between the moment when an individual decides to become a fiction writer and the day he or she sells that first book lie some terrible years — a wasteland of self-doubt, false starts, flagging discipline and humiliating obscurity. Sometime in the 1960s, university creative writing programs stepped in to fill those years with structure, support and training. At least, that’s their stated intention. The literary world has been arguing for years over whether or not they succeed.
University fiction workshops, in which a group of students, led by a teacher, offer each other detailed critiques of their manuscripts, are usually, but not always, part of a two-year master of fine art degree-granting program. A number of highly regarded writers, including David Foster Wallace, Ethan Canin and Lorrie Moore, have graduated from such programs, and many ambitious young writers regard them as a necessary career steppingstone. But the programs have also been criticized for more than a decade. Critic John Aldridge best distilled the complaints in his 1994 book “Talents and Technicians: The New Assembly-Line Fiction.” One of Aldridge’s charges is that fiction workshops lead to a “cookie cutter” effect, prose “so bland, so competently but unexcitingly written, so interchangeable in style and substance that it very seldom stimulates a distinct response.”
In a recent issue of the Paris Review, several leading editors, including Grove-Atlantic’s Morgan Entrekin and TriQuarterly’s Reginald Gibbons, blasted workshops for producing work marked by what Gibbons called “the conventionality of its artistic choices.” Karl Wenclas, editor of the New Philistine, denounces workshop writing as “constipated, homogenized products … a putrid disease.”
the granddaddy of all gripes about workshops, however, is that they fostered the dominance of minimalism — or “Kmart Realism,” as novelist Tom Wolfe snidely called it — in American fiction. The arch-practitioner of the style, the late Raymond Carver, inspired a generation of writers whose work Aldridge condemns as “technically conservative … and often extremely modest in scope.” This is fiction full of lower-middle-class characters who light cigarettes, lean silently against their kitchen counters, and contemplate the anomie of their stifled lives and relationships. When critics and editors decry “workshop stories,” it’s this type of writing they’re referring to. (In its upper-class mode, this is what Entrekin calls “the ‘divorce and cancer in Connecticut’ school of fiction.”)
“Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops 1997,” a new annual series edited by John Kulka and Natalie Danford (with novelist Alice Hoffman as guest editor on this particular volume), may not contain much minimalism, but it’s unlikely to convince these critics. The editors culled these stories from “nearly 100 prestigious writing programs around the United States and Canada,” including the supposedly more adventurous and avant-garde programs at Johns Hopkins and Brown. Very few read like the stoic, spare prose of Raymond Carver or Ann Beattie. It seems that everyone knows better than that by now. But, with few exceptions, this isn’t remarkably inspired or memorable writing, certainly not “strikingly fresh” or “astoundingly diverse,” as Hoffman claims.
Frederick Busch, a seasoned novelist (“Girls”) who has taught at the University of Iowa’s famous Writers’ Workshop and at Columbia and who served as a judge for Granta magazine’s 20 Best American Novelists Under 40 competition, dismisses the quintessential “workshop story” as possessing “a laconic voice that says, ‘I’m not complaining, but I really am.’ There’s a searing moment or a memory of a searing moment. Then there’s an epiphany where they realize something about their entire life. The cellos come up, and we go out on a quiet, pensive note.” Ben Yalom, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, describes it as “psychological and small in scope.” Its focus is nearly always domestic.
If the Scribner’s anthology allows for a bit of stylistic variation — including the staccato stream-of-consciousness technique employed by Helen McGowan in “Chemistry” — it certainly toes the line when it comes to subject matter. Twelve of the 22 stories included here are about parent-child or sibling bonds (many with child protagonists); six center on marriage or primary romantic relationships. Only Adam Schroeder’s witty “The Distance Between Prague and New Orleans,” about a spoiled movie star’s efforts to claim his “heritage” in Czechoslovakia, feels like it was written from a more expansive perspective. Not coincidentally, it’s also the only genuinely funny story in the book.
This myopia plagues a lot of American fiction, but how much of the responsibility lies with writing programs? Yalom observes that Iowa “does have an ethos” that insists on “close attention to the words on the page, making sure they’re clear, comprehensible and unambiguous. The result, which is unintentional, can be that young people tend to become cautious in content as well as style.” And, as Glasgow Phillips, author of the novel “Tuscaloosa” and a veteran of Stanford’s creative writing program, points out, “To workshop a story, you need a common set of terms, and American realism is the most common and discussable style. You can ask, ‘Is the dialogue believable? Does the narrative arc resolve in a satisfying way?’”
Critiquing fiction containing elements of the fantastic often baffles many workshop participants. Yalom says he was perplexed that “the writers held up as models at Iowa — Robert Stone, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford — didn’t include some postmodern, international or magic realist writers who are some of the major novelists working today: Milan Kundera, Paul Auster, the Latin Americans. While I was there, I encountered only one person who was writing a historical novel, and a small handful who were doing research to bring into their work.” This despite the fact that readers, who have put even the sometimes difficult historical novels of Umberto Eco on bestseller lists, obviously love the stuff.
But even students at schools with more adventurous reputations complain of the rarefied environment at university writing programs. Alvin Lu earned his MFA at Brown, which “prides itself on not making everyone sound the same. But it has an ideology, the ideology of the avant-garde. I knew people there who wrote more conventional fiction, and they felt they couldn’t get an honest critique. Someone would suggest they cut their story up in seven pieces and rearrange it randomly.” If schools like Iowa concentrate on teaching students “craft,” which will help them write “publishable” work, at Brown the goal was “writing breakthrough, genius-level prose. You could learn craft there, but Brown was much more about how much of a genius you were.” Ultimately, Lu felt that he was “writing for about six people … I lost sense of a larger audience.”
Nevertheless, few graduates of writing programs consider the experience worthless. Perhaps perversely, most, like Yalom and Lu, found workshopping a honing process, one that taught them to take good criticism and to understand that most criticism isn’t worth taking. Phillips dropped out of the Stanford program after his first year “because who is anyone to tell me what they think about what I do? It’s just not for me.”
Even purportedly “homogenizing” programs like Iowa’s produce highly original writers like Denis Johnson, whose brooding, almost biblical fiction can hardly be called Kmart realism. Johnson, who has also taught at Iowa, thinks that the “sameness” in the work of some workshop graduates is “just temporary; the talented ones get over it.” What good programs do offer is an accelerated learning of the nuts and bolts of building fiction. “You have to put in an apprenticeship, as with any art,” says Busch. “A workshop can help them shorten their apprenticeship, which is a pretty good thing.” “It takes a lot of manipulation of language to make a story,” Johnson concurs. “You have to practice a lot. I didn’t get anywhere with prose until I’d written a couple of books worth of stuff.”
Everyone seems to agree that grant-making programs like Stanford’s Wallace Stegner fellowship are commendable. “It keeps people afloat for two years when, if the funding wasn’t there, they’d have to go out and get a job,” says Phillips. In a culture that strikes many as hostile to literary values, writing programs, as Johnson puts it, give beginning writers “some endorsement of the effort they’re making and of the idea of putting everything else aside to learn this hard thing. It offers a sense of community and camaraderie that we imagine existed in Paris in the ’20s, and which you don’t always find.” “It’s sad that things like literary community, which should happen in the real world,” Lu sighs, “only seem to happen in artificial academic environments.”
But if writing programs can make life easier for writers, they often infuriate “gatekeepers,” like editors, critics and award judges. Kate Moses, a reviewer, former editor at North Point Press and literary advisor to the grant-making Lannan Foundation, has done all three, and read hundreds of manuscripts and published novels over the years. “Writing programs are a bunch of crap,” she declares. “Almost anyone can be taught how to craft a musical sentence, but passion and something to say, these you can’t teach. There are only so many people who can soar above the multitudes. Writing programs make more people think they can and determined to try to do it publicly, whereas once people indulged that sort of thing privately.” The increased volume of “facile but mediocre” manuscripts and novels, she fears, makes it much harder for editors and critics to discover the “gems.”
Of course what constitutes a “gem” remains highly debatable. Alice Hoffman considers the stories in “Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Writing Workshops 1997″ to be “exciting,” the “debuts of important careers,” while the same work struck me as tepid. But if what Moses calls a “write what you know” ethos has led to “an age of waning imagination” in American fiction, it’s still possible to be riveted by a book whose premise sounds tired (like Frank McCourt’s memoir, “Angela’s Ashes”), provided the writer brings the sorcery of great storytelling to the table.
McCourt, however, has had nearly 60 years to polish his yarn-spinning skills. Johnson notes that writing programs can push fledgling writers into a premature professionalism. “They’re not themselves yet,” he observes of the twentysomethings who emerge with MFA in hand, fully expecting to publish immediately. Publishers look for young (and preferably good-looking) first novelists, because they make for
good press. Often enough, these writers, in Moses’ words, “haven’t found their voice yet, or, most of all, something to say.” Readers fascinated by young novelists often relish a romantic notion of fiction writing in the Jack Kerouac mode — the miraculous gushing of passionate genius fleetingly captured on paper between cross-country jaunts, sexual adventures and drinking binges, all the mediagenic pursuits of youth. In reality, as Johnson relates, novels are usually the result of years of practice, discipline and a certain amount of outright calculation.
Perhaps the biggest and most unsung benefit of writing programs is the fact that they offer a reliable income to older writers like Johnson and Busch, artists in their prime who don’t always attract the attention lavished on the Next Big Thing. In that case, there’s still cause for concern: Johnson says that while he was teaching at Iowa, the volume of problem-ridden manuscripts he read left him “confused” and unable to write more than a sentence. He even speculates that some novelists go into covert “retirement” by becoming instructors. “They’ve published their books, done what they wanted to do, and now they just want to teach, collect a paycheck and hang out with young people.”
In my opinion, one Denis Johnson story is worth more than the entire contents of “Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops 1997,” so it’s heartening to hear he keeps his teaching gigs to a minimum. “If you’re at a teachable stage, writing programs can be helpful,” he says, “but mostly you should just go someplace where it doesn’t cost much to live. That’s the secret: Quit your job.”
This originally appeared on
The Chimerist, a site devoted to the intersection of art, stories, and technology.
Whatever interactive fiction is (and we’re still figuring that out) it suffers from all the problems of traditional fiction and then some. The vast majority of novels and short stories aren’t much good, but when a branching fiction — along the lines of the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s books — fails to engage, the first impulse is to blame the form rather than the content. Let “Frankenstein,” just released by Inkle Studios and Profile Books, serve as a reproach to that reflex. The app is a creative, subtle and sensitive adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novella, and it has singlehandedly renewed this critic’s hopes for interactive fiction.
What this “Frankenstein” isn’t is a replication of the source text with the addition of a lot of digital doohickeys like sound effects and illustrations that animate when tapped. The app is all about the text, even if it is beautifully framed by period art and anatomical illustrations. The reader is presented with a screenful of narration and then offered one or more responses to it. The preferred response, when tapped, delivers up another screen of text. (In an absurdly pleasing visual touch, these appear as sheets of paper fasted together by straight pins.) According to the press materials, the reader’s responses will shape the way the narrative is presented, although not to the degree of substantively changing the plot.
This is an important point. The pleasure of storytelling lies in the dynamic between the surprising and the inevitable. The reader wants to feel the story is going somewhere, that its events follow from each other in meaningful, but not too obvious ways. When a story can go anywhere, it feels meaningless. In Mary Shelley’s novella, which is saturated with the Western tradition of the tragedy, Viktor Frankenstein’s character is such that he must create a monster, and the monster’s body is such that he can never belong among human beings however much he yearns to. A “Frankenstein” that ended with either misfit finding a comfortable place in the world would be a travesty.
But that doesn’t mean the reader doesn’t long for the story to unfold otherwise; that’s the nature of tragedy. The great insight that writer Dave Morris brings to this adaptation of the novel is that while a reader cannot significantly change the outcome of the story, the interactive element can change the shading and flavor of the tale. It can be mournful and reflective or action-packed. The creature and his creator can show greater or lesser ambivalence about their own behaviors. The ambiguity of both figures is baked into Mary Shelley’s novella, and while Morris has nearly doubled the word count of the original, this mostly amounts to playing up or down what’s already there.
Morris — a novelist who has written graphic novels, games and, yes, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories for kids — has changed the original text in other ways, as well. (Let’s take a moment here to point out to all future narrative app developers that hiring a real writer who actually knows what he or she is doing is totally worth it.) He’s moved the setting to revolutionary France, a choice that shows shrewd understanding of the idealistic political climate that affected Shelley’s thinking; the new Republic is its own kind of Frankenstein’s monster. He’s also eliminated much of the 19th-century framing of the tale and converted it into two present-tense narrations. One is Frankenstein’s dialogue with either himself or a (possibly imaginary) companion. The other is a second-person account of the monster’s first weeks of life as it spies on a family of dispossessed French nobility and has the chance to observe the loving relationships it can never enjoy itself.
Morris presents the reader with choices I’ve not encountered in other interactive fictions. Is humanity mostly good, or mostly evil? Does the most recent development make you (the monster) feel hope or despair? Is the revolution the dawn of a brave new world or a descent into chaos and barbarity? While I’m usually skeptical that present-tense narration increases the “immediacy” of a story, in this case, it really does work, particularly in the sections concerning the monster. Depending on your own outlook, you may urge him to keep trying to connect with humanity, or promptly forward him on to homicidal rage.
In either case, the narrative is shaped not by the reader deciding to turn left or right, to go down into the cellar or to get out of the house — the usual actions offered on the choose-your-own menu. Instead, the options have more to do with personality and interpretation, beliefs and ideas. As a result of the reader’s choices, the characters seem more like him- or herself, with a concurrent ratcheting up of emotional investment. To my surprise, I found myself more moved by this adaptation of the Shelley novel than I have been by the source text. (Although the app does include the original if you want to compare and contrast.) This is the only interactive fiction I’ve ever read with that quintessential, old-fashioned readerly avidity: the hunger to know what happens next. Of course, I already knew, but that didn’t matter at all.
Ron Rash’s atmospheric, strangely uncomplicated novel, “The Cove,” begins with a scene of melancholy and abandonment, the promise of obliteration, and a shocking discovery. It is 1953 and a man called Parton, a scout for the Tennessee Valley Authority, is investigating a remote parcel of land in North Carolina’s Appalachia for inhabitants who will have to be evicted in advance of the valley’s inundation. In a small notch — from which the book takes its title — over which looms a light-exterminating, anvil-shaped cliff, he finds a deserted farm. Pasture fenced by sagging barbed wire, a collapsed barn, a cabin and two wells are the desolate relicts of past life and labor. The general doominess of the setting is further enhanced by an ash tree decked in charms against evil forces, dead American chestnut trees (victims of the plague that wiped them out across the land), and the memory of the now extinct Carolina parakeet. Parton, thirsty, manages to winch up a bucket of water from one of the wells — and with it a human skull.
I give little away in revealing this, as it occurs on page 4; it takes another 243 pages and a step back to the late summer and autumn of 1918 to discover the skull’s owner. It is then, during the last months of World War I, that the story takes place. At its heart is Laurel, a young woman afflicted with a large birthmark. She is shunned by the residents of the nearest town, Mars Hill, who believe that the cove is cursed and that she herself is a witch. Both her parents are dead, and with occasional help from a neighbor, she survived the previous summer alone on the farm while her brother, Hank, was away fighting in France. He has returned, absent a hand but resolutely capable and preparing for marriage.
In passage after passage, Rash describes life and work on the farm in its dailiness — the preparation of meals, tending to chores, mending clothes, setting fence poles, pulling wire — creating a sense of order and industry that would seem to promise future happiness and prosperity. But as the initial scene of desolation and death promises the reverse, an air of menace and foreboding pervades the story. And, indeed, like the waters that will inundate the farm decades later, powerful, destructive forces are gathering outside the cove.
On one of her forays to do her laundry in a stream away from the farm, Laurel hears and secretly observes a young man resting in a makeshift camp, playing a flute; days later she finds him near death, stung by a swarm of wasps. She brings him home; he recovers and produces a piece of paper saying that his name is Walter and that he cannot speak or read or write. As we — unlike Laurel or Hank — have already learned that a man has escaped from what turns out to be an internment camp for Germans, we get the picture. Walter won’t speak, but he will help with the farm, and this he does handily, capturing Hank’s admiration and gratitude — and Laurel’s heart.
All the while, anti-German hysteria is escalating in Mars Hill, a volatile temper encouraged by one Sgt. Chauncey Feith, a preposterous character ripped from a handbook of one-dimensional villains. Vainglorious, opportunistic and cowardly, he is a jingo, a sneak and a bully. The son of a politically connected banker, he has been deployed as the town’s recruitment officer, thus avoiding the perils of the battlefield. He has gone about this zealously, congratulating himself at every turn for sending young men off to the war and priding himself on being an “unsung hero, because you couldn’t go around telling people that any man can hold a rifle and stand in a trench but only a select few could do what a general or commodore or recruiter did.” That’s Chauncey Feith for you — believe it or not.
If Walter were to show up at Mars Hill and be recognized, there is no question that he would be strung up as a Hun. Meanwhile life and love go on at the farm. Walter helps Hank in sinking a second well, and the description of digging and lining it deep, deep in the earth is wonderfully potent. Indeed, Rash’s material detail, depiction of work and evocation of place — of nature, woods and stream, the play of light and the oppressive dark of the monstrous cliff — are truly splendid. Still, between the threat of a lynching and scenes from the cove, a vacuum yawns, and into it flows one simple question stripped of complexity: Whose skull? Or, put another way, happy ending or sad? The answer, when it comes, seems perfectly arbitrary.
J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China, and returned to England in 1946, having been interned with his family in a Japanese prison camp, an experience that inspired his most popular novel, “Empire of the Sun.” Ballard’s astonishing fiction ranges across continents and galaxies, but a quiet London suburb was his home until his death in 2009, and it is to the suburbs that he returned in his last novel, “Kingdom Come.” In its opening pages, the narrator, a London advertising executive named Richard Pearson, travels to one of the “perimeter towns dozing against the protective shoulder of the M25″ to find out who murdered his father. It sounds like the setup for a cosy English mystery. But this is Ballard. It will not be cosy.
“The suburbs dream of violence,” Ballard declares as we enter the blandly menacing town of Brooklands. Among this “placid sea of brickly gables” Richard searches his father’s flat for clues to the life — and violent death — of a parent he barely knew, a pilot who had “flown millions of miles … and then died in a bizarre shooting incident in a suburban shopping mall.” Three others died, and the suspected gunman, a mentally unstable local, is arrested but then released. The police, the family lawyer, the doctor who treated Richard’s father — all appear to be hiding something, while many respectable Brooklands residents seem to have formed a fascist militia.
When Richard first witnesses a racist attack, he concludes that “a new kind of hate had emerged”; its hub is the Metro-Centre, the mega-mall in which his father was killed. During one visit, Richard sits beside the mall’s manmade beach, where Julia Goodwin, his father’s doctor, has arranged to meet him. “The wave machine had been turned to its lowest setting,” he notices, “and a vaguely gastric swell, like a suppressed vomit reflex, flowed across the colorized water.” This languid, sickly image could only be Ballard’s. No other writer so effectively alienates his readers — and his protagonists — from an everyday reality that he reveals to be shifting, often nightmarish terrain.
At the same time, he soothes us. In “Kingdom Come,” as in Ballard’s short stories and in novels like “Crash,” the rhythmical balance of the sentences has a tranquilizing effect, like the shushing roar of the ceaseless traffic on the motorway outside Brooklands. Richard, too, seems oddly numbed as he probes his father’s involvement with local thugs, falls in love with Julia Goodwin, and is increasingly drawn to the Metro-Centre and to the figure of David Cruise, the mall’s TV celebrity.
The novel’s pace quickens as violence spreads and the Metro-Centre comes under attack. “Fights broke out, fists flailing through the workmanlike rise and fall of police truncheons” as screams are drowned out “by the blades of army helicopters cuffing the night air.” Soon the mall becomes a fortress, hostages are taken, and the wave machine churns up a corpse. Emerging from the wreckage, Richard predicts that “In time … an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.” In his final, elegiac vision of suburban apocalypse, Ballard once again allows us to imagine the unthinkable.
This week sees the publication of “The Hunger Angel,” by the Romanian-born German author Herta Müller. It’s her first novel to appear in English since she won the Nobel Prize three years ago, and the book, set in a Soviet labor camp in the years after World War II, arrives in America trailing behind it a passel of rave reviews in the European press: a masterpiece, they say, to be put next to Solzhenitsyn or Primo Levi.
But, more quietly, “The Hunger Angel” is something else – a major addition to the tradition of gay literature, and a rare evocation of gay life in the war years and after. Leo, the narrator, is just a teenager when he’s deported from Romania to the Ukraine, but he has already had his first “strange, filthy, shameless and beautiful” assignations in the town park and the local bathhouse. At first he sees his deportation as a welcome escape from his Nazi-supporting father, and a mercy for the mother he truly loves, for in his own eyes he is a double disgrace: not just gay, but an ethnic German who sleeps with Romanians. In the camp, hunger becomes all-consuming, and he longs for home, but he also watches fellow skin-and-bones detainees sneak off to an industrial wreck for sex and knows, “If I’d been caught in the camp I’d be dead.” “The Hunger Angel” lets a gay man embody universal themes of suffering and endurance but also captures the unique contradictions of gay desire – a substantial accomplishment, and one that’s even more impressive because Herta Müller is a straight woman.
Müller is part of a small but growing number of heterosexual writers publishing novels that not only include gay characters as central parts of their narrative, but are largely about gayness itself. It’s a trend that suggests that homosexuality may no longer be the taboo it once was, for writers — and for readers.
These days, in American and British fiction, at least, it’s no longer uncommon for straight writers to feature gay characters in a novel. Think of Claire Messud, whose “The Emperor’s Children” examines a young gay writer’s friendship with his two best friends, both straight women. Or read Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” which features a young gay kid experimenting first with drugs, then with sex. More recently, Chad Harbach in “The Art of Fielding” didn’t just feature a gay and decidedly not butch baseball player, but a 60-something, theretofore straight college president who falls in love with him. (These examples all feature gay men, obviously: Straight writers’ interest in lesbians is usually less edifying, as any gay person who endured Philip Roth’s “The Humbling” will remind you.)
Yet while straight writers now include gay characters as a matter of course, putting gay people at the center of a book remains all too rare. Gay characters can help straight writers write a book of larger scope, but a novel that concentrates on gay characters is automatically “gay fiction” – and that, sadly, still puts readers off. Gay novelists know all too well that without the right promotion, their books can end up relegated to the “LGBT interest” section of the bookshop, somewhere between the Spartacus travel guide and “Homosex: 60 Years of Gay Erotica.” (If, that is, the bookshop even stocks gay books; if, moreover, the bookshop hasn’t gone out of business.)
For straight writers, taking on gay subjects isn’t just an imaginative risk, it’s a commercial one. And therefore the list of examples is brief, but even so, they suggest that reader opposition to gay-themed books is on the wane. Although fantasy and science-fiction writers may have taken earlier steps, it wasn’t until the 1990s, with Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, that a straight writer saw major success with gay literary fiction on both commercial and critical terms. The Regeneration trilogy, with its cast of both real and fictional characters during World War I, had a built-in audience among British readers who grew up reading poets like Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen. Yet on the first pages of “The Eye in the Door,” the middle book, they were plunged into a rough (and fantastically hot) sex scene between two officers of different class backgrounds, complete with war wounds from Passchendaele and bedside Vaseline. “The Eye in the Door” goes on to detail the horrible persecution of gays in the British civil service, sometimes even by closeted gay men themselves, while in “The Ghost Road,” the last novel of the series and the one for which Barker won the Booker Prize, Sassoon, Owen and fictitious soldiers spend page after page thinking about their desire for men, and about the gaps between the military’s sometimes surprising tolerance and the cruelties of civilian life.
You see similar contrasts of confidence and doubt, narcissism and self-loathing, in Annie Proulx’s short stories, most famously “Brokeback Mountain.” The subsequent film was anxiously promoted as a “universal” love story, but Proulx insists that her two ranchers aren’t any old star-crossed lovers, and that gay desire has a special character. Ennis and Jack aren’t just incapable of having their love accepted by society; much more fundamentally, they hate themselves for loving who they love. Proulx told the Paris Review that she now gets fan mail from readers who have rewritten “Brokeback Mountain” with a happy ending, like the stale 18th-century tradition of letting a victorious Hamlet marry a not-drowned Ophelia. “They can’t understand that the story isn’t about Jack and Ennis,” Proulx lamented. “It’s about homophobia; it’s about a social situation.”
Homophobia is naturally a major theme in straight-written gay fiction, but it’s not all about tears and the law. In “Call Me By Your Name,” from 2007, the straight writer André Aciman looked at the enduring power of first love through a teenager’s overwhelming desire for another man, complete with lashings of sex in the forest, at the sea, and in the streets of Rome. (You will never eat a peach again without thinking about what those two guys do to a piece of fruit.) Straight novelists are even beginning to write about gay history, and in particular HIV/AIDS. Tristan Garcia’s “Hate: A Romance,” co-translated by the Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, examined not only the devastation of the first years of the disease, but the virulent debates between proponents of safe sex and more radical gay activists who see barebacking as a political act. That is the sort of thing even many gay writers are not yet ready to discuss.
It can only be a good thing that the terms of gay fiction are expanding to include not only more readers but more writers. Yet gays have been writing about straight people for hundreds of years, and while straight writers who write gay fiction are celebrated for taking a risk and for imagining something beyond their own experience, gay and lesbian writers who do the opposite, such as Colm Tóibín in “Brooklyn” or Sarah Waters in “The Little Stranger,” don’t really get the same credit. Perhaps this is because straight love and desire is omnipresent; perhaps, more homophobically, it’s because we still think gay writers “naturally” have such powers of imagination. Either way, while the situation has improved, gay fiction still suffers from ghettoization, and while straight writers may be mindful of the risks they take in depicting a minority to which they don’t belong, gays who turn to straight subjects can find the new, larger audience for their books bewildering. Michael Cunningham observed as much back in 2000, when he was asked about the success of “The Hours.” “I can’t help but notice,” said Cunningham, “that when I finally write a book in which there are no men sucking each other’s dicks, I suddenly win the Pulitzer Prize.”
The news that no Pulitzer Prize for fiction would be awarded this year came like a slap across the face to a book world still reeling from a Department of Justice suit filed against publishers trying to forestall an Amazon e-book monopoly. Double ouch! But does the Pulitzer snub mean that no good fiction was published in America last year?
I would (and have) argued otherwise, most strenuously; 2011 was an exceptional year for fiction, American and otherwise. I also suspect that the Pulitzer Board itself has not turned up its collective nose at every book produced by American novelists and short story writers in 2011. The Pulitzer Prize may wield far more clout with book buyers than any other American prize for fiction. It can turn an obscure title into a success and a modestly successful title into a bestseller. Readers take it seriously and snap up the books it honors by the thousands. But that doesn’t mean that the Pulitzer Prize for fiction doesn’t suffer from the same problems that afflict every literary prize, no matter its size or influence.
I have some insight into those problems because I served on the Pulitzer fiction jury two years ago. I can’t talk about my jury’s deliberations, however — that was part of the deal. I can tell you that choosing the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is a two-tier process, a fact that even people well-versed in the literary world tend to forget.
The first tier is the jury’s selection. Three jurors (usually an academic, a critic and a fiction writer) are responsible for wading through huge boxfuls of books. Anyone can submit his or her book to the Pulitzer competition for a small fee, and believe me: anyone does. We got hundreds and hundreds of them, including many self-published novels with titles like “The Bikinis of Alpha Centauri,” most of which read as if they’d been run through Google Translate into Farsi and then run back again into English before being committed to print.
From the many submissions, the jury picks three titles to recommend to the Pulitzer Board, and the board picks the actual winner, as well as selecting the winners of all the other Pulitzer Prizes. The board does have the option to select a title not on the jury’s list, but it rarely does so nowadays.
The heyday for picking no book at all was the 1970s, a time of considerable cultural upheaval and conflict. In 1971, the board rejected titles from Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow and Joyce Carol Oates. In 1974, a stellar jury consisting of Benjamin DeMott, Elizabeth Hardwick and Alfred Kazin (three titans of literary criticism) unanimously recommended that the prize go to Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.” The Pulitzer Board dug in its heels and said no. In 1977, the last time the prize was not awarded, the jury favored ”A River Runs Through It” by Norman Maclean and the board shut them down.
Why? According to the critic and experimental novelist William Gass, who wrote a notorious diatribe on the subject, the Pulitzer Board’s taste is hopelessly mainstream, middlebrow and unadventurous. (In 1941, most of the board did pick Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” but one member — who happened to be the president of Columbia University — put the kibosh on that because he considered the book immoral.) However, Gass’ complaint seems an absurd cavil to level against an institution whose power and influence resides precisely in the fact that it speaks to a broad audience.
The Pulitzer Board consists of working journalists and journalism professors, most with a deep respect for literature but relatively little familiarity with the literary world. This can be a strength and a weakness. The Pulitzer’s excellent record at singling out literary works that also appeal to a lot of readers is one reason why it has so much more influence than “insider” prizes like the National Book Award.
However, because the Pulitzer Board is fairly representative of educated Americans, it surely includes a lot of people who don’t really have time to read fiction — or, at least, literary fiction — anymore. Past boards might have been able to settle on a title that most of them had read even if it wasn’t offered as a finalist by the jury; reading at least a few of the “big” novels published during the year was something a lot more people did before the Internet and cable TV came along. In 21st-century America, the novel has become a marginalized and Balkanized art form, and even when avid fiction fans compare notes, they often find they’ve read nothing in common.
Chances are good that the three novels recommended by this year’s Pulitzer jury — “Swamplandia!” by Karen Russell, “Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson, and “The Pale King” by David Foster Wallace — are the only three serious new novels many of the board members read last year, apart, perhaps, from one or two others. These people are, after all, pretty busy doing things like editing the Denver Post and running the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, jobs that are a lot more time-consuming than they used to be, as well as selecting the winners in the other Pulitzer categories.
By all accounts, the group could not reach a majority on any of the three titles recommended by the jury. It’s certainly unlikely that enough of them read fiction widely enough to agree on an alternate choice. In that, they truly are representative of American readers, and that bodes worse for our national literature than a year without a Pulitzer winner.
(Credit: iStockphoto/RapidEye) 
Details from the covers of "Train Dreams," "Swamplandia!" and "The Pale King" 
