Exactly
Above all, I would insist that novelists who think they’re smarter than their characters, and more sophisticated than the idea of the novel itself, and who cannot resist the temptation to demonstrate as much, ought instead to find deeper characters and better stories to write. I want a book to break my heart; everything else is television.
– Jim Lewis
From a great exchange on modernism, multiculturalism and other writerly topics, between those two clever and erudite J boys, Eugenides and Lewis.
You asked about the multicultural novel. OK, here goes. The majority of so-called multicultural novels are nothing but new wine poured into old bottles. What’s the great subject of the novel? Marriage, of course. In the West, we’ve lost that subject. Marriages aren’t arranged anymore. Divorce is no longer unthinkable. You can’t have your heroine throw herself under a train because she left her husband and ruined her life. Now your heroine would just have a custody battle and remarry.
What the multicultural novel has going for it is the marriage plot. They can still use it! The societies under examination are conservative, religious, still bound by custom and tradition. And so—voilà—you can be an Indian novelist or a Jordanian novelist and still avail yourself of the greatest subject the novel has ever had. Arranged marriages, dowries, social stigma at divorce—it’s all back again, in perfect working order.
No doubt a trite observation, but I was reminded again while reading this that one of the keys to powerful writing is the writer’s awareness of what s/he is trying to accomplish, particularly in terms of language. (Cf. Dennis Lee, and his sabbatical spent figuring it out.) Aware of all the influences of the past, but equally aware of the ability of an individual and focused voice to create something beauteous and new.
As opposed to those only eager to prove how clever they are.
Ma! Hey, Ma!
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Comment
- Marriage is the great subject of the novel?
— August Jul 1, 8:08am # - Well, I agree that it probably sounds reductive to an extent – and confess that my first reaction to the statement was, “hang on…”
But, looking back on the most popular novels up to now (e.g. Bovary, Karenina & all those Victorian and Edwardian babes, to name but a few), you have to admit that marriage has been a pretty regular mainstay of their central drama.
The eternal search for love and self.
— gail Jul 1, 2:31pm # - Bloom’s too, unravelling as it was.
Though great marriages are a novel subject still…
Myself I love the search for the eternal, in the particulars of the mundane.
— msg Jul 1, 11:59pm # - Yes. Good writing is finding “garlic and sapphires in the mud clot:” it must speak of other worlds while being rooted (mired) in this world.
— GMR Jul 2, 3:17pm # - I thought “clot” was a verb… just as
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings
— fp Jul 3, 7:22pm #
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