Not a review, just some disorganized thoughts that came to me while reading. A friend’s question about Hustvedt’s What I Loved led me to reach for The Sorrows of an American. My friend had mentioned falling out of love with Paul Auster’s writing and I was getting stuck in the strands of a possible reply — one, it dawned on me, more likely to make her more skeptical of What I Loved than eager to reread it — when Lydia Perovic’s piece on What I Loved landed in my inbox. At that point my reply became impossible to write.
So I started reading instead. I fell into the two strands of the story in The Sorrows — the son’s narrative meshing with his reading of the father’s memoir — and felt carried by the fiction of it all. Yes, there are elements palpably linked to Hustvedt’s life there, familiar settings and character backgrounds, but there is also invention. The materials — the more raw, the invented — work in the service of fiction.
I realized I felt relief.
I had read What I Loved with great pleasure and little context. Reading up on the novel after I finished it, I was dismayed to find out that it could be read as a roman a clef of sorts. It was as if the story had been suddenly hemmed in by life, by the interests of the characters’ precursors battling it out on the page merely redoubling lived battles (maybe), by the writer’s hand suddenly more visible to me behind the narrator, the strings between them suddenly revealed.
Is anything really taken away from the novel by the connection to life? No, but I’d recommend reading it with innocence if you can. Otherwise, I think, instead of interpretation we get gossip.
Fiction as a veil for life, autofiction, memoir — these seem to me hamstrung by our undeniable need to maintain a good reputation. Even when these serve up confessions, the confessions are burdened by this need to save face. The writer cannot afford to lose face — the writer needs to function in the world beyond the book. (And in this world we’ve made such books into possible witnesses against the writer; but more about that perhaps another time.)
But fiction — not as a veil but as a means of finding things out through writing and reading — can save us from the tyranny of saving face. We can think through fiction without treating it as a mirror. We can. But that possible freedom seems to have gone out of fashion. Or maybe, as Kat Rosenfield put it, “people, in their fervor for recreational hatred, are rendering themselves functionally illiterate.”
I like Rosenfield’s formulation because I find it optimistic. Unfortunately, I’m increasingly worried that people aren’t pretending anymore. Sure, it might have started with a desire for rage clicks, but I think that the desire has devoured understanding. Like Rosenfield, Etgar Keret recently offered a great thought that captured something more widely understood not so long ago: “When I teach creative writing, I always tell my students that a good story, by definition, has to be smarter than the person who wrote it. Because if it’s less smart, that means the writer wasn’t writing a story but assembling a piece of Ikea furniture.”
Oh, if only. I think that too many today prefer a Freudian cage instead — an idea of art as direct transmission of the writer’s identity. Your ideas will be treated as your demons, and even your demons will be counted and assessed. Whatever identity means these days, it’s purportedly immutable, eternal, fungible, and clearly priced out. As with an Ikea flatpack, the nuts and bolts are counted and everything better be in its place when you put it together. Or else.
Fiction is too rogue a concept given this demand. And so we get people writing about “fictional novels,” which upon first encounter I took to be a pleonasm, but, no, it’s a term of art. It’s fiction dethroned and banished to afterthought — now it can only be the stuff of a “lesser” kind of novel. Imagination and invention have become the ugly stepchildren of some sort of a cruel and readily verifiable (or so we’re told) truth.
In The Sorrows of an American the protagonist Erik Davidsen meets Leo Hertzberg (the protagonist of What I Loved). I lift my imaginary glass and stroll over, banishing any thought of reflections of Hustvedt and Paul Auster in that other novel. We have been rescued into fiction.
Later that night, in order to invite sleep, I reach for something familiar. In Howards End, Forster’s narrator looks into the future and the past. I know the characters will make mistakes, compromise their principles, do good, do bad, have ideals and deep flaws. But between the narrator and Forster the thread I care about is that of working away at a story — how to tell it, how to dance with the reader. And I feel the relief of fiction.
All this is not to say that autobiographical writing (or reading) is somehow bad. Some of it is fantastic. What is bad is the banishing of fiction to the margin of possibility and pretending that all writing is autobiography, and then treating that lens as a trial.
As I’m writing this I am also thinking about the news about Alice Munro, and especially about Meghan Daum’s resonant question whether Munro was an “art monster” (Daum has elucidated that concept here). I’m not going to offer any remotely articulate insights here — I’m still processing the news and feeling stuck on the short story “Vandals,” which I interpreted as an exploration of the lasting damage of child abuse and of the forced silence around it. “Vandals” is the final story in Open Secrets, a collection in which Munro experimented with different plot structures. She also included it in Carried Away — her own selection of her fiction for the series Everyman’s Library. So it was one of her own favorites, for whatever reason. I suppose there’s a level of Keret’s Ikea metaphor on which I wouldn’t mind being stuck. Let the invention transcend the writer, but the writer be changed by it in the way the reader wants to be changed.
But fiction, that rogue element, can outgrow us all. That’s why I hope we don’t banish it outside the realm of what we allow.
[NOTE: I will be hitting “send” on this draft, warts and all, because I anticipate having no time to edit it in the coming weeks. I’d like to return to it and improve it later, but who knows when that might happen. I will take a risk here.]