The Age of Literary Conceits

(From the NYTimes review):

The story is told by each of a dozen characters, and now and then by a dog, a tree, a gold coin, several querulous corpses and the color crimson (''My Name Is Red'').

The contemporary novelist, anxious to make her characters vital, overdoes the vitality; and then, anxious about the overdoing, attempts to ironise some of that cartoonishness. One should have sympathy for this tricky dilemma – a basic one of novelistic creation, and scarcely avoided by hundreds of even very great writers – especially in the case of a young writer. But Krauss’s novel has been praised precisely for the ‘brilliance’ of its portrayal of Leo Gursky, for its ability to capture a ‘voice’. Or two voices: Leo’s and Alma’s. Can we now no longer tell the difference between human vitality and the theatrical vitality of Hollywood? When publishers talk about a novelist’s or a narrator’s ‘voice’, the word is evacuated of content: ‘voice’ does not have to belong to a plausible human being; ‘voice’ is merely vocal – it is the sound of exaggeration; the sound of ‘liveliness’, not the lifelike.

How telling, then, that Krauss’s two ‘voices’ inhabit the extremes of age: the child and the pensioner. Both characters, in a way, are children, because they speak with the whimsy of the child; at one point, Gursky, feeling happy in Starbucks, wants to burst out: ‘The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!’ The child represents a short-cut to fictional vitality, and fiction has been especially fond in recent years of the childish speaker: there is Mark Haddon’s autistic narrator; and the heroine of The Lovely Bones; and the brilliant, near-autistic nine-year-old narrator of Jonathan Safran Foer’s most recent novel. This vocal juvenility represents a fear of the median (and by ‘median’ I do not imply mere ordinariness). Unfortunately, the result of all this childishness, emphatically so in Krauss’s case, is a novel that is not a grown-up book for grown-up readers.

I'm very sympathetic to the thrust of his argument (and that of the thread so far), but disagree that the term "voice" is "evacuated of content" because it does not have to belong to a "plausible human being". (I'm probably splitting hairs here, but there's a difference between artificial content and no content). I think "fear of the median" is exactly right, though.

There seems to me some revival of interest in the literary novel, or at least semi-literary novel, and that it is bound up with a notion of self-improvement. Many readers don't want radical novels that are too hard to read, but nor do they want beautifully written but conventionally structured novels: they have already read a number of these and feel that in self-improvement terms, the law of diminishing returns must have kicked in some time ago. These novelty perspective novels satisfy a craving for novels that are obviously modern (& fashionably so) and yet readable. Fear of the median is also fear of not selling - or simply being ignored, because however much reviewers may deplore the trends these novels represent they are also the novels that are getting reviewed.

i was really hoping the new answers would be dialogues in the voice of a dead trochaic dog ;_;

i'm not sure what "median" is meant to mean here.

i'm not sure that "narrated by a dead dog" is technically a literary conceit, come to think of it, not in the way that "in trochees" is

Not only that, but they don't require much in the way of attention span - a must in this age of cell-phone, cable TV, Internet, etc. and their constant bombardment of our free reading time. It takes a while to get into a meaty novel, to learn the characters, understand the milieu, to follow all the plot lines - whereas a novelty gimmick can be assimilated in the time it takes to read the back cover - there is an immediate gratification that the more old-fashioned literary pleasures do not provide.

Two movies I've read about recently that I might not have cared about except for the conceit (or at least the conceit makes me really excited):

*The Todd Haynes movie about Dylan, where Dylan is played by several different actors and actresses, including BEYONCE.

*The Sally Potter movie (Yes) where everyone speaks in rhyming couplets (Chris, is this close enough to your "told entirely in trochees" desire?).

So, yeah, the problem isn't that it's a gimmick or conceit, it's that it doesn't work. You could write a book told from a dead child's pet rock, and it could work.

I suspect most successful literary conceit novels are science fiction. Actually at this point I suspect most success novels are science fiction. But I don't read enough novels, or enough science fiction, to have a list of examples, or even to know if what I just said is true.

1 is a square. 2 is a typical novel character. 3 has several narrators that are one step away from death. 11 is a typical novel character, but he's trapped in his bedroom. 15 is a guy who is planning to lock himself in a room for a year to write a novel. 16 is a typical novel character. 22, which to be fair isn't a novel at all, is a hermaphoditic pansexual cat. 24 is, for purposes of this list, a sleeping man. 25 is a typical novel character. 28 is the last person alive in the world. 33 is a normal vaguely novelistic character. 35 is half memoire, half description of a fictional island nation obsessed with an Olympics. 36 is actually about the adventures of a story rather than about the characters in the story. 39 again isn't a novel, but it does have normal characters. 44 is told from somebody who spends half the book in utero, and who as I recall ends the book still as a child. 45 is told by a monster with anxiety and self-esteem issues. 50 have cartoonish but still typical novel characters.

Now I'm sure I'm not a typical novel reader (since after all I don't really like novels in general) but a decent portion of the novels I like have odd conceits for main characters. Someone else posted a list of 50 books; I wonder how that list compares. Or that [Modern Library?] list of the top 100 novels.

What I found most amusing about that Wood piece was how it waded into exactly the same territory that caused so much discussion on the Wood thread - his annoyance at writers trying too hard to produce a Jewish voice. It was almost as though he had read us and decided deliberately to rile half of ILB.

(Although a novel written from the point of view of Britney Spears's fucking lapdog might amuse me for an hour or two -- especially if it thought in sonnets.)

how would skaz rescue postmodern literature?

tonight i read the kafka story 'the bridge'. at first i read it in german, understanding little of it, and certainly not enough to have picked up what was obvious on the second reading (which happened to be in english). on the first reading i said, hey, look, a story told from the point of view of an object - the narrator is a bridge! but it's far better than that. apart from maybe the way the introduction implies the story (only about a paragraph long or so) is a remembered dream or something imagined, it's told by a narrator who -acts as a bridge-. and the hint is basically that of using the past tense with no other indication the story is a dream ('i was a bridge'), combined with the, you know, unbelievability of someone being a bridge. somehow i find this far more appealing than the story i imagined after having read the german version and misunderstood it. that one i think mostly worked because i gave it a pass on being narrated by a bridge because i imagined it being, you know, 'kafkaesque'.

also, i was asking out of ignorance since i've never read it.

Seriously, the question that I would ask is if a book is based around a literary conceit, does that make it worthless? Or is it only acceptable to use a literary conceit if you are a great writer? If so how is a great writer defined? When they make it into a list of the great writers of the 20th century? or when they are added to a classics of the western canon list? And how can you judge if a author is poor, average, good or great when you read only a page or two of his book?

Writing from the point of view of a little kid or a ghost or a deaf, dumb and blind old man because it is "cute" and engenders sympathy = Dud.

(they didn't have the new Safran Foyer) (i checked)

The chapters narrated by dead people/abstract concepts/figures in paintings are few and far between.