How novels came to terms with the internet

| Friday January 21, 2011 00:00

Novelists have gone to great lengths - setting stories in the past or in remote places - to avoid dealing with the internet. Is this finally changing, asks Laura Miller

Back in the early 1990s, David Foster Wallace wrote an essay urging young American novelists to find a way to come to terms with the role of television in contemporary life. He believed they were going about it the wrong way, but at least they were trying, which was more than he could say for the generation of older writers he complained about in the same piece ('E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction'). One of these, an unnamed 'gray eminence' who ran a graduate workshop that Wallace attended in the 1980s, scolded his students for including 'trendy mass-popular-media' references in their work. Treating of such things, he insisted, would only date their writing, pegging it as belonging to the 'frivolous Now' instead of to the proper province of literature, the 'Timeless'.

Twenty years later, in the current frivolous Now, Wallace's essay itself seems a shade dated, and not just because today's novelists confront a very different communications behemoth in the form of the internet. The notion of a cadre of literary novelists, young or old, eager to depict the moment we live in - let alone battling conservative naysayers for the right to do so - is almost quaint. When reading for a American literary prize a couple of years ago, I was struck by how strenuously most of the entrants seemed to be skirting that challenge.

Writing historical fiction is the easiest way to escape the Now; to avoid dealing with the internet, you only have to step back a decade or two. If you'd prefer to write about characters entirely innocent of TV, you'd need to retreat as far as the 1940s; then you get the second world war and the Holocaust, subjects that, despite their historical specificity, are understood by everyone to be unimpeachably Timeless.

Venturing back in time isn't the only option for novelists loath to address the mass media that most of us marinate in. There are also those populations cut off from the mainstream for cultural reasons, such as recent immigrants and their families - a very popular choice of fictional subject these days. And then there are those at the geographical margins, living in remote rural areas where broadband access is hard to come by.

It's remarkable how many recent American literary novels and short stories are set on ranches, from writers as established as Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy to newcomers such as Maile Meloy and CE Morgan. And this is especially curious when you consider that the vast majority of the people who write and read these works live in cities and suburbs.

Perhaps it's because the characters in ranch novels spend most of their time contemplatively driving long distances in trucks or climbing up snowy mountains to rescue stranded animals, scenarios in which there's absolutely no danger that a TV will be switched on or a laptop flipped open. (Real-life ranchers, of course, treasure their satellite dishes.)

As the showdown in Wallace's graduate workshop indicated, the American novelist is buffeted by two increasingly contradictory imperatives. The first comes as the directive to depict 'The Way We Live Now' - a phrase whose origins in the title of a Trollope novel have been almost entirely obscured by countless deployments in reviews and publisher's blurbs. Clich it may be, but the notion that no one is better suited to explain the dilemmas of contemporary life than the novelist persists.

After the 9/11 attacks, every fiction writer of note reported receiving dozens of calls from magazine editors, each looking for insights and ruminations that a whole industry full of accomplished journalists was apparently insufficiently thoughtful to summon on its own. Which brings us to the other designated special province of the literary novelist: museum-quality depth. The further literature is driven to the outskirts of the culture, the more it is cherished as a sanctuary from everything coarse, shallow and meretricious in that culture. It is the chapel of profundity, and about as lively and well visited as a bricks-and-mortar chapel to boot.

Literature is where you retreat when you're sick of celebrity divorces, political mudslinging, office intrigues, trials of the century, new Apple products, internet flame wars, sexting and X Factor contestants - in short, everything that everybody else spends most of their time thinking and talking about. (Guardian.co.uk)