The War Against Cliché
A Review of "Inside Story" (Martin Amis) "Leave Society" (Tao Lin) and "Novel 11, Book 18" (Dag Solstad)
Back in the heyday of my third attempt to write a novel, I recall feeling hemmed in by notions that you had to have a plot, and characters, and had to make a detailed outline of every bit of action that moved your story forward. On the other hand, why was it that the novels that I loved were not encumbered by adhering to a checklist?
Most of what I read and am excited by essentially breaks the algorithm of expectation, and I can think of at least half a dozen novels I’ve read in the past year that could be said to be plotless. (At a local bookstore, the owner makes it a point of pride to point out all the brilliant novels he likes, with emphasis on the conspicuous lack of plot.) I would say the lack of plot is one of the first things I recognized—the kind of intentional plot that drives most genre fiction, another area of literary profusion I am allergic to—as a motivator to get me to want to write.
Shortly after this revelation, I mentioned to a teacher that I was happy to discover that “novels don’t have to have a plot.” (She assured me that, oh yes, they do.) As such, I continued to write whatever I wanted and managed to get enough of it published that I gave up trying to make my work conform.
The fact is, I still feel the need to address these elements whenever I work on a novel, and I am just enough of a contrarian that I still resist, and will only acknowledge I’ve found them as if they were naturally there—and maybe they are—but it is always enough of a stretch that I wonder if people are so hemmed in by the usual way of doing things that they don’t even try to question the usefulness or validity of these elements. The novel, after all, is where tradition is sacrificed on the altar of experimentation. (Which sounds to me suspiciously close to something Jed Perl might say.)
My favorite reading experiences are when the author seems to have broken something. Maybe my expectations. I’m drawn to the novel and unusual. The innovative structure. I strongly resist gimmickry. I want substance. Three books I've read lately, if not all necessarily using innovative structures, achieve an engaging novelty that left their admirable impression on me.
Amis is the most obvious about novel structure in Inside Story, while achieving a clarity I can't say I've found in his other books. Amis as narrator is immensely charming in this book. It's as if he wants to be liked, to be the favorite teacher. I have no idea how the average non-writing reader takes his asides, chapters which read like mini craft shop talks, but I found them to be useful, and telling, with Amis practicing what he preaches. There are few books I've read lately that feel deliberate and precise, chiseled in their prose, and economical (and this, at just over 500 pages). The care with which Amis has written Inside Story makes it a joy to read, and a near masterpiece. My previous favorite book of his was The War Against Cliché, a collection of book reviews, with a title I can't invoke without imagining a scowling Amis ready to lecture.
But, as is perpetual with the cross-genre pollination these days, I kept wondering, is Inside Story really a novel?
Here is a bit of Amis’s craft advice: “See the world with ‘your original eyes’, ‘your first heart’, but don’t play the child, don’t play the innocent—don’t examine an orange like a caveman toying with an iPhone. You know more than that, you know better than that. The world you see out there is ulterior: it is other than what is obvious or admitted.”
Amis’s writing can feel unhurried, particularly as he lingers on his pet themes (“If a country was a person” to which I respond, huh?). Dialogue can feel exclusive, insider-ish, and I get that feeling at times that I think I know what he’s talking (writing) about, and yet I feel hermetically excluded. Do I really follow the logic as Amis and Christopher Hitchens, aka the Hitch, parse French hatred—and what is it for, ultimately? To make a point (in 2003) about the impending Iraq war. This is purportedly a novel based on Amis’s life, and he delves into the personal: his relative happiness with his wife; an inexplicable fixation on suicidal ideation; a meditation on the deaths of his friends. Amis inserts a teaser about his ex-girlfriend Phoebe Phelps’s, an intriguing and well-drawn character who decades after their relationship delivers a bombshell which lies at the heart of this inside story. I recognize that this is a master class in drawing a character. So, I am rapt, and not a little flummoxed, but more or less trusting. Though hasn’t Amis occasionally led me to a phantom well? (Yellow Dog; Money. Though maybe I needed to read those with Amis’s post-modernist acrobatics and youthful need to obscure his father’s shadow in mind.)
Amis can lag a bit, too, or get mired in those Britishisms that, if you do not look them up, will make you scratch your head for pages. I went forth. I never wanted the book to end.
There is the sense that the books I sometimes end up loving the most, I didn't fully love reading. I don't know if this is a holdover from grad school, when I was drawn heavily into so-called experimental novels (Bernhard, Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Gertrude Stein, et al) because they offered a refreshing alternative to 95% of what was out there. I feel like if a book is doing something I can’t quite pin down, that it might be worth sticking with. That it is probably good for me. Like medicine. Again, so often these dense narratives have more going on in them and are more rewarding, ultimately.
Tao Lin's Leave Society achieves this in an oblique manner, and as such, I found myself pulled in. Time is what gives this novel structure, with each of the four sections named after a year (“Year of Mercury”; “Year of Pain”, etc.), with a pattern of travel and seasons marking time. Protagonist Li almost reverts to childhood every time he makes a trip to Taiwan to visit his parents, or he bides his time and attempts to self-isolate in New York, reconnecting with an old friend, Kay, who moves into his building. Once I was caught up in Li’s story and rhythms, I found myself in that suspension of belief that a long narrative can provide. The characters, like in Amis’s novel, became real. To root for a character in fiction seems almost naïve, a primal element of why we read fiction. Why we follow along hoping these characters don't make stupid choices, this paper and ink creation that comes alive in our minds. At some point, I was rooting for Li’s relationship with Kay. The novelist David Mitchell talked of not wanting to spend 500 pages with a character he does not like, and it seems to me literary writers and readers are probably reasonable people. But likeability can be overdone, too. I'm partial to flawed characters. I don't want saccharine lovability, just a character who is invested in their path, whatever it may be. I don't need absolute love. Understanding, absolutely.
Lin avoids expected descriptive writing, though in lieu of this he writes a heightened science-y language self-concocted to describe his inner psychedelic phenomena. Li is prone to self-diagnosis and broad theories about everything, and often summarizes a period of time in a clipped style: “That summer, learning what existed outside society by writing a column on psychedelics, history, and nature, Li had decided to go further into autobiographical writing, using it to help him learn and change. […] Nine months later, Kay had moved to Manhattan; twelve months later, into his building.” Immersed in pharmacopeia, this writing might best be called auto-fiction on drugs.
The novel, after all, is where tradition is sacrificed on the altar of experimentation.
Leave Society intrigues as it reveals its inner workings. The narrator talks about drafting the novel within the novel we are reading. Toward the last quarter of the book, he discusses editing one of the early chapters. He’s going meta (though I suppose we’ll now have to find a new word for that term). Also, of the long, at times mundane passages of dialogue with his parents, I began to understand (from a few instances where he acknowledges it) that he has recorded them and transcribed them; this would be the author recording his parents, for further genre-blurring. These dialogues have a quality of real conversation, with its maddening repetitions and confusions, as well as lack of occasionally necessary attributions. But what is real for Lin doesn’t necessarily feel real for fiction. At one point, Li (or Lin?) claims to have 189,000 words of notes for one of his four yearly named sections. All of these elements enliven Li’s meandering soul searching.
Dag Solstad's Novel 11, Book 18 is a cleverly conceived and slyly accomplished novel. Though in fact told in close third person, my memory of reading it was almost as of a first-person narrative. The paragraphs lack the usual breaks set off for dialogue and relies extensively on the interior thoughts of the narrator, Bjorn Hansen, whose adulthood life story is related across a period of several years. The style reminded me of Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser, and perhaps the similarities have to do with how narrating in this way lends the story an underhanded and quiet subtlety that remains consistent throughout the book. Consistency of voice is a hallmark of carefully wrought prose. The character goes through his paces and creates a delay, constantly deferring or outright ignoring the motivation of his actions, never revealing to us the why. This induces a reader to keep reading, and is what any skilled writer hopes to accomplish by drawing a reader in. Solstad’s tone acknowledges the interior thoughts of incredulity but without leading to any apparent external change, as when he leaves his wife for the somehow aptly named Turid Lammers:
“The only thing he regretted about this break was that he had not told his wife exactly how things were. Otherwise he accepted that everything had turned out as it did. He still recognized, eighteen years afterward, that he had done the right thing in abandoning an unsuspecting wife and his small child sleeping in an adjacent room. In order to look for the woman who represented adventure to him, even though he knew that the adventure was now over by the very fact that he was cutting loose from his marriage to follow Turid Lammers.”
Bjorn Hansen’s unprincipled life seems to perplex him, which leads him to an ultimate life-altering act to perplex the reader—and get us to read on. Be it the relationship he leaves his wife and child for or allowing the son to return into his life twenty years later, a son whom he finds puzzling, Bjorn Hansen has let fate guide his life. Though he may question why, he seems to lack the will or the agency to do anything about it, until he finally doesn’t.