DAPHNE MERKIN
743
complications have not yet begun to show themselves. Unlike the
great Russian and French novelists , who follow their characters
through the long and winding caverns of their lives, Calvino just
turns off the set after the easy beginning and switches to another
channel." This explanation may account for the kind of fiction we
find ourselves getting, but it seems to me to beg the question of what
people read
for.
And Calvino is popular, if at all, among theorists,
consumers of "texts" rather than of novels and stories . ... I buy a
book anyway, a small act of defiance:
Look at Me ,
a novel which will
prove to be in the great English tradition of Henry James and Eliza–
beth Bowen, where corrupted innocence is conveyed by the raising
of a brow. But Anita Brookner, its author, is British, and they, it
might be noted, continue to write fiction as though the movies never
happened. The blonde pessimist is pleased, contradicting himself:
"Tell me what you think . I hear she's interesting."
Some years ago, an anthology of short stories that had first ap–
peared in
Esquire
was published under the title
All Our Secrets Are the
Same.
I remember being struck by the aptness of that title, for I am
most clear on what it is that is dear to me about fiction when I am
engaged in a routine, in what Benjamin called "the drudgery of use–
fulness"- brushing my teeth, say, in the morning- and fantasizing
about disappearing into a warm country or murdering a former lover
or being any person I am not: a country singer, a brain surgeon,
anything but what the day ahead presents as my fait accompli . What
is also clear to me is that most adults lead courageously Walter
Mitty-like lives, doing what's expected of them while daydreams of
liberation proliferate. Few of us are blessed with the existences we
think are owed us. And if all our secrets are the same, or pretty
nearly-that we want to be rich, famous, and loved for ourselves
alone rather than our yellow hair- then the service that the reading
of fiction provides is an
enabl£ng
one; we uncover our own willful
longings through Madame Bovary's or Portnoy's. What good fiction
gives us is the gossip on our desires, the chaotic promptings and un–
reasonable wishes ; it allows us to wonder who and where we would
be if the drift of our lives hadn't hemmed us in. This imaginatively
subversive aspect must have been, I suppose, what the novelist
Caroline Gordon had in mind when she cautioned that "the writing
of fiction is almost too dangerous an occupation for women."
Listen, for instance, to John Gardner, who wrote in his ad–
mirably straight-shooting if very partisan
On Becoming a Novelist:
"In
nearly all good fiction, the basic- all but inescapable- plot form is
this:
A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (per-
