Realistic Exhaustion

What I ask for from a novel is easily stated—and very difficult to accomplish. The storyteller, whether distanced from the events narrated or a character implicated in them, must come across as a "man speaking to men" (to use William Wordsworth's formula). I must believe the storyteller is a person talking to me about matters of real concern and in a voice a real person would use in earnest conversation with another. Basic, boring realist aesthetics, you might say—and it is true that I read "serious fiction" compulsively while having no taste for fantasy, science fiction, mystery, or other "genre" novels, and a limited tolerance for avant-garde writers like Kathy Acker, Thomas Bernhard, or even David Foster Wallace. And so, yes, within my chosen world of realistic fiction, bad writing fails to provide an interesting angle, an arresting take, on the world it unfolds. Here's a good example of bad writing, from Geraldine Brooks's much-praised People of the Book (2008):

Faber's pale hands caressed each volume. He turned the pages with exquisite care. As he fingered the rarest of codices, peering at the faded inks and delicate, veined parchments, his expression changed. He moistened his lips. Serif noted that his pupils were dilated, like a lover's.

The reader who can be pulled into this world or moved by such a direct attempt to call forth an emotion is not me.

Much more interesting are the writers who struggle with the exhaustion of the realistic mode, but who are still determined to tell a story. What kind of voice can such a writer provide when hyper-aware that, as William H. Gass puts it, all novelists are liars. Here's two samples from two contemporary American novelists.

He'd always thought of himself as a progressive. He believed in the perfectibility of the republic. He thought, for instance, that there was no reason the Negro could not with proper guidance carry every burden of human achievement. He did not believe in aristocracy except of individual effort and vision.

And the second:

He took the lamp from beside the bed and jerked the cord free and climbed up onto the dresser and stove in the grate with the metal lampshade and pulled it loose and looked in. He could see the dragmarks in the dust. He climbed down and stood there. He'd got blood and matter on his shirt from off the wall and he took the shirt off and went back into the bathroom and washed himself and dried with one of the bath-towels.

Good or bad writing isn't found in sentence structure or word choice. The first writer establishes an ironic distance from sentiments he cannot endorse, but which he can get "inside" of, and which he relates in the epiphanic moment that his character experiences a moment of self-doubt. The second writer uses distance as a shield from all sentiment, to be the recording angle who reveals no angle of vision, nothing about himself as narrator or his characters as people. It's all story—and it's all pointless. And, worst of all, to me it sounds all affected, a tough-guy persona that I don't believe for a moment. I am baffled by the high regard in which Cormac McCarthy (the quote is from No Country For Old Men [2005]) is held. Give me E. L. Doctorow (Ragtime [1975]) every time.