making money. What few readers of fiction that remain in the U.S. today are,
largely, readers of the pap of which I speak. Probably a lot of them think that
this is what real fiction is. As Donald Trump would say—if Trump were a reader
of good fiction, or even a reader of anything—SAD.
The narrator of a recent novel by the Chinese émigré writer
Ha Jin, The Boat Rocker, has this to
say about restrictions on the Chinese writer of fiction in Red China: “those
writers, every one of them, were talented but had to toe the line, not only on
the page but also in their imaginations, because they received salaries from
the state and could not afford to jeopardize their livelihoods.” You say, Yeah, that’s China, but there is no
censorship in America. But haven’t writers of U.S. fiction, intent on
making careers, sold out their imaginations in similar ways? Not sold out to
the political pressures of the ruling government, but to the pressures of the
ruling trends in mediocre writing.
I sometimes think that most people, deep, deep down, are
most comfortable with mediocrity. Human nature is such that in any life’s
endeavor things are so set up as to find a common denominator in the pedestrian.
One amazing discovery that I made while a member of American Academia is that
university professors are often little interested in creativity. While
professing to be great lovers of the liberal viewpoint politically, many of
them are pompously pedantic arch-reactionaries at the core. Don’t try to make
things better by suggesting radical new ways of doing things in Academia; they
will fight you tooth and nail.
Then again, take a look at the American “free press.” Why is
it that U.S. media networks all run the same news on a given evening, and all
with basically the same slant? Who is the backdoor operator organizing this
everyday conformity of opinion? Why, for example, is there not a single news
outlet giving us, say, the Russian view of the brouhaha concerning so-called
“Russian interference” in the recent U.S. presidential election? Because the
Russians are assumed automatically to be guilty, since the Russians are always
the bad guys. Americans take psychological comfort in knowing there are always
Russians around, to bear the brunt of all the badness. With the collapse of the
Soviet Union Hollywood was in a quandary for a time: who will be the bad guys
in our movies now? Then they found the easy solution: although Russians aren’t
communists anymore, they still are bad.
Why, to take another example, did not a single news
commentator anywhere question the veracity of reporting on the most recent gas
attack in Syria (April, 2017)? President Trump sent in Cruise missiles to
punish our favorite bad guy, Assad, but nobody stopped to think: you know, it
simply makes no sense that Assad, or his Russian allies would be behind that
attack on civilians. Just at the point when our new president was prepared to
consider a new approach to Assad, BAM, another use of poison gas on civilians.
It’s simply not believable, but, once again, it’s a comfort for Americans, who
always prefer simple answers to complicated questions.
And mediocrity. Take
American beers, all brewed for beer drinkers with absolutely no taste, and all
selling voluminously. Beer drinkers in Germany, Holland, England, etc., etc.,
take a taste of such a beer and say, “What? Americans drink this? And elect Trump as our President. And watch movies made by Woody Allen. Anyone with brains is aware that these days Woody Allen's movies are terrible; he should have stopped making movies twenty years ago. But everyone goes on pretending that his films are worth watching. A recent article in The Atlantic said as much.
As for The New Yorker,
luckily there are a few bright spots in the fiction offerings. Offhand I’d say
the magazine has five or six stories a year worth reading. This year I have
appreciated Kirstin Valdez Quade’s story with its origins in The Lives of the
Saints, “Christina the Astonishing,” and a story by Etgar Keret, “Fly Already”—true,
this one is not by an American writer; it is translated from the Hebrew, but at
least they published it.
Acknowledged masters of American fiction make their
way occasionally into the pages of The
New Yorker. A recent issue featured “The Itch” by Don DeLillo, about a man
caught up in the typical DeLillo malaise: “He was forty-four years old, trapped
in his body. Arms, legs, torso. Face did not itch. Scalp developed something
that a doctor gave a name to, but it itched only rarely, then not at all, so
the name didn’t matter.” And so on, in the same vein. If you’re looking for the
very best in DeLillo, try his magnificent comic novel, White Noise, one of the best pieces of American fiction of the
twentieth century.
Another big exception is the writer George Saunders, who is
also a contributor to The New Yorker
and a participant in the grand boondoggle of the creative writing racket—he
teaches creative writing at Syracuse University. The most recent of his stories
I have read in The New Yorker is “Mother’s
Day” (Feb., 2016), and it, once again, is wonderful, full of great humor and stylistic
panache. Someone as creative as Saunders is certainly aware of the sad state of
the modern short story, so why doesn’t he come out and say something about it? Well,
why should he jeopardize his position in the pantheon by accusing his fellow
writers of insipidity and phoniness? That would make him appear ungrateful and
arrogant.
In the same issue of The
New Yorker containing the story of Bella, there is an article about the
well-known writer of short fiction, Grace Paley, a writer of the domestic
quotidian. “Paley initially suspected that her work would be considered
‘trivial, stupid, boring, domestic, and not interesting,’ but she couldn’t help
it: ‘Everyday life, kitchen life, children life had been handed to me.’”
What is the difference between Paley’s domestic fiction and
the stifling domestic fiction that is rampant today? The main difference is
that Paley’s fiction is WRITTEN. What does that mean? Take this example from
one of her stories, “A Conversation with My Father,” a tale in which the
eighty-six-year-old father of the narrator, sick in bed, asks her to entertain
him with a story about “simple people.” Here is what she comes up with at first,
a story that is NOT WRITTEN.
“Once in my time there was a woman and she had a son. They
lived nicely, in a small apartment in Manhattan. The boy at about fifteen
became a junkie, which is not unusual in our neighborhood. In order to maintain
her close friendship with him, she became a junkie too. She said it was part of
the youth culture, with which she felt so much at home. After a while, for a
number of reasons, the boy gave it all up and left the city and his mother in
disgust. Hopeless and alone, she grieved. We all visit her.”
The narrator’s old father then complains that she has left
everything out of the story. How did the woman look? Who were her parents that
she should end up like this? The next attempt by the narrator is WRITTEN. What
makes it WRITTEN? See the passages I have italicized below.
“Once, across the street from us, there was a fine handsome
woman, our neighbor. She had a son whom she loved because she’d known him since
birth (in helpless chubby infancy, and in
the wrestling, hugging ages, seven to ten, as well as earlier and later).
This boy, when he fell into the fist of
adolescence, became a junkie. He was not a hopeless one. He was in fact
hopeful, an ideologue and successful converter. With his busy brilliance, he wrote persuasive articles for his high-school
newspaper. Seeking a wider audience, using important connections, he drummed into Lower Manhattan newsstand
distribution a periodical called ‘Oh! Golden Horse!’
“In order to keep him from feeling guilty (because guilt is the stony heart of nine-tenths of
all clinically diagnosed cancers in America today, she said), and because
she had always believed in giving bad
habits a home where one could keep an eye on them, she too became a junkie.
. . .”
The writer of the article Alexandra Schwartz goes on to say
the following: “On the branches of the bare first draft, life begins to bud.
Before the woman seemed delusional, pathetic. Now we see her goodness, her
confused optimism, her protective love for her son. The narrator’s tone turns
rueful, tender; a piece of gossip has become literature” (New Yorker, May 8, 2017, p. 67-68). Well, maybe not high art, but
yes, literature, and why? Because it is WRITTEN.
Oh, that only Vladimir Nabokov were still around, with his
high standards for what is good literature and his hound dog’s instinct for frauds
and literary trash. I would advocate forcing the fiction editor of The New Yorker, plus the fiction editors
of all the American “literary” journals—before they accept for publication
another single story—to read all of Grace Paley’s fiction. If they don’t have
time for that, let them read one story published in The New Yorker back before the advent of the Age of Egregious:
Vladimir Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols.” Here we have a mere five pages of sheer
aching loveliness. Well, it too features an American domestic scene, describing
an old Russian Jewish émigré couple; they live in an American city and have a
grown son who is mentally ill.
But what a difference between Nabokov’s story and the
pap/dreck that has long since become the new normal. What a plethora of lovely
lines, what an amplitude of emotion! Read just this one story, modern-day
writer of American fiction, and try to get at least a little bit ambitious! Forget
everything they’ve told you back in those dismal creative writing courses.
Write something new
and unique, try for something original.
Then don’t send it anywhere until you’ve revised and polished it eight, ten,
twenty fifty times—until it coruscates and gleams like a precious gem of lapis
lazuli. Okay, we cannot all be Nabokov, but we can at least make an effort to
transcend the dreck. Not interested in writing LITERATURE? Fine. Good. Go on
writing the stultifying stuff, but don’t
pretend that it’s literary.
The American Literary Establishment has recently been shaken
up by the power of Amazon, frightened to the core by that power. I say good for
Amazon, which does not have to indulge in the fakery of The Establishment. Amazon has done some highly positive things for American Letters. Take, for one
example, the thing of the editorial review. Amazon customer reviews now cut
into the reprehensible practice of having establishment literary figures write
automatic positive reviews for any writer who is already IN. This often makes
for an interesting contrast. We no longer have to trust the editorial reviews,
when on Amazon we can read often highly intelligent customer reviews of the
same books. The editorial reviews for established writers, were they to give
stars, would all be starred at 4.5 and 5.0. When the customer reviews for the
same book are at 3.0, we suspect that the writer of the editorial review has
been engaged in meretricious fakery.
d
Herein appended is the final section of a recent review I
wrote of a novel by Elif Batuman, The
Idiot. My jeremiad here resembles, in some respects, that above, repeats
some of the same points, but comes at the discussion from a slightly different
viewpoint.
Although Elif Batuman has published
only two books, both relatively recently, she has already made it big time in
the Eastern Literary Establishment. Many American writers would give their
right writing hand to be where she already is. Ms. Batuman has a literary agent
in the most prestigious agency in New York, she is a contributor/staff writer
for The New Yorker. She has hotshot
editors on high, and her books are reviewed at the highest levels: The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books,
The London Review of Books, etc. No
matter how good or bad her next novel is, it will without doubt be favorably
reviewed at the same high levels as The
Idiot—not really a very good novel—has just been reviewed. That’s the way
the game works, after you are accepted into the IN crowd.
So what Ms. Batuman needs to do at
this point is stop listening to the hotshot establishment agents and editors
and write something that is real literature. Unlike so many modern American
writers, those who have come out of creative writing programs, she has taken
the time to read the great writers; she knows what literature is. For her first
novel I can imagine the agent telling her, “Stick to the timeworn pattern,
don’t get far away from realism, describe the everyday life of a girl who
resembles yourself. Write ‘domestic literary fiction,’ for this is what sells
in America. Don’t get too cute in your first published work. Nobody needs too
much creativity.” So she wrote a semi-autobiographical novel about her days at
Harvard. Okay, she has listened to that spiel once, but now that she is in with
the in crowd, she can write whatever kind of fiction she likes. She should.
Elif Batuman is aware of the vast
wasteland that is the creative writing industry in the U.S. How do I know?
Because in her nonfiction work, The
Possessed (something of a companion work to The Idiot), she expresses strong opinions about that puerile racket.
Just beginning her creative life, she drops in on a writing workshop on Cape
Cod, where the lead guru tells her, “If you want to be an academic, go to
graduate school; if you want to be a writer come here.” The implication is that
you need not even read and discuss the great writers of the past. Instead you
sit around reading and critiquing short stories by pedestrian writers who have
read, largely, other pedestrian writers. Who, furthermore, buy into deadening
trends like “political correctness” in fiction. Who actually worry about offending people. Great writers are
often eager to offend people.
Here's what Franz Kafka said on that
subject. “We ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If
the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow on the head, what are
we reading it for? . . . We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that
grieve us deeply . . . . A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
He’s talking LITERATURE, fellow Homosapien. And AMBITIOUS writing.
“For many years [goes on Elif Batuman],
I gave little thought to the choice I had made between creative writing and literary
criticism. In 2006, n + I magazine
asked me to write about the state of the American short story, using the Best American Short Stories anthologies
of 2004 and 2005 as data. Only then, as I turned the pages in the name of
science, did I find myself remembering the emptiness I had felt on that rainy
day on Cape Cod” (The Possessed).
“I remembered then the puritanical
culture of creative writing, embodied by colonies and workshops and the ideal
of ‘craft.’ . . . . I thought it was the dictate of craft that had pared many
of the Best American stories to a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and
vivid nouns.”
This critique of the modern American
short story goes on for two more pages and concludes as follows: “Contemporary
short stories contain virtually no reference to any interesting work being done
in the field over the past twenty, fifty, or hundred years; instead,
middle-class women keep struggling with kleptomania, deviant siblings keep
going in and out of institutions, people continue to be upset by power outages
and natural disasters, and rueful writerly types go on hesitating about
things.” Domestic literary realism. Urggh.
This revelation—that the “best
stories” written in the U.S. in 2004 and 2005 (and, alas, any other recent
year) are bad stories—should open the eyes of the writing world. But given that
the whole writing industry and publishing enterprise prefers to proceed with
eyes shut, nothing essentially will be changed. In creative writing programs
all over the U.S. “creative writers” teach their students to value the same
twaddle. After which the students graduate, get positions as creative writing
instructors, and perpetuate the problem. The best solution would be to abolish
all creative writing departments in every university in the country. Then ban
the genre of “domestic literary fiction.”
When I am elected President, I will
issue an executive order to that effect. Dream on.
But what about the good writers? you may ask. Some good writers come out of creative
writing programs. Fine, but we need not worry about the good ones. They will
find their own way; they have no need of people encouraging mediocrity and feeding
them platitudes: “show, don’t tell,” and “you can’t use adverbs.”
As is obvious, however, Elif Batuman
is already aware of the Vast Egregious Boondoggle that is the contemporary
American short story. I’m sure she is also aware that the people interested in
selling books—her agent, her editors, all of the establishment literary
world—would prefer that her next novel stay with realistic characters and
pedestrian plots. She is in a position now to defy those agents and editors.
Write something new, vivid, vital now, Elif. Something ambitious, something
with literary panache. Write us a piece of LITERATURE.
