State of the Nation
The social novel in the Substack era: Wolfe, O'Hagan, Barkan, Kanakia
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan
Glass Century by Ross Barkan
The Default World by Naomi Kanakia
Around the second decade of the twenty-first century, the social scope of the novel began to shrink. Partially due to a wavering confidence in the vitality of the form, partially due to a new set of social impositions that cast a cold eye on attempting to inhabit the minds of those who didn’t share one’s exact demographic profile, partially due to simple exhaustion from the flashing and whizzing carnival ride of Y2K realism, the expansive spirit given voice in turn-of-the-century novels like White Teeth and Kavalier and Clay and Cloud Atlas turned inward. Novels became interrogative, hesitant, wary of their purported ability to swoop through the streets of the teeming modern metropolis and alight on its inhabitants. Instead, they burrowed deep into the self. They asked questions: what does it mean to be a writer? A mother? A lover? How can anyone be expected to capture one’s own thoughts in prose, much less those of anyone else? How can one live a moral life in an immoral world? Put simply: how should a person be?
Such was the world of literature I found myself surveying upon graduating college in 2017. Those are all worthwhile questions for the writer to ask, of course, but what came out of that inward turn often felt narrow and timid, produced for a shrinking and hermetic audience of fellow overeducated bourgeois. One contorts to avoid the thought-terminating cliches “MFA” and “autofiction” but it must be said that a truly shocking number of these novels were about writers going to writing conferences. Where was the ambition? Where was the titanic act of will, the drive to raise a monument in prose that would cheat time of its inevitable victory? Must it be a world of Molloys and no Ulysses? Always Outline and never Vanity Fair? There’s no accounting for taste, of course, but I can tell you that when I stepped out into the adult world as a bright-eyed striver and looked around at the possibilities offered by contemporary literary fiction— well, I won’t pretend it wasn’t depressing.
That all seems very far away now. History is moving again. It’s not exactly that the novel is moving with it. As one of the authors I discuss below once told me, the novel is in fact becoming so marginalized that it doesn’t really matter what you do anymore, the writer can practice his art as he chooses, safe in the knowledge that the chances of making it are small and the rewards if he does are more modest than ever. So space for outward ambition has, counterintuitively, been opened up, and perhaps that, as well as the massive social changes afoot, accounts for the signs I have seen of a recent turn away from self-interrogation and towards examining the great wheel of society upon which we rise and fall. Kafka in his journal once quipped that on the handle of Balzac’s cane was inscribed “I break all obstacles,” while Kafka’s cane would have to be inscribed “all obstacles break me.” I wouldn’t want to live without either writer, but it seems fair to let the Balzacs have their say for a while. So here follows a survey of the state of the rambling, ambitious, lively, sharp social novel.
But we can’t get to the contemporary ones just yet. We have to play the overture. We have to set a baseline by which to judge. And so, to do that, I read the definitive social epic of the late twentieth century, which (talk about a vibe shift!) has just been reprinted with a new cover and introduction: The Bonfire of the Vanities.
“Back in the day,” says Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter in his recent memoir, “when books mattered more than they do now, certain books could make a certain segment of the city stop. People just sat down and read them—in part so they wouldn’t be left out of the conversation.” Carter names The Bonfire of the Vanities as one of those books and it’s not hard to understand why; it’s a real blockbuster, a gigantic, acidic soap opera1. I can’t imagine any recent book that felt like a national event, the way Bonfire must have.
You know the plot, but here it is anyway. Wealthy white Wall Street “Master of the Universe” Sherman McCoy, accompanied by his young mistress, takes a wrong turn into the South Bronx and, panicking in the midst of what he thinks is an attempted robbery (whether it was or not is never revealed), ends up running down a black teenager. In a glittering 1980s New York filled with crime, racial strife, and a gigantic chasm between haves and have-nots, his case becomes a cause célèbre, attracting the attention of the up-for-reelection mayor and his nebbishy assistant DA, corrupt “community leaders,” the lying fake news media, and various other archetypes of the period. Piece by piece, Sherman is ground down by the great machine until it spits him out, penniless and abandoned, the Master of the Universe laid low.
What makes this sort of novel work? Wolfe’s overcaffeinated style isn’t for everyone, and the characters are little more than broadly sketched stereotypes. But he has two great assets. First, he has done his homework. His years spent both in journalism and in researching the novel pay off not in the tedious show-your-work descriptions that novelists who research heavily sometimes indulge in, but in an electric verisimilitude. The main plot of Bonfire is fairly simple; the book’s length comes as a result of Wolfe’s long digressions that simply describe the workings of the criminal justice system, the tabloid press, and Manhattan high society. Coldly, masterfully omniscient, he glides over these different milieus to bring forth singular details: once read, never forgotten. Wolfe can tell you that the lawyers in the Bronx Criminal Court eat the same delivery deli sandwiches every day, because they’re too scared to walk a few blocks through the middle of the neighborhood for another option. He can tell you the exact makeup of the floral arrangements at the dinner parties, the florist’s bill ($3,300), and how those arrangements have been specially crafted “to underscore the informality of the occasion.” And he can not only tell you that Sherman McCoy is “going broke on a million dollars a year” trying to keep up with his Park Avenue neighbors, he can open up the books and give you the precise financial breakdown.
Second, few writers can equal Wolfe’s violent social intelligence. He simply sees through people in a way that lesser writers do not. It’s the easiest thing in the world to skewer liberal hypocrisies and pieties, as most of these novels delight in doing. It’s harder to pinpoint the exact moments in which we manipulate our own consciences, the ways we twist our perception of the world to excuse aspects of ourselves we would find unacceptable in others. A telling moment comes early in the novel. Larry Kramer, the assistant DA who becomes Sherman McCoy’s foil, is lamenting his state: his shabby apartment, his inadequate civil service salary, his thwarted ambitions. The disorder of his own life causes him to feel judged by the crisp, Jeeves-like efficiency of the live-in nurse he and his wife have hired to assist with their newborn—until, watching the news, she blurts out a racist remark.
Thank God in heaven! What a relief! They could let their breaths out now. Miss Efficiency was a bigot. These days the thing about bigotry was, it was undignified. It was a sign of Low Rent origins, of inferior social status, of poor taste. So they were the superiors of their English baby nurse, after all. What a fucking relief.
Such internal reversals of status and subliminal self-justifications are a constant in the novel. In Bonfire, as in Wolfe’s journalism, while one’s social conscience may somewhere harbor an earnest desire to better the world, that desire quickly becomes so twisted up in hierarchies, interpersonal maneuverings, and self-serving ends that untangling the threads is an impossible task.
The final fifty pages of Bonfire are more of a thin flicker than a raging inferno. There’s an extremely unlikely deus ex machina in the form of a secret tape recorder, a courtroom scene in which a tough old Jewish judge finally lays down the law before a mass of unruly rabble, a thinly sketched, perfunctory riot, and a tart epilogue that shows that no one really learned anything and that the great wheel spins on. One gets the sense that Wolfe simply got bored and decided to wrap things up (this seems to be a persistent problem with novels of this sort, in Caledonian Road the action also just sort of ends). And while I was all set to defend Bonfire from charges of racism that have persistently dogged it, given that every character of every race is portrayed as equally venal and self-serving, the final courtroom scene, pitting as it does stern Hebraic order against a mass of dark-skinned slum dwellers and their howls of execration, makes that defense a bit flimsier than I would prefer.
But the reader who can forgive those faults will find a model for what this sort of novel is capable of. Like its predecessor Dickens, like True Grit or The Secret History or American Tabloid, The Bonfire of the Vanities is great popular art propelled by a sort of titanic, electric, overflowing energy, an energy that you can almost feel emanating from the novel in your hands, traveling up your arms, and flowing into your brain and central nervous system, where it detonates savage pleasure after savage pleasure.
Who, today, is attempting to do such a thing? Well, Wolfe’s world is gone now. There is precisely one real literary magazine left in the world, and it’s the London Review of Books. And there’s one larger-than-life journalist and novelist of the Didion-Talese-Mailer-Wolfe school still going, and it’s Andrew O’Hagan.
O’Hagan is a literary man seemingly plucked from the twentieth century; sharply dressed, charismatic, prolific, and unafraid of controversy, (and get a load of his house!). The LRB allows him to operate with a relatively free hand, turning in 25,000 words on his ill-fated attempt to ghostwrite the autobiography of Julian Assange, 35,000 words on his search for the creator of Bitcoin, and a gargantuan 60,000 words on the Grenfell Tower disaster, as well as shorter works of criticism and reflection (speaking of Mailer, O’Hagan’s portrait of Norman in his dotage is excellent). So when he released Caledonian Road, a long “state-of-the-nation novel” that seemed to bear the same relationship to The Bonfire of the Vanities as Less Than Zero does to Play It As It Lays, I was thrilled. Finally, someone was taking big swings! It opens with a cast of characters, for Christ’s sake! Pop the champagne! Schedule launch parties in every major city! Blow up the cover to enormous size and put it in the window of every Barnes & Noble! When I read Brandon Taylor saying there was “nothing cinematic” about Caledonian Road—that it was a novel in the old-fashioned sense—and that the reader can tell O’Hagan “has read more books than he has watched YouTube videos,” I was practically DROOLING! It’s very rare for me to enjoy the kind of book that gets put in a New York Times Anticipated Fiction list, but I had a feeling this could be the one.
Alas, alas. Led astray again. And I must say I bear the redoubtable Mr. Taylor some animus for his breathless endorsement, not because he liked Caledonian Road and I didn’t, which is fine and normal, but because I disliked it in the exact way he promised I wouldn’t.
A sort of transatlantic cousin to Bonfire, Caledonian Road is another story of the fall of a powerful man and a panoramic view of London society circa 2021-22. In this case, the man is Campbell Flynn, a celebrity academic. Campbell has written a bestselling biography of Vermeer (!), has a viral piece in The Atlantic on liberal hypocrisy, appears on the BBC, gives lectures, and enjoys a comfortable life among the North London intelligentsia thanks to his marriage into the aristocracy. Into Campbell’s life comes Milo Mangasha, a young, mixed-race hacker and activist. Passing into late middle age and confronting the world he and his peers have built, Campbell feels strangely drawn to this representative of Generation Z, while Milo is eager to puncture Campbell’s complacent middle-class liberalism.
Here we run into the first problem with Caledonian Road: there are simply too many things happening in it. The spine of the book is the Campbell-Milo relationship, but into that central dynamic are thrown dozens of other hot-button topics. To name just a few: Campbell writes a self-help book for easy money, and hires an American actor to pose as the author; this actor is quickly cancelled online for perceived insensitive remarks (this K-Mart Amis plot thread never goes anywhere). Campbell’s best friend, a fast fashion magnate, finds himself in deep with both the Russian and Saudi oligarchies as well as cancelled for inappropriate relationships with his employees (there’s a lot of cancelling in this book). Another subplot follows migrant smuggling, ending in a horrifying scene of mass death in an insufficiently-oxygenated shipping container. Still another follows Milo’s friends; gun-toting drill rappers and gang members at war. There are chapters following Guardian journalists and Labour MPs. Campbell juggles his relationship with his airhead DJ son and sensitive fashion model daughter. He puts the nest egg into Bitcoin. I think I’ve missed a few.
Even in a novel of 619 pages, this is too much to handle. Here the comparison with Bonfire is instructive. Bonfire is a very long, discursive novel, but really has three viewpoint characters: Sherman McCoy, Larry Kramer, the Javert to his Valjean, and the slimy journalist Peter Fallow, a wild card who alternately helps and hinders each man. Everything and everyone else in the novel is in the service of either better sketching the world in which these characters operate or forwarding their respective sections of the plot. Meanwhile, the relationship between Campbell and Milo in Caledonian Road, which should be the emotional core of the novel, gets lost in the fog. It doesn’t help that, while the beleaguered Campbell is a reasonably memorable and sympathetic protagonist, Milo is never given the breathing room to become more than a caricature of a young do-gooder, who says things like “Fuck Henry James. We’re all on the Net.”
But I’d rather a book be too ambitious than not enough. That’s all forgivable. My real problem with Caledonian Road, the reason I felt betrayed by Taylor’s recommendation, is something more difficult to pin down. A combination of elements—the hammering effect of the fast-moving plots and subplots, the workaday prose, the fairly predictable social satire—all combine to create something any reader of the modern novel is surely familiar with: HBO syndrome. Caledonian Road feels like prestige television. It feels screenwritten. Say what you will about Bonfire, but not only could I easily identify any random page as being written by Tom Wolfe, it’s a novel that, while propelled by plot, does things only the novel can do. It puts you in the heads of its characters, cataloguing every weakness and self-deception, and it’s not afraid to spend thirty pages digressing on the intricacies of the Bronx criminal justice system. Caledonian Road has that overly-slick feeling, the same thin, unsatisfying sense I get when I deign to watch the TV drama of the moment. When I describe my attraction to the social novel, I often put it in terms of film: the novelist as camera, swooping freely over the city. But one can go too far in this direction. When a novel doesn't have that je ne sais quoi which even bad ones often have, that certain feeling unique to the form, it makes you question why you’re bothering to read it instead of rewatching The Wire or something. By the end of Caledonian Road, with its brittle lack of interiority and its parade of things happening, happening, happening, I was ready to forgive autofiction for all of its faults. Had it continued for another one or two hundred pages, I might have sent Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk personalized letters of apology.
Oh well. A game attempt, and I’ll continue to follow O’Hagan’s career with interest. But my investigation into the mainstream’s contribution to the wicked and witty social epic didn’t yield much. But what of those laboring in the shadows, overlooked until now? What energies are growing in the online watering holes around which the true lovers of literature congregate, free from the stultifying atmosphere of the major publishing houses? Will the next great social novel, as the New Yorker recently asked, come from this very website?
We must turn now away from the realm of literary celebrity and towards literary friendship; that is to say, my own friendships. Before I discuss Substack novels-of-the-moment by Ross Barkan and Naomi Kanakia, both of whom maintain popular literary newsletters on here, I should give the obligatory disclaimer that I consider these authors my comrades and peers and am thus motivated to think well of them, as well as the obligatory counterpoint, that our friendship is based on a shared literary sensibility, that I was attracted to their work in the first place because I believed in what they were doing, well before I had exchanged a single word with either, and that if I didn’t have nice things to say, I would simply maintain a demure silence rather than give undue praise. Now, with that out of the way…
Ross Barkan’s Glass Century is an epic of temporal rather than social scope, tightly focused on its two main characters through a fifty year stretch of New York City tumult and tragedy, from the scuzzy 1970s to the early days of the pandemic. Mona Glass, a tennis player and photojournalist with a tremendous and often-thwarted internal drive, and Saul Plotz, a more circumspect and cerebral academic and civil servant, enter into first a sham marriage, then a long-running extramarital affair (it’s complicated) where they raise Mona’s illegitimate child together. A subplot follows Tad, Saul’s son from his real marriage, as he drifts into a Kaczynski-esque alienation and falls under the spell of a retired vigilante.
Though it too could be called a social novel, where Wolfe and O’Hagan have a cold, magisterial narrative eye, Glass Century has a big, generous heart. Its approach is closer to someone like Tolstoy: we follow its characters as they are buffeted about by history, powerless to escape the forces at work much greater than themselves, but given strength by their connection to one another and to the city. Mona and Saul themselves constitute the major achievement of Glass Century, they are real, painfully human characters, wonderfully old-school American novel protagonists of the great Huck-to-Herzog tradition, and perhaps that’s why, though the novel has little plot per se, one feels compelled to keep reading, to see their romance play out. There is something compelling and true in their relationship, in the way that each one fits the other like a puzzle piece. Mona’s tremendous energy at times threatens to overpower her; she won’t be tied down, won’t take no for an answer, won’t accept the boundaries placed upon her by both nature and society. Saul’s quiet, clearheaded stoicism acts as a tempering influence on Mona but is also the cause of the book’s central tragedy; he is too dutiful to show “real fucking initiative,” to leave his wife and break up his family, and in his passivity he loses them both anyway, in spirit if not in body.
All the while, the nightmare of history continues. The book is too wide-ranging to really be a “9/11 novel,” but the towers adorn the front cover and the 30-page sequence depicting the events of the day makes up the centerpiece of the book. The first wave of 9/11 novels have mostly fallen out of our consciousness. No young writer is reading Falling Man or Netherland or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (I only know about the first because I’m a DeLillo fan, the second because people still read “Two Paths for the Novel,” and the third because I remember my mom reading it back in ‘05). But perhaps it takes twenty years to process what the event truly meant, because the 9/11 sequence in Glass Century is the most purely riveting stretch of the book, a virtuoso extended performance of surreal confusion and fear comparable to White Noise’s Airborne Toxic Event. From the moment one side character takes a job at Windows on the World, you know their fate is all but sealed, but seeing the events of the day depicted—the frantic phone calls, the assurances that it’s some sort of minor fire or accident, the sudden, horrible fall, the dreadful, slowly dawning realization—brings back the feeling of a moment that has been dulled by years of memes, corny tributes, and American imperial misadventures. It captures the giddy, sickening feeling of the future being unwritten, and of a new set of possibilities emerging, the feeling that always accompanies ruptures and hinge points in history, even though when looking back, their eventual trajectory seems inevitable.
Glass Century has many virtues, so it feels churlish to demand just a bit more. But its quality is the kind of quality where you can see, almost reach out and grab, the places where just a slightly finer lens might have elevated it into the realms of its predecessors. Descriptive prose can sometimes provoke confusion rather than the pleasure of recognition, and dialogue can sometimes trend towards a comic-book-y exposition (“I was telling you about Vengeance, honey—” / “Ah yes, that 70s vigilante!”). My fellow critics have been split on the Tad plotline, with many wishing it was either expanded or cut entirely. I lean towards the “expand it” camp—the novel needs the feral underside, the indigenous American berserk, to avoid becoming too mannered. Yet perhaps it is wrapped up in too neat of a bow, and falls victim to a temptation that has scarred many novels: that of excessive coincidence.
But compared to the flaws of many far more feted novels, these are minor complaints. Barkan stated in his recent appearance on the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast that he feels quite certain that if his book had come out in the late 1990s or early 2000s he would have received a six figure advance from a major publisher. It takes guts to make a statement like that, which runs a high risk of seeming like empty bravado at best and undignified sour grapes at worst. But reading Glass Century, one can’t help but be convinced. This is the type of sturdy, lively novel the industry used to produce fairly regularly, and if it doesn’t quite reach the heights of its noted inspirations DeLillo and Roth, hey, it’s a short list of people who have. And if you’re placing bets on whose future work will catapult them into such company, I’d give Barkan better odds than most.
For a while, I wavered on whether to include Naomi Kanakia’s The Default World in this survey. It doesn’t quite fit the mandate: it is much more limited in scope, following as it does one protagonist in a close third-person through a fairly small social milieu, and Kanakia is a lifelong novelist rather than a journalist like Wolfe, O’Hagan, or Barkan, and more interested in one woman’s internal experience than in a panoramic view of the urban landscape.
And yet, my ultimate feeling is that it does belong, not only because it takes place within and satirizes a distinctly contemporary world, that of San Francisco tech utopians, but because I found in Kanakia the same keen social intelligence and the same ruthless dissection of liberal self-deception that I found in Wolfe. Let’s say it plays the same themes in a minor key. It’s more The Bostonians or The Blithedale Romance than Vanity Fair, but it’s closer to both of those novels than it is to your average 2010s navel-gazer.
Like Glass Century, The Default World is a character-driven novel, with a singularly compelling protagonist: Jhanvi, a trans woman who moves to San Francisco with a scheme to insert herself into a house of rich, young, hedonistic tech workers, Burning Man types (here called “AlternaFest”) who see themselves as progressive and open-minded, and as somehow contributing to the betterment of society via their sex parties, drug use, and non-monogamous lifestyles. The down-at-heel Jhanvi plans to marry one of them to take advantage of Big Tech’s generous trans health benefits and get the surgeries she needs (sham marriage is a hot topic in literature, it seems). She slowly finds herself drawn into their world, alternately attracted to their glamor and freedom and repulsed by their self-righteousness and hypocrisy, all the while dealing with her own consuming feelings of rejection, envy, and self-hatred.
I have long admired Kanakia’s perceptive, intelligent Substack, Woman of Letters, in which she deploys her social insight in a prodigious output of columns, reviews, and fictional fables and allegories meant to illustrate some large point. What has always struck me most about it is her unique ability to describe the dynamics of the literary world simply and directly, to see larger trends and cut past people’s self-definitions and their positions in this or that culture war to offer straightforward, clear-eyed analysis: often blunt, but rarely cynical. Other writers I might admire for their descriptive precision, for their drawing of unexpected connections, or for their vast erudition, but those are all skills I can improve at. Kanakia’s powers are far more difficult to emulate. And so of all the compliments I have ever received on my work here, hers have meant the most, because I know she is, as they say, allergic to bullshit.
So I’m happy to say that these same traits form the core of The Default World, a novel that is extraordinarily sensitive to the particulars of social interaction and manipulation. Much of Jhanvi’s interactions with the house take place in a realm where the line between the two is indistinct—and in fact the novel puts forward the idea that perhaps it is never distinct, perhaps every exchange is at its core an attempt to manipulate the other person. Jhanvi begins the novel knowing that she, single, penniless, and without a place to stay, is acting needy, and that neediness always produces a slight involuntary feeling of disgust in those helping you, even if their surface intentions are altruistic and their politics progressive. So she learns to barge into situations, to push buttons, to become alternately cajoling and forceful, to offer first anger and then absolution, to play on the guilt and secret desire and disgust of the wealthy white liberal until she finds herself accepted into their circles.
This sensitivity to the invisible power plays that make up our social life extends even, or rather especially, to the most intimate realms, as sex is the social currency among the young, hot, polyamorous house members and Jhanvi knows from painful experience that no amount of woke posturing can change the fact that Audrey and Katie, the queen bees of the house, possess sexual capital that she does not. Anyone in the “sex scenes don’t belong in fiction” crowd will have to contend with a central hallucinogen-fueled scene in The Default World, its finest stretch of writing, which begins as a mystical, primordial D.H.-Lawrence-earth-goddess scene of becoming and slowly shifts until it ends in hard, pitiless, transactional realism.
A bolt of sensation shot through Jhanvi’s heart. She’d reflected that morning on the events of last night, on the craziness of it—the instantaneous switch—the nakedness of the in-group/out-group dynamics. All it took was prostituting myself.
But if I’m making The Default World sound a bit brutal or joyless, I would not be doing it justice. It’s true that spending so much time in the head of Jhanvi, who is full of ugly feelings and resentment, and who commits several acts over the course of the book that I would categorize as objectively morally repugnant, can be exhausting and there are times when her misanthropy leaves one gasping for relief. But like most novels with such a fine grasp of our everyday deceptions and hypocrisies, the book is also quite funny, and though it ends far from neatly, with questions of manipulation and social pressure still hanging in the air, it doesn’t forgo the possibility of a good life in this found family, who may be weakly passive, oblivious, obstinate, and jealous, but aren’t such bad people at the end of the day.
A brief word on craft and editing: There has been much debate recently, in the self-published/small press Substack-centric world, about the value of the editorial process, with the pro-editor camp waxing rhapsodic about how they were essentially Neanderthals scratching pictures in the dirt before their brilliant editors saved them from themselves, and the anti camp pointing out that the heavy hand of the editor is a 20th century invention, and that Austen and Shakespeare wouldn’t be any better if they were subjected to the disciplinary rod of the red pen (and as Jhanvi would probably point out, that there is something a little fetishistic in insisting that you’re a bad little boy who needs to be punished for the crime of writing freely). While both Glass Century and The Default World presumably enjoyed the attention of editors at their respective small presses, both books can occasionally lapse into hasty imprecision—a doorbell in The Default World is “an electronic touchscreen dealie,” a word that should probably never appear as a description in a literary novel—or cliché. At times, one can’t help but think that they both could have benefited from one final layer of polish, one extra pair of intelligent eyes.
But we can’t be too quick to chalk one up for the gatekeepers here: the major press books that do enjoy a lavish editorial process, if in fact any still do, too often emerge as airless, worked over, talking loud and saying nothing, full of the kind of “lyrical” descriptive prose that one has to trudge through. All things being equal, and acknowledging that the editor who can take a book to brilliant new heights is a rare creature indeed, I’ll take the vitalism of the former over the technical precision of the latter (and make no mistake, they’re plenty polished, as much if not more than many big five books—you can blame my excessive reading of The War Against Cliché for my probably-too-exacting standards). In any case, Glass Century and The Default World, partly as a result of my personal connections to them but partly for—I promise!—real unselfish reasons, provoked in me something I’m not used to feeling, something I have hardly felt at all until perhaps the past year: a sense that the contemporary novel is worth caring about.
So, what have we learned? We’re no closer to dragging the novel back to the center of the national discourse, in fact we get further every day. But reading these four books did help me solve a paradox that had bothered me in my quest for the Bonfire of the 2020s. When I look around, I see material that Balzac and Dickens and Zola would have put to great use: massive social changes at work, vast, teeming cities set to ignite at any time, public figures continually inventing new and interesting ways to be vain, cruel, and pathetic. And yet, the thought of reading about that material in a novel, particularly in a thinly veiled version a year or two after the fact, sounds exhausting. Who wants to read more about Elon Musk, or Trump, or Sam Altman, or that awful man who’s trying to stay young forever? What would I learn, that tech moguls and right-wing politicians are bad? I know they’re bad! La Comédie humaine plays out on our screens every day, whether we want it to or not, and when I pick up a book, my first instinct is to leave that world for a while. In fact, despite my admiration for Kanakia, I had in fact avoided The Default World when it first came out because I believed it to be more of a straightforward tech industry satire, and being originally from and now priced out of San Francisco, I’ve had all of those that I can stand.
This thought depressed me. Perhaps the ambitious realist novel was simply a dead form, like grand opera. Perhaps inward was the only direction in which to travel. But I don’t think that’s actually true. What I do think is that writing a long novel about contemporary topics is not nearly enough, if your approach to those topics is tepid or obvious, two modes in which many contemporary literary writers excel. No one wants to be told what they already know. What is needed is not just a novel that addresses not just contemporary conditions but the effect those conditions have on our own self-image, the ways in which we justify our own actions while all the while a great, unstoppable force carries us forward. It takes a brave, resourceful writer to do this, one who is not only willing to risk offending their own social milieu but also willing to, as Wolfe put it, “head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property,” to take us into places we are unable to go ourselves2. The Default World has the penetrating gaze such a novel would need, Glass Century has the sweep and scope, and even if I was rather harsh on it, I do admire Caledonian Road for at least making the attempt. But I believe that still out there, perhaps simmering in the collective unconscious, perhaps being dutifully toiled away at this very moment, is the definitive 700-page social epic of post-Covid American life. Whether it comes from here on Substack, from a major publisher, or from an anonymous PDF posted on an obscure forum, I hope we will recognize it when it emerges.
If you’re interested, here are the others: William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice [?!], David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be, Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s Barbarians at the Gate, David McClintick’s Indecent Exposure, and The Andy Warhol Diaries. I reviewed Graydon Carter’s memoir for The Metropolitan Review here.
If the journalist James Pogue ever turned to fiction, I think he would be a leading candidate.
True story about Bonfire. I was at the airport, going back to my parents house for Thanksgiving. The airport is absolutely packed. I’m reading the book and I’m laughing out loud. I’m surrounded by all these people looking at the weird guy laughing out loud. I decided to double down. I said, all right, you people need to hear this, and I read out loud the part where the judge spits at the prisoners on the bus, and I had a bunch of them laughing. That actually happened. The book is great. Every page has something good on it and you’re right, he did the homework.
I recently read Wolfe’s first book of magazine articles. As many have probably observed before me, it’s hard now not to see the incipient novelist there twenty-some years before Bonfire. Here he is in “Putting Daddy On,” already writing about the world of Sherman McCoy:
“Parker wants me to go down to the Lower East Side and help him retrieve his son from the hemp-smoking flipniks. He believes all newspaper reporters know their way around in the lower depths. “Come on down and ride shotgun for me,” he says.”
I suppose one thing he still needed to do was to shift away from the first-person narrator, which itself represented a shift away from traditional reporter third-person. But the language is already there: his reluctance to say Beatniks, the term that would have been current then, and his coinage of an alternative; the satire in “lower depths”; and then dropping into vernacular with “ride shotgun.”