Looking Up from the Navel

Judging by their fulsome endorsements on the jackets of so many novels, it’s apparent that some critics don’t get out much. To blurb-bestowers, no work is ever just moderately entertaining. Books are “captivating,” “enthralling,” “sprawling,” and even “festooning.” Maybe I’m just naÏve, but when I read a book that’s billed as “a masterpiece of savage comedy,” I expect something like Wise Blood or The Loved One. “Riveting from first page to last” is a description that gets my hopes up: it promises at least the intensity of Crime and Punishment, and a lot more than Babbitt. Obviously, I deal with some disappointment. I guess honesty doesn’t make good jacket copy, or we’d see more blurbs like this:

“A dense book in which very little happens.”
“A well-written but depressing novel, lacking in excitement what it makes up for in style.”

The latter especially could apply to so much “serious” modern writing. As Annie Dillard observed 20 years ago in Living by Fiction,

The serious novelist takes pains to distinguish his work from trash. If popular films and popular novels have good stories, then literary novels shall not. If despite all your precautions your novel is epic in scale, if it embodies such quaint narrative virtues as enlargement and diversity of action, forcefulness of dramatic conflict, vivid spectacle, and heart-pounding suspense, someone will accuse you of writing with an eye toward a film sale. No one will like you anymore.

Dillard describes a gradual internalizing of the action over the novel’s three-century history. Eighteenth-century fiction was open and outward, and society was its stage. By the twentieth century, the theater of action (once again, in so-called “serious” writing) had moved to the mind:

at some point, the people in novels stopped galloping all over the countryside and started brooding from chairs. Everything became psychological and interiorized . …We swallowed the arena and can no longer watch the show.

One effect of this inward movement was to make the telling of the tale as important as the tale itself. The way in which a character viewed the action became part of the plot. But here lay the dilemma. In the past, readers had quietly conspired with authors to create fictional worlds. They pretended to believe the narratives, at least till they put their books down.

When narratives moved to the minds of multiple characters, the conspiracy unraveled. Actors in stories couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth about themselves: they constantly tricked readers with madness, magic, miracles. Readers naturally became cynical about all this. Gone was the joy of good storytelling. The main thing left was the experience of reading: often just the beauty of pretty words. “In the contemporary modernist view,” Dillard says, “the work of art is above all a chunk in the hand. It is a self-lighted opacity, not a window and not a mirror. It is a painted sphere, not a crystal ball.”

I guess it’s really no wonder that a lot of educated people would rather watch Trading Spaces than stare at a painted sphere. A good writer, working at a moment in history where reading literary fiction has evolved from a popular craze (like seeing Attack of the Clones) to a cultural duty (like giving to public radio), must find other ways of attracting and holding jaded readers.

One way is to tell a story in the voice of an irresistible narrator, usually someone funny and highly befriendable. That pretty much describes the heroine of Laura Zigman’s Her. After years of disappointing relationships, Elise has finally met the love of her life, Donald. The problem is that Donald comes with baggage: a lovely and highly chic ex-girlfriend named Adrienne. Elise becomes sick with jealousy. Sure that Adrienne is out to get Donald back, she gradually sinks to embarrassing depths of anxiety and suspicion—even stalking Adrienne and intercepting Donald’s phone calls.

A book written in a character’s voice can be especially beguiling. Fiction is notoriously companionable, and never more so than when it provides an actual playmate. The danger for us as readers is that we may be suckered. While admitting her faults, Elise asks us to stand in sympathy with her rather than judgment. At the end, she happily concludes that she was wrong not to trust Donald; she even says that she’s learned something—essentially that love survives by virtue of blind faith, not by night vision and radar devices. The point is, though, that Elise has the last word. We may very well have been pleasantly scammed.

It’s interesting, on that note, to look at another new book which depends heavily on the charming voice of its main character. Greg Garrett’s Free Bird is the story of Clay Forester, a depressed part-time rock-and-roll musician and generally “sorry excuse for a human being,” who lives with his pious mother and aunts in Robbinsville, North Carolina. Trouble comes when Clay gets word that his long-dead father hasn’t really been dead after all—that is, not until recently. The funeral of the now-actually-dead man is to take place in Santa Fe in five days. After some initial resistance, Clay decides to go.

This is a classic odyssey story. Clay must make his way across America to discover a ghost of a father and somehow make him real again. Unlike many modern heroes who find themselves in stories with nothing to do, poor Clay has everything to do, all of it in the heavy-duty tradition of Christian gothic. He must rescue an old man sinking under the burden of a wooden cross, save a farting dog, help a stripper for Jesus escape from an abusive husband, give a ride to two anti-nuke priests and the young Mexican mother they’re caring for, and meanwhile battle with his own demons: his guilt over the death of his wife and child, and his inability to commit to a woman. Oh yeah, and did I say he used to be a lawyer who represented Exxon in the Valdez incident?

Garrett’s novel is a bit over the top: it’s like a dream from the collective unconscious of John Irving, Frederick Buechner, and John Grisham. On the other hand, it really does live up to Bret Lott’s description on the jacket: “that most rare of things these days, a book with meaning and with heart.” As with much good writing by religious authors (at least in books that deal directly with religious ideas), we get a sense of a silent voice outside the narrative. That voice reestablishes an old conspiracy between author and reader: we all agree to assume that the main questions have been settled.

Is there meaning in all of this? Yes. Is there a difference between good and evil? Yes. Now we’ll get on with the story, which must succeed or fail on its merits. The good news, as the novel shows, is that within the old boundaries there’s still a broad swath of territory to cover.

A third new book explores a small piece of it. The Monk Downstairs, by Tim Farrington, is told from the point of view (though not in the voice) of a single mother who rents her downstairs apartment to a monk who’s just given up the monastic life. Mike and Rebecca strike up a comforting friendship and then fall in love. But is it possible for two very different and also troubled people to make love work? Their struggle forms the subdued crisis of the book: each must learn about faithfulness and suffering in what Mike calls the “mapless wilderness of love.”

Though we don’t get inside Mike’s head, we do hear from him directly in letters to a young monk back at the monastery. We learn why he left: after years of emphasizing the contemplative over the active life—even to the point of pride and open conflict with his abbot—he no longer experienced God in “the silence,” in prayer. By entering a woman’s life, joining her family, and loving her through her mother’s illness, he regains some of his old joy in God’s presence. In the act of loving and serving the world, he sees glimpses of the Divine.

This is an understated book, depending mainly on sexual tension, mild humor, and interesting social collisions to keep the reader going. A story told in the monk’s voice might have brought us denser, more passionate writing; told in the actual voice of Rebecca, it could have brought us a companionable novel—something like Her. As it is, The Monk Downstairs is a quiet bit of wisdom, an exploration of emotional and philosophical space that doesn’t even exist for us unless we agree to accept, once again, that certain underlying questions are answered.

As far as outward versus inward fiction, I think that introspection is here to stay. We’re an inward-looking society, and despite what Tom Wolfe says, that’s not entirely a bad thing, either for the culture or for the novel as an art form. Many of us—as Oprah has proved—actually enjoy all the navel gazing. For religious writers, though, the inward look must be just a first glance: things far away gradually come into focus, and, like Mike in The Monk Downstairs, we inevitably take our vision outward into the world. Which, whatever the blurbs may say, is an utterly captivating, even enthralling idea.

Betty Smartt Carter is the author of two novels. She has a book of essays forthcoming from Paraclete Press.