six or seven years older than our narrator? As soon as her hair began to turn white, she bleached it platinum. There, in France, with her current young New Zealander, who finds her so fascinating, she’s working on a book about her country’s archaeology …
Still, with examples two and three I have more trust in the writer than I do with example I—a trust that, in terms ranging from mood to plot, either writer 2 or 3 may still betray with the next sentence. However promising I find their openings, both tales could dissolve, equally and easily, into clutter. Unless the writer is really setting us up for a very conscious effect, number I telegraphs a general thinness that is the hallmark of contemporary dullness. And if the narrator doesn’t win my trust soon, I’m likely to enjoy only a narrator whose tone and character I personally like. And if the narrator never gains my trust, however much I personally like the narrator or sympathize with his or her politics or recognize the situation, for me the work remains—if I keep reading, and most of the time I don’t—an entertainment, rather than a work of art. Finally, I want all this information—whether sensual or tonal—given me economically. If, after even three, five, seven sentences, I have not gotten one or the other of these orders of information, and I find myself spotting extraneous words and phrases that tell me nothing of interest, phrases that withhold information rather than present it, expressive clumsinesses and general lack of writerly skill, then I am disgruntled. (Vast amounts of fine literature wait to be read. Many more skilled writers exist than I can read in a lifetime. Unskilled writers don’t hold much interest for me. Bad writing makes me angry.) If the elements of the sentence could be better arranged so as to give the information more swiftly, logically, forcefully, I am equally unhappy. (I don’t particularly enjoy having to rewrite the writers I read, sentence by sentence. I want the writer to have done that work for me.) In my experience, three such clumsy sentences in a row usually indicate that the text will be littered with them. Despite whatever talent is manifested, they signal that the imaginative force needed to develop an idea clearly and explore it richly is likely lacking. In turn this means that even should I enjoy the story, I am not likely to point it out as an exemplum of one idea or another (unless it’s an example of what not to do); nor am I likely to sketch out the development of its idea as praiseworthy in any of my own critical writing. (As Emily Dickinson wrote, “Nothing survives except fine execution.”) While any of the information I enjoy might be worked up to form what might easily be called a good story, if I don’t enjoy the economy and force of
the presentation (the word for this level of presentation is “style”), from experience I know the tale will simply not be worth the time and energy I must put into reading it. These are the books—the nineteen out of twenty—I put down and rarely come back to.
Fortunately there are other readers who read—no less critically than I—for a different order of writerly and readerly priorities and pleasures. In their critical writing, such readers are always guiding me to things I might have missed, as I hope, in turn, now and again I can guide them to something interesting. Of course what is likely the case is not absolutely the case. Three dull, bland, or clumsy sentences don’t always mean an impoverished work. I would have missed out entirely on the considerable pleasures of Leonid Tsypkin or W. G. Sebald had I only read the opening page or pages of either, under my own critical regime—not to mention Theodore Dreiser, a great novelist (for many readers, including me) despite his style.
Nevertheless, the above represents my own priorities. It outlines my own aesthetic gamble, if you will, in the greater process of working to sediment the new or revised discourses that stabilize the systems of the world and make them better. (The purpose of fiction in particular and art in general is not to make the world better, directly and per se. But, despite the protests of all the apolitical critics, they [art and fiction] still help, if only because, as critics from Pater to Foucault have acknowledged, they do make life more enjoyable—specifically the time we spend reading them. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t bother.) In pursuit of such ends, the above gives the parameters around which my own set of dos and don’ts for fiction are organized—and thus suggests where their limits lie. Unless another critic has alerted me to pleasures that will only come after 50, 75, 150 pages, these are the texts I’m likely to abandon after a few thousand words or so—if not a few hundred.
Although I believe thirty-five years of teaching creative writing have helped me become more articulate about my readerly responses than I might have been without them, and while there are many other good readers of types different from mine, I do not think I am all that uncommon. I believe the kind of reader I am has a contribution to make in the contestatory wrangle producing that social construct, literary quality. But because human beings are a multiplicity, there can be no fixed and final canon, despite whatever appearance of stability any given view of the canon suggests. This is why no single book can tell folks how to write fiction that will join the canon. Having seen the canon change as much as it has in the years between my adolescence and the (I hope) forward edge of my dotage, I’m content with the forces that retard that change as much as they do.
Balzac, Dreiser, and Sebald; Lawrence, Barthelme, and Bukowski are all extraordinary writers, for extraordinarily different reasons. All are writers who at one time or another I’ve gorged on; but all are writers about whom I end up feeling, finally, that a little goes a long way. To enjoy any and all of them requires a fertile and lively mind; fertile and lively minds find things of interest, and thus may also find greater or lesser amounts of what’s in this book interesting. They may also find some things here painful, if not crashingly irrelevant, even as they marvel that someone could go on at such lengths as I do about fiction while spending so little time on fiction’s oh-so-necessary social content.
Because in the realm of art all absolute statements are suspect, the most I can say is that I am still willing to gamble on the fact that, by and large, most of the writers whose works I would lay down and not return to are ones who don’t contribute very much (except by their all-important negative examples), and the exceptions are precisely those glorious ones that prove, in the sense of test, the rules and principles on which my overarching aesthetic rests.
The less interested either we or our characters are in their jobs, incomes, families, social class, landlords, friends, neighbors, and landscapes (i.e., how they are connected to the material world around them), the less we have to write about. This may be why the highly individualistic but highly isolated heroes of genre fiction—from Conan the Conqueror to James Bond—often seem so thin in relation to those of literary fiction. This is why the strength of such stories that feature them tends to be on an allegorical—i.e., poetic—level, rather than on the level of psychological (not to mention sociological) veracity.
IX
I’ve already suggested that the desire to hear our stories in chronological order may begin with the desire to have our fictions take on the image of history. Eighteenth-century novels such as Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) were often called histories (the novel’s full title is Tom Jones, the History of a Foundling). Readers of the twenty-four-years-earlier Robinson Crusoe (1726) initially flocked to the book because they thought they were getting the thinly fictionalized “history” of the actual adventures of a sailor named Alexander Selkirk, who had famously spent time on a desert island, as had Crusoe; Defoe even encouraged the rumor that he had interviewed Selkirk in order to write his book, though almost certainly that was untrue and just a publicity move.
Supporting him through fourteen meaty novels, Dickens’s great discovery in the nineteenth century was that what happens to us as children directly influences the adults we turn out to be, both in terms of our strengths and in terms of the shortcomings we must overcome. Thus plot in the novel in particular—and in fiction in general—became, for Dickens, part of a structure of incidents that not only tell the story but also move us among the kinds of incidents that explain what happens in terms of certain kinds of causes as well as the given moments of history needed to understand them: in Dickens’s case, particular childhood incidents and (later in his novels) the adult happenings particularly affected by them.
The fictive
