It seems the most obvious thing: fiction is about relationships. Like most things in life, not having been led by the hand or properly ushered into the world of interpersonal relations, I had no clue about it. This is why, when I first started writing fiction, I was at sea. I didn’t have model relationships, or a basic understanding of how two people related to each other. I was less able to see how it could have any relevance to fiction.
I was steeped in literature that reflected similarly unrealistic views of the interactions between men and women: Herman Hesse, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell and Harold Brodkey. Then into the solipsism slipstream of Kerouac, Hemingway, Joyce, and Beckett. Not one among them held anything approaching a normal perspective on human relations that didn’t involve a power struggle. Of course, every relationship has a power struggle of some kind.
This is why, when I started to write fiction, it was frankly based on fantasies and wish fulfillment: the forlorn protagonist in desperate pursuit of an unattainable ideal. I certainly took the “write what you know” to heart.
This is why almost everyone in my fledgling writing group years ago universally disapproved of the writer who presented a story about a stick going down the river, which several of us defended. A stick going down the river. I would probably still defend this point of view for its sheer audacity.
This is why, in 1996, Brown University summarily rejected my application for their MFA program with a note that implied deficiencies in my writing (if not my life). And the other five MFA programs that I had applied to took the donation of my application fee in return for their form rejections.
Good fiction abounds in relationships. Usually messy ones.
And dare I say—okay, I will say it—this may be why there are so many more women successfully writing fiction than men. Women have relationships earlier and perhaps more meaningfully than their distracted adolescent male counterparts.
Good fiction abounds in relationships. Because I wanted to be better at them, I started to veer into the humble writers, or at least those with viable humility. I took a keen interest in what I would call psychological stories. I see these stories as having to do with complications in relationships, something I would become well versed in. Messy relationships, mostly. No one wants to read about happy ones, really. In other words, I could relate. I had never quite gotten relationships right, though I might have tried, as desperate as when I first started to engage in any with a vestige of meaning.
And now, I’m mainly interested in how relationships have a functionary means in a story. Beyond fiction, actual relationships provide fodder for all the other types of writing: song lyrics, poetry, or the excavating essays that look with a cold eye on the past.
Those old habits die hard. After thousands of dollars paid out in psychotherapy over the decades, it’s hard for me to not be interested in well-wrought psychological stories. It is in fact the primary motive of my fiction, I am convinced, and that of 99 percent of most fiction. (This is based purely on my gut).
Why is that? Is it a form of wish fulfillment? I tend to think there is a vicarious magnetism to stories that let us try on a situation, safely. Arm-chair fiction. This gets into another of my early, adolescent hangings on, adventure stories. Never would I climb those mountains, but I am thrilled to try to imagine undertaking them—with the all-pervasive shadow of dysfunctional relationships that go along with them.
This might be as much what we read for. Why wouldn’t I read a story about someone struggling within a relationship? To see an alternative, or possibility. To rejoice in the vicarious thrill of it. One of my favorite novels is Norman Rush’s Mortals. In this novel, I check two boxes. The frisson of adventure and the turmoil of a cuckolded man desperately in love. If I take other of my favorites, I can see a similar trend: Knausgaard (My Struggle), Ben Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station), Rachel Cusk (The Outline Trilogy), Alice Munro, Bolaño, Vollmann. All have the important problematic relationships at the center (Ok, so I might have overstated that. Bolaño and Vollmann get a check for their “adventure,” or maybe mystery, another draw to me. Their relationship portrayals are frequently at the adolescent level of my first set of inspirational conspirators). As well, those initial draws to fiction are ever present. As an aside, could this explain why some middle-aged men never seem to lose their fascination with the Marvel universe? (Something I never quite got, although, at the impressionable age of ten, I could strongly relate to Bruce Banner and The Incredible Hulk on television.)
If there is any prejudice against white guys’ writing—and there is plenty of it to go around—I’d like to blame some of it on Marvel comics, and the easy simplistic categorization of men as merely boys still trying to live out their childhood superhero fantasies. But as soon as someone points that finger, I’ll point to romance novels.
What might explain the fascination of so many writers with genre? Personally, I have zero interest in most fantasy writing. (I’m all in on experimental, however, the realm of innovators and wordsmiths, as much as I find much of it to be a challenge, if even occasionally a slog. It’s the idea of the experimental that I'm drawn to.) I want my fiction based in reality. The possibility of the real. But never witches, warlocks, magic, elves, spells, swords, or monsters nonsense. If I can’t see a possibility in reality, I have no interest in reading it.
As for romance novels, though I could not tell you the first thing why they are popular, I would guess again by returning to my wish fulfillment theory, that its dedicated readers find a thrill in romantic possibility, or its failure.
I believe we turn to our literature for an odd vicarious connection. To see how messed up others are. To consider how messed up we might be.