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My oldest son arrived
Saturday from New York City, having already resolved a crisis familiar
to every uncommonly common reader. He had almost finished reading Edith
Wharton’s The House of Mirth, but left it in his dorm room
in Manhattan. In the airport terminal in Newark he soothed his panic by
buying two paperbacks, both novels by Dickens – Martin Chuzzlewit
and A Tale of Two Cities. Say what you will of Philip Roth’s
hometown, its airport services the needs of desperate readers.
Among other things, I’m reading After-Thought, a collection
of reviews and essays published in 1962 by Elizabeth Bowen. She has much
to say about our complex relations with fiction. In “Truth and Fiction,”
based on three unscripted talks she gave on the BBC in 1956, Bowen writes:
“The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.”
Every common-sensical reader knows this, though many literary theorists
do not. Good fiction – even some lousy fiction – has a way
of displacing real life, making room for itself in our memories, imaginations
and sensibilities. My son, now 19, is not the first man to have fallen
in love with Natasha Rostova while reading War and Peace. Of
course, his happiness when Natasha and Pierre Bezukhov are, at last, married,
is mingled with jealousy. I suppose this is not very sophisticated (except
on Tolstoy’s part), but it’s certainly human. Bowen understands:
“A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does
do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates
round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something
of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience
in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an
approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they
have had. And like all experiences, it is added to by the power of different
kinds of people, in different times, to feel and to comment and to explain.”
I read less fiction today than I did when I was younger, and much of what
I read is a novel or story I have already read two, or three, or six times.
Contemporary fiction, at least in the United States, holds little attraction.
I remember reading only three new novels in 2006, all of which I reviewed
for newspapers – The Prisoner of Guantanamo, by Dan Fesperman
(pulp rubbish); The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers (dull, pretentious);
and Everyman, by the aforementioned Philip Roth (a small masterpiece).
Fiction writers in the United States have suffered a failure of talent,
obviously, but also a failure of nerve. Glibness, superficial cleverness
and lazy irony have replaced “adding to experience,” as Bowen
might put it. Novelists have internalized the instant gratification spawned
and encouraged by television, much of the Internet, dumbed-down education
and the resulting marginal literacy. How many of us, without classroom
pressure, still read “Ward No. 6,” The Spoils of Poynton
and Nostromo? And without such experience, can we still call ourselves
educated – in books and life? Can we aspire to such things as Bowen
describes in another essay from After-Thought, “The Roving
Eye,” which concerns how fiction writers choose subject matter:
“Unsuspected meaning in everything shines out; yet, we have the
familiar re-sheathed in mystery. Nothing is negative; nothing is commonplace.
For it is not that the roving eye, in its course, has been tracing for
us the linaments of a fresh reality? Something has been beheld for the
first time.” [B]
PATRICK KURP
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