The Novel That Doesn't Know

As a narrative theorist, I can find something interesting in any piece of prose fiction, and as a feminist, I am wary of pronouncing books "good" or "bad." I always ask, who's it good for—whose interests does it serve? However, I acknowledge one kind of truly bad book: the Novel that Doesn't Know (NDK). The NDK is a work of realistic fiction that makes foolish mistakes in its representation of the material world.

Novels set on college campuses, for example, are almost universally ignorant of the tenure process. Candidates for promotion are forever getting or losing it because of some personal remark they made to somebody. The NDK has no idea how people actually progress toward tenure—presumably it's too arcane to matter. Sometimes academic novels don't know information that's much less obscure. The protagonist of Chasing Shakespeares (2003), a twenty-first-century Harvard graduate student in English, got his BA at the University of Vermont, where he played football. That's just dumb: UVM hasn't had a football team since the 1970s. How hard would it have been to check?

The NDKs that irritate me the most, though, are novels whose protagonists' tribulations can be attributed to their active alcoholism, but the novel has no idea. As I remember Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (1996), one of the protagonists has some drinks, then has a fight with her boyfriend, then has a few more, then argues with her mother. The novel asks you to take the substance of the fights seriously. My reaction: "Get sober and then tell me about it!" Shades of The Sun Also Rises (1926), another book dangerously verging on being an NDK.