When you wait as long as I did to read “Anna Karenina” for the first time — I’ll be 50 in August — there’s no way you can come to it without any preconceptions. For one thing, I already knew the famous first line (“All happy families are alike,” blah blah blah), and for another, I already knew how it ends (Anna, train). And I had a rough idea of what happens in between — that the title character is a beautiful Russian aristocrat who leaves her chilly, older husband for the dashing Count Vronsky, and that their scandalous love affair is juxtaposed with the fraught courtship and marriage of the anxious Levin and the innocent young Kitty. I knew that Levin was basically Tolstoy, and that Tolstoy, like Levin, was torn his whole life between the profane and the sacred. And I knew from the very first time I ever hefted a copy that “Anna Karenina” is a really, really long book.
So I’d never quite gotten around to it. I had an old Signet edition for years, back when Signets had tissuey pages and smudgy type, and a few years back I read the first 50 pages or so on an airplane. The main thing I took away from that attempt, though, was the realization that I needed bifocals. Then, last year, my agent, who was just about to publish his own first novel, told me that “Anna Karenina” was his favorite book, and I promised him I’d read it for sure, along with his.
“Read mine first,” he said. “I don’t want you reading my book after you’ve just read Tolstoy.”
In the meantime that fat, smudgy Signet had vanished, so I bought a new copy, a World’s Classic from Oxford, a stout little hardcover. But the print in that one was too small even for bifocals, and finally I invested in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation from Penguin — it’s Oprah-rific! — and a brand new pair of reading glasses. And just last month I settled into my sofa, worked out the proper distance to hold the damn book from my geriatric new glasses, and started reading.
And wouldn’t you know it, this particular new experience, like everything else that’s new in midlife, has turned out to be both predictably melancholy and unexpectedly rewarding. Melancholy, because that pure joy of discovering a great novel on your own (the way I discovered “Lord Jim” when I was 10 years old) is greatly diluted by the fact that I’m denied the simple narrative pleasure of not knowing how the story turns out. And there’s another reason: Just as you’ll never fall in love again the way you did the first time, you’ll never read a great novel at 49 in the wholehearted way you would have read it at 20, if only because so much life, and so many books, have happened in the meantime. The younger me would have been more credulous, perhaps, would have taken the novel’s reputation as a masterpiece — maybe even as the masterpiece — at face value. The younger Jim would perhaps have read the book more meticulously than the older Jim just did, especially those long and frankly tedious passages where Levin — who has to be the most painfully self-conscious character in literature; he makes Stephen Daedalus seem like Mike Hammer — agonizes over, I dunno, the Slavic question, whatever that is. Jim Jr. at least would have paid closer attention to the footnote explaining exactly what the Slavic question is, while Jim Sr. just sighed and peeked ahead to see how many pages there were before we got back to Anna and the good stuff (and I say this as a Slav — I’m half Serbian).
The older me is a little more world-weary and streetwise: OK, Mr. Big Shot, Mr. Canonical Masterpiece, Mr. Greatest Fucking Novel Ever Written — what makes you so hot? Bring it on. And here’s the rewarding part — you saw this coming, right? — the rewarding part is that the book does bring it, after all. I don’t believe in fate, and I don’t even believe that you’re meant to read certain books at certain points in your life, but I do believe that you have to be ready for a great book if it comes along. The younger me might have read the more pedantic passages of “Anna Karenina” more meticulously, but he would have read the magnificent set pieces of domestic life with less understanding than I did.
When he wasn’t shaking his finger at the reader about God or the Slavic question, Tolstoy was a brilliant and effortlessly confident dramatist, creating scene after magnificent scene in that attractively declarative 19th century style, in which infinitely detailed and subtle evocation of the tiniest gesture or glance (the envy of any contemporary novelist) is seamlessly interwoven with plain-spoken exposition of hard psychological truths. The book is full of heart-stopping set pieces: Vronsky riding his race horse to death as Anna watches; Levin mowing hay all day with the peasants on his estate, and then staying up all night on a haystack to ponder his life; Levin and Kitty caring for Levin’s consumptive brother in his final days. My favorite, though, is a little episode about two minor characters, Kitty’s spinsterish friend Varenka and Levin’s scholarly half-brother Sergei Ivanovich, whom everyone, including Varenka and Sergei Ivanovich, thinks would make a perfect match. But in a heartbreaking and bitterly honest scene set in the woods on Levin’s estate, they come to the brink of passion but no further:
To be the wife of a man like [Sergei Ivanovich]… seemed to her the height of happiness. Besides, she was almost certain she was in love with him. And now it was to be decided. She was frightened. Frightened that he would speak, and that he would not.
He had to declare himself now or never; Sergei Ivanovich felt it, too. Everything in Varenka’s gaze, colour, lowered eyes, showed painful expectation. Sergei Ivanovich saw it and pitied her. He felt that to say nothing now would be to insult her. In his mind he quickly repeated his arguments in favor of his decision. He also repeated to himself the words in which he wished to express his proposal; but instead of those words, by some unexpected consideration that occurred to him, he suddenly asked:
”And what is the difference between a white boletus and a birch boletus?”
”Varenka’s lips trembled as she answered:
”There’s hardly any difference in the caps, but in the feet.”
And as soon as these words were spoken, both he and she understood that the matter was ended …
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is fucking brilliant. Tolstoy was never the fastidious stylist that, say, Flaubert was, and the prose here, at least in translation, is plain-spoken to the point of gracelessness. But the psychological insight is so acute and subtle — Varenka is “almost certain” she loves him; Sergei Ivanovich is more afraid of hurting her feelings than winning her heart — and Tolstoy’s attitude is so calmly honest and compassionate, that it’s not like you’re reading this harrowing and humiliating moment, but you’re living it. Sergei Ivanovich (or Varenka, for that matter), c’est moi.
The greatest set piece, though, is the climactic one, the sequence leading up to Anna’s famous suicide under the wheels of a freight train. For five breathless chapters, as Anna convinces herself, erroneously, that Vronsky loves someone new and careens about Moscow looking for him, Tolstoy inhabits her feverish consciousness nearly as deeply as Virginia Woolf inhabits Mrs. Dalloway’s, or (perhaps more apropos) as Joyce inhabits that more carefree adulteress, Molly Bloom. With the same sturdy prose, we look through Anna’s eyes as the streets of Moscow pass her carriage window and she imposes her frenzy on everything she sees. A fat man raises his hat to her, thinking he knows her, then realizes his mistake:
‘He thought he knew me. And he knows me as little as anyone else in the world knows me. I don’t know myself. I know my appetites, as the French say. Those two want that dirty ice cream. That they know for certain,’ she thought, looking at two boys who had stopped an ice-cream man, who was taking the barrel down from his head and wiping his sweaty face with the end of a towel. We all want something sweet, tasty. If not candy, then dirty ice cream. And Kitty’s the same: if not Vronsky, then Levin. And she envies me. And hates me. We all hate each other. I Kitty, Kitty me. That’s the truth.’
No she said no I won’t No — it’s a sequence, in fact, that blows apart any facile dichotomy between the loose bagginess of the 19th century novel and the intense inner focus of the modernists, reminding this reader, anyway, that the history of the novel is organic, an evolution, not a hierarchy.
It’s a critical commonplace by now that Tolstoy the philosopher manqui was at odds with Tolstoy the peerless artist, and that “Anna Karenina” represents a tug of war between the brilliantly dramatized scenes of domestic life and warfare, and Tolstoy’s passionate, if tendentious working out of his own spiritual dilemma through the character of Levin. Of course, I’m being a little glib, it’s more complicated than that. At the heart of every great novel is a mystery, or, if you prefer, a contradiction. At the heart of “Ulysses” is the paradox that Joyce fled Dublin, never to return, and then spent his whole life reconstructing the place brick by brick in his imagination. There are a number of mysteries at the heart of “Anna Karenina,” but perhaps the greatest one lies in the heart of its author.
You don’t need to know a thing about Tolstoy’s biography to understand that he was a profoundly sensual man who at the same time yearned to reject the material world and be spiritually pure; this struggle is indelibly etched on every page of “Anna Karenina.” Perhaps no one understood this struggle better than Vladimir Nabokov, not just because he was a great novelist himself, but because he was also a Russian. “What one would like to do,” Nabokov writes in “Lectures on Russian Literature,” “would be to kick the glorified soapbox from under [Tolstoy's] sandalled feet and then lock him up in a stone house on a desert island with gallons of ink and reams of paper — far away from the things, ethical and pedagogical, that diverted his attention from observing the way the dark hair curled above Anna’s white neck.” But in the same passage, Nabokov allows that “the thing cannot be done: Tolstoy is homogeneous, is one,” and the “truth which he was ponderously groping for or magically finding just around the corner, was always the same truth — the truth was he and this he was an art.”
If I wanted to be criminally glib here, I could boil this down to the workshop truism that it’s all about the process, dude. But I don’t think that’s what Nabokov meant, and it’s certainly not what Tolstoy’s life and work meant. As this middle-aged novelist (and I’m the same age as Tolstoy was when he published “Anna Karenina”) struggles up off the couch and takes off his aggravating reading glasses and returns to work on his own novel, he’s faced with the fact that the author of the greatest novel on the greatest conundrum in human experience — flesh vs. spirit, profane vs. sacred, whatever — finally decided that writing novels was downright sinful and immoral. For what it’s worth, Jim the philosopher manqui (and I have the useless B.A. to prove it) thinks Tolstoy was wrong about that, and that what Nabokov is really saying is, don’t listen to what Tolstoy said about art, look at what he did, at the magnificent art he created. For that matter, I don’t have to look any further than my agent, who, with the towering example of “Anna Karenina” before him, turned around and wrote a first-rate thriller (“The Icon,” by Neil Olson. Check it out).
At the climax of “Anna Karenina,” Anna’s final moment is represented as the extinguishing of a candle, “by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil,” and one last time it flares up, “brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been in darkness, sputtered, grew dim, and went out for ever.” Any reader who finishes that passage and isn’t weeping doesn’t have a heart. And any writer, no matter what his age or her ambition, who finishes that passage and isn’t inspired to at least reach for that level of grace and subtlety and truth — who isn’t inspired, in other words, to keep Anna’s flame, and “Anna Karenina’s,” burning a little longer — well, that writer hasn’t been paying attention.
This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
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" 
