The Quiet Contemporary American Novel by Rachel Sykes (review)

Rachel Sykes’s The Quiet Contemporary American Novel explores a number of recent American novels in relation to the rather mobile concept of quiet, arguing for a contemporary trend that includes the work of well- known authors like Marilynne Robinson and Ben Lerner. With the exception of audio books and children’s storybooks that have squeaky toys attached, however, all books are quiet – silent, even, but for the turning of pages. Thus from the outset Sykes has the unenviable task of trying to take the measure of a synaesthetic term that means something other than what it denotes. Moreover, instead of working to impose some kind of rigour on it, the author’s propensity for accretion that piles idea upon idea affirms and expands the ambiguity of quiet as a concept. The result is a stylishly written monograph that is packed with interesting readings of contemporary American novels but unfortunately doesn’t offer a cogent argument for the critical importance of quiet to literary studies.

When reviewers first started using the term ‘the quiet novel’ in the nineteenth century to refer vaguely to a slow, contemplative narrative in which very little happens, America was a very noisy place. In the throes of an industrial revolution that rendered urban spaces in particular obscenely loud and infernally busy (not to mention polluted and overcrowded), some literary works seemed to offer momentary respite from the racket. Such works contrasted sharply with the sensational novels of the time, which seemed only to amplify the noise of the streets: Sykes notes that one reviewer compared reading a quiet novel in 1868 to ‘entering a sacred space in search of tranquillity’ (p. 15). However, this very distinction between the quiet novel and the loud, dramatic society in which it circulated also contributed to a widespread belief that, compared with works that engaged with the noise and traffic of the contemporary moment, the quiet novel was trivial at best. At worst it was quietist, nostalgic, even reactionary. Such assessments, Sykes states, haven’t changed much in the intervening years, and she writes that ‘throughout its long history, many critics have used “the quiet novel” sometimes to denote praise but most often as a phrase that dismisses and derides the work of writers whose novels seem disengaged from the noise of their wider society’ (p. 2).

Sykes attempts to push back against this characterisation. Analysing what she considers to be a move towards quiet in contemporary novels, she argues that although the withdrawn, reflective states that such works represent are often viewed as apolitical, when framed as a rejection of a social and cultural impetus towards noise, productivity, and progress, we might in fact consider them to be radical. She turns away from what she calls ‘noisy novels’ – those works generally written by straight, white, male authors (such as Don DeLillo, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace) that are full of plot and directly address social and cultural conditions of the day – to focus instead on the work of writers like Marilynne Robinson, Richard Powers, Lynne Tillman, and Teju Cole, ‘in which the interior lives of introverted, scholarly, and often reclusive characters are prioritised’ (p. 3). Following a line pursued (it must be said in a more focused and persuasive manner) by Kevin Quashie in his 2010 study The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture, Sykes argues for ‘the notion of quiet’s counter-cultural potential’ when situated within a contemporary, post-9/ 11 context (p. 7).

Even in a place as noisy as America, the birthplace of rock and roll, where honking is such an aural menace they introduced fines for it on residential streets, the events of 11 September 2001 were heard loud and clear above the din. If the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center tore through the soundscape of New York and ripped it asunder for a few hours that autumn morning, the cultural cacophony that followed after would reach...