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  • “On Spinning One's Wheels”
  • Susan Steinberg

Ben Marcus' essay from the October 2005 issue of Harper's Magazine ("Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It") is a welcome reminder that the literary world is, and has been, in deep shit. Though I do tend, now, to try to repress this fact (much in the same way that I try to block out the nightly news), much of my four years of graduate school was spent obsessing heavily about the very things Marcus fights for in his essay: the need for "difficulty" in literature; the need for artists to challenge themselves and their readers; and the need for the obliteration (or at least the questioning) of a certain paint-by-numbers style of laziness (mistaken for realism) that is clearly acceptable to publishing houses, readers, and, evidently, Jonathan Franzen. My boyfriend-at-the-time and I would sit on his bed, plotting ways in which to write (then publish, God-willing, in some magazine like Poets and Writers) that much-needed essay, that scathing document that, at long last, would attack mediocrity in all of its written forms. We would bash a certain type of too-cool-for-school irony and its superfluously acerbic humor. We would equally bash sentimentality of the type one should only find in paperbacks spinning on dollar racks in dollar stores (and in war rhetoric, credit card commercials, made-for-TV movies, the aforementioned nightly news, and the like). We were ready to take on everyone from the Best American series to The New Yorker to Oprah's book club, and we were ready to do it by ourselves. Yes, we knew the battle had been waged before, again and again, by every last Avant-garde movement and its frustrated-by-the-mainstream leaders. But we felt we needed to reopen the dialogue against formulaic writing and the fearful market that supported it. And no one, save our professors, we were convinced, felt as pissed off as we did. And no one would feel as pissed off—we were convinced—until we wrote our manifesto.

So did we write it? No. I'd say we were too gutless. My then-boyfriend would likely say we were too compassionate. Perhaps it was both; perhaps we were scared, equally, of burning bridges and of hurting feelings. Sure, I was also a little bored with the fight. And sure, it felt [End Page 327] weird that I was plotting to change the literary world when I wasn't even plotting in my fiction. Too, I sometimes forgot who and what, exactly, we were fighting—perhaps the enemy had just grown too large. For there mediocrity loomed, at every turn, from the most prestigious MFA programs to the fronts of every bookstore in America—lazy, vapid, generic, predictable drivel from first to last page. But I just didn't have the courage to write the essay that said, readers, writers: Wake the fuck up! This shit is formula! You know how this story's going to end! Undoubtedly, the narrator is going to look at the stars and feel something vaguely reminiscent of Joycean anguish!

So I held my tongue, as I read work by writers whose popular influences showed through like a black bra under a white shirt. I held it even tighter when peers would buy into the word "best" in the Best American series, as if that word could ever be an appropriate adjective when speaking of art (or supposed art), as if literature had become some sort of extreme sport, as if the book series shouldn't be titled something like Some Recently Published Fiction Chosen by One Well-Known Editor. And yet over a beer, these peers were humans with souls and beating hearts who read and wrote what they read and wrote because for some reason—maybe some very good reason—they wanted to. I would have to accept the fact that quite possibly I was a snob who, after four years of art school followed by an MFA program, wanted the bar for what was passing for art raised to an extreme level. Of...

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