We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media. A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness. A novel is not BuzzFeed or NPR or Instagram or even Hollywood. A novel is not an “afternoon special” or fodder for the Twittersphere or material for journalists to make neat generalizations about culture. I wish that future novelists would reject the pressure to write for the betterment of society. Aliveness is the opposite of trying to get an A+ in novel writing. Those all read as aliveness to me, and they made me feel alive. Or the blood at the beginning of Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind and how it peters out and then starts up again but it’s someone else’s blood, and then at the end there’s no blood, and there’s really not much else that can be said to have “changed.” Or the “Middle (Nothing Happens)” section of Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts-just the existence of that chapter heading. I’m thinking of the central conceit of Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby and how it’s established in order to introduce the characters, who then just keep getting reintroduced, and at the end of the book the question’s still unanswered. There is a kind of deliberate messiness that always thrills me, like seeing a beautiful model’s unshaved leg or getting a pump of industrial pink soap from an Aesop bottle. My favorite books have a headlong quality, a sense that the author was having fun, saying “fuck it” at some point in the process and letting go of the idea of controlling an imagined audience’s reaction. I am struggling to think of what the recent books I’ve truly loved have in common, because in most ways they are all so different, and the only way I can think of to describe it is “aliveness.” So many books are perfectly good but not alive-they are skillfully made, are entertaining or edifying, serve a purpose (in the author’s career at least).
Writing in this way would mean taking the risk that some books, even good ones, would remain unwritten. We should write only what has to be written and what can be written only now that is about life as we live it now, and we should write novels that have to be novels and could never exist as memoir or another literary genre, let alone film or television.
There is no formula for that, nothing in particular that one should risk but it probably involves risking everything, courting humiliation, being open to being misunderstood, and telling the truth. I want to be physically stunned, physically immobilized by language.
I want to read more novels that make me feel like the end of The Copenhagen Trilogy-which is not a novel-did: shaking, sputtering, like I had just (barely) survived a car accident.
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