Friday, January 16, 2009

Suburban malaise ...

... A Year in Reading: New Yorker Fiction 2008.

I would have missed this had I not had lunch yesterday with Max Magee, who happens to live a few blocks north of where I do. Max is a very bright and very personable young man. In the course of our conversation I made some mention of how much American fiction seems to be about the emptiness of life in the suburbs and he remarked that a good many of the stories in the New Yorker throughout 2008 had been about precisely that. He asked me if I had seen his survey of those stories and I had not. Now I have. If you haven't, take a look. Talk about yeoman's service.

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous12:45 PM

    Yes, I used to read a lot of modern American fiction but I got bored with endless reiterations of this theme, and all the self-pity.

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  2. Anonymous3:33 PM

    maxine, what is modern British fiction like? I assume it's a bit different?

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  3. Looking in from way, way outside, I believe the folks who work in the modern US publishing industry drive this approach, along (perhaps) with modern college liberal arts / literature education. My hypothesis, somewhat born out by email conversations with agents, goes like this: Agents/publishers repeatedly say in interviews that a book has to grab them "personally" in order for them to handle it. Many (most?) literature agents and publishing house folks come out of both a solidly urban/suburban environment and a modern liberal arts education. Practically all of them live and work in that urban environment now. Our popular entertainment culture also portrays this world as practically the sole modern American lifestyle worth experiencing.

    Put it all together and the books most likely to grab such folks are the ones they personally identify with or which have simularities to modern works they've learned to regard as brilliant. Urban angst novels are well positioned to meet both these requirements.

    Of course, there's nothing inherenty wrong with (sub)urbanites or modern emptiness literature about them, but a business model that filters out most everything else from the "quality" American literature stream could perhaps stand some tweaking. Books that don't get that treatment do still get published of course, either by accident, or more likely, by having a story and atmosphere that neatly fits into one of the narrow genre bins available for "lesser" works.

    Or perhaps I'm wrong. It's not exactly my area of expertise.

    But in either case, to paraphrase Jerry Lewis: "Modern US literature is wacky."

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  4. This is exactly why I find mainstream American fiction so mediocre, and have mostly stopped reading it. The novels are rarely an better than this. I mean, how many times can we go on and on about middle-class suburban angst? Whether or not it's done artfully, or as "fine art literature," begs the question: but isn't there so much more to life?

    Of course, The New Yorker is not exactly the fiction bellwether. They've been in a rut of sameness for decades. Editors' bias. James Aach's points here about agents' and publishers' biases are dead-on, it seems to me. It is probably an east coast urban bias, too, since most publishers are based there; dare one say it, even a New York City bias.

    But again, there's so very much more out there.

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  5. I'm pretty much in agreement with Jim and Art on this. Common sense - to say nothing of every day experience - ought to put the lie to the notion that everyone in suburbia is gripped by angst over their empty lives. How many people do you know of whom that is true? I have mentioned before a scene is a Don DeLillo novel where a character has an existential crisis while standing amid the veggies in the supermarket. I remember it because I thought it was unintentionally hilarious, something made up by someone who hadn't gone to a supermarket in years. So if the literary agents connect with novels about suburban angst, it must be because they identify with that angst on some level. That must be, for them, the proper view of suburbia. But presumably this is an angst they have themselves escaped - so they want to sound the alarm to others, so they can escape as well. Otherwise, if they themselves are living in suburbia and actually feel this angst, then why the hell don't do something about it and move, or get another job?

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