I feel compelled to write. I dreamt all night about sitting with my notepad and pen, writing. I woke up with my son, Derby, at 7:30, and while he was playing with his toy train and watching cartoons, I was day dreaming about writing. I won't call it inspired, though, for I still think of inspiration as positive.
I finished Reality Hunger, by David Shields yesterday. It's for Trussler's Memoir class next semester, and I'm forced to say it was a good book. I bought it Wednesday. I started reading it out of curiosity, and from the first few pages, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Every spare minute I had, I picked it up and read a few chapters, and I finished it yesterday. I
It tore me up. It made me wonder if writing fiction, this thing I love so much, is something worth doing.
His point is simultaneously:
-Everything is fiction; even straight biography, and especially autobiography, is written in way that sheds light on something, leaves things out, elaborates—always to make a point.
-Fiction is useless; he believes novels are 3-5 hundred pages of drivel, all to make a single point, all to explore one idea. He talks about highly acclaimed novels (The Corrections, and others) as being works he could never finish; they would bore him too much. He equates today's literary prizes to the federal bailout package, subsidizing work that is no longer remotely describing reality.
-The only interesting form is the Essay. It's the only form that one can explore what they think about a single idea in a short amount of time without any planned agenda. It takes fiction's obsession with being an omniscient God out of it. It's unmediated thinking out loud.
-Memoir would be interesting if people recognized it as fiction (the first point) and the memoirist was allowed to lie. He defends Frey's A Million Little Pieces and says he made the right decision, lying; it moved the narrative forward. Frey's only mistake was apologizing for it.
So he's basically saying that fiction is boring and useless unless it is disguised as fact, unless one is uncertain of it's factuality/fictionality. The only nice thing he has to say about fiction is about short-short fiction, because it gets to the point and he can stop reading.
He says, near the beginning, that one should read the book as if it is a character from a novel speaking, and as a character, I hate him. I want to grab him and shake him and say, Are you freakin' kidding me? Have you read Munro? Read Atwood, Carol Shields, David Mitchell, Delillo? Read a goddam book, I wanna tell him. I've learned more about life from the fiction I've read, than I could possibly have learnt in these 27 years if I hadn't been reading. I'm happiest with a novel, or story collection, in my hands and an Americano by my side if not with a pen in my hand, writing. Who is this guy telling me he doesn't care about any of this, and he thinks nobody else should care either? I wish I never read the book, almost.
Yet at the same time, it's caused me to rethink my philosophy of writing. I've started rewriting all of my previous stories in my head, trying to make them somehow 'true,' somehow autobiographical, somehow tricking people into being confused—"Is it fact or fiction?"
I listened to a tour guide at the National Gallery ask his group what made Rothko great. Someone said, "The colors are beautiful." Someone else mentioned how many books and articles had been written about him. A third person pointed out how much people had paid for his paintings. The tour guide said, "Rothko is great because he forced artists who came after him to change how they thought about painting." This is the single most useful definition of artistic greatness I've ever encountered.
So is Shields, this man who has so challenged what I think of 'good writing,' is this man a great artist, for causing this rethinking? Is a writer who finds it impossible to write or appreciate straight fiction a great writer?
I don't know.
But I've decided to write, and to keep writing.
There's nothing else I can do.
