You Have the End of the Novel, and I Got a Bridge for Sale

At The Guardian, Zadie Smith writes about what she calls 'novel-nausea', framed as something what might be called a review, of Reality Hunger by ex-novelist David Shields. Smith writes, 'The pages are filled with anti-fiction fighting talk: "The creators of characters, in the traditional sense, no longer manage to offer us anything more than puppets in which they themselves have ceased to believe." And: "All the best stories are true." And: "The world exists. Why recreate it?" It's tempting to chalk this up to one author's personal disappointments with the novel as a form (Shields hasn't written a novel since the early 90s), but in expressing his novel-nausea so frankly he hopes to show that he is not alone in having such feelings – and my sense is that he's right. [. . .] In these arguments the new received wisdom is that all plots are "conventional" and all characters sentimental and bourgeois, and all settings bad theatrical backdrops, wooden and painted. Such objections are, I think, sincere responses to the experience of reading bad novels'.

It's telling that Smith chooses to focus in her essay not on sales and readership to find the novel's bellweather, but on authors and students of writing (future authors I suppose) who exist in an almost comically blasé inner circle of the literary world. They eat and breath the craft. The novel is their product, and writing their production line. However the general reading public, the students of literature, and the more intelligent readers are all in love with the novel: with its structures and narratives, and the imagined characters who inhabit them. Even memoir and nonfiction has won its recent popularity by taking on the structure and techniques of the novel.

Worse than that — at least, worse for Smith's notion and for those who are hypnotized by hip deconstructions — is that the majority of those readers really love bad novels. Love them, and buy them, and beg for more of them. The bad novels they love range from the somewhat-bad pretension-to-literature to the truly cringe-inducing vampire love stories and what have you. Only rarely does a good novel grab our imagination by the shirt collar and jostle the weary, mediocrity-bored reading masses awake. In this sense, the novel form is very much alive.

So it isn't the reading of bad novels that leads to 'novel-nausea', or they wouldn't be as undeniably popular as they are, and it wouldn't be just the 'rare reader' who seeks essays out 'with any sense of urgency'. No, it's the tired, workaday vulgarity of the writing life, the writing profession, that makes a person sick of novels as familiarity breeds contempt, or at least disdain — as magicians can't enjoy another's tricks: they can only see the mechanics; they feel envy instead of awe. Smith eventually admits as much: 'Simply put, my imagination had run dry, and I couldn't seem to bring myself to write the necessary "and then, and then" which sits at the heart of all imagined narratives. When you're in this state – commonly called "writer's block" – the very idea of fiction turns sour.' The novel's sour taste is a malady of the insider, I think; not the form.