I didn’t grow up in the time period of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, but I am a programmer and a gamer so that connection was strong for me. I enjoyed one particular scene that played out through FORTRAN code.
But your fears are well founded. The thing that I disliked most was that both main characters are deeply flawed people - selfish, self-destructive, unwilling to take advice or listen to reason - and this was presented with no comment. I’m sure people would argue that this is “realistic,” but I don’t read books for realism; I read for escapism, and I want my books to challenge me to be a better person. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow doesn’t show me anything I could aspire to, and for that reason I found it depressing.
I would say this is a failing of Millennials (my generation) and younger. We would rather stew in our problems than solve them. This makes me furious.
I hear you. We boomers are a much maligned generation, but we were at least a generation of problem solvers, whether people like our solutions or not.
So I share your frustration. I do want realism, of a kind, in stories. Not modern literary realism, which I can take or leave alone, but what I suppose one could call moral realism, which can exist profoundly in a fantasy story and be missing entirely in a realistic novel.
And perhaps that is the problem with the contemporary novel. Their realism is of a clinical nature, like reading a psychiatrist's case file. And while I can see how many readers would relish the opportunity to become amateur psychiatrists and dissect the protagonist like a patient on a table, I can also see why many readers would prefer to escape from that particular asylum.
I haven't read the book you mention and I can't speak to your theory about connectedness because I haven't read many (any, really) works of contemporary fiction lately. But I wouldn't be surprised if there is an element of that. The quote about giving advice being immoral is especially deranged. No one is forcing anyone to _take_ the advice.... Are we really at the point where even the goodwill of others is an oppression?
I also read samples from time to time without any luck. The few attempts I've made at whole novels were failures for the reason you stated: they don't seem real. Or I would say they give me a "phony" vibe. By that, I mean they feel manufactured, uncanny, precise to the point of being creepy. In the way perhaps a robot or AI would attempt to simulate a human being, contemporary novels attempt to simulate human life, but there's nothing organic or surprising about them. Everything feels neat, staged. Real life and real people are anything but.
I blame MFA programs for this effect, because the writers who emerge from these programs all seem to wield the same handful of techniques in their writing. I'm sure there are fancy names and theories underlying all these methods, and maybe they allow aspiring writers to become published authors. But the result of all this processing is cold, calculated, lifeless stories. Once you detect the pattern, you can't unsee it. Give me raw, unpasteurized fiction any day.
Yes, I think you are absolutely right about MFA programs. Whatever their intentions may have been, they have done what academic programs always do; they have analyzed what I will call "art writing" and turned it into a teachable craft, so that every MFA graduate ends up sounding the same. And when you read them you feel that what you are reading is full of artfulness and craft, but it is also somehow vacant at the same time.
It is notable that the greats that were the first objects of study for MFA programs were not academics at all. They were journalists and sea captains and hacks and cowboys and aristocrats. It used to be a trope of back-cover author blurbs to list the weird and disgusting jobs that an author had done before their first novel got published. Now it where they got their MBA, and where they teach creative writing. The older generation of authors had lived and worked and adventured and rubbed shoulders with people of every station and profession. The new generation have studied and passed exams. No wonder their works don't feel real.
For me, the preeminent example of this distinction is the character of Mack in Steinbeck's Cannery Row (his finest achievement IMHO). Mack is a violent bum who bullies and cheats his way through life, but who also has a curious sense of self and of virtue which expresses itself in disastrous and destructive ways. This is not a man you would want to meet on the street, much less attend a party with. And yet Steinbeck's affection for the character shines through from the beginning. In any lesser hand, in any less affectionate hand, Cannery Row would have been a dreary tale of dysfunction. In Steinbeck's masterful hand, it is a glorious tale of strange nobility. And the difference is all in the affection that the author holds for his character.
This is really a subject for another post, but I think one of the things that I miss most in contemporary literature is any sense that the author feels affection for their characters. Without that affection, with a clinical approach to character, I think you get exactly what you describe, observations of character that are "manufactured, uncanny, precise to the point of being creepy."
Now, based on my reading of ten pages or Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, I am in no position to say whether Gabrielle Zevin feels or expresses affection for her characters. On the other hand, I can say that I saw no positive evidence of it in the pages I read. From Joseph Harris's report on it, I don't expect that I would, and I probably won't read on.
Is this lack of the sense of affection the same thing as a lack of a sense of reality. I think it is. I think that there is a natural human sympathy that comes through in the natural interest that we feel for each other, and that when it is missing we fell a sense of unreality, not because the subject matter is clinically incorrect, but that in it clinical correctness it is all the more obviously missing that element of natural affection. They are not real because the human reaction to them is missing this indispensable element of affection. But more on this another day.
I agree. I imagine it's difficult to have affection for characters when they are pure inventions not grounded in people the author has actually met and had meaningful experiences with in real life. Which relates to your point about earlier authors having lived varied and interesting lives before they decided to write. They had a deep well of practical experience and human interaction to draw from. Their point of reference when sitting down to create characters and stories wasn't _other people's_ characters and stories but their own hard-earned knowledge. Those authors weren't (just) mining or parroting other people's insights and observations, they were drawing from their own unique impressions and interpersonal connections.
So many contemporary authors exist inside this closed system, and I think a big part of the problem is that young writers in particular go straight into degree programs seeking writing careers with little more ammunition for creating fiction than having read fiction. The ambition to become a writer doesn't mean one has anything to write about, and relying on the closed loop of existing fiction for one's knowledge about people and life is one of the ways new fiction becomes less real--and less interesting.
Yeah, I'm reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and... I had similar issues about Sam not feeling like a coherent character... But I kept reading and... well, yeah, he's not a coherent character, but it doesn't totally matter, it's kinda just a good book.
I've seen the book you write about, but haven't read it. A part of me wonders if contemporary/newish authors are unconnected in their personal lives, and thus can't relate to any other frame of reference.
Have you tried any Zadie Smith? Now there is a novelist whose characters are connected, to place and to relation (so much so that her protagonists sometimes show up as minor characters in other novels) and who recognizes that actions have consequences. She was just 21 when her first novel was published and it has all the liveliness (and more) of the earliest writers of the English tradition--Defoe, Richardson--when “the novel” was still an odd creature caught halfway between the drama and the literary-journalistic account. She read everything in the tradition precociously and vibrantly--and it shows to advantage. I wonder what you’d make of White Teeth or Swing Time or NW.
I further note these novels share two other features of earlier literature, which you say you miss in much contemporary fiction: the sense of “felt life” (of which firsthand experience is one of the key elements), and a sense of affection for the characters as real people rather than caricatures or plot devices.
I didn’t grow up in the time period of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, but I am a programmer and a gamer so that connection was strong for me. I enjoyed one particular scene that played out through FORTRAN code.
But your fears are well founded. The thing that I disliked most was that both main characters are deeply flawed people - selfish, self-destructive, unwilling to take advice or listen to reason - and this was presented with no comment. I’m sure people would argue that this is “realistic,” but I don’t read books for realism; I read for escapism, and I want my books to challenge me to be a better person. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow doesn’t show me anything I could aspire to, and for that reason I found it depressing.
I would say this is a failing of Millennials (my generation) and younger. We would rather stew in our problems than solve them. This makes me furious.
I hear you. We boomers are a much maligned generation, but we were at least a generation of problem solvers, whether people like our solutions or not.
So I share your frustration. I do want realism, of a kind, in stories. Not modern literary realism, which I can take or leave alone, but what I suppose one could call moral realism, which can exist profoundly in a fantasy story and be missing entirely in a realistic novel.
And perhaps that is the problem with the contemporary novel. Their realism is of a clinical nature, like reading a psychiatrist's case file. And while I can see how many readers would relish the opportunity to become amateur psychiatrists and dissect the protagonist like a patient on a table, I can also see why many readers would prefer to escape from that particular asylum.
I haven't read the book you mention and I can't speak to your theory about connectedness because I haven't read many (any, really) works of contemporary fiction lately. But I wouldn't be surprised if there is an element of that. The quote about giving advice being immoral is especially deranged. No one is forcing anyone to _take_ the advice.... Are we really at the point where even the goodwill of others is an oppression?
I also read samples from time to time without any luck. The few attempts I've made at whole novels were failures for the reason you stated: they don't seem real. Or I would say they give me a "phony" vibe. By that, I mean they feel manufactured, uncanny, precise to the point of being creepy. In the way perhaps a robot or AI would attempt to simulate a human being, contemporary novels attempt to simulate human life, but there's nothing organic or surprising about them. Everything feels neat, staged. Real life and real people are anything but.
I blame MFA programs for this effect, because the writers who emerge from these programs all seem to wield the same handful of techniques in their writing. I'm sure there are fancy names and theories underlying all these methods, and maybe they allow aspiring writers to become published authors. But the result of all this processing is cold, calculated, lifeless stories. Once you detect the pattern, you can't unsee it. Give me raw, unpasteurized fiction any day.
Yes, I think you are absolutely right about MFA programs. Whatever their intentions may have been, they have done what academic programs always do; they have analyzed what I will call "art writing" and turned it into a teachable craft, so that every MFA graduate ends up sounding the same. And when you read them you feel that what you are reading is full of artfulness and craft, but it is also somehow vacant at the same time.
It is notable that the greats that were the first objects of study for MFA programs were not academics at all. They were journalists and sea captains and hacks and cowboys and aristocrats. It used to be a trope of back-cover author blurbs to list the weird and disgusting jobs that an author had done before their first novel got published. Now it where they got their MBA, and where they teach creative writing. The older generation of authors had lived and worked and adventured and rubbed shoulders with people of every station and profession. The new generation have studied and passed exams. No wonder their works don't feel real.
For me, the preeminent example of this distinction is the character of Mack in Steinbeck's Cannery Row (his finest achievement IMHO). Mack is a violent bum who bullies and cheats his way through life, but who also has a curious sense of self and of virtue which expresses itself in disastrous and destructive ways. This is not a man you would want to meet on the street, much less attend a party with. And yet Steinbeck's affection for the character shines through from the beginning. In any lesser hand, in any less affectionate hand, Cannery Row would have been a dreary tale of dysfunction. In Steinbeck's masterful hand, it is a glorious tale of strange nobility. And the difference is all in the affection that the author holds for his character.
This is really a subject for another post, but I think one of the things that I miss most in contemporary literature is any sense that the author feels affection for their characters. Without that affection, with a clinical approach to character, I think you get exactly what you describe, observations of character that are "manufactured, uncanny, precise to the point of being creepy."
Now, based on my reading of ten pages or Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, I am in no position to say whether Gabrielle Zevin feels or expresses affection for her characters. On the other hand, I can say that I saw no positive evidence of it in the pages I read. From Joseph Harris's report on it, I don't expect that I would, and I probably won't read on.
Is this lack of the sense of affection the same thing as a lack of a sense of reality. I think it is. I think that there is a natural human sympathy that comes through in the natural interest that we feel for each other, and that when it is missing we fell a sense of unreality, not because the subject matter is clinically incorrect, but that in it clinical correctness it is all the more obviously missing that element of natural affection. They are not real because the human reaction to them is missing this indispensable element of affection. But more on this another day.
I agree. I imagine it's difficult to have affection for characters when they are pure inventions not grounded in people the author has actually met and had meaningful experiences with in real life. Which relates to your point about earlier authors having lived varied and interesting lives before they decided to write. They had a deep well of practical experience and human interaction to draw from. Their point of reference when sitting down to create characters and stories wasn't _other people's_ characters and stories but their own hard-earned knowledge. Those authors weren't (just) mining or parroting other people's insights and observations, they were drawing from their own unique impressions and interpersonal connections.
So many contemporary authors exist inside this closed system, and I think a big part of the problem is that young writers in particular go straight into degree programs seeking writing careers with little more ammunition for creating fiction than having read fiction. The ambition to become a writer doesn't mean one has anything to write about, and relying on the closed loop of existing fiction for one's knowledge about people and life is one of the ways new fiction becomes less real--and less interesting.
This exactly. All craft and no life.
Yeah, I'm reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and... I had similar issues about Sam not feeling like a coherent character... But I kept reading and... well, yeah, he's not a coherent character, but it doesn't totally matter, it's kinda just a good book.
I've seen the book you write about, but haven't read it. A part of me wonders if contemporary/newish authors are unconnected in their personal lives, and thus can't relate to any other frame of reference.
Have you tried any Zadie Smith? Now there is a novelist whose characters are connected, to place and to relation (so much so that her protagonists sometimes show up as minor characters in other novels) and who recognizes that actions have consequences. She was just 21 when her first novel was published and it has all the liveliness (and more) of the earliest writers of the English tradition--Defoe, Richardson--when “the novel” was still an odd creature caught halfway between the drama and the literary-journalistic account. She read everything in the tradition precociously and vibrantly--and it shows to advantage. I wonder what you’d make of White Teeth or Swing Time or NW.
I further note these novels share two other features of earlier literature, which you say you miss in much contemporary fiction: the sense of “felt life” (of which firsthand experience is one of the key elements), and a sense of affection for the characters as real people rather than caricatures or plot devices.
I haven't, but I will. Thanks for the recommendation.
Some novels I think would seem real to you.
A Gentleman in Moscow: Amor Towels
A Soldier of the Great War: Mark Helprin
The Leopard: Giuseppe Lampedusa (not sure how contemporary this is to you but it is based off the authors lived experience/family history)