Sam Anderson, book critic for New York Magazine, wrote a great piece called When Lit Blew Into Bits. He spins a cogent narrative about the evolution of literature in the aughts, a time of massively multi-platform, multi-text and content-riddled genres that “seem not only to siphon our attention but to change the way our brains process text.”
Great passage from the piece:
What new species of books, then, have proved themselves fit to survive in the attentional ecosystem of the aughts? What kind of novel, if any, can appeal to readers who read with 34 nested browser tabs open simultaneously on their frontal lobes? And, for that matter, what kind of novel gets written by novelists who spend increasing chunks of their own time reading words off screens?
I found myself drawn, this decade, in the gaps between blog reading, to a very particular kind of novel. Not to sound all techno-deterministic here, because the loops of influence are obviously complex, but many of my favorite aughts novels are those that mimic (or thematize, or rejigger, or one-up) the experience of reading online. They show quasi-bloggish tendencies: They’re relatively short, deeply style-conscious, and built out of text fragments narrated by radically diverse voices. Cohesion seems less a textual given than a tenuous miracle that takes every ounce of a writer’s artistry and genius to pull off.
Anderson quotes Roberto Bolaño from his massive 900-page aught epic 2666: “We are increasingly fluent in images with no handhold, images freighted with all the orphanhood in the world, fragments, fragments.”
What a sentence.
Anderson’s book of the decade? (I can’t help it, it’s my love of lists so bear with me here.) Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I adored the book. I found Anderson’s contextualizing of Díaz’s genius (he refers to the book’s “webbiness”—yes!) very insightful:
If there is a signature novel of the aughts—one book that most artfully co-opted our newfangled webbiness, that allowed itself to feel simultaneously major and small, that anchored its post-postmodern gimmickry in solid fictional ground—it was Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). It took Díaz, famously, eleven years to follow his first book, the short-story collection Drown, with Oscar Wao—the same amount of time it took Tom Wolfe to write his 750-page A Man in Full. Instead of pouring that time and energy into making Oscar Wao long and sprawling and sweeping and universal, Díaz made the book radically particular and condensed. It performs classic meganovel services— tracking a family through several generations, telling the history of an entire nation—in 350 pages. It’s rare to find a novel so short so often referred to as “epic.”
The really stunning thing about Oscar Wao, in true aughts fashion, is its style. Díaz turns the book over to a small crowd of narrators, each of whom seems to channel 100 different subcultures and dialects. The result is a reference-studded Spanglish loaded so densely with extratextual shout-outs (ringwraiths, Le Corbusier, Joseph Conrad’s wife) it practically requires the web as an unofficial appendix. The book could have been sponsored by Google and Wikipedia; you either have to consult them constantly or just surrender to the vastness of the knowledge you don’t have—which is, of course, its own kind of pleasure.
Lots to consider here.
Call me crazy but I don’t think literature is really changing at all. Sure, the digital revolution has a tremendous impact on the way material is distributed and read. But the core thing about reading lit is still reading. And despite publishers’ tremendous financial woes (because of some outdated business models and generally shaddy structured financing among the parent companies of the whole five publishing houses left standing after too many stoopid mergers), the amount of readers remains steady. (Actually, there’s substantial evidence that readership continues to grow with the development of cheap, accessible e-books and digital readers). So people who spend half the day immersed in the many instant gratifications of the internet are still settling in to a novel once in a while. In fact, the best thing that I think might happen to publishing because of increased competition in the digital age and a general anxiety about cutting costs in markets where credit sources have shriveled is that publishers may get pickier. Maybe they’ll stop flooding the markets with thousands of truly crappy titles. Maybe the hundred or so really terrific books that surface every year will actually become more noticeable in a clearer field. Maybe we won’t have to hold up Oscar Wao as the best book of the decade because people will have actually seen that there were far better books produced year after year. We don’t need gimmicky novels that posture as internet-friendly; we need what we’ve always needed: good stories.
(Btw, I loved Drown, but Diaz just isn’t as strong as a novelist. I’d also love to see publishers stop forcing authors into writing mediocre novels when they are clearly better short story writers, i.e. Diaz, Maile Meloy, Toby Wolff, Amy Bloom, Jhumpa Lahiri, etc.)
Ok, end soapbox 😉
I love the way your mind works. So much truth here. Thanks so much for bringing a counterpoint.
A few questions for you:
Did you read 2666? (I haven’t yet.)
Didn’t you think Diaz did achieve a form of the epic in that compact little Osacr Wao? THAT amazed me, and I was mesmerized by how he did it.
And the concept of images with no hand holds–did it delight you just a little?
Nope, haven’t read 2666. But yes, I’d agree that Diaz got to epic in Oscar. I’m just not sure how much that matters. On a very simplistic level, I tend to judge books by how memorable they are after. I didn’t hate Oscar but nothing in that book haunts me. I know this is a very individual, completely unreliable, and subjective way of measuring anything, but I’m holding on to the basics: I want my heart broken every time.
As far as the no handhold thing goes, I don’t know what to say about it because I don’t really understand it. I suppose I get hints of what it’s after, but I’m a literalist first and always. For me, the most “poetic” of sentences has to make sense first on a literal level. That handhold sentence enhabits a kind of suggestive space, and maybe that’s enough for a lot of people. But I’ll take precision over the floaty stuff any day. I think imagistic arts provide better mediums for creating evocative, suggestive space. Words should mean. They should be, as our favorite Miss Saville likes to say, acute.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has been on my “to read” list for awhile.
And Bolaño’s quote. One word: Wow.