The Pathetic Fallacy of the Entire Indifferent Universe
On Brandon Taylor's "The Late Americans"
In We Read ‘Em So You Don’t Have To, I’ll let you know if the new book everyone’s talking about is actually worth the effort, or dig into the classic that’s never left your TBR shelf. Many thanks to paid subscriber and longtime friend Anqi Z. for asking for this review.
What are we to do with the novelist-cum-critic? Beyond the territory of I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine bland novelist book reviews (which you can read every week in the New York Times Book Review), there are the rare few writers who write both serious literary criticism and novels, and they’re very rarely known for doing both. You’re either a critic first and a novelist second, or vice versa, and one is judged as the time-wasting offshoot of the other. The novelist writes criticism between novels; the critic writes a novel to get a book deal (and enough money to keep writing essays).1 In theory, the novelist brings a certain craft and know-how element to their literary criticism, as when Catholic-raised Colm Toibin writes about the novelistic problem of grace (and its absence) in the novels of very Protestant Marilynne Robinson, while the critic writing a novel is supposed to bring a strong aesthetic rigor to the process, as if all their time spent studying novels will help them avoid all the pitfalls they’ve dinged others for. (No one really ends up liking them all that much, though; would you really want to live in a house built by an architectural critic?) Geoff Dyer, a critic first and novelist second himself, once wrote about this phenomena as he reviewed a collection of Susan Sontag’s essays and speeches, At The Same Time, noting that while she thought of herself as a novelist first and a critic second, everyone else loved her criticism and thought of the fiction as “an interruption to her ongoing critical project.” The irony, for Dyer, is that “dozens of writers, some with only a fraction of [Sontag’s] intelligence and knowledge, have produced novels that are many times more impressive – to say nothing of enjoyable – than hers.” (The whole piece is vertiginously meta, as Dyer accuses Sontag of making the whole book “about” the dissonance between Sontag’s self-image as novelist and her public reputation as a critic while he sub-textually positions himself as someone who knows he’s a more lauded critic than novelist.) When the accomplished critic writes a bad or even just average novel, the natural reaction is to wonder: don’t they know better? To Dyer, Sontag “couldn’t tell a story to save her life”, but because she “understood so well what it took to produce literature of lasting value”, she
wanted to meet people on equal terms. It’s just that the people she most wanted to meet were right at the top of the cultural totem pole. And she couldn’t meet them on equal terms simply as a critic, so the fiction, the fiction that (to her) was more important than – and, at the same time, palpably inferior to – everything else she wrote had to be hauled (or, if you prefer, smuggled) up there too. How? By claiming that the magisterial pronouncement about literature was a side effect of having produced it.
This is a long way of getting around to Brandon Taylor, the author of a Booker shortlisted novel, Real Life, a much-lauded and Story Prize winning collection of stories, Filthy Animals, and a new novel, The Late Americans. He’s also a pretty great critic; his newsletter, Sweater Weather,2 is a consistent source of well-reasoned and cogent thoughts on literary craft and theory, and he’s brave enough to actually pan people in major outlets. Not that I always agree with those pans, but it takes a certain integrity to actually go through with them rather than writing a review of 90% plot summary and 10% wan constructive criticism of a book you didn’t like so you can keep your standing in the literary world. Reading Taylor’s criticism, I get the sense that he knows what makes for good fiction, what works and what doesn’t, and that he knows what the some of the problems are with contemporary fiction. His newsletters have ably covered the over-reliance on the trauma plot – “I do know that producing a litany of traumatic events doesn’t actually recreate the sense [of] trauma on the page” – and the prevailing trend of scenes and dialogue written like a TV screenplay wherein emphasis is placed on facial reaction and the moving of objects across a space – “trite physicality” in Taylor’s formulation, which “just reads like a literal transcription of visual phenomena, totally divorced from whatever underlying subtextual or emotional structure would give the action weight and feeling” – as well as a weak or nonexistent system of morals in contemporary novels, which leads to wishy-washy resolutions where characters acknowledge the ills of the world without actually engaging with them. To Taylor, good fiction requires a strong moral system:
[A] story has its own moral universe and its own system of weights and measures. And … your job as the writer is to draw meaning out of the relationships between actions and outcomes and between characters within that system of weights and measures, and to follow it honestly. Such a system needs the good as well as the bad, the evil. Both are required for anything to mean something within a fictional world.
And so it’s strange to read Taylor’s latest novel and see almost none of that critical acumen applied. You know better!!! His latest novel is precious, obvious, narratively over-familiar and idiomatic, and gestures at the greats (characters reading Proust, Garshin, and Mauriac, the style aping Chekhov) while falling well short of their marks. It’s a linked set of stories masquerading as a novel, juxtaposition standing in for cohesion, a grim processional of interchangeable characters making bad decisions for bad reasons in a milieu where nothing really matters. The title comes from an early passage in the book, where a character thinks of his life as
living in a museum exhibit or dollhouse. It was so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous and indifferent God prying the house open and squinting at them as they went about their lives on their circuits like little automatons in an exhibit called The Late Americans.
And the creator of this book displays a similar indifference: here are some characters in Iowa, here they are fucking, and here they are in broken relationships. Do with that what you will. And it’s extra galling to read a novel like this after Taylor’s own newsletter just bemoaned “the novels of vibey contemporary consciousness where unbathed millennials have sex and sometimes get UTIs and think about capitalism … [with] no real moral schema there. No moral vector to any of the actions.” The call is coming from inside the house!
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