The Novel-Writing Class
There is a Novel-Writing Class in America as surely as there is a Movie-Making Class.
At the risk of gross generalization—and I’m a risk junkie when it comes to gross generalizations—the people who write “serious” fiction, short stories and novels of the type that get reviewed in the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Book Review without any genre classification in bold type at the top of the page, are in background and in outlook upper middle class, intellectually pretentious, employed in academia, and inclined to value character over story and imagistic exposition over dialogue and simple declaratives to advance the narrative.
They write as if fiction is the art of mixing poetry with psychology and storytelling the craft of revealing emotional turmoil and documenting fluctuations in the individual human heart.
The Novel-Writing Class is self-absorbed and the fiction it produces is self-referential. Characters are almost exclusively drawn from the novelists’ and short story writers’ personal circle, which is to say most of their main characters are members of the Novel-Writing Class who, if they aren’t actively writing novels work at jobs that are transparent surrogates for writing novels—creative, intellectual, solitary (even when they work in offices they do not collaborate), and flexible in hours and in assignment.
Characters who are not of the class are either villains, eccentrics, comic relief, or symbols of a life outside the mind that the novel-writing characters either long for or fear they are doomed to fall into.
The drama in their fictions is personal, usually a quest for individual happiness or at least fullfillment, and consequently their cast of characters is often small and the stages on which they strut and fret are small and intimate and without much in the way of scenery—except when characters need to look at a sunset to reveal their emotional states in poetic terms or the author gives in to an urge to write a prose poem.
My description is belittling and unfair, but not inaccurate. Nor is it an argument that all the fiction produced by the novel-writing class is sentimental, unambitious, and trivial.
I would argue that Jane Smiley, Richard Russo, Richard Powers, E.L. Doctorow, and even Saul Bellow are (were, in Bellow’s case) members of the Novel-Writing Class, although I’d also argue that their greatness is a result of their ability to break free from Class Conventions.
But on the whole the Novel-Writing Class writes over and over again variations on a kind of story Gore Vidal dismisses by assigning them all the same title: “Last Year’s Affair at Brandeis.”
I’m gearing up to write a response to Christopher Lehmann’s insightful essay in The Washington Monthly, “Why Americans Can’t Write Political Fiction?”
Lehmann sets out to show how some of the most famous examples of political novels—All the King’s Men, Primary Colors, Henry Adams’ Democracy—fail to capture either the way politics is actually practiced in our democracy or its meaning.
I plan to try to explain why there are so few political novels to begin with and why the ones we have tend not to be written by novelists but by journalists (and in the case of All the King’s Men, by a poet). But I also think there have been some very successful political novels, it’s just that they don’t meet a Washington Insider’s definition of political.
I have to run out, so I’m going to do something I do regularly on my own page but haven’t tried to get away with here:
Promise another post on the subject later.
October 30th, 2005 at 6:44 pm
Well, for starters there’s Advise and Consent, which won a Pulitzer for Allen Drury. The four or five sequels he wrote got worse and worse, but that one seemed to be reasonably accurate, particularly in that it had an instance of homophobia at its center.
I’d almost argue that we’re living in Seven Days in May right now, except that instead of the military attempting a coup it’s Grover Norquist and the Club for Growth, with a side order of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Family Research Council, and whatever outfit Dobson’s affiliated with.
October 30th, 2005 at 11:01 pm
Some of my favorites are probably not considered part of the canon.
US politics are far more deeply corrupt, IMO, than many would like to admit. Richard Condon’s Mile High, or James Ellmore’s American Tabloid (and, I hear, The Cold Six Thousand, but I haven’t read that yet) capture that flavor.
The book that the movie Wag the Dog was very loosely and badly based on, American Hero by Larry Beinhart, is a fascinating imagining of What Really Happened to bring us Gulf I. Good old hardboiled mystery writing with an intriguing premise.
Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon has written two books (with a co-author - his uncle?) under the pseudonym Stephen Bury: an amazing and (to me) hilarious Ultimate Political Conspiracy book, Interface, with some really good pieces on media manipulation, and the more subtle The Cobweb, the latter again touching on Gulf I.
Out of the above I like The Cobweb the most as a serious take on how American politics work, I think.
Then there are the comedy stylings of Christopher Buckley, e.g. No Way to Treat a First Lady, which I laughed out loud at, but which also has some pretty on-target stuff to say about the media/politics interplay.
October 31st, 2005 at 3:19 pm
Speaking as one who was writing a political novel…I have to agree, especially with your observations on the Novel Writing Class. I’ve read too many first novels, judged too many contests, where writers were guilty of exactly these sins.
If you’re looking for a comic-political novel, look no further than The Woody by Peter Lefcourt (who apparently skipped out on that novel writing class).
I eagerly await your next installment, which is hopefully free of “imagistic exposition”. (Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious.)
October 31st, 2005 at 7:11 pm
Linkmeister, “Advise and Consent” is a great example. And Cliff, “American Tabloid” is just as good. “The Cold Six Thousand” is not only astonishing, but it’s a weird formal experiment. No sentence more than six words. For 500 pages. (I’m exaggerating, but not by much.)
The essay by Christopher Lehmann was just stupid, frankly, and I’m not quite sure why you’re bothering to respond to it, except to say just that. He brings up Gore Vidal’s historical novels briefly and just as quickly dismisses them with a few kind words because they disprove whatever the hell he’s trying to say.
My nomination for the great American political novel: “Sister Carrie” by Dreiser. I don’t think I’ve read a book that so economically showed why women become “kept” rather than work themselves to death in a factory twelve hours a day. The ending, with the fallen lover working as a streetcar strikebreaker, says just about everything about the labor movement of its time with the same economy.
And everything else is said in Dos Passos’ “U.S.A.” which is another great formal experiment that is a blast to read. Lehmann’s an insular idiot.
November 1st, 2005 at 4:02 am
Mike, you’ve anticipated me. You’re right about Sister Carrie. Jennie Gerhardt is also a very political novel. And I think that American “political” novels have tended to follow their example, rather than being the kind of behind the scenes soap operas of the lives of the high and mighty.
Link, Advise and Consent is one of the first grown up books I ever read. I read it, A Shade of Difference, and Capable of Honor all in 8th Grade and I loved them. But even my 14 year old self knew that Drury went nuts with Preserve and Protect and I didn’t even bother with the next one. If he’d stopped at Capable of Honor his reputation and the reputation of Advise and Consent would be a lot higher now.
Cliff, Condon is terrific. I’ll have to look into the others you recommend.
Kathy, I’m very fond of that phrase “imagistic exposition.” It expresses my horror and dismay when I read a lot of contemporary “serious” fiction perfectly.
November 2nd, 2005 at 2:49 pm
If you’re going to include Condon, include Ross Thomas as well.
And if you’re going to talk about “political novels,” don’t limit them to official-Washington novels. Because you’re leaving out William Kennedy’s Albany novels, Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, John Sayles’s Union Dues, and even something as national in scope as Dos Passos’s USA trilogy, to name a few, none of which fit into Lehmann’s oh-my-God-we-lost-our-innocence-AGAIN rubric.