Letter to Norway: A report on the American fiction of the last decade

From Benjamin Kunkel at n+1…

Before venturing any trendspotting comments about American literature of the past decade, it’s probably worth scanning the ground hovering behind any exciting new figures stamped on the air—in other words, to observe again that novel-writing as an artistic practice has changed more slowly than almost any other, producing not only over the last ten, but over the last one hundred-and-fifty years mainly examples of what you might call the perennial novel. The perennial novel’s degree of realism or of sentimentality; its mixture of description, analysis, and dialogue; the social and psychological variety of its characters—all of these things and more shift across time, but only slowly. The novel of this past decade, then, is above all like the novel of previous decades; and it may be precisely because the novel is so open to changing historical content—new ways of talking, eating, and dressing, along with new technologies, manners, and beliefs—that the form itself displays such a glacial stability.

In fact, one of the main developments in recent American literature has got to be a newly self-conscious traditionalism, a preference among many sophisticated writers and critics for what are felt to be tried-and-true ways of doing things. For the novel, this means endorsing a relatively high degree of sentimentality, as against the chilly affect of someone like DeLillo or Brett Easton Ellis; a “well-rounded” approach to characterization, as against a previously avant-garde commitment to the evasiveness or speciousness of robust personal identity; and an acceptance of all the artificial contrivance involved in the kind of plotting associated with Dickens, say. This trend could be said to run through the novel of the 0’s from Franzen’s Corrections (2001)—its most distinguished instance—through Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005) to Adam Haslett’s recent Union Atlantic (2010). The relative eclipse of another sort of novel—one of flintier feeling and flatter characters, and more diffuse plots—can be seen in the decline of DeLillo’s work from social critique toward mysticism, and in the sad death of David Foster Wallace, whose fiction had seemed to promise a kind of avant-garde humanism that now we’re left to imagine or, more likely, fail to. More…