November is National Novel Writing Month, or at least it was until last year when NaNoWriMo the organization went kaput, due no doubt to its unwieldy acronym. I’m sure there are people who will go ahead and complete an entire novel manuscript, in one month, anyway. A contest, after all, an aspect of the American absurd, like flagpole sitting.
November is also National Banana Pudding Lovers Month, but it so happens that I was recently at a dinner party, sitting across from Will Blythe, with whom I got to talking about the current state of The Novel, and he encouraged me to write something about a subject dear to his heart.
Also present at the dinner was Bill Tonelli, ex editor at Rolling Stone, who actually read my own uncompleted novel last year, and evidently said good things about it to Will. Bill worked with novelists like David Foster Wallace, so maybe it’s time I take heart and finish the damn thing.
Will spent ten years as Literary Editor at Esquire and edited an essay collection called, after the essay by Orwell, Why I Write: Thoughts On The Craft Of Fiction (Little, Brown). The 26 contributors include the aforementioned Wallace, plus Mary Gaitskill, Jayne Anne Phillips, Robert Stone and a whole pantheon of novelists once touted as potential authors of The Great American Novel.
Novelist Martin Amis said, “The Adventures Of Augie March is The Great American Novel. Search no further.” So, the G.A.N. was written by Saul Bellow, an immigrant from Montreal who grew up speaking Yiddish with his immigrant parents from Russia.
Paradoxically, perhaps, it doesn’t get more American than that. A more recent candidate for G.A.N. status is Underworld by Don DeLillo, who grew up in a tiny 3-generational Bronx row home with 10 relatives, speaking, as I did in childhood, an Italian dialect.
Trying to write a novel is a scary business, so it’s natural to look for guidance, but the guidance isn’t necessarily helpful. In Enemies Of Promise, Cyril Connelly says, “The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece.” He adds that, “No other task is of any consequence.” Yikes! Let me throw my ms into the fireplace now.
Why am I trying to write a novel anyhow? Writing a novel is a lonely business, and easily doomed to failure. I always envied my artist friends who could paint with a party going on around them. A writer’s version of this is writing in a café in Paris, like Hemingway, or as Sartre did for much of his life at the Café de Flore, but in Paris or Rome people don’t feel compelled to interrupt you, like they love doing at Think Coffee at Bowery & Bleecker.
In August of 1984, back when I lived on Elizabeth Street, I went around the corner for a walk on the Bowery at 2am. William Burroughs was standing there on the sidewalk in front of The Bunker, lost in thought, writing in his head.
I considered crossing the street, but as I caught sight of him, he caught sight of me. I tried slipping by with a quick “Hi, Bill”, but he was glad to see me, because I could go upstairs and entertain the famous rock star, who had dropped in on him uninvited.
You apparently couldn’t win in the novel writing business. You were either broke and unrecognized or having rock stars showing up at all hours.
But the novel no longer holds a central place in our culture, a kind of fate worse than death. Nobody discusses the G.A.N. anymore. Back in the 80s & 90s, when I should have been writing my novel, novelists were still the cultural rock stars they’d been for 150 years: William Burroughs, Jay McInerney, Brett Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace.
The novel has not died. It has merely been quietly sidelined. Novelist Will Self argues that the serious novel, along with the novelist, has entered a Retirement Home where it is looked after within university creative writing programs.
By working on a serious novel I am reduced to being a Don Quixote, a term for an impractical idealist, coming, ironically enough, from a novel. It is my punishment for being a late bloomer.
At least I’ve figured out what to tell Will Blythe. The dream of the dictators has been realized. There’s no longer any need for the creative individual to be imprisoned, for books to be burned. The novelist as Cultural Hero is no more, has died the quiet death of irrelevance.
The reading public will gradually feel the need to turn again to the novel as a source of seeing, to experience the novelist’s ability to taste and feel reality, the reality that the Powers That Be don’t want them to see.
In the meantime, I’ll take the Literary Underground over the Novelist Retirement Home any day.
