Don't read widely!

A month and a half, and my novel's only two hundred words thicker.

I've been experimenting, actually; not with my novel, which I dare not touch except in the most conscious of moods, but with my reading: The Language Instinct, American Pastoral, Freedom, some terrible New Yorker stories---the much touted twenty under forty, each of whom are more execrable, more obviously sentimental, more cooperatively continent, than the one before---, some terrible novels by twenty-something American soi-disant talents. My unconscious is full of references to Little League baseball, to pot and cocaine addiction at university, to bombs going off in hushed suburbs, to "creative writing", to the importance of word "Freedom", to, in other words, the world of American letters, replete with its preference for the symbolic to the pithy, its vacant valuing of "simplicity" and "brevity" in "expression", its unashamedly trite imaginings of ethnicity. I have nothing left in me, it seems, for what I have always regarded as belonging to the numinous: what McEwan, through one of his belletrists in Atonement, calls the "crystalline present".

From the further side of the square a lane led on to a still bleaker area. The street lamps flickered into pink as I approached, but nothing else responded. The buildings were grandiose, like cinemas gone dark, the lower windows boarded up and plastered with the posters for rock groups and the dud grins of politicians in the previous year's elections. The names of newspapers, printing works, engineering firms, in forward looking Deco script, could still be read above the padlocked entrance grilles. There was a sense that cacophonous all-night business had been done here, and the city, with a certain unflustered malevolence, had chosen its moment, and stilled it, and reasserted its own dead calm. At the street's end was the long vulgar front of a hotel, the Pilgrimage and Commercial, still with its brass entrance rail and the red and blue badges of motoring clubs. I climbed the steps, among the ghost-throng of arrivals, and peered through the splendid glass doors on to a shadowy half-acre of mud and rubble.

(These, of course, are lines from Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star, a novel which has, over my nearly twenty readings of it, reminded me of everything a work of art might aspire to do.)

Returning to a passage like this after weeks and weeks of American literature is difficult; my mind seems in the interim to have developed a new aesthetic, one that seems to like smaller sentences that say very little or nothing, and which promotes factual rather than moral information. My own style has begun, like Hollinghurst's, to look densely alien, like that of a much older person; my efforts at sentential rhythm archaic; my approach laughably detailed. I'm reminded of, and react reflexively against, Zadie Smith's injunction to mix up one's reading when one is writing a novel:

My writing desk is covered in open novels [...] If your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on David Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If your aesthetic has become so refined it is stopping you from placing a single black mark on white paper, stop worrying about Nabokov and pick up Dostoyevsky, patron saint of substance over style.

This is perhaps good advice to writers who think, as she does, that writing should be like "a balanced diet"; but for people like me it is very nearly fatal. As such, American literature is probably good "roughage", but too much of it, and you might not be able to return to your own voice, the one you abandoned a month and a half ago to ill-advisedly become more widely read.

Chimamanda Adichie...

...speaks here of cultural authenticity.

She tells the story of one of her American professors who, on reading a draft of her first novel, remarked that her Africans were not "authentic"; they weren't poor or dying of starvation or under siege from ethnic militants, but, on the contrary, were well-adjusted, middle-class Africans who drove cars and got divorces in middle-age. Adichie deplores this behavior, ascribing it to the poverty of a single conception of a Nigerian or African reality, and is out in her fiction to set the record on Nigeria straight. Nigerians, she may say* through her characters, are more like you than you might think. If they suffer from poverty, they also suffer from iPod tinnitus. If some of their women are bare-breasted in public, others proudly display their cleavage. If some shake fruits from trees, others prefer to shop at WalMart. Implicit to her point of view is the contention that she, a Nigerian woman brought up in Nigeria, is more qualified to speak for her "people"; which is to say, more qualified to invent fictions about them through which she can explore her uniquely Nigerian themes.

This is all bollocks, of course. The current American fictional monolith, fraught as it is with an excess of White American, is obsessed with the question of cultural authenticity; it treats the non-White as a sort of journalist whose material for fictional reportage lies in his repressed past. MFA programs encourage in such writers a mining of lived experience, leading to a number of "stories" which are more-or-less autobiographical and more-or-less thematically transparent. The "best" fictional magazines---The New Yorker, Tin House, Paris Review--- are, almost by definition, ones in which your uniquely cultural background, heralded by your deliciously unusual name (Bezmozgis; Adichie; Scibona; Mueenuddin), will afford you the sort of treatment that would beggar any writer of the previous generation. Your success as an ethnic writer is largely governed by how well you evoke your own cultural past; conversely, if your past is not as culturally interesting as it can be, your fiction is ignored.

This anxiety for authenticity subscribes to the writing-workshop edict: "Write what you know!". It is the anxiety of a Developed Society in which the boundaries between lived and second-hand experience are vanishing. For most middle-class Americans, it is easier today to watch a documentary about Lagos than to walk a mile to the nearest convenience store; easier to understand the plight of slum-dwellers in Lucknow than to attend Mass on Sunday; easier to survey Lowe's employment figures than to drive to its nearest outlet. The writer who values lived experience will be confronted by how little of it abounds in his own life, and will thus be drawn to those of his colleagues who seem to possess more of it; drawn to his ethnic counterparts, who are more authentic simply because more of what is "natural" has been available to them.

Is lived experience more authentic? To ask this question is itself to subvert a great deal of contemporary fiction. There is no doubt that there is a certain frisson about someone's saying "It really happened", or about the jauntily sombre "Based on a true story" labels that underscore today's movie titles. But is there something fundamental that prevents me---an Indian brought up in a very Indian household---from creating a fiction about a Slav zookeeper or a Malagasy mother of seven? Something that renders me unable to understand their cultural concerns as well as I'm supposed to my own? Or, and more importantly, is my origin the final sign of my cultural authority? Is there something that disqualifies a Karaite Jew from writing about my recent out-of-caste wedding and its impact on my orthodox family?

These are important questions, and there is no sign, in its spate of celebrations of ethnic writers in the past few decades, that the American literary firmament has an eye on their fictional explorations; no sign indeed that the people at its helm know what such an exploration might look like, or whether they will not reject an example of it---even a rather deficient one---out of hand. In fact, people like Adichie, who "know" that the only true fiction is one that is about their "people", have begun to make modern literature seem like some benignant inversion of the United Nations, in which the most marginalized, by virtue of their experience, assume the greatest primacy. It's safe to say that no good can come of this.

*Disclaimer: I have read none of Adichie's writing.

And also...

Adultery seems still to be a primary American (sub)urban concern, the kind of thing that can fuel a 576-page tome without seeming to lose any of its originality, as fresh as it was when Updike, in 1960, first made his claim on its uniquely voyeuristic territory.

Audiobooks suck...

... or, at least, they suck in the following ways:

1) You can't make notes and/or underline text,

2) You can't skip the elaborate description of a tea-cosy* midway through the first part of the book, a description which the author has specifically chosen to illustrate the theme, in his novel, of the way individual freedoms are negated by the lack of energy and creativity required to make them worthwhile,

3) Most importantly, you can't circle, in red or black ink, the weightless, crabwise, inordinately long sentence, which begins, as it must, in the ostensible present, in the female protagonist's capitalistically oriented thoughts, and continues, as it only can, into a "brilliant" explication of her consciousness in the third person, an explication such as can only have originated, incongruously enough, from the author's literal-minded private-college-educated meditative mind, and not---as perhaps would have been more appropriate---from the character herself.

PS: Reading the audiobook version of Franzen's Freedom.

*Disclaimer: In Franzen's novel, no such tea-cosy actually exists.