The Future of the Bold and Audacious Novel

There is an audacity in writing that I admire and aspire to. It is a particular touch that really is very moving to me. We see it very rarely these days. It is clear that American publishers, responding to American readers, are extremely cautious in fiction. Books that go on too long can not be published, certainly not until you have a tried and true following. This is sad on many levels. Writing to satisfy an audience whose tastes are whetted by Real Housewives and whose attention spans grow shorter and shorter from more and more instant gratification will only give the literary novelist an ulcer. It won't be pretty. We will lose the magic.

Already I wonder if it would be possible for Salman Rushdie to have published Midnight's Children in today's market, as a debut novelist. It was actually Rushdie's second novel, but his first novel, Grimus, was largely ignored, so he surely didn't have a big following yet. I really doubt such a sprawling, exceedingly long, abstract novel (which also won the Booker Prize in '81 and the Best of the Booker, as well) could be published now by a relative unknown. The absence of that book from our literature would be a terrible void. I fear we are on our way to a literary world with patulous holes where the lasting magic would have been.

I have read a lot of beautiful, beautiful books, but there are few that throb with the kind of bold audacity I am referring to. There will always be beautiful books but it is those raucously courageous ones I fear for. Right now, off the top of my head I can think of three of this specific genre: Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin (which absolutely, beyond a doubt changed my life and made me a writer), A Confederacy of Dunces (which I read when I was quite young and ought to reread just to be sure I am right...but I know I am right), and The Yiddish Policemen's Union (which I didn't know I was going to love in the beginning, but which turned into one of the most wholly satisfying, fantastically robust, gigantic, prodigious and overall amazing reads of my entire life). These authors took great literary leaps and wrote books that will resonate forever. So here's the thing: John Kennedy Toole committed suicide because this book was rejected and rejected and rejected. After he died, his mother found the manuscript and sent it in with a long letter and it was published to great acclaim. Helprin? I read an interview with him once where he was asked why, as a highly educated man, he chose to work as a dishwasher while writing this book. He replied to the effect that it is better to work as a dishwasher and to retain your literary integrity than to work on an advance for an unfinished book which then your publisher gets to weigh in on and demand changes to. Once they have paid you, they own your work. He said that now publishing houses have even less integrity and that the author who works on an advance is almost certain to have to make these types of concessions. At least that is how I interpreted what he said. It really struck me as a pearl to hold on to. Chabon is Chabon. He won the Pulitzer Prize, he has written successful screenplays; maybe he no longer has to worry about hearing, "No. You can't write a book that is purportedly in Yiddish about a fictional Jewish town in Alaska which has one fabulous riff after another and which amounts to a literary crime novel of Jews." Maybe they just don't say no to him anymore. Maybe Chabon has earned carte blanche. Thank God he has earned it with beautiful work, not just work that sells a lot of copies. He might be one of our few corners of refuge.

I can say that when I finished As It Was Written, it was nearly 800 pages. Too long, I guess. But it was THAT book that I always say was driven by Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale. I worry that one day he might read that he inspired me so and therefore go pick up my book and read it and wonder..."in what way could my book have possibly inspired this one?" Though I hope he would like it all the same. But the truth is that all that wackiness, all that tangential audacity, all those riffs for the sake of riffs, (because I love to write), gone. One after the other after the other, CUT AWAY GONE. And it was those elements that made me cry with ambition when I read Helprin, that he wrote like someone who just loved to write. I believe there is beauty and worth in that kind of bold storytelling, literary explosiveness and vigor.

Anyway, it is a fear of mine, a horizon with no books that make us shriek in disbelief. "HOW DID HE DO THAT??!! WOW!" Maybe I am one of the few who reads that way, who looks for that in a book. But for me and those of my ilk, I do worry about what the future holds.

Just a thought for today.

Peace, and as always, send the muse!

S