Dumping on people is not really my thing. I have my tastes, and they align with some folks' and diverge from others'. There is a growing tendency in literary fiction to not judge one's characters too harshly that has led to soft, inexact language that may not rely as heavily on ten-dollar words as Faulkner once did but makes up for simplified vocabulary with fanciful description and endless sentences that are invariably described as 'discursive' by reviewers.
Pictured at right is Joshua Ferris. My use of his photograph is completely arbitrary. He could just as easily be Jonathan Safran Foer or Colum McCann or Gary Shteyngart or any author whose books are full of people who 'make love' rather than engaging in anything so quotidian or dirty as sex, intercourse, fucking; who 'desperately seek' love or salvation and never are manipulative or callow except when attempting 'soul transference' with some other person whose 'desire' happens to align with their own.
On the last page of McCann's Let the Great World Spin, the author explains that the title comes from a line in Tennyson, and that Tennyson in turn was inspired by an Arabic verse that translates into a lovely description that could very easily be read as somehow evocative of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Since Let the Great World Spin is framed around Phillipe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974, it's very easy to see where McCann is going with all this intertextual classicism. There's a soothing element to the whole book, an effort to make sentences into balms that a reader might use to ease the pain of existence. There's a character who reminisces about her home in Missouri and later dies the moment she reaches the riverbank to which she so longed to return. The hookers in the book are good-humored and articulate about their anger against God. A coked-out trust funder is able to find redemption in the arms of a man who most of the other characters consider a bit of an asshole. People in this world do things like find one another.
Big words and complex ideas are fine in fiction, not that I want to side against Hemingway in any fight. Hemingway wrote books before flickering images robbed simple words of their power. Suddenly all simplicity did was say in a page what a filmed image could tell you in a second. Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen both pack their books with ruminations on science and art and consumerism and neurology and biology and the difference between, say 'run-on' as a hyphenated construction of four letters and that construction's capacity to describe this sentence, and, better, to evoke it.
Most of this is predicated on my view of the world. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner builds these fantastic characters who keep fucking up their lives because they are haunted by memory and ruled by emotion. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway builds admittedly rather shallow characters whose lives are fucked by external circumstance and seek moments of grace through their present actions. I prefer Hemingway and that preference is tied up more than a little in my belief that action trumps emotion.
To put this in a more direct way - the characters in the books of these soft-handed MFA holders are constantly feeling a course through life and then reflecting on how the course they muddled on to has given rise to other, equally interesting feelings, while the characters in, say George Saunders' writing are acting (or not acting, but in a weak-willed rather than reflective manner) and these actions (or inactions) arose from considerations like economics and loyalty and tribalism rather than some need to 're-capture the wild narrative of my life.'
For the record, none of the quotes come from the writings of the authors I am criticizing, though I feel they easily could have. Also, Ferris' sweater in the picture is ridiculous.
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