November 21st, 2009 / 12:46 pm
Author News & Craft Notes
No Easy Cure for Novel-Nausea
Zadie Smith has a long essay in The Guardian that is half about David Shields’s forthcoming, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, and half about her own frustration with novel writing. Go read it. It’s longish, but it is completely worth the time. I am not going to include an excerpt here. Once you’ve read all of it, read the rest of this entry.
Ok….. done? Pretty good, right? I invited David to speak on a panel discussion last year and he gave me the galley to give Zadie, so I feel personally very happy that she read it because now that essay exists, which deepens my understanding of Reality Hunger. (Everyone, put your pre-orders in with a book seller you love.) However I disagreed very slightly with her perspective on the book and when David emailed me to say that her essay was on the Guardian this morning I replied to him with this:
…She assumes that enthusiasm about the book equals an act of “literary hara-kiri” and that enjoying Reality Hunger is a form of “grave-dancing.” Not at all! I read Reality Hunger as an encouragement to write a more risky, honest book, be it memoir or novel or something in between.
Also, she seems to get a little bent out of shape when thinking about your and Coetzee’s praise of “novels that don’t look like novels.” She assumes that this taste is meant to be “in some way unusual, the mark of a refined literary palate,” but I don’t think that’s what you meant at all. I think you’re just encouraging writers to bend the boundaries of the novel or story or memoir as we understand it now. She seems to believe that too, and says so in the next sentence: “But even the most conventional account of our literary “canon” reveals the history of the novel to be simultaneously a history of nonconformity.” Yes. Nonconformity. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought that Reality Hunger was encouraging more nonconformity, particularly in the realm of incorporating “nonfictional” or “true” elements or questions into the novel form. Also, when she says that “underneath some of these high-minded objections, and complementary to them, there is another, deeper, psychological motivation, about which it is more difficult to be honest,” does she think that is so contrary to what Reality Hunger advises? Because it seems to me that is exactly what your book is encouraging us toward.
In any case, I really enjoyed reading about what she thought while reading your book even if it seems she agrees with it more than she thinks. The idea of “novel-nausea” seemed to be an astute diagnosis…
Also, Hi. I’m back. It’s been a while. What did you think of the essay? Anyone else have Novel-Nausea?
Tags: David Shields, Zadie Smith
fantastic essay. a lot to think about. zadie smith has balls of steel!:
“When our own imaginations dry up – when, like Coetzee, we seem to have retreated, however spectacularly, to a cannibalisation of the autobiographical – it’s easy to cease believing in the existence of another kind of writing. But it does exist.”
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Smith seemed defensive to me. I don’t think that the distinction is between the novel and the non-novel, or the novel (well-made) and everything else. The distinction is between the raw and the cooked: I think what most of us want is the obsessive, the heartfelt, the passionate, the crazy, the compulsive, the intimate, the revealing, and the revelatory, and all of that is _raw_. Too many novels, Zadie Smith’s among them, are just cooked: they’re not very interesting _Bildungsromane_, they’re social novels of “the way we live now” variety, they’re character studies, they’re just not compelling. Nothing wrong with them — they sell! people read them! — but they’re not what I’m looking for.
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November 21st, 2009 / 5:21 pmCatherine Lacey—
I love your Raw & Cooked idea….. That is exactly it.
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November 21st, 2009 / 5:28 pmKen Baumann—
Seconded.
Curious: What would you say of 2001: A Space Odyssey (the film)? Raw or Cooked? I feel as if that is in another class, perhaps the Gourmet? A masterful mix of the two? Obsessive, well formed, perfectly manipulative?
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November 21st, 2009 / 5:42 pmKen Baumann—
2001 just an example… thinking of others now, but films keep coming to mind. Infinite Jest?
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I can certainly claim to have bouts of novel-nausea, but it always seems to be a symptom of having read too many, too-similar novels too quickly. And is thus always overcome by reading something fresh, whether fiction or non-fiction. I must say I did greatly enjoy Schields’s “The Thing About Life…”–and felt at the time that he must have taken inspiration from Markson’s recent work. Since I haven’t read Reality Hunger I can’t be sure, but Smith seems to imply that Schields may be mistaking his own frustration with the form for a general trend or exhaustion, overblowing something personal into a social sphere. But however much attention he brings to his own struggle, we simply can’t have too much encouragement to push beyond received ideas about what novels “should” be, so I applaud the sentiment.
Another thought: I’d be careful not to confuse “honesty” in writing with the inclusion of “true” or “nonfictional” elements. Dishonesty can be as easily the result of disordered facts as it can properly ordered lies. Trying to pursue “honesty” or personal risk in writing has no necessary correlation with particular forms or content. It’s simply a matter of clarity of mission, a kind of self-awareness.
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My memoir-malaria is a lot more intense than my novel-nausea these days.
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November 21st, 2009 / 5:23 pmCatherine Lacey—
Yeah, those Memoir-Mosquitoes will get you.
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I haven’t read Reality Hunger but I did hear Shields give a leacture based on the book and my reaction was pretty much the same as Zadie Smith’s. I like Shields as a writer and think he is very intelligent and interesting, but as Shya paraphrases Smith saying, Shields just seemed to be mistaking his own biases and habits with universal trends.
I also find the idea of looking towards non-fiction for inspiration, new forms or “messiness” of truth to be totally bizarre. Non-fiction seems to be always playing catch-up with fiction technique wise. Someone like D’agata can be praised as a revolutionary for using techniques fiction writers used decades earlier.
And while truth in reality may be messy and ambiguous truth in non-fiction is normally more simplified and cleaned up. I think fiction has a much longer tradition of ambiguity and messiness, indeed trying to “open a window instead of closing a door” has long been a motto of fiction” where as non-fiction tends to want explanations for everything. Which is fine and good, but simply the opposite of what Shields seems to think, from my point of view. On a similar note I agree with Zadie saying that novel writing has always been baggy and sloppy and idiosyncratic while non-fiction forms like essays are thought to be hardened jewels, or at least were until they started borrowing more and more from fiction.
Still, I’m sure Reality Hunger is worth the read.
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November 22nd, 2009 / 12:44 amsasha fletcher—
sarah manguso won’t stop talking about how this book is going to change everything and i will more or less trust sarah manguso, what with my blind belief in brainwashing.
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A writer may be unimaginative both in fiction and nonfiction. Zadie Smith makes quite the perfect case.
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November 21st, 2009 / 8:56 pmryan—
ouch
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Zadie Smith’s hot
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I cannot speak to the cookedness of Zadie Smith’s novels, but this essay of hers is outstanding. Consider me spanked. I agree with Shya: this seems a case of one author mistaking his own thoughts and feelings for a more general cultural illness. Which, come to think of it, seems something of a recent trend with guys like Malcolm Gladwell presuming that their individual curiousity somehow speaks for all curious people. It’s like synechdoche fever up in here.
One argument missing from Smith’s essay has to do with the abundance of ‘reality’ already contained in most novels. How many wild, crazy, mindblowing books have you read that took place in a city you recognize, with a protagonist who reminds you slightly of your overly sensitive, nervous little brother? Even works of absurdity, fantasy, and science fiction still include human beings, works and days, a local habitation and name. We need a smidgen of the real in all our fictions, or else we couldn’t read it. The only fully un-real text would be indecipherable. This Shields guy seems to neglect the superabundance of reality already there in the literature he wants to surpass with more “reality.”
And another thing. Why is “honesty” a value in literature? I keep reading so many comments (including by posters on this site) praising works for being somehow “honest.” But if I want honesty, I’ll read a court transcript. Isn’t the whole point of literature to make shit up?
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November 22nd, 2009 / 11:19 amCatherine Lacey—
I would agree with you wholeheartedly if the book that Zadie is critiquing actually existed, but, as brilliant as she is, she is got quite a bit of it wrong. When it comes out in February, you should have a look.
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November 22nd, 2009 / 11:19 amCatherine Lacey—
whoa, let’s re-read that:
“she is got quite a bit wrong”
HA.
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It is one of the curses of these of-the-moment book reviews that they tend to deal with upcoming, yet-to-be-seen books. Which leads to a certain information asymmetry. I’m out in the cold here. How do I know whether or not Zadie is right, if I can’t go straight to the source till early next year?
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from the content of her last few essays i’d guess whatever she’s working on fiction-wise might be more interesting, or at least trying to be more interesting, than anything she’s published to date. But I concur with Landon and often see things rose-coloured w/r/t Zadie.
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Verisimilitude is a good quality to have in novels and soda.
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Hey Htmlers, I found this excerpt from the book in question: http://www.ewu.edu/willowsprings/archives/shields.pdf
It’s gotten me very excited about Shields’ ideas
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