The Return of the (Hysterical) Real

On Eleanor Catton's "Birnam Wood"

It’s been nearly 25 years since the critic James Wood coined the term “hysterical realism” in a New Republic piece on Zadie Smith, and the consequences are still reverberating. The essay didn’t singlehandedly kill the zany postmodern novel of possibly too many ideas, but it certainly knocked them down a peg, and Wood’s lashing may have turned Zadie Smith into the world’s most centrist and least decisive writer going. (It probably also got Wood the New Yorker’s criticism gig. Not too shabby!) Just a year after Wood’s essay, 9/11 wiped away most of the irony and irreverence in the anglo art sphere, and in the intervening years, as DeLillo, Pynchon, and Rushdie aged out of being preeminent writers, Jonathan Franzen decided to give up cynicism, and David Foster Wallace passed, an overweening earnestness took over the book sphere, focusing on generational family stories (preferably immigrants) or the intensely personal lives of artists (autofiction), who no longer dared to imagine a world outside of their own milieu. Not all of the hysterically real novels were good, and not all of the earnest ones that followed were bad, but the general shift was, at least to this critic’s eyes, a net loss; like baseball’s bloodless shift towards efficiency in the past two decades, we traded big swinging home run hitters for solid guys who always got on base. Sure, they struck out less, but there was something admirable in a writer trying to encompass the world!

Wood’s principal objection to Smith’s White Teeth - and, by extension, Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, DeLillo’s Underworld, Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, all of which are excellent novels, save that Rushdie that I haven’t read¹ – is that they are “evasive of reality while borrowing from reality itself.” All of these novels piled up story around their characters in order to “cover up” their authors’ disinterest and/or lack of skill in building actually deep characters, the lifeblood of great novels. With a “bonhomous, punning, lively serenity of spirit”, these novels’

features are mistaken for scenes, as if they constituted the movement or the toil or the pressure of the novel, rather than taken for what they are—props of the imagination, meaning’s toys. … they clothe real people who could never actually endure the stories that happen to them. They are not stories in which people defy the laws of physics (obviously, one could be born in an earthquake); they are stories which defy the laws of persuasion. … Alas, since the characters in these novels are not really alive, not fully human, their connectedness can only be insisted on. Indeed, the reader begins to think that it is being insisted on precisely because they do not really exist. Life is never experienced with such a fervid intensity of connectedness. After all, hell is other people, actually: real humans disaggregate more often than they congregate. So these novels find themselves in the paradoxical position of enforcing connections that are finally conceptual rather than human.

Wood goes on to reservedly praise Smith, and hope that her fiction might improve with the publication of more novels, which, depending on who you ask, might be the precise opposite of what ended up happening in her career. Wood also delineates these new “hysterical realist” novels from their classical progenitor, Charles Dickens, who used flat stock characters as much as any contemporary novelist but had “immediate access to strong feeling, which rips the puppetry of his people, breaks their casings, and lets us enter them.” And so, as he goes on meticulously finding flaw in White Teeth, he issues a challenge to the contemporary novel: “Which way will the ambitious contemporary novel go? Will it dare a picture of life, or just shout a spectacle?” Life was not, per Wood, the perpetual motion of these story-machines, chock full of funny acronyms, punny names, absurdities, and ridiculous convergences; it was real, and tragic, and anguished, and unerringly human, like when David Copperfield and Mr. Micawber share a moment of true sadness in David Copperfield: it would be “difficult to find a single moment like that in all the many thousands of pages of the big, ambitious, contemporary books—difficult to imagine the possibility of such a sentence ever occurring amid the coils of knowingness and the latest information.”

Things swung around back towards feeling, big maudlin FEELINGS in this Briefly Gorgeous Little Life of ours; not to say that the postmodernists disappeared, but they certainly went underground. Contrary to Wood’s taxonomy of reality, though, the real world and real people, only broke more towards the hysterical. It’s as if the internet opened up a new window into people’s lives, and it turns out that nothing could be more absurd, more ridiculous, more spectacular, than real people and real life. People with Pynchon-character names are everywhere²; they’re underneath tweets about the NBA Finals, telling you to shut up about Jayson Tatum, and they’re also on TV being interviewed on the local news because someone with an even sillier name shut down the subway system because they wanted to make a video of themselves surfing on top of a car to post to a Chinese social media site called TikTok, which may be at the center of a DeLillo-like international conspiracy, or may just be a product of the end stage of the stupid boxes in our pockets. We can get off the internet’s hall of absurdities and into the highest halls of power instead: a guy named David Pecker was instrumental in convicting the former President of the United States, a former reality TV star, for 34 felony counts of fraud involving a hush-money payments to a pornstar who performed under the name Stormy Daniels. Ridiculous names! Unbelievable convergences! Too cute by a half, reality! Get back there in that box of sadness and calm down!

Contemporary fiction has only recently begun to reintegrate the insane firehose of the internet-addled post-truth and possibly post-real world; novelists have finally looked out and said: wait, what the fuck? I’m thinking of Paul Murray’s magisterial 2023 novel The Bee Sting, which captured the atonal swings of navigating the internet and all its narrative possibility, and Jessi Jezewska Stevens’ 2022 Occupy novel of love The Visitors, and Patricia Lockwood’s 2020 portrait of a brain melted by twitter and then shocked back into a kind of normalcy by real life No One is Talking About This, and now Eleanor Catton’s 2023 zanily plotted high-lit thriller Birnam Wood. Birnam Wood is a madcap examination of various kinds of activisms, idealisms and cynicisms pitched to the hysteric register, and just as utterly ridiculous as the real world.