Daphne Merkin
THE PLIGHT OF READING:
IN SEARCH OF THE NEW FICTION
This is how it is in the word within the world: I am having
dinner with my father, a businessman with an ancillary interest in
culture. We are sitting at a restaurant table covered with crisp linen,
gleaming with glasses and silver. If this were a story by a certain kind
of writer, a Saul Bellow or a Philip Roth, my father would probably
be described- in the interests of clarity as well as of hostility- as a
mogul. So, my father the mogul wants to know what my novel is go–
ing to be about. I fidget with the menu, a large calligraphically ren–
dered object. My father, like many men who don't either write or
teach them, doesn't read novels. He does, however, savor book re–
views; he knows who is well or badly received and will bring home
expensive hardcovers, the latest Iris Murdoch, and once in a while
an odd, literary choice. "I don't know," I finally say , "I'm having
trouble beginning. But it will probably be," I add, as though this
weren't the obvious irritant in the oyster of the novice's imagination,
"about me ." I settle back in my upholstered chair. I've said it all: The
Daughter is planning to write about Herself. At this point my father
the mogul peers over his half-glasses and says with a conviction I find
dazzling: "If I could write, which I can't, I'd write about
issues."
"If I could write .. ."But doesn't everyone in America believe
that, given the inclination, he or she could "write"- string a bunch of
words together? Issues ... Of course I know about them, I read the
paper like any watchful citizen, but I had never thought to bog my
novel- that embryonic, fleeting vision behind my eyes- down in
them.
There are many things I suppose I could have said in my own ,
and literature's, defense : Issues aren't novels . (Although some of the
more artistically successful books of the past few years have been
those in which "real life" pulses at the edge of the page: the biography–
cum-novel , such as
Edie
or, more recently, Joyce Johnson's novelis–
tic memoir of her affair with Jack Kerouac,
Minor Characters. )
Art
rises beyond the everyday. I might have quoted Ford Madox Ford,
who went so far as to suggest that it was best for writers not to have
any views at all: "Your business with the world," he pronounced to
Conrad, "is rendering, not alteration." But for a moment, in this
well-appointed spot filled with the murmurings of coiffed women
