Is the American Novel Already Dead?

In a 2008 interview with Hoover Institute’s Peter Robinson, Tom Wolfe said that “the novel is dying a horrible death.” For the purposes of this short essay, I will be focusing only on the American novel. The question is, is the American novel on life support, barely making it, or is it in fact, already dead?

Why even ask such a question, and where is the evidence for it? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I haven’t read a good, solid American novel in ages. Somehow, I have to go back into the 1920s and 1930s (or before that) if I want to remind myself what was the anatomy of the American novel. I look at Willa Cather and her honest, beautiful treatment of immigrant life; or Hemingway and his take on human malaise or war; or Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy…there are a few. But today? The norm is memoir! Some of them might even be true.

Art has, for some time now, become quite political. The novel, in particular is really not concerned with characters or their moral choices that they are facing. There is no beginning, middle or end, and there is no reality. Pseudo-novelists that we are seeing today are concerned with ideas, and even that is old news. These so-called ideas were not challenging to begin with: I can just hear the beautifully stream-lined voice of today’s writer who religiously practices yoga, brings compassion to the common man (while having contempt for the common man, because the writer is part of the elite which calls itself “league-of-free-form-anti-bourgeois-erudite-ordinaries”), does not smoke and regularly recycles.

Down with reality, they scream. But if we have no reality, what indeed are we left with? Pseudo-novelists, who are part of the masochistically self-imposed bourgeois leftism, ruminate on the meaning of life and—AH!—miraculously conclude that there is only nihilism perpetuated by the endless game of phenomenological psycho-analysis. (Can someone please tell me why are we still stuck in a Woody Allen movie?)

Novels today deal with liberal politics, they are filled with political correctness, the exploration of the ‘feminine’ (my personal favorite), they lack something writers like Hemingway knew well: freedom. Today’s writer is convinced that if he inserts a profanity, or better yet introduce a deviant character who lives a deviant life and has many instances of deviant sex (use your imagination with this one) a la Norman Mailer, then he is indeed free. Only this time, the character in question is hundred times more deviant than what Mailer could have come up with.

The biggest trouble with today’s writer is the fact that he does not let his characters speak for themselves. When asked whether she knows exactly what will happen in her stories, Flannery O’Connor said that she didn’t even know what would happen a minute after one sentence. Her fiction, for that and many other reasons was dialogic. There was no coercion of character’s thoughts or emotions, and a character certainly did not serve as a writer’s mouthpiece for political propaganda.

Perhaps the biggest thing today’s writer is afraid of is—drum roll please—experience. Talking to people: you know, that common man that they love but really can’t stand. Today’s writer can go on and on, for hours really about what is the ideal place for him to write (usually a multi-million dollar cabin in the middle of nowhere, where he can become a pantheistic hermit, pontificating about the spider webs behind the toilet bowl) and traveling into the past and repeatedly answering the question: when was it you knew that you were born to be a writer?

If I ask a question, I try, most of the time anyway, to come up with solutions or answers. But this time, it beats me. There are lots of bad writers out there. There are lots of bad memoirs out there (as Tom Wolfe says, bordering on Wikipedia entries). And there are lots of bad novels out there. As long today’s writer is an ideologue, he will put leftist politics above art. And his novels will be disastrous.

Maybe I should try to write a novel, since I am so damn frustrated. And I promise to stay objective: if the writing is mediocre and not worth pursuing, I will use the paper as a fire starter and enjoy the warmth of the fireplace in our beautifully modern living room.