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.”
Excellent stuff! And I appreciate the inclusion of a British novel. Your comments on Caledonian Road do make me wonder whether you'll appreciate Murdoch - in her novels there is always too much going on. The British/American distinction is interesting.
A minor point - I don't think there's anything wrong with "dealie" since it sounds true to life to me. By hewing close to the characters' POV, many contemporary authors can claim that the language is bad on purpose, a semi-ironic semi-reference to some Internet thing. Or at least that's how I write! (If we're honest with ourselves, most of our thoughts are clichés)
I just started "Mating" and am thus far blown away so I think I'll move Murdoch up the list as a companion talky-novel-of-love.
I take your point, in this particular instance it didn't work for me-- it's a fine line between excessive casualness and annoyingly overcooked description and few novelists can get through a book without straying into one or the other. But unlike certain house critics at certain populist right publications I don't think a novel is well-served by red-penning isolated passages of it, so I should clarify that on the whole it is not a huge deal.
Yeah I should return to Lessing. I read half of the golden notebook too soon after a painful breakup and had to stop bc I was taking large amounts of psychic damage.
I also want to reread The Golden Notebook. I read the The Grass is Singing more recently: it’s a brisker read and a clear-eyed portrayal of race relations in the Southern African context.
Great read, as usual. I had some scattered thoughts.
One of the surest ways to sap your delight in a form or a style is to read the worst derivative representatives of it—I have a hard time picking up any Denis Johnson these days after reading so many insipid imitations of him during grad school—and my old adulation for these big ambitious social realist novels got pretty thoroughly dimmed by exposure to all of the flops (Garth Risk Hallberg was the killshot). It's the type of novel that feels doomed to resemble, in most cases, because most cases of anything are bad, a species of homework. It's too easy for it to become an act of dorky box-checking: here's The Big Event, here are my characters' reactions to The Big Event; voila, I have shown you History. Do I get an A or an A+? Often the novelist becomes a diligent student of current events rather than a student of human nature. It's like an audition to write for The New Yorker. I'm looking forward to reading Glass Century because Ross is really good at characters, as you note, which is the prereq for history to matter to me in a novel.
Also, I'm going to be obnoxious here and say that I think what you're looking for actually is more likely to be found in autofiction than in any potential 700-page here-is-post-COVID-America novel—the very fact that the novel would likely try to orbit around COVID would make the sort of box-checking above inevitable (here's a character putting on a mask; here's a character learning about lockdown; here's a character having Thoughts about essential workers, etc. etc. The cheap traps abound.). History works for me as a force in a novel if the novel isn't about it but if you can feel it ambiently around the characters, the way you feel weather, and the navel-gazey aspects of some autofiction at the very least refuse history from taking up disproportionate space. The primo example here is Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (I rabidly recced this to Ross). History suffuses the novel, but the people are the point, not the events. Powell doesn't pull up a chair to explain how something is historically significant; instead, you get to watch how these forces of change, "unstoppable" as they are, work their way into the mundane flow of life, into dinner party conversations, love affairs, career disappointments, etc. It was also, crucially, a work of autofiction (or I guess we would retroactively slot it into that category, along with so many other big-hitters of that era).
Maybe what I'm really lamenting is that so many contemporary writers suck at interiority, which to me is the only thing that makes a novel truly unlike anything else. If O'Hagan's book had, I don't know, 25 percent more interiority, presuming that interiority was "good," would it have felt less like an HBO special? I haven't read it, so I don't know. But my guess is that it would have felt more like a novel.
Yes, I think I end this essay in largely the same place as you. I think there is sort of a middle ground. CR has a lot of hey-the-news-is-happening bits but there is also a lot of turgid "short paragraphs about how it feels to read the news" stuff from peak autofiction that I reject equally vehemently (this is why I tried to avoid the term, I think Knausgaard is doing something very different and much more admirable than say, Olivia Laing -- it seems pointless to conflate the two).
What I did love in Wolfe was the sense of wheels within wheels, the great view of all these different parts of society banging up against one another (ofc it also plays now as a period piece). Parts of it do feel like reskinned journalism but when the journalism is so good, it seems to matter less. And the characters are stereotypes but the way in which they relate to one another-- the minute reversals of status etc -- is done well. Really I think part of the charge here is just the industry being set up to produce provincial outcomes and general polarization of society making this synoptic view more difficult.
But I agree, I wouldn't want to set up some sort of "interiority vs social scope" false dichotomy. Obviously most great novels have both to some extent. I have really wanted to read A Dance to the Music of Time for a while -- that's definitely the kind of thing I would like to see more of!!
I agree on Knausgaard, partly because he does a good job of showing how often history exists as a kind of oblique shadowy presence that exerts almost no internal force on you beyond a guilt-inducing sense that it should be exerting more force, if you were a good person, whatever the hell that is. Then he also draws the madcap parallels between himself and Hitler, which like what Wolfe did at least took moxie, even if it was also sort of specious and moronic (I don't mean those derogatorily, or not entirely so). Wow, I'm so lonely and artistically stultified, I'm sorta Hitlering right now! Wild stuff.
I think my final point about CR is just the logical endpoint of most of literary criticism, in that unfortunately I think it eventually pratfalls into the "good things are good and bad things are bad" trap. Sure, for instance, a novel about a cat eating an endlessly replenishing bucket of grapes while ranting to a Communist slice of cheese sounds insufferable -- but what if it was good? A post-covid-America panorama novel might seem doomed to become a vessel for either drab and staged liberalism or faux-daring leftist sneering or even HBO special redolence in feeling and form -- but what if it wasn't? As in, what if it was those things, but also good? Good things are good and bad things are bad. As Roth said, the treatment of the subject matters far more than the subject itself, so whenever people jeer at the subject of a novel, there's an impish part of me that goes, Ah, very interesting, I understand your complaint. But what if it was good?
Definitely check out Powell, I think you'd dig him. To me he clobbers Proust because he's actually funny instead of droll. Also Proust is getting popular again, so I can't like him anymore. What a shame.
I struggled with Caledonian Road; I kept waiting for it to say something about anything, rather than simply piling in the stuff.
By the by, one of the few recent novels to give me a high remotely comparable to Bonfire, written by someone with similar journalistic bona-fides to Wolfe, is Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise.
I have that sitting in my pile, I'd very much like to get to it soon. She wrote the introduction to the bonfire reissue so they're definitely kindred spirits.
"Substack Summer" is curious to me because people are evaluating Ross and Naomi's work in relation to their previous writing... but by "writing" they mean their newsletters, not the novels they've previously written and advertised on said newsletters! I think this is kind of understandable in Naomi's case in that LitStack isn't really into YA -- it is crazy how much "Just Happy to be Here" (which I randomly saw on the shelves at the library and read on the spot in ~90 minutes) is almost literally "The Default World" for twelve-year-olds btw -- but I'm not really sure why Ross's debut has been memory-holed in this way.
Wow, super-memory-holed -- I forgot "Glass Century" is actually novel #3 for him!! Very curious. Definitely would be interesting to see what the "dealie" (as Jhanvi would put it) with "Demolition Night" is
So. . .TOM WOLFE is your standard for panoramic social novel as the baseline? Really? Reading this I was confused multiple times, mainly by the way you've set this up to make sure the goalposts were in the right position for you to score all the points.
Bonfire of the Vanities was a big seller, but it had almost no influence on anyone after that can be traced, because it is so generic and its characters so thin. Then you pretend that nothing came since it that was part of this subgenre you are supposedly identifying. So Stephen L. Carter, Jonathan Franzen (whose two books before The Corrections were excitingly weird social novels, and The Corrections was absolutely in every way the event you imagine for Bonfire), Joseph O'Neil, Barbara Kingsolver, Louise Erdrich, Martin Amis (whose absolutely dreadful The Information came out in the early 90s), just weren't writing? it seems like your definition of the kind of novel you want to discuss is willfully narrow in order to prove your own point.
Then your bit about you only know about three books for limited reasons just makes clear what a kid you are. You don't know about those books and their effects (Safran Foer had a HUGE impact with his first, very acerbic and funny, book, which made the second one popular beyond its value) because you just weren't aware of them and so think they don't matter. You obviously have not been paying attention since to Adam Haslett, JAMIE O'Neil, Clair Messud (blech but still part of the genre), Adam Ross, Alan Hollinghurst, and even the execrable Hanya Yanigahara and the acceptable Douglas Stuart, not to speak of Namwali Serpell or Lauren Groff (I know some are not American. Part of my point about your narrowness of reference is that you really want some British-style 19th Century (Dickens) or French (but only Balzac and why not Hugo and Zola and Flaubert?) novel, and those novels were actually written in every language in Europe during the 19th Century and beyond, and often quite differently: See The Maias, The Betrothed, and Chronicle of the Murdered House for some variants). I've been finding myself persistently bothered by the narrowminded and extremely poorly informed nature of a lot of Substack literary commentary; simply not knowing (or, more likely, not showing the knowing) of vast swathes of works and authors and thinking that any ideas are new. Maybe you need the fire in your belly to write Ulysses, but it doesn't need rewriting, and Molloy is a better book -- but we get them both. Better to revisit Dos Passos, or Jose Camilo Cela, or Berlin Alexanderplatz for a new variant.
This comment got away from me so I will stop. It's valuable to do this work, and raise these ideas; I don't mean to be merely a scold, so sorry.
I do appreciate being held to high standards (tone sincere) but I think perhaps you misunderstand what I’m trying to do here, which is not write a dissertation or a definitive history of a certain type of novel (you’d need much more length than a substack post to do that!) but discuss a few recent books that share similar preoccupations and their connection to a reading experience I had been looking for and not finding. I did actually have a paragraph that I deleted about how this is necessarily one, oversimplified story and how with ten thousand novels released every year it’s always possible to find counterexamples but I took it out because I trust my audience to read me in good faith and grasp this fact intuitively! And I don’t know what you mean about points and goalposts, literally all I’m trying to do is describe my own experience honestly. Yes, it’s a narrow definition and I don’t pretend it’s not, “social novel” is in fact far too broad, perhaps I should have invented a portmanteau like “brodernism” to describe this sort of Wolfean epic but whatever.
It’s also true that someone with 30 more years of reading novels under their belt will have a leg up on me as far as breadth of knowledge goes but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that or at what age it becomes acceptable to start writing about literature. While it’s true I have not read every commercial hit of the mid-2000s nor every single thing in the western canon I think it’s fair to say I am as informed if not more than many people who hold what you would find are quite alarmingly prestigious positions in the literary world.
And nowhere do I say that nothing after Bonfire resembled it, just that by the late 2010s the trend had swung far in the opposite direction, which I think is a defensible claim. I have written on both The Corrections and The Information (which I found flawed but far from absolutely dreadful, clearly we just have divergent tastes which is not a crime) within the last few months. It’s also just not true that Bonfire has had almost no influence, I literally review a major recent novel in this piece that is clearly trying to be 2024 Bonfire! They just gave all his work a deluxe reissue campaign with introductions from major contemporary authors talking about his impact on them!
Anyway while I strive to be as informed and erudite as possible in my writing my hope is that people treat my work here as somewhat diaristic, as a record of one person’s enthusiasm for literature, and as a set of sincere questions that I pose and attempt to answer as best I can through my own experience rather than as a would-be voice of God or attempt to set the terms of the conversation for everyone. Not to claim that I’m just a little baby who shouldn’t be critiqued, only to say that I have never claimed to be anything but the former.
A fair and measured response. I apologize for being a little sharp; I was writing in a hurry and should have slowed down. Essentially, though, I think the fact that you had a paragraph that answered my objection and removed it makes the utility of some basic throat-clearing sensible even if this is also your judgment as to how much to do.
I disagree that the pendulum swung as you say -- it's defensible but I specifically mentioned two massive sellers and generators of literary comment that came after it and were clearly of the tradition, Yanegehara and Stuart. I think that you (and many many people here) have internalized a sense of grievance which I find genuinely silly, because literary fashion changed (without actually ending doorstopping social novels from being written or feted) in a way you just don't like, and perhaps the style of the social novel has changed some too.
I strongly disagree with the Substack whiny men that autofiction is cramped and a sign of decadence or that what "we" need are big bold novels of ideas, because they have not (and probably never will) left us.
Of course we have different taste, that's why we are all here arguing about nonsense, but I will say that Martin Amis was absolutely seen as the premier miniaturist of the social novel, and the Information is not just bad per se but is bad as a Martin Amis novel (none of which -- NONE -- are very good to begin with) and that sometimes what I am seeing in the Substack whiny men threads is a frustration at a totally incorrect perception of the influence and authority of various authors. As another commenter notes, Bonfire was a huge seller but TOTALLY derided as being schlock by many "serious" critics at the time, and by no means a critical darling. Not even close. Which is partly why I take such exception to you using it as your standard. The fact that the new ediiton has an introduction by Taffy Brodesser-Acker, whose novels are exactly the same kind of book as his, and I guarantee you would have been dismissed as lite, possibly "chick lit" if published when Wolfe's book was, (I am not saying anything negative about her myself, just how she would have been seen back in the manly days of writing by men) is a sign that A) the whiny Substack men have missed that plenty of social novels are written, but OH NO, they're WRITTEN BY WOMEN and B) critical evaluations change over time and that Wolfe is NOW feted as a great novelist (he isn't -- his nonfiction with the exception of his pathetically reactionary art criiticism is quite good and socially relevant but his novels are all hobbled by his self-absorption) as his actual personal presence has faded. Personally I think you should have used Flesichman is in Trouble as your marker, not Tom Wolfe, but I also think that all kinds of writing , even bad or weak writing can be interesting nonetheless. I just hadn't realized that part of the reason the Substack man parade pisses me off is that they think Tom Wolfe is the guidepost.
Finally, I should note that i am not including you in the Substack whiny men, but since you are reviewing the loudest of them here, it's important to constantly push back on their false claims and silly assertions, lest they gain traction with more than this cohort. Good books are good books regardless of whether a person with a penis composed them, and there is no crisis of masculinity unless you think masculinity in its traditional form is worth preserving. Keep doing what you do, it's good quality stuff or I wouldn't argue so much with it.
No worries, I can take it and though I stand by my assessment of all this stuff it's good to have a more acerbic perspective bc the last thing I want is to do boosterism for my online cohort (Ok, I want to do it a little bit...but not make it my personality!). I think the company I ultimately put Bonfire in is fair -- Donna Tartt, James Ellroy, Charles Portis etc. It's not the highest heights of literature but it is supremely well-crafted and intelligent entertainment. That is to say it is if you think it's successful at what it's trying to do, which I obviously do and you do not. Anyway I don't know what's to be gained by me saying "x novel is pretty good, if undeniably flawed" and you saying "x novel is dogshit not worth the paper it's printed on" over and over again lol.
On the literary men question I have said my piece and am not terribly interested in getting back into this recurring and rather boring topic except I will say that discussions I've had as on this piece in particular have convinced me that George Monaghan in the New Statesman recently was entirely correct in saying that a lot of the literary-man stuff is a misplaced lament for bohemia. I think common criticism of autofiction gets too caught up in the "auto" aspect. What I was really responding to with disappointment, when I first started reading all this stuff, is how tidy and professionalized much of it is. So much great twentieth century fiction is semi-autobiographical and about writers doing writer things. The difference is it's not about "fellowships" and "conferences". I don't have an MFA and I have never been on a Professional Writer track, so it's hard for me to care about that stuff. Obviously lots of autofiction does not fall into this box (Knausgaard etc), but lots does.
A lot of the gender stuff is silly or overblown but I really do think the literary novel is basically where academic painting was in 19th century. It's not that nothing worth reading is ever produced, but things are badly in need of a shakeup. Whether it's possible to do that before the form is totally marginalized and everyone forgets how to read entirely, well, we'll find out I guess.
A lot of people do name "Bonfire" as the last literary novel to become a national sensation on its own merits. (I say "on its own merits" because there have been other sensations that had an extra-literary element to them: e.g. "The Corrections" became a sensation partly because of Franzen's spat with Oprah.) But "Bonfire" was also Wolfe's *first* novel, after a long career as an extremely well-known pioneer of New Journalism, so he had that going for him. Large parts of "Bonfire" indeed read like long-form New Journalism. Also, he had a great subject - NYC in the "greed is good" era.
Yeah, as I recall Franzen released the book in the wake of a highly publicized article he wrote for Harper's (I think) calling for precisely the kind of large-scale social novel he was writing at the time. That was the opening salvo in his double whammy of publicity.
Actually there was a five and half year gap between that essay and appearance of The Corrections. Definitely too far apart to make a double-whammy impact on the reading public.
At the risk of sounding ignorant…aren’t LARB and NYRB literary magazines? Or have they committed a crime of some kind? Great work and amazing/civil discourse.
Henry what do you mean by auto fiction because in France and I suspect in other European languages as well, it means memoir. So when I was telling my French partner when we first met that I was working on a memoir, he didn’t understand. Then he said , ah auto fiction. (And he’s tres literaire!)
It is sort of a contested and vague to the point of useless term (like "neoliberalism" or something), so I tried to avoid using it directly or relying on it. Obviously tons of fiction is directly or indirectly autobiographical. But when people say "autofiction" they're usually referring to the big wave of 2010s autobiographical fiction (that might be only partially autobiographical, or almost entirely) -- Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, Knausgaard etc. I think I would say a lot of that stuff is sort of characterized by an ambivalence TOWARDS fiction as a whole and an emphasis on the status of the creator as an author or writer and the act of creation, which makes it a bit different than Proust or Joyce or something. But it's obviously a fuzzy line. Lots of it is worth reading so I tried to avoid lazily criticizing it as a whole. But there were also a lot of awful "how it feels to be upper middle class and go on twitter" books in that era.
Ah ok makes sense. I try not to pay attention to these new terms that keep getting invented, mainly by publishers and bookshops.
I have qualms enough that there is a difference between fiction and non fiction which also does not exist in many European countries. The term they use is literature— for all sorts of writing.
Hallberg famously got $2 million advance for it. I tend to think we'd be getting more novels like this if more of them were selling like Bonfire (of which I regret I cannot share your high opinion) as opposed to City on Fire. Or Caledonian Road, for that matter. Looking forward to seeing what kind of readership embraces The Glass Century.
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.”
Excellent stuff! And I appreciate the inclusion of a British novel. Your comments on Caledonian Road do make me wonder whether you'll appreciate Murdoch - in her novels there is always too much going on. The British/American distinction is interesting.
A minor point - I don't think there's anything wrong with "dealie" since it sounds true to life to me. By hewing close to the characters' POV, many contemporary authors can claim that the language is bad on purpose, a semi-ironic semi-reference to some Internet thing. Or at least that's how I write! (If we're honest with ourselves, most of our thoughts are clichés)
I just started "Mating" and am thus far blown away so I think I'll move Murdoch up the list as a companion talky-novel-of-love.
I take your point, in this particular instance it didn't work for me-- it's a fine line between excessive casualness and annoyingly overcooked description and few novelists can get through a book without straying into one or the other. But unlike certain house critics at certain populist right publications I don't think a novel is well-served by red-penning isolated passages of it, so I should clarify that on the whole it is not a huge deal.
And to bridge the two, maybe consider Doris Lessing…
Yeah I should return to Lessing. I read half of the golden notebook too soon after a painful breakup and had to stop bc I was taking large amounts of psychic damage.
I also want to reread The Golden Notebook. I read the The Grass is Singing more recently: it’s a brisker read and a clear-eyed portrayal of race relations in the Southern African context.
Great read, as usual. I had some scattered thoughts.
One of the surest ways to sap your delight in a form or a style is to read the worst derivative representatives of it—I have a hard time picking up any Denis Johnson these days after reading so many insipid imitations of him during grad school—and my old adulation for these big ambitious social realist novels got pretty thoroughly dimmed by exposure to all of the flops (Garth Risk Hallberg was the killshot). It's the type of novel that feels doomed to resemble, in most cases, because most cases of anything are bad, a species of homework. It's too easy for it to become an act of dorky box-checking: here's The Big Event, here are my characters' reactions to The Big Event; voila, I have shown you History. Do I get an A or an A+? Often the novelist becomes a diligent student of current events rather than a student of human nature. It's like an audition to write for The New Yorker. I'm looking forward to reading Glass Century because Ross is really good at characters, as you note, which is the prereq for history to matter to me in a novel.
Also, I'm going to be obnoxious here and say that I think what you're looking for actually is more likely to be found in autofiction than in any potential 700-page here-is-post-COVID-America novel—the very fact that the novel would likely try to orbit around COVID would make the sort of box-checking above inevitable (here's a character putting on a mask; here's a character learning about lockdown; here's a character having Thoughts about essential workers, etc. etc. The cheap traps abound.). History works for me as a force in a novel if the novel isn't about it but if you can feel it ambiently around the characters, the way you feel weather, and the navel-gazey aspects of some autofiction at the very least refuse history from taking up disproportionate space. The primo example here is Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (I rabidly recced this to Ross). History suffuses the novel, but the people are the point, not the events. Powell doesn't pull up a chair to explain how something is historically significant; instead, you get to watch how these forces of change, "unstoppable" as they are, work their way into the mundane flow of life, into dinner party conversations, love affairs, career disappointments, etc. It was also, crucially, a work of autofiction (or I guess we would retroactively slot it into that category, along with so many other big-hitters of that era).
Maybe what I'm really lamenting is that so many contemporary writers suck at interiority, which to me is the only thing that makes a novel truly unlike anything else. If O'Hagan's book had, I don't know, 25 percent more interiority, presuming that interiority was "good," would it have felt less like an HBO special? I haven't read it, so I don't know. But my guess is that it would have felt more like a novel.
Yes, I think I end this essay in largely the same place as you. I think there is sort of a middle ground. CR has a lot of hey-the-news-is-happening bits but there is also a lot of turgid "short paragraphs about how it feels to read the news" stuff from peak autofiction that I reject equally vehemently (this is why I tried to avoid the term, I think Knausgaard is doing something very different and much more admirable than say, Olivia Laing -- it seems pointless to conflate the two).
What I did love in Wolfe was the sense of wheels within wheels, the great view of all these different parts of society banging up against one another (ofc it also plays now as a period piece). Parts of it do feel like reskinned journalism but when the journalism is so good, it seems to matter less. And the characters are stereotypes but the way in which they relate to one another-- the minute reversals of status etc -- is done well. Really I think part of the charge here is just the industry being set up to produce provincial outcomes and general polarization of society making this synoptic view more difficult.
But I agree, I wouldn't want to set up some sort of "interiority vs social scope" false dichotomy. Obviously most great novels have both to some extent. I have really wanted to read A Dance to the Music of Time for a while -- that's definitely the kind of thing I would like to see more of!!
I agree on Knausgaard, partly because he does a good job of showing how often history exists as a kind of oblique shadowy presence that exerts almost no internal force on you beyond a guilt-inducing sense that it should be exerting more force, if you were a good person, whatever the hell that is. Then he also draws the madcap parallels between himself and Hitler, which like what Wolfe did at least took moxie, even if it was also sort of specious and moronic (I don't mean those derogatorily, or not entirely so). Wow, I'm so lonely and artistically stultified, I'm sorta Hitlering right now! Wild stuff.
I think my final point about CR is just the logical endpoint of most of literary criticism, in that unfortunately I think it eventually pratfalls into the "good things are good and bad things are bad" trap. Sure, for instance, a novel about a cat eating an endlessly replenishing bucket of grapes while ranting to a Communist slice of cheese sounds insufferable -- but what if it was good? A post-covid-America panorama novel might seem doomed to become a vessel for either drab and staged liberalism or faux-daring leftist sneering or even HBO special redolence in feeling and form -- but what if it wasn't? As in, what if it was those things, but also good? Good things are good and bad things are bad. As Roth said, the treatment of the subject matters far more than the subject itself, so whenever people jeer at the subject of a novel, there's an impish part of me that goes, Ah, very interesting, I understand your complaint. But what if it was good?
Definitely check out Powell, I think you'd dig him. To me he clobbers Proust because he's actually funny instead of droll. Also Proust is getting popular again, so I can't like him anymore. What a shame.
I struggled with Caledonian Road; I kept waiting for it to say something about anything, rather than simply piling in the stuff.
By the by, one of the few recent novels to give me a high remotely comparable to Bonfire, written by someone with similar journalistic bona-fides to Wolfe, is Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise.
I have that sitting in my pile, I'd very much like to get to it soon. She wrote the introduction to the bonfire reissue so they're definitely kindred spirits.
"Substack Summer" is curious to me because people are evaluating Ross and Naomi's work in relation to their previous writing... but by "writing" they mean their newsletters, not the novels they've previously written and advertised on said newsletters! I think this is kind of understandable in Naomi's case in that LitStack isn't really into YA -- it is crazy how much "Just Happy to be Here" (which I randomly saw on the shelves at the library and read on the spot in ~90 minutes) is almost literally "The Default World" for twelve-year-olds btw -- but I'm not really sure why Ross's debut has been memory-holed in this way.
Wow, super-memory-holed -- I forgot "Glass Century" is actually novel #3 for him!! Very curious. Definitely would be interesting to see what the "dealie" (as Jhanvi would put it) with "Demolition Night" is
So. . .TOM WOLFE is your standard for panoramic social novel as the baseline? Really? Reading this I was confused multiple times, mainly by the way you've set this up to make sure the goalposts were in the right position for you to score all the points.
Bonfire of the Vanities was a big seller, but it had almost no influence on anyone after that can be traced, because it is so generic and its characters so thin. Then you pretend that nothing came since it that was part of this subgenre you are supposedly identifying. So Stephen L. Carter, Jonathan Franzen (whose two books before The Corrections were excitingly weird social novels, and The Corrections was absolutely in every way the event you imagine for Bonfire), Joseph O'Neil, Barbara Kingsolver, Louise Erdrich, Martin Amis (whose absolutely dreadful The Information came out in the early 90s), just weren't writing? it seems like your definition of the kind of novel you want to discuss is willfully narrow in order to prove your own point.
Then your bit about you only know about three books for limited reasons just makes clear what a kid you are. You don't know about those books and their effects (Safran Foer had a HUGE impact with his first, very acerbic and funny, book, which made the second one popular beyond its value) because you just weren't aware of them and so think they don't matter. You obviously have not been paying attention since to Adam Haslett, JAMIE O'Neil, Clair Messud (blech but still part of the genre), Adam Ross, Alan Hollinghurst, and even the execrable Hanya Yanigahara and the acceptable Douglas Stuart, not to speak of Namwali Serpell or Lauren Groff (I know some are not American. Part of my point about your narrowness of reference is that you really want some British-style 19th Century (Dickens) or French (but only Balzac and why not Hugo and Zola and Flaubert?) novel, and those novels were actually written in every language in Europe during the 19th Century and beyond, and often quite differently: See The Maias, The Betrothed, and Chronicle of the Murdered House for some variants). I've been finding myself persistently bothered by the narrowminded and extremely poorly informed nature of a lot of Substack literary commentary; simply not knowing (or, more likely, not showing the knowing) of vast swathes of works and authors and thinking that any ideas are new. Maybe you need the fire in your belly to write Ulysses, but it doesn't need rewriting, and Molloy is a better book -- but we get them both. Better to revisit Dos Passos, or Jose Camilo Cela, or Berlin Alexanderplatz for a new variant.
This comment got away from me so I will stop. It's valuable to do this work, and raise these ideas; I don't mean to be merely a scold, so sorry.
I do appreciate being held to high standards (tone sincere) but I think perhaps you misunderstand what I’m trying to do here, which is not write a dissertation or a definitive history of a certain type of novel (you’d need much more length than a substack post to do that!) but discuss a few recent books that share similar preoccupations and their connection to a reading experience I had been looking for and not finding. I did actually have a paragraph that I deleted about how this is necessarily one, oversimplified story and how with ten thousand novels released every year it’s always possible to find counterexamples but I took it out because I trust my audience to read me in good faith and grasp this fact intuitively! And I don’t know what you mean about points and goalposts, literally all I’m trying to do is describe my own experience honestly. Yes, it’s a narrow definition and I don’t pretend it’s not, “social novel” is in fact far too broad, perhaps I should have invented a portmanteau like “brodernism” to describe this sort of Wolfean epic but whatever.
It’s also true that someone with 30 more years of reading novels under their belt will have a leg up on me as far as breadth of knowledge goes but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that or at what age it becomes acceptable to start writing about literature. While it’s true I have not read every commercial hit of the mid-2000s nor every single thing in the western canon I think it’s fair to say I am as informed if not more than many people who hold what you would find are quite alarmingly prestigious positions in the literary world.
And nowhere do I say that nothing after Bonfire resembled it, just that by the late 2010s the trend had swung far in the opposite direction, which I think is a defensible claim. I have written on both The Corrections and The Information (which I found flawed but far from absolutely dreadful, clearly we just have divergent tastes which is not a crime) within the last few months. It’s also just not true that Bonfire has had almost no influence, I literally review a major recent novel in this piece that is clearly trying to be 2024 Bonfire! They just gave all his work a deluxe reissue campaign with introductions from major contemporary authors talking about his impact on them!
Anyway while I strive to be as informed and erudite as possible in my writing my hope is that people treat my work here as somewhat diaristic, as a record of one person’s enthusiasm for literature, and as a set of sincere questions that I pose and attempt to answer as best I can through my own experience rather than as a would-be voice of God or attempt to set the terms of the conversation for everyone. Not to claim that I’m just a little baby who shouldn’t be critiqued, only to say that I have never claimed to be anything but the former.
A fair and measured response. I apologize for being a little sharp; I was writing in a hurry and should have slowed down. Essentially, though, I think the fact that you had a paragraph that answered my objection and removed it makes the utility of some basic throat-clearing sensible even if this is also your judgment as to how much to do.
I disagree that the pendulum swung as you say -- it's defensible but I specifically mentioned two massive sellers and generators of literary comment that came after it and were clearly of the tradition, Yanegehara and Stuart. I think that you (and many many people here) have internalized a sense of grievance which I find genuinely silly, because literary fashion changed (without actually ending doorstopping social novels from being written or feted) in a way you just don't like, and perhaps the style of the social novel has changed some too.
I strongly disagree with the Substack whiny men that autofiction is cramped and a sign of decadence or that what "we" need are big bold novels of ideas, because they have not (and probably never will) left us.
Of course we have different taste, that's why we are all here arguing about nonsense, but I will say that Martin Amis was absolutely seen as the premier miniaturist of the social novel, and the Information is not just bad per se but is bad as a Martin Amis novel (none of which -- NONE -- are very good to begin with) and that sometimes what I am seeing in the Substack whiny men threads is a frustration at a totally incorrect perception of the influence and authority of various authors. As another commenter notes, Bonfire was a huge seller but TOTALLY derided as being schlock by many "serious" critics at the time, and by no means a critical darling. Not even close. Which is partly why I take such exception to you using it as your standard. The fact that the new ediiton has an introduction by Taffy Brodesser-Acker, whose novels are exactly the same kind of book as his, and I guarantee you would have been dismissed as lite, possibly "chick lit" if published when Wolfe's book was, (I am not saying anything negative about her myself, just how she would have been seen back in the manly days of writing by men) is a sign that A) the whiny Substack men have missed that plenty of social novels are written, but OH NO, they're WRITTEN BY WOMEN and B) critical evaluations change over time and that Wolfe is NOW feted as a great novelist (he isn't -- his nonfiction with the exception of his pathetically reactionary art criiticism is quite good and socially relevant but his novels are all hobbled by his self-absorption) as his actual personal presence has faded. Personally I think you should have used Flesichman is in Trouble as your marker, not Tom Wolfe, but I also think that all kinds of writing , even bad or weak writing can be interesting nonetheless. I just hadn't realized that part of the reason the Substack man parade pisses me off is that they think Tom Wolfe is the guidepost.
Finally, I should note that i am not including you in the Substack whiny men, but since you are reviewing the loudest of them here, it's important to constantly push back on their false claims and silly assertions, lest they gain traction with more than this cohort. Good books are good books regardless of whether a person with a penis composed them, and there is no crisis of masculinity unless you think masculinity in its traditional form is worth preserving. Keep doing what you do, it's good quality stuff or I wouldn't argue so much with it.
No worries, I can take it and though I stand by my assessment of all this stuff it's good to have a more acerbic perspective bc the last thing I want is to do boosterism for my online cohort (Ok, I want to do it a little bit...but not make it my personality!). I think the company I ultimately put Bonfire in is fair -- Donna Tartt, James Ellroy, Charles Portis etc. It's not the highest heights of literature but it is supremely well-crafted and intelligent entertainment. That is to say it is if you think it's successful at what it's trying to do, which I obviously do and you do not. Anyway I don't know what's to be gained by me saying "x novel is pretty good, if undeniably flawed" and you saying "x novel is dogshit not worth the paper it's printed on" over and over again lol.
On the literary men question I have said my piece and am not terribly interested in getting back into this recurring and rather boring topic except I will say that discussions I've had as on this piece in particular have convinced me that George Monaghan in the New Statesman recently was entirely correct in saying that a lot of the literary-man stuff is a misplaced lament for bohemia. I think common criticism of autofiction gets too caught up in the "auto" aspect. What I was really responding to with disappointment, when I first started reading all this stuff, is how tidy and professionalized much of it is. So much great twentieth century fiction is semi-autobiographical and about writers doing writer things. The difference is it's not about "fellowships" and "conferences". I don't have an MFA and I have never been on a Professional Writer track, so it's hard for me to care about that stuff. Obviously lots of autofiction does not fall into this box (Knausgaard etc), but lots does.
A lot of the gender stuff is silly or overblown but I really do think the literary novel is basically where academic painting was in 19th century. It's not that nothing worth reading is ever produced, but things are badly in need of a shakeup. Whether it's possible to do that before the form is totally marginalized and everyone forgets how to read entirely, well, we'll find out I guess.
Agreed. I’m a fan of Wolfe but Bonfire of the vanities was seen as popular fiction, lowbrow, never seriously regarded as a novel.
Enjoyable as always, thanks for keeping a finger on the pulse!
A lot of people do name "Bonfire" as the last literary novel to become a national sensation on its own merits. (I say "on its own merits" because there have been other sensations that had an extra-literary element to them: e.g. "The Corrections" became a sensation partly because of Franzen's spat with Oprah.) But "Bonfire" was also Wolfe's *first* novel, after a long career as an extremely well-known pioneer of New Journalism, so he had that going for him. Large parts of "Bonfire" indeed read like long-form New Journalism. Also, he had a great subject - NYC in the "greed is good" era.
Franzen’s book was already big and part of the publicity machine. The spat certainly raised the profile but it was already anointed
Yeah, as I recall Franzen released the book in the wake of a highly publicized article he wrote for Harper's (I think) calling for precisely the kind of large-scale social novel he was writing at the time. That was the opening salvo in his double whammy of publicity.
Actually there was a five and half year gap between that essay and appearance of The Corrections. Definitely too far apart to make a double-whammy impact on the reading public.
You have a point there! That gap has definitely shrunk in my memory.
I too wanted more of Tad in GC--I kept thinking of Denis Johnson. The world demands more Tad!
At the risk of sounding ignorant…aren’t LARB and NYRB literary magazines? Or have they committed a crime of some kind? Great work and amazing/civil discourse.
Thanks! There are of course many literary magazines, I just personally think the LRB towers above them all.
Henry what do you mean by auto fiction because in France and I suspect in other European languages as well, it means memoir. So when I was telling my French partner when we first met that I was working on a memoir, he didn’t understand. Then he said , ah auto fiction. (And he’s tres literaire!)
It is sort of a contested and vague to the point of useless term (like "neoliberalism" or something), so I tried to avoid using it directly or relying on it. Obviously tons of fiction is directly or indirectly autobiographical. But when people say "autofiction" they're usually referring to the big wave of 2010s autobiographical fiction (that might be only partially autobiographical, or almost entirely) -- Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, Knausgaard etc. I think I would say a lot of that stuff is sort of characterized by an ambivalence TOWARDS fiction as a whole and an emphasis on the status of the creator as an author or writer and the act of creation, which makes it a bit different than Proust or Joyce or something. But it's obviously a fuzzy line. Lots of it is worth reading so I tried to avoid lazily criticizing it as a whole. But there were also a lot of awful "how it feels to be upper middle class and go on twitter" books in that era.
Ah ok makes sense. I try not to pay attention to these new terms that keep getting invented, mainly by publishers and bookshops.
I have qualms enough that there is a difference between fiction and non fiction which also does not exist in many European countries. The term they use is literature— for all sorts of writing.
Maybe poor Ross Barkan would have gotten a *seven*-figure advance if this hadn't happened: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/12/the-time-of-broken-windows
Hallberg famously got $2 million advance for it. I tend to think we'd be getting more novels like this if more of them were selling like Bonfire (of which I regret I cannot share your high opinion) as opposed to City on Fire. Or Caledonian Road, for that matter. Looking forward to seeing what kind of readership embraces The Glass Century.
Ross and I in conversation actually recently fingered Mr. Hallberg as "the guy who ruined it for all of us"