My husband and I just finished reading the latest in a series of books by Michael Gruber (see his website here), a Seattle-based novelist with a wildly varied career, like a novelist of the old school, like the Tolstoys or Jack Londons or Hemingways who fought in wars, made love to countesses, ruled provinces, and hunted game. Mr Gruber has never ruled a province, but he did work as a speech-writer for Jimmy Carter, protect pretty girls from danger, track squid through murky waters, and work for the Miami police, during which time he observed, as he puts it, some very unusual – i.e. borderline supernatural – events. I suppose it would be unfair to Mr Gruber to suggest that his intriguing personal history is one of the elements that helps to make his work so compelling, as that would be ascribing his novels’ success to something other than talent or hard work, but I’m suggesting it anyway. I was especially bowled over by his Jimmy Paz books and the strange, tormented, fierce women who stumble through them.
We know – that is, Clio and I know – that the complaint that today’s writers have too little life experience is a common one, and that it infuriates writers, especially the more literary ones. All the same, it seems to us to have some merit. Yes, writers ought not to write only about what they know, or their work might grow dull very quickly; they ought to be free to use their imaginations; and there is nothing wrong with doing research to fill in the gaps left by personal experience or its absence. I still wonder whether people of very limited life experience write well about those matters which they investigate via research or their own imaginations. I’m not talking about the writers who write about murder investigations but have never experienced one, nor writers who never lived in the sixteenth century but set their writing in the past. Gaps in knowledge of this kind can indeed be made up for by careful research, especially of the kind that involves meeting people who work as detectives, or traveling to places where their historical novels are set. But is it likely that say, a police procedural novel written by someone who never worked in an office and experienced the dullness of routine and the stupidity (or brilliance) of bosses, could be convincing? How about adventure novels by people who have always led very regimented lives? And how could straight-A swots who have done well in school and won scholarships all their lives, who have never been fired or unemployed except by choice, who have never known a serious personal defeat (except perhaps in affairs of the heart) – write about failure?
I believe that the repetitive and formulaic quality that has crept into literary fiction, ambitious fiction, whatever one wants to call it, in the last 30 years or so is the result of the limited life experience of its writers. In order to stand any chance of success, they have to go through a series of expected steps – university, graduate school, post-graduate programs – that make taking any time off to live life rather difficult. So they’re left with two options: to write about what they know, no matter how limited their knowledge is; or to try to research their way into greater knowledge and understanding of the world and its people.
The former approach was once adopted by women and invalids, and other people whose life experience was restricted by convention or disability. Make no mistake that it can produce very great novels: Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, and even, up to a point, Madame Bovary, were all written by people whose life experiences were limited by either their sex or health. The trouble is that it places a tremendous burden on those writers who attempt it, who must mine their life-stories until they are mined out, or until they have infuriated all their close relations and friends. (I wonder, in passing, if these fates tend to strike women writers more often?)
The other option, that of using research to explore those aspects of life which have been closed to you, is not without its uses, as I said above, but can seldom make up for limited experience of life. Writers of this kind tend to have a rather ponderous and heavy quality to their prose, and their work, though it may make a huge impression for a time as readers excitedly grab hold of the new characters or information presented to them, tends not to endure beyond a season or two.
Astute readers of this piece will notice that I’ve avoided naming any names here. That’s because I don’t want to outrage from the start anyone who might stumble upon this piece by pointing fingers at their favourite literary novelist. I admit, though, that a few of the big-name literary writers named by B.R. Myers in his notorious piece for the Atlantic some years ago are some of the ones I have in my sights.
Hi Clio, good to see you blogging again. The problem with modern lit-fic writers is that their life experience is limited to the academy, and the academy is not just limited, and not even just limited to life in the head, it’s limited by being filled with so much damaging intellectual garbage. The academy is governed by a left-wing ideology so hostile to the realities and complexities of human life that it drains the creative energy out of anybody who tries to live in it. Any writer worth his salt can overcome by imagination even the most restricted life (as you stated), but no one can overcome by imagination an environment devoted to the destruction of imagination itself by the relentless application of minute pervasive regulation of the very medium of writing: speech, language, words. PC kills everything it touches, and art most of all. Speech codes, thought police, the very worst enemy of good writing.
Nice to hear from you again, PH. I don’t know if I agree with your comment, though, or at any rate, I’d have to qualify it before I agreed.
Here goes: much as I appreciate our various freedoms (though “freedom of speech” has never really been one of them in Canada, as our legislators inform us with perhaps indecent glee), I don’t know that they really greatly improve the quality of our writing. Shakespeare had patrons to please and laws to obey. Few great writers of fiction have lived in regimes in which they were free to speak their minds, and many worked under constant fear of exile, arrest and worse.
On the other hand, and perhaps this is what you really meant anyway, I do agree that literary writers have hobbled their own freedom of thought, out of their fear of offending the Professionally Offended. That, in turn, has affected their freedom of imagination and the quality of their writing.