Less than a hundred years ago, D.H. Lawrence called the novel “the highest form of human expression so far attained.” Jane Austen said that it had nothing to recommend it but “genius, wit and taste.” Today, even novelists themselves—maybe especially novelists themselves—are unlikely to make such large and unironic claims in favor of their art. It is no coincidence that many of the most exciting novels to have appeared in recent years—Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, Ben Lerner’s “10:04” and Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?”—have been distinctly un-novelistic, featuring protagonists who share many biographical details (and sometimes names) with the authors, and substituting the messiness of experience for conventional plots. Such “novels from life,” as Heti’s book was subtitled, reflect the authors’ exasperation with fictional artifice. “Just the thought of writing fiction, just the thought of fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous,” Knausgaard wrote in the second volume of “My Struggle.”
These books made David Shields’s “Reality Hunger” (2010) seem prescient. An earnest “manifesto” against the traditional novel (which Shields finds “unbelievably predictable, tired, contrived, and essentially purposeless”), “Reality Hunger” galvanized many critics and novelists alike. Shields argued that novels are often flashes of “narrative legerdemain”; he calls for “serious writing,” in which “the armature of overt drama is dispensed with, and we’re left with a deeper drama, the real drama: an active human consciousness trying to figure out how he or she has solved or not solved being alive.” He particularly prizes the lyric essay, which forsakes plot and character entirely.
If aspects of “Reality Hunger” were familiar, refrains on old arguments (in fact much of the book consists of direct quotations from other books), Shields’s points are worth considering again, both because he is laudably serious about what literature ought to aim for and because his ideas about the novel are so firmly entrenched in contemporary literary culture. Shields’s belief that the traditional novel is dated and that the way forward—aesthetically, if not commercially—lies in non-novels or at least non-traditional novels now represents the fashionable position in the literary world.
I confess that I share Shields’s dissatisfaction with much contemporary fiction—and I too like the recent spate of “novels from life”—but I think he has homed in on the wrong target. The novel form isn’t the reason so much contemporary fiction seems uninspired; for that, we’d do better to consider other causes, of which there are plenty: an emphasis on documenting social conditions and modernity over the study of individual characters, a post-Freudian tendency to lean on secondhand psychoanalytic ideas as a cover for incomprehension or shallowness, a corrosive commitment to niceness at the expense of the kind of social and moral judgments that used to be at the novel’s center, MFA programs, to name just a few possibilities.
As a novelist who doesn’t feel especially inclined to experiment with form, I admittedly have a dog in this fight. And yet I hope it’s not only defensiveness that urges me to defend the form against an indictment that in some iterations seems more trendy than rigorous. Before we rush to condemn whole-hog the novel’s supposedly obsolete conventions—the well-worn apparatuses of plot and character—we ought look at how they function and what they do well.
For Shields, the fact that characters are made up is problematic on both pragmatic and moral grounds. He feels that novelists, presiding god-like over the world of their creation, enjoy a “spurious authority”; memoirists and essayists, on the other hand, are honest about the fact that their thoughts and even their projections as to other’s thoughts are just that. But this framework can easily be reversed. The autobiographer or essayist might be said to have a spurious authority because he or she can fall back on the claim to be speaking “truth”: if readers express skepticism about anything in the text, the writer can defend it by saying that this is how it “really” was, or at least how it seemed to him. The novelist who invents characters, on the other hand, depends entirely on whether those inventions are convincing.
But why bother, Shields wants to know. “The world exists. Why recreate it?” In fact, made-up characters have two key virtues. The first is variety. If authors wrote only about what they knew firsthand, from self-reflection, literature would exclude the kind of people who are not, by temperament or circumstance, likely to sit down and write books. Consider Vronksy, from “Anna Karenina.” (Because Shields’s argument isn’t leveled against middling novels but against the form itself, it makes sense to look at one of the most successful examples.) This is Vronsky’s state of mind when a friend teases him about his pursuit of Anna:
Shields assumes that fictional characters are merely authors’ “surrogate selves,” but like many fictional creations, Vronsky—callow, dashing and professionally ambitious—is not that. Creating him required on Tolstoy’s part qualities other than introspection: attentiveness to the peculiarities of social life, the ability to conceive the thinking of people morally and psychologically unlike oneself, and fairmindedness. Channeling people other than the author also makes possible the presentation of multiple consciousnesses, enabling novels to capture some of the populous cacophony of real life. This is one of the strengths of the form. “Other people,” as Zadie Smith wrote in a critical response to “Reality Hunger” in “The Guardian,” “that mainstay of what Shields calls the ‘moribund conventional novel,’ have a habit of receding to a point of non-existence in the ‘lyrical essay.’ ”
A second advantage of character is perspective. When Tolstoy gives us Vronsky’s thoughts, they are of course inflected by Tolstoy’s own point of view; what is disclosed is two-fold: Vronsky’s way of thinking and Tolstoy’s critique of Vronsky’s way of thinking. That’s a distinction we see even more clearly here:
If someone like Vronsky were to give an account of his moral code, it would not, we can be sure, read in precisely these terms. It’s certainly possible for an autobiographer or memoirist to resist self-hagiography—to view him or herself with this kind of irony—but fiction expands the field of possibility exponentially. The memoirist is, after all, limited to commenting on his own inner life, the only one he has access to. Serious fiction works by demanding the painstaking recreation of reality, or rather what the author sees as reality’s salient qualities; the payoff is that one is then able to comment widely on types of people and habits of mind that are both varied and real.
But Shields, like the French avant-gardists in whose path he follows (and whom he quotes extensively), doesn’t only go after invented selves; he questions the very notion of selfhood, the idea upon which fictional characterization hangs. “When a self can (through language, memory, research, and invention) project itself everywhere, and can empathize with anyone or anything, what exactly is a self?” Shields wonders. He isn’t alone in this type of doubt. In her essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” Smith also evoked the same basic idea, poking fun at realism for its “often unexamined” belief in “the essential fullness and continuity of the self.” To view with skepticism the idea of the self as contained and describable has become a hallmark of postmodern sophistication.
To my mind, though, the problem is one of self-awareness rather than of selfhood. That is, while one may appear to oneself to have no consistent qualities, to encompass everything that one encounters, to lack fullness and continuity—I wake up feeling this way myself most mornings—this is more of an optical illusion than a recently revealed truth to which the novel must adapt. The self’s instability wasn’t unfamiliar even to the character-happy 19th century novelists: “Self-possession depends on its environment. We don’t speak on the first floor as on the fourth,” Flaubert observed in “Madame Bovary.” At the same time, few of us have much trouble distinguishing continuity in other selves. That’s the paradox. We are each, to ourselves, formless, men and women without qualities—and yet our friends and relatives and co-workers have qualities enough: they are sufficiently consistent that we recognize their demeanor and behavior and self-presentation as being theirs. In other words, everyone but we ourselves seems more or less like the selves we read about in fiction.
Nonetheless, the cumulative effect of describing characters in traditional novel fashion may indeed, as postmodernists assert, offer a specious form of reassurance, by implying the existence of a contained and orderly universe. It’s a valid point. The 19th century novels that invariably represent “The Novel” in these discussions do of course have plenty of admirers who value them precisely because their fixed parameters are comfortable and familiar. But Nabokov was certainly right that not all kinds of reading are equally valid aesthetically, and just as we shouldn’t discount Derrida because we associate his ideas with pretentious adherents who seem overly fond of obfuscation, we shouldn’t write-off realist fiction on the basis of what some of its fans derive from it. The texts, not the readers, matter. The texts show us what character does that exposition doesn’t.
Here is Tolstoy’s description of Anna’s brother, the affable Oblonsky, in the opening pages of “Anna Karenina”:
As the passage continues, observe the growing specificity of Tolstoy’s description, which gives it the texture of “reality,” whether or not this “Oblonsky” corresponds to an actual flesh-and-blood person who once existed:
By poking fun at a certain (real) brand of shallow political and intellectual engagement, and at a type of well-to-do liberal, Tolstoy is making the sort of statement that could be made in nonfiction. For someone like Shields, there’s little reason to attach this kind of statement to a work of fiction (for most novels, he says, “you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written”; he recommends that would-be authors skip the excess pages and instead write a sort of brief précis as to these main insights). But imagine the passage above as nonfiction: exchange the particularity of “Oblonksy” for a generic, the “well-to-do liberal.” You’d have a very different kind of assertion. The conditional quality of novel speech, applicable only to particular characters, enables the novel to be acute without being reductive. In novels, it is left to readers to see—or not to see—the universal in the specific. In this, there is something humble and essentially democratic.
Meanwhile, the writer who would satirize Oblonsky’s political self-satisfaction as if that were the whole truth or a particularly deep truth is implicitly criticized by the novel itself, in the richness of the portrait that emerges over the course of the novel of this epicurean, indebted, adulterous, urbane, kind-hearted, professionally conscientious and largely appealing man. Good novels contain observations that wouldn’t be out of place in serious nonfiction, but by situating these thoughts in contexts that capture the fluidity and multidimensionality and what Lawrence called the “subtle inter-relatedness” of real life, they are imbued with a unique tension. Novels have a knack for speaking and casting doubt simultaneously, for being clearly stated and yet hard to pin down, possessing meanings that slip away or evaporate when you try to express them in the language of exposition or argument.
If there’s any component of fiction we think of as unfortunate, it’s plot—that “low atavistic form,” as E.M. Forster referred to it in “Aspects of the Novel.” We’ve all probably expressed the wish that books could be less plotty, more like life, which is so formless and strange. Even James Wood, one of the novel’s ablest defenders, is apt to treat plot as a grim necessity. “This silly machinery of plotting and pacing… who does not want to explode it?” he wrote in an otherwise critical review of “Reality Hunger.”
All too often, plot is a drag. Far too many books use it as a substitute for subtle characterization or interesting ideas. After a stab at something suggesting ambition in the early chapters—some atmospherics, a good thought or two—very little compels the reader forward except an interest in what happens next. Plot decorates—and attempts to distract us from—a vacuum.
Other times a plot can be bad in and of itself. In his “Reality Hunger” review, Wood went on to list plot devices serious fiction is usually better off without: “coincidence, eavesdropping, melodramatic reversals, kindly benefactors, cruel wills.” (I’d add the revelation of long-buried family secrets.) A bad plot can also be more subtle. Tim Parks, writing in The New York Review of Books last year, complained of novels that made him feel “manipulated toward goals that are predictable and unquestioned: the dilemma, the dramatic crises, the wise sadness, and more in general a suffering made bearable, or even noble through aesthetic form, fine prose, and the conviction that one has lived through something important.” Such novels sound to me to be what might be even worse than manipulative: trite, faux-deep.
There are altogether so many ways to abuse plot that we tend to forget what plot is at bottom—and what is lost when it is dispensed with entirely. Plot dramatizes incident and moves characters through time. In good novels, these functions combine to approximate not only the reality of life, which is of course linear and time-bound, but also, crucially, life’s tendency to defy abstraction and deflate our pretentions—to make fools of us.
“Anna Karenina” is again useful here. Insomuch as it’s the story of Anna and Vronsky, its plot is nothing other than the trajectory of their relationship, which consists of multiple phases. It looks something like this:
- Initial attraction at train station, followed by meeting at the ball
- Vronsky’s flirtation/Anna’s resistance, even as she becomes more and more psychologically dependent on his attention (this lasts a year)
- Consummation, in which Vronsky’s love for Anna reaches its peak
- Subtle, unspoken decrease in Vronsky’s love (not yet perceived by Anna), mixed with his awareness that he is bound to her; her loss of natural calm and attractiveness as she becomes habituated to lying—particularly to herself, particularly about the irreconcilability of her love for Vronsky and her love for her son
- Anna’s illness and renunciation of Vronsky; his humiliation and the reflowering of his love for her, stronger than ever
- Their move to Italy, in which Anna is happy and Vronsky, without career or society, begins to grow bored
- Their return to Russia, to Vronsky’s country estate, where he is increasingly bored and Anna, aware of his boredom, is alternately despairing and difficult—angry, jealous, unreasonable
- In attempt to get out of rut, they move to Moscow
- Anna’s suicide and Vronsky’s ensuing deterioriation
Instead of providing narrative satisfaction to readers who crave it, the plot of “Anna Karenina” is an unfolding complication. If the book ended at about the halfway point, when Anna, believing she was dying, renounced Vronsky, the book would be far more conventional and melodramatic, another tale of a tragic triangle in which inexorable fate and frowning society dooms the course of true love. But “Anna Karenina” is a different type of book. It’s crucial to what F.R. Leavis called the novel’s “representative comprehensiveness” that although Anna was in earnest when she renounced him and although Vronsky was in earnest when he shot himself, their high-flown feelings don’t survive the passage of time and the social and psychological pressures of daily life. This of ebbing and flowing in their relationship mimics what happens in real life, not only the way relationships change but also the way our present state so often conflicts with past declarations or expectations or projections, no matter how sincere or well-intentioned they were. (You know you’re reading a bad book if, when a character thinks “I will never do X,” you feel sure that the character will never do X.)
For Shields and other critics of plot, narrative is a distraction from “the deeper drama” of epiphanies and overt meditation. But at its best narrative is the deeper drama: it takes in epiphanies and meditation—Anna and Vronsky are constantly having the former and engaging in the latter—and then complicates these realizations and discoveries, by showing the reader what happens the day or the week or the month afterward. This is one of the novel’s greatest brutalities against its characters, but it’s not intentionally mean-spirited: it’s a way in which fiction seeks to present life as truly as possible. This kind of fidelity to lived experience as it plays out is rare in the lyric essay, since essays are typically written from a single point in time, after the events have unfolded.
So habituated are we to thinking of plot as a concession to an entrenched, anti-intellectual craving for story and decisive endings, as a sort of spoonful of sugar to make the medicine—the ideas—go down, that when we defend plot it tends to be on the grounds of human nature, which may be childish but is intractable (Didion is often quoted: “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”). It’s no wonder, in light of these kinds of justifications, that serious people like Shields have come to disbelieve in plot. But it ought to be considered instead on aesthetic grounds. A non-manipulative plot, one that doesn’t distort reality for the sake of neat narrative, exerts a beneficial pressure on the novelist, demanding that he or she consider a situation from multiple vantage points, see it more fully, and also weeds out much triviality by requiring the writer to choose situations that can sustain such considered analysis.
Another component of plot is dramatization, which also cuts deeper than we might think. To dramatize requires deeper knowledge of characters than exposition or summary: for one thing, the author has to have listened closely enough to the way people talk to approximate it. Scenes also have the tendency to expose what might easily get a pass in other types of writing—that is to say, dramatization is naturally antagonistic to ideology. If fiction is a discipline, it is one that demands a high degree of reliance on empirical observation. This is why fiction so often represents something better, more just, than an author’s theoretical beliefs. (Just consider the abstract opinions of the Victorian novelists—what, say, Dickens believed about virtue and vice and fallen women—and compare those to the sensitivity of the portraits that emerge in the novels.)
The novel’s tendency to work against generalization is not limited to political or social biases. When novel characters sound like mouthpieces for the author’s overarching theories about human motivation or psychology, even the least sophisticated readers recognize this intuitively as bad. And so novels don’t usually offer up simple theories about human nature—for those, one must look to self-help books. In this sense, good fiction doesn’t tend to console but rather to complicate, to baffle our desire for easy explanation, to give us not what we want but what we suspect is more meaningful, more akin to the complexity we encounter in life.
None of this to say is that the requirements the novel imposes make automatically for good literature, that the form has some special power to bestow brilliance where previously there had been none. Far from it, as any trip to the bookstore will reveal. About most novels, Shields is certainly right; even most “literary novels” are undoubtedly nothing more than a means of entertainment suited to the pretensions of a certain type of reader, with little that is meaningful to say about the human condition. But the novel is a different matter.
As a form, the novel has always lent itself to experimentation—we don’t have to limit our examples to Bernhard and Kafka who are often trotted out for this purpose. There’s also Philip Roth’s strangest and most unplotty autobiographical novels or even a novel as unusual in structure and frame as “Wuthering Heights.” And if the Victorians whose influence Shields finds so limiting had their preoccupations (morality, virtue), so too does he. Issues like subjectivity, the unreliability of memory, the power of narrative to distort—in other words issues related to the act of storytelling—are of special interest. These are all worthwhile topics, and they may be particularly well-suited to essayistic writing that eschews plot and character, but we should be wary of privileging—to borrow a word from the postmodern lexicon—one set of concerns over all others. The house of literature is large, and the problems with storytelling aren’t so dire that we need to put all other inquiries on hold until we iron them out. Even the most naïve readers know there is no such thing as an omniscient narrator, that it’s just a guy named Tolstoy guessing at what he thinks people are like and it’s for us to buy it or not.
There remain subjects aside from storytelling that the novel might continue to pursue profitably—subjects that weren’t exhausted in the 19th century. A few that come to my mind: interpersonal ethics; the varieties of form conscience takes in individual psyches; the difficulty of getting along with others; the qualities of mind that meaningfully distinguish one person from another (i.e., what makes Vronsky so different Oblonsky so different from Levin). Whatever else it’s done, contemporary life hasn’t obviated these kinds of questions any more than it has rendered the novel incapable of addressing them.
