Tipping Point of Badness

Badness in the historical novel is particularly discomfiting because the novelist makes an implicit contract with the reader for verisimilitude of historical context, character, or idea, and then the form itself guarantees that she can never fully deliver. By design, historical fictions always embed a thesis about history, and their badness becomes a matter of tipping point rather than failure. Badness enters the nonparodic historical novel when an author overtly uses historically situated people, places, and cultures as mirrors, and denies their difference. It is easy to fool readers who don't know history about how historical a novel is, and literary studies has made us believe that verisimilitude is a politically disingenuous ideal anyway, so one feels retrograde saying that in the historical novel, the tipping point of badness is a failure of dialogue, a moment when a thesis about history becomes cocksure. But there it is. It is the tipping point when an author transcribes only his own desire echoing from the past.

It happens in very good novels by very good novelists. It happens in Toni Morrison's A Mercy (2008) when Morrison refuses fully to open her mind to seventeenth-century religious life, in The March (2005) when E. L. Doctorow rewrites historical fact to such little purpose that his thesis goes banal. It happens in Saturday (2005), an oddly historical novel of the present, when Ian McEwan implies that a good poem read well can turn the hearts of men from violence to fraternity, a wishful thesis about terror in our time. These moments of badness are moments of authorial ego when dialogism fails. But they also are slippages that instruct about our own moment: an author's desires, the reader's own face in the glass.