The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  The Good of the Novel

  EDITED BY

  Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction: Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan

  1 Ian McEwan, Atonement JAMES WOOD

  2 Don DeLillo, Underworld and Falling Man ANDREW O’HAGAN

  3 J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace TESSA HADLEY

  4 Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things AMIT CHAUDHURI

  5 Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac MARY HAWTHORNE

  6 Martin Amis, The Information JASON COWLEY

  7 Philip Roth, American Pastoral IAN SANSOM

  8 Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy FRANCES WILSON

  9 Paul Auster, Leviathan KEVIN JACKSON

  10 Ross Thomas, Briarpatch MICHAEL WOOD

  11 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty ROBERT MACFARLANE

  12 Colm Tóibín, The Master BENJAMIN MARKOVITS

  13 John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun RAY RYAN

  Contributors

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  The Good of the Novel is a collection of specially commissioned essays on the contemporary Anglophone novel. The book brings together some of the most strenuous and perceptive critics of the present moment and puts them in contact with some of the finest novels of the past three decades. The book starts from the conviction that the job of the critic is evaluation, and that what needs to be evaluated is primarily the technique of the writer. The essays in this volume are avowedly evaluative; that is, they attempt to consider novels as novels.

  ‘Real novels are as rare / As winter thunder or a polar bear’ is W. H. Auden’s jocular proposition in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’. Real critics are rare too, and it might be thought that the digital revolutions of the late twentieth century have made them still rarer. Now that anyone who wishes to can review a book on Amazon, who any longer defers to the critic’s expertise? Where are the pundits who can establish a writer’s reputation, as Kenneth Tynan helped to establish Samuel Beckett’s? If the authority of the literary critic has been dissipated by the internet, it has also been sabotaged by the academy’s retreat into theoretical obscurantism. The result is a demise of critical authority that has been both celebrated – in books like Jeff Gomez’s Print is Dead (2007) – and lamented, most notably in Rónán McDonald’s The Death of the Critic (2007).

  This project is motivated partly by the sense that, as books like Terry Eagleton’s After Theory (2004) and Valentine Cunningham’s Reading After Theory (2001) postulate, we are emerging from a period of heavily theoretical criticism and that, as a result, what might be called the novelness of novels is coming back into focus. The loosening of the theoretical grip has coincided with a reinvigoration of evaluative literary criticism, notably in the form of the long review-essay. The past decade and a half has seen the emergence of a number of strong evaluative critics (some of them novelists themselves), writing in magazines like the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic and the New York Review of Books.

  This is, in fact, a very good period for literary criticism. It may be that reports of the critic’s death have been exaggerated. It is not true, for one thing, that the internet is intrinsically hostile to critical authority. There is plenty of rigorous, discriminating criticism in online journals like Salon and Slate, as well as on literary blogs and e-zines. Nor have university English Departments altogether abandoned the practice of evaluative criticism. There is no shortage of literary academics – John Mullan, Helen Vendler, John Carey – who eschew the ‘jargon o’ the schools’ (in Robert Burns’s phrase) to engage a general audience. But if it is true, as Martin Amis argues in The War Against Cliché, and McDonald in The Death of the Critic, that the days when literary criticism seemed a practice of indisputable cultural centrality are over, it remains equally true that there is presently at work in Britain and America a group of literary journalists and academics committed to the evaluative criticism of fiction, to a criticism that approaches novels as novels.

  Much of the most interesting and rewarding criticism of recent years has been preoccupied with the question of ‘novelness’, with what is distinctive and indigenous to the novel form. The debate has been shaped by the appearance of a number of highly publicised novels that have seemed, in interesting ways, to be aping other cultural forms – novels that aspire to journalism, biography, history, ‘prose television’ and so forth. The list would include David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. These are books which bombard the reader with data, with unassimilated nuggets of arcane information. Gordon Burn has described them as ‘data-processing machines’, ‘big, brick-like novels which also double as encyclopaedias’. They are novels which appear to share the belief of Eric Packer in DeLillo’s Cosmopolis that ‘data itself was soulful and glowing’. Their frenetically proliferating narratives and compulsive purveyance of information has led James Wood to coin the term ‘hysterical realism’ to describe their procedures.

  The attractions of ‘hysterical realism’ have only increased in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and the related pressure on novelists to make their work somehow ‘equal to’ the historical moment it inhabits. The danger of this imperative – and its potentially catastrophic effect on the economy of the novel – is evident in the recent career of Nicholson Baker. Baker’s forte as a novelist has been the ingenious and suggestive microanalysis of everyday objects and activities. This is the ‘sluggish’ novel par excellence, slowing down perception until the familiar discloses its strangeness. In books like The Mezzanine and A Box of Matches, Baker opens new areas of experience, changes the way we look at things. By contrast, his 2004 novel Checkpoint, in which two men in a hotel room discuss means of assassinating President Bush, is a tickertape of received opinion. There is almost nothing in the book that you couldn’t find more pithily expressed in the op-ed columns of a broadsheet newspaper. In this sense, it is less a novel than a tissue of disposable journalistic ‘positions’. In courting social and political ‘relevance’, in seeking to make his novel equal to its historical moment, Baker dissipates its force. Nor is this simply a question of politics. Baker’s earlier writing is much more intelligently political than Checkpoint. In Checkpoint you either agree or disagree with Baker’s conclusions, and you know in advance which it will be. In his earlier books, Baker enlarges your vision: he makes you see something you previously considered marginal or unimportant – if you even considered it at all – as significant. In that sense, his anatomies of shoelaces and milk cartons are more political – as well as more novelistic – than his ruminations on Bush and the war in Iraq.

  A similar tension between resonance and relevance is evident in the work of Jonathan Franzen, one of the most justly lauded novelists of the past decade. Much of the excitement generated by Jonathan Franzen’s capacious third novel, The Corrections, boiled down to a single word: character. The Corrections was hailed as a literary event – and its author as a stellar new talent – mainly because the novel was understood to represent the return of character. To the analytical intelligence, the theoretical savvy, the narratological panache of the American social novel, The Corrections restored a concern with plausible human beings, their complex desires, their compelling stories, their difficult relationships. And it did this by returning to the institution that lies at the heart of so much American art: the family.

  And yet, at times in The Corrections, Franzen seems to regard his fictional family as worthy of artistic attention only if he can make
it serve the ends of ‘social description’ and ‘cultural engagement’, ends Franzen discussed in a famous Harper’s essay of April 1996 called ‘Perchance to Dream’. In this respect, The Corrections is close to another celebrated American novel of domestic life – Don DeLillo’s White Noise, a book which is ostensibly about the Gladney family but is really about the cultural forces that converge on the Gladney family. (At one point, Jack Gladney, De Lillo’s narrator, watches his daughter sprawling on a bed, her head on her folded arms: ‘How many codes, counter-codes, and social histories were contained in this simple posture, I wondered?’)

  From the first, the allegiance of Franzen’s fiction has been split between the particular and the exemplary. One of the difficulties with Franzen’s first two novels is that their documentary ambition – their aim to function as working scale-models of the contemporary American city – overwhelmed their ability to communicate the lives of believable human beings. In this sense, Franzen’s focus on the Lambert family in The Corrections represents a contraction of scope, but also an enlargement of sympathy. It’s as if Franzen has come to share the novelistic premise of Graham Greene in Our Man in Havana: ‘I can’t believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.’ At one point in The Twenty-Seventh City, a character reflecting on the political conspiracy which animates that novel observes that ‘individuals were vectors, not origins’. The problem with Franzen’s first two novels is that the author himself appears to second this perception. By the third novel, the correction has been made. When Chip Lambert dismisses his parents as ‘vectors of corporate advertising’ for wearing their cruise-line shoulder-bags, we are meant to laugh at his priggishness.

  The novels of Franzen and Baker, and of DeLillo, Tom Wolfe, Zadie Smith and others, have focused recent criticism on the question of when a novel is most novelistic, and when a novel stops being a novel and becomes something else – novelised history, novelised biography, novelised journalism. In pursuing this concern with the distinctive virtues of the novel – with what Robert Macfarlane has called ‘the mandate of the novel’ – recent critics owe a great deal to the critical formulations of Milan Kundera, particularly in the essays collected in The Art of the Novel (1988), Testaments Betrayed (1995) and The Curtain (2007). In these essays, Kundera disparages all forms of novelised journalism and novelised history, and argues that: ‘The sole raison d’être of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.’

  It is worth asking, then, what this novelistic knowledge might look like. What is it that the novel knows? What kinds of truth can the novel tell? What is it about the language used in a novel that creates a world different from that of drama or poetry? What distinguishes fictional prose from journalism, biography, or non-fictional prose? And how does a particular novel exemplify this? In seeking answers to such questions, The Good of the Novel will not be dogmatic or prescriptive. To theorise about a genre as fluid, capacious and protean as the novel is to risk incoherence or banality. Each novel sets the terms of its own reception, makes its own demands of its readers. As Amit Chaudhuri argues here, the reading of a single novel can realign one’s entire aesthetic. Each novel writes its own constitution. Moreover, as both Mikhail Bakhtin and Kundera have emphasised, the novel is the one genre that can accommodate all others. Poetry, drama, shopping lists, recipes, personal letters, legal depositions, newspaper reports: everything can be incorporated in the novel’s capacious maw. How definitive can one be in identifying the characteristics of such a genre? How does one evaluate such multifariousness?

  For all that, the novel as a form is amenable to study. The novel has a history, a tradition, a generic profile. It has characteristic procedures and protocols; it has distinctive faculties and virtues. Perhaps we can even follow Kundera in talking of ‘the spirit of the novel’. One can say, for one thing, that the truth of fiction cannot be rendered in any other form; it cannot be abstracted or codified, turned into a thesis or proposition. Novelistic truth is not data, not reportage, not documentary, not philosophical tenet, not political slogan. Novelistic truth is dramatic, which means above all that it has to do with character, and with what the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray calls ‘persons in relation’. In exploring character, the novel’s key strength is the disclosure of human interiority. To the question, what does the novel do?, we might most pertinently answer: the novel does character, and the novel does interiority. In Bellow’s Seize the Day, it does Tommy Wilhelm’s lengthy, baffled, outraged, complicated internal response to the poem Dr Tamkin has just shown him, before he responds: ‘Nice. Very nice. Have you been writing long?’

  The novel also does character and interiority in a specific way. It tends to be anti-heroic in its characterisation. The novelistic hero is rarely heroic, rarely has the finish and consistency of the epic hero, the tragic hero, the action hero. When most novelistic, the world of the novel is one of compromise, shortcomings, inexactitude – a comic world, in other words. As this suggests, ‘novelness’ is partly a question of perspective, of a writer’s orientation towards his or her material. The novelistic approach is humorous, relativistic, sardonic and sceptical, which is why a poem like Byron’s Don Juan – with its irreverence, its joyous detonation of pious abstractions, its overtly ‘anti-poetic’ animus – can be more ‘novelistic’ than many a novel. A good novel’s truths are never portentously explicit or categorical. In forwarding its own truths, the novel will rely on the implicit – on patterns of imagery, on parallel episodes whose significance is nowhere made explicit but remains unstated, open-ended. The novel’s truths are not reducible to a formulation, a proposition. They are partial, provisional. The novel represents a distinctive kind of ontology. The novel’s wisdom is the ‘wisdom of uncertainty’.

  All this is intended less as a manifesto than a rough working definition of the kinds of principles and categories that preoccupy many of the contributors to The Good of the Novel. Questions as to what the novel does and what kinds of truth the novel tells are best answered in practice, and this is what The Good of the Novel aims to do, by bringing some of the strongest critics of the present moment into contact with some of the finest novels of the past three decades. While André Gide’s ambition to ‘strip the novel of every element that does not specifically belong to the novel’ remains an impossible goal for the novelist, it provides a good working rule for the critic. How good are these novels? What kind of good are they? What do these novels achieve that couldn’t be achieved in any other genre? These are the questions we aim to address in The Good of the Novel.

  1 Ian McEwan, Atonement

  JAMES WOOD

  There is something fishy from the start. A group of peculiarly named characters – Pierrot, Lola, Briony, Jackson, Leon – gather in a Surrey country house in 1935. But the country house is a bit of a fake – it is barely forty years old – and the characters themselves have an aura of the inauthentic. They say rather literary-sounding things like: ‘I knew some grammar school types at Oxford and some of them were damned clever.’ Or: ‘He’s got a first-rate mind, so I don’t know what the hell he’s doing, messing about in the flower beds.’ The village constable is a kind of fake, too – a ‘kindly old man with a waxed moustache whose wife kept hens and delivered fresh eggs on her bicycle’. (Well, of course.) The author’s prose is rich, studied, sometimes carefully pretentious – ‘the long grass was already stalked by the leonine yellow of high summer’ – but always very careful, very ‘good’:

  The drawing room which had transfixed her that morning with its brilliant parallelograms of light was now in gloom, lit by a single lamp near the fireplace. The open French windows framed a greenish sky, and against that, in silhouette at some distance, the familiar head and shoulders of her brother. As she made her way across the room she heard the tinkle of ice cubes against his glass, and as she stepped out she smelled the penny
royal, camomile and feverfew crushed underfoot, and headier now than in the morning.

  Meanwhile, the author also subtly flags the fact that though the mise en scène is 1935, the scene of the writing is nearer to home: ‘But Jackson had wet the bed, as troubled small boys far from home will, and was obliged by current theory to carry his sheets and pyjamas down to the laundry and wash them himself, by hand.’ (My italics.) One of the characters, Paul Marshall, is described in the style of a Boys’ Own annual: ‘only fractions of an inch kept him from cruel good looks’. Cruel good looks, eh? The same could be said for the entire first section of Atonement: only fractions of an inch keep the writing from sounding quite real.

  Those are of course deliberate fractions. In the same year that our strangely named crowd assembles in Sussex, the critic Cyril Connolly published a polished plaint called ‘More About the Modern Novel’, in which he proposed banning ‘whole landscapes’ from the modern novel, including the following: ‘reception of love-letters by either sex … all allusion to illness or suicide (except insanity), all quotations, all mentions of genius, promise, writing, painting, sculpting, art, poetry, and the phrases “I like your stuff”. “What’s his stuff like?”, “damned good”, “Let me make you some coffee”, all young men with ambition or young women with emotion, all remarks like “Darling, I’ve found the most wonderful cottage” (flat, castle), “Ask me any other time, dearest, only please – just this once – not now”, “Love you – of course I love you” (don’t love you) – and “It’s not that, it’s only that I feel so terribly tired.” Forbidden names: Hugo, Peter, Sebastian, Adrian, Ivor, Julian, Pamela, Chloe, Enid, Inez, Miranda, Joanna, Jill, Felicity, Phyllis.’ Connolly might as well have been describing the first part of Atonement; one suspects that Ian McEwan, who in the third part of this novel will invent a long letter from this same Cyril Connolly, is perfectly familiar with that witty screed from 1935.