Two Paths for the Novel

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Review of Books
Volume 55, Number 18 · November 20, 2008
Two Paths for the Novel
By Zadie Smith

Netherland
by Joseph O'Neill
Pantheon, 256 pp., $23.95

Remainder
by Tom McCarthy
Vintage, 308 pp., $13.95 (paper)

1.

>From two recent novels, a story emerges about the future for the
Anglophone novel. Both are the result of long journeys. Netherland, by
Joseph O'Neill, took seven years to write; Remainder, by Tom McCarthy,
took seven years to find a mainstream publisher. The two novels are
antipodal—indeed one is the strong refusal of the other. The violence
of the rejection Remainder represents to a novel like Netherland is,
in part, a function of our ailing literary culture. All novels attempt
to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this
road the true future of the novel lies. In healthy times, we cut
multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely
as a Graham Greene.

These aren't particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism
has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other
exits blocked....

[...]

... Netherland is only superficially about September 11 or immigrants
or cricket as a symbol of good citizenship. It certainly is about
anxiety, but its worries are formal and revolve obsessively around the
question of authenticity. Netherland sits at an anxiety crossroads
where a community in recent crisis—the Anglo-American liberal middle
class—meets a literary form in long-term crisis, the
nineteenth-century lyrical Realism of Balzac and Flaubert.

Critiques of this form by now amount to a long tradition in and of
themselves. Beginning with what Alain Robbe-Grillet called "the
destitution of the old myths of 'depth,'" they blossomed out into a
phenomenology skeptical of Realism's metaphysical tendencies,
demanding, with Husserl, that we eschew the transcendental, the
metaphorical, and go "back to the things themselves!"; they peaked in
that radical deconstructive doubt which questions the capacity of
language itself to describe the world with accuracy. They all of them
note the (often unexamined) credos upon which Realism is built: the
transcendent importance of form, the incantatory power of language to
reveal truth, the essential fullness and continuity of the self.

Yet despite these theoretical assaults, the American metafiction that
stood in opposition to Realism has been relegated to a safe corner of
literary history, to be studied in postmodernity modules, and
dismissed, by our most famous public critics, as a fascinating
failure, intellectual brinkmanship that lacked heart. Barth,
Barthelme, Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, David Foster Wallace—all
misguided ideologists, the novelist equivalents of the socialists in
Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. In this
version of our literary history, the last man standing is the
Balzac-Flaubert model, on the evidence of its extraordinary
persistence. But the critiques persist, too. Is it really the closest
model we have to our condition? Or simply the bedtime story that
comforts us most?

[...]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22083