Blown Away
27th October 2024
I gave up reading American literary fiction when its authors gave up writing it. The novel was born with its subject, the bourgeois individual. When it became uncool to be bourgeois and individual, literary novelists abandoned realism (the means of portraying society) and plotting (the ends of the individual’s story). What remained was character (subjective perceptions) and politics (the objective goal of social life). The vestiges of the Puritan personality disorder mean that character must always align with politics.
I exempt detective fiction and spy novels. These genres remain true to form and readership, so they retain a high degree of craft: plausible social detail, competent plotting, and coherent character motivation. Without these constraints, American literary fiction, which was world-class in the century between Mark Twain and Tom Wolfe, has devolved into pious, slackly written slop, a cynical mixture of self-help, affirmative action, and movie pitches.