Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

Unfortunately, there’s also evidence that young writers today feel ghettoized in their ethnic or gender identities — discouraged from speaking across boundaries by a culture that has been conditioned by television to accept only the literal testimony of the Self. [6] The popularity of role-playing m on-line MUDs (multiple-user dialogues) and chat rooms, which enthusiastic theorists extol for their liberating diffractions of selfhood, in fact merely confirms how obsessed we all are with a superficially defined “identity.” Identity as a mystery (the continuity of consciousness from your childhood through the present) or as manners (how kind you are, how direct, how funny, how snobbish, how self-deceptive, how ironic; how you behave) is evidently weightless in comparison to the assertion: “I am a twenty-five-year-old bi female in fishnet stockings.” The problem is aggravated, or so it’s frequently argued, by the degree to which fiction writers, both successful ones and ephebes, have taken refuge from a hostile culture in university creative-writing programs. Any given issue of the typical small literary magazine, edited by MFA candidates aware that the MFA candidates submitting manuscripts need to publish in order to obtain or hold on to teaching jobs, reliably contains variations on three generic short stories: “My Interesting Childhood,” “My Interesting Life in a College Town,” and “My Interesting Year Abroad.” Of all the arts, fiction writing would seem to be the least suited to the monotony of academic sequestration. Poets draw their material from their own subjectivities, composers from God knows where. Even painters, though they inhale at their own risk the theoretical miasma emanating from art history and English departments (and the only thing more harmful to a working artist than neglect is idiotic encouragement), do not depend on manners , on eavesdropped conversations and surmounted quotidian obstacles, the way novelists do. For a long time, I rationalized my own gut aversion to the university with the idea that a novelist has a responsibility to stay close to life in the mainstream, to walk the streets, rub shoulders with the teeming masses, etc. — the better to be able, in Sven Birkerts’s words, to bring readers “meaningful news about what it means to live in the world of the present.”

Now, however, I think my gut aversion is just that: a gut aversion. Novelists within the academy serve the important function of teaching literature for its own sake; some of them also produce interesting work while teaching. As for the much greater volume of impeccably competent work that’s manufactured in and around the workshops, no one is forcing me to read it. The competitor in me, in fact, is glad that so many of my peers have chosen not to rough it in the free-market world. I happen to enjoy living within subway distance of Wall Street and keeping close tabs on the country’s shadow government. But the world of the present is accessible to anyone with cable TV, a modem, and transportation to a mall; and as far as I’m concerned, any writer who wants to revel in that life is welcome to it. Although the rise of identity-based fiction has coincided with the American novel’s retreat from the mainstream, Shirley Heath’s observations have reinforced my conviction that bringing “meaningful news” is no longer so much a defining function of the novel as an accidental by-product.

The value of Heath’s work, and the reason I’m citing her so liberally, is that she has bothered to study empirically what nobody else has, and that she has brought to bear on the problem of reading a vocabulary that is neutral enough to survive in our value-free cultural environment. Readers aren’t “better” or “healthier” or, conversely, “sicker” than nonreaders. We just happen to belong to a rather strange kind of community.

For Heath, a defining feature of “substantive works of fiction” is unpredictability . She arrived at this definition after discovering that most of the hundreds of serious readers she interviewed have had to deal, one way or another, with personal unpredictability. Therapists and ministers who counsel troubled people tend to read the hard stuff. So do people whose lives have not followed the course they were expected to: merchant-caste Koreans who don’t become merchants, ghetto kids who go to college, men from conservative families who lead openly gay lives, and women whose lives have turned out to be radically different from their mothers’. This last group is particularly large. There are, today, millions of American women whose lives do not resemble the lives they might have projected from their mothers’, and all of them, in Heath’s model, are potentially susceptible to substantive fiction. [7] If the rolls of nineteenth-century literary societies are any indication, women have always done the bulk of fiction reading. But in a society where a majority of women both work and take care of their families, it’s significant that, even today, two out of every three novels purchased are purchased by women. The vastly increased presence of women in serious American writing probably has explanations on both the supply side and the demand side. An expanded pool of readers with unexpected lives inevitably produces an expanded pool of writers. And sometime around 1973, when American women entered the workplace in earnest, they began to demand fiction that wasn’t written from a male perspective. Writers like Jane Smiley and Amy Tan today seem conscious and confident of an attentive audience. Whereas all the male novelists I know, including myself, are clueless as to who could possibly be buying our books.

In her interviews, Heath uncovered a “wide unanimity” among serious readers that literature ‘“makes me a better person.’” She hastened to assure me that, rather than straightening them out in a self-help way, “reading serious literature impinges on the embedded circumstances in people’s lives in such a way that they have to deal with them. And, in so dealing, they come to see themselves as deeper and more capable of handling their inability to have a totally predictable life.” Again and again, readers told Heath the same thing: “Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive —my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. ‘Substance’ is more than ‘this weighty book.’ Reading that book gives me substance.” This substance, Heath added, is most often transmitted verbally, and is felt to have permanence. “Which is why,” she said, “computers won’t do it for readers.” With near unanimity, Heath’s respondents described substantive works of fiction as “the only places where there was some civic, public hope of coming to grips with the ethical, philosophical, and sociopolitical dimensions of life that were elsewhere treated so simplistically. From Agamemnon forward, for example, we’ve been having to deal with the conflict between loyalty to one’s family and loyalty to the state. And strong works of fiction are what refuse to give easy answers to the conflict, to paint things as black and white, good guys versus bad guys. They’re everything that pop psychology is not,”

“And religions themselves are substantive works of fiction,” I said.

She nodded. “This is precisely what readers are saying: that reading good fiction is like reading a particularly rich section of a religious text. What religion and good fiction have in common is that the answers aren’t there, there isn’t closure. The language of literary works gives forth something different with each reading. But unpredictability doesn’t mean total relativism. Instead it highlights the persistence with which writers keep coming back to fundamental problems. Your family versus your country, your wife versus your girlfriend.”