Recently, I've noticed that the characters in literary novels, especially books by young writers, are just too *sad*. A pair of books by a married couple, Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" and Nicole Krauss' "A History of Love" are prime examples. The characters have suffered a catastrophic loss -- the death of a loved one in some spectacular public event (9/11, the bombing of Dresden -- although the Holocaust is the prototype of this sort of tragedy). As a result, they're mute or beset with weird compulsions or just perpetually glum.
This isn't how real people behave, I've been thinking. Even people who survived the Holocaust manage to build new lives, to have fun, to love again. Human beings are built to sustain far more loss than modern life generally doles out; think about the child mortality rates of past generations, who could reasonably expect no more than half their kids to survive childhood.
A recent Times interview with happiness expert Daniel Gilbert tends to confirm this belief:
We certainly fear the things that would get us down to 20 or 10 — the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, a serious challenge to our health. But when those things happen, most of us will return to our emotional baselines more quickly than we’d predict. Humans are wildly resilient.
...
Another factor that makes it difficult to forecast our future happiness is that most of us are rationalizers. We expect to feel devastated if our spouse leaves us or if we get passed over for a big promotion at work.
But when things like that do happen, it’s soon, “She never was right for me,” or “I actually need more free time for my family.” People have remarkable talent for finding ways to soften the impact of negative events. Thus they mistakenly expect such blows to be much more devastating than they turn out to be.
I suspect that a lot of young Western novelists have fairly sparse experience with grief and hardship, and as a result don't know how to portray its effects plausibly. They want to write about something "serious," so they pick an event like the Holocaust or 9/11 and then try to imagine how they'd feel if they lost a parent or spouse that way. As a result, their characters are permanently crippled by the loss, and this, ironically, makes them seem *less* human.
Joan Walsh
Kerry Lauerman
Mary Elizabeth Williams
Scott Rosenberg
Heather Havrilesky
caitlin shamberg
Salon.com
Comments
This equation doesn't seem balanced to me. (And that's your point, right?) Great does not equal incurable.
Your introduction of "observation" alongside experience gets at the heart of things, I think. Your reminder that we humans are much tougher than we give ourselves credit for is elegantly articulated in your original post. I just have this niggling feeling that living through more painful experiences won't necessarily make young writers more credible as writers about painful experiences.
In the original post, you close by suggesting that "[Young writers] want to write about something 'serious,' so they pick an event like the Holocaust or 9/11 and then try to imagine how they'd feel if they lost a parent or spouse that way."
It's precisely the dimension of imagination, which you mention here, which intrigues me. Imagination contributes profoundly not only to fictional experience, but to real experience, both remembered and current. Any reflective experience depends upon imagination for its interpretive framing--at the very least, we have to imagine the parts of the world (and ourselves) which contribute to our experience, but of which we have no direct knowledge. We have to observe ourselves as well as others.
Thus, losing a parent won't necessarily make you a good writer about the experience of losing a parent. It's necessary to reflect on it. To observe your own reaction. To compare it with the observed reactions of others. In short, to place the mere having-lived-it in a context which gives it richness and connection.
Writers who provide credible characterizations of, say, someone of another gender or race rely on imagination at least as much as lived experience. Probably more so. Is that what you mean by your inclusion of observation in the mix?
However, I wasn't talking about "good writing" per se, since some of these novelists are good writers in other ways. I meant only that they lack the knowledge of lived experience which informs other novels. If they had it, they might realize that much of the time, people survive great losses far more successfully than they expect to.
As has been said, more imagination, or more experience, might help these authors. Grief does affect people, and it can affect them for a long time. Yes, humans are resilient, but they're still shaped by their experiences. A great loss can affect a person's concentration, their outlook on life, and even their likes and dislikes. It can trigger chronic depression, or anxiety, or shorten a person's temper. It's unlikely to cause a person to devote every moment to dwelling on their loss, but it can still be a grief that surges to the surface at the slightest reminder of what they lost for years to follow.
In the end, the problem for the authors you describe is simply one of believability. Humans are versatile, but they're also just human. We run the gamut of behaviors and reactions, but there's always an explanation for those behaviors beyond just, "they feel bad." An author who has a character perpetually sulking because of a loss is far too shallow in their characterization. An author who shows a character who can't escape their grief, and lets the reader know about every reminder and lets them into the character's head, on the other hand, is one with the creativity to make a character that depressed acceptable.
I have known people who cope with grief by becoming flat characters, drowning themselves in alcohol so they can stall their grieving, and never really cope beyond getting plastered. In the end, though, those people would make terrible protagonists in novels. Reality isn't always interesting, and in a novel's major character you usually either want to see character growth, or growth of the reader's understanding of a character. "He drinks to forget" is only good for bit parts.
Once in a while this can be a moving saga, but there is less than there used to be about what people do in the world and how their actions effect communities and neighborhoods they might pass though. It would seem that someone had uttered once that having your characters merely think about world suffices for momentum, but that is hardly enough. There is a tedium in the results, a monotony self awareness that is depressing for all the depressed people these plots deal with.
Blame therapy, twelve step movements, the 60s? It hardly matters now. Once we read stories of women and (mostly) men who wanted to engage their universe and change it somewhat, a situation where introspection, if any, was predicated on actual turns of events; tension was created, resolution came finally,and we had dramatic action.
Even the great soliloquist Shakespeare knew that Hamlet's navel gazing had to be juxtaposed against more turbulent events around him. It's a shame that our better prose stylist have largely forgotten that lesson.
Every semester I would begin by telling them to make a list of 10 things they wanted to write about. The lists would include cancers, accidents, addictions, divorces, deaths, and abuses of all kinds. The lists almost never included people who made them happy, vacations that changed their lives for the better, lucky accidents that re-affirmed their love of life.
I always asked my students why they wanted to write about the gloomy and dark and not the happy and light.
The answer was pretty much always the same. My students felt that the happy was "cheesy." The sense I got from them was that happy topics were somehow inauthentic.
I wish somebody would have helped me understand why they felt that.
at least in my life it seems like the first time things are experienced (loss, grief, failure) which these days will sometimes hit before age 25 do often feel powerful, strange, true & permanent. Maybe it's only as you older, you can learn to become more textured in perspective and find more humor... over time you learn that failure may not be as personal but something that most people experience...and basically how to get over yourself...
I look at the long first piece of writing I did at 28 and it's exactly the way you describe...sort of humorless and somewhat wrecked by grief. I look at it now and roll my eyes. And as for borrowing world tragedies to mirror one's own...in a sort of troublesome way...I might have done that a little...(sigh)
Maybe the problem is not only that writers put pressure on themselves to write a serious novel before they really can, but that this culture puts so much value on youth...even in novelists...whereas, psychologically, in your twenties you are more likely to be obsessed with the personal pronoun (I definitely was!) and if you've grown up in a western culture, you might not have the long term experience in hardship, or know how to relate to others who have experienced true grief, so the writing rings false. I find books like these difficult to read for the same reasons.
Interesting to think about.
Character wise anyway.
Yet these are the "young turks" that all the agents want.
Mindy
I would like to invite you to add your ideas to my own blog:
http://open.salon.com/blog/berrycomposer
best wishes, Chuck
You're right. Novels in which the characters do nothing but pout and despair are pallid, unadventurous and show no understanding of the vibrant outside world. But trust me, not all of us writers wish to write that way.
Most of this work was about young people, recent university graduates struggling to make sense of their shocking losses--parents who died of cancer, love interests who wandered away, dogs hit by cars... As though these events made them special and unique instead of part of the human race.
We fight and fight this idea, in our youth-obsessed culture, but the fact is: age and experience give writers something to say and the perspective to realize they are not separate from humanity. Youth is alluring because it seems to have the potential to be anything--but more often than not it resolves into what has gone before. Youth in itself is not interesting, and when we figure this out, we are finally on our way as writers.