Meaning and condescension

Surely, however, one feature of post-9-11 life is the immediacy and pervasiveness of events. The attacks on New York were so shocking partly because we all saw it, as it happened - however silly it sounds in hindsight, at the time it felt like it was happening to all of us. In this sense, a trashy-but-entertaining movie like Cloverfield has more to “say” about the post-9-11 world than “serious fiction” like McEwan’s. There is something contemptible about the way McEwan and others use their complacent fiction to present diagnoses of these events. It is arrogant art: here comes fiction with all the answers! Doesn’t it make you think? What it doesn’t do is confront and disturb because that would require moving beyond certain safe modes of thought and presentation.

I suppose it’s unfair of me to begin this post with a quotation from The Lost Dog, a novel that for the most part avoids the kind of simplistic interplay and faux-profundity I have been describing here.

Another Booker-nominated novel, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, is however the acme of the post-9-11, thematic-jigsaw novel, and it’s got a mopey, passive protagonist to boot. Netherland is sober and “realistic” and terribly sincere - a real “missive to the future” concerning our interesting times. I doubt I’ve read a less engaging novel all year, and I only wish I had my copy here so I could quote some of the deep thoughts O’Neill has his standard-issue white Western male protagonist think.

This post is less a consolidated essay than a collection of (possibly intemperate) “thoughts” about contemporary fiction and I’m not sure how coherent it is. I think what underlies everything I’ve said is a wish to read fiction that is honest. Not honest in the sense of realistic, but honest as in truthful to the work rather than to some facile “message”.

I’m tired of didacticism and “research”. If I want argument and editorialising I can read the newspaper. If I want to know what happened when and to whom I can read history or biography. I read fiction for other reasons - aesthetic pleasure; intellectual diversion; a sense of possibility coupled to an implicit acknowledgment of limitation - things that are either beyond the ability of writers like Davies and O’Neill to provide, or else do not interest them. I suppose they have bigger things to think about.