"The Rise of the Failure Memoir," my failures, and other ruminations

A list of the things that I did wrong in writing the first 200 pages of my Florence novel:

* Having the audacity to think that I could fit it in during this season of Extreme Busyness (though I had to fit it in, on behalf of a fellowship project I was teaching).

* Choosing to escape the frightening avalanche of emails by taking the book off the computer altogether and writing it in small spurts on the iPad. Good for scenes. Horrific for continuity.

* Giving myself a tremendously complex set of plot points and intersections to manage with a brain now too crowded to manage anything but the bare rudiments of daily life.

* Pushing ahead through the panic, as opposed to calling the panic off completely, and reconsidering. (But I had to push ahead; I was teaching this novel to a student.)

Finally, a few weeks ago, I did stop. Threw almost all of what I had away and started over. New technology. Simplified plot. More sleep. Less work at midnight hours. Less anxiety about the mountains of books and emails flooding in. Yesterday, Friday, was the first day since I began the book last October that I could work on it for an entire continuity-seeding stretch. Last night was the first night that I slept, unpanicked. There's a ton of work to do. But there's a working foundation.

Since I was giving myself some breathing room I decided to go one step farther down the easing road and read through some of the New Yorkers that have gathered here in this season of Extreme Busyness. First up: Giles Harvey's contemplations, "Cry Me a River: The Rise of the Failure Memoir."(March 25 issue) A look at the crop of memoirs that have emerged from failed novelists. Memoirs about failures—hmmm, I thought, I could have written one of those, if I didn't already understand that we all have our failures, our shames to work through.

Most interesting to me was this paragraph about the failure of the novel in our era—something we've all heard much about. Harvey is reflecting on David Shields (that inveterate provocateur) in this passage.

Shields tells a story about how he reached this conclusion ["that the novel is no longer up to the task of representing contemporary life"]. In the eighties and nineties, he spent "many, many years" trying to write a novel about this country's obsession with celebrity culture through the lens of a married couple's domestic life, a kind of American version of Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being." The project stalled when Shields came to find the conventional novelistic apparatus (plot, dialogue, character) cumbersome and irrelevant to his deepest concerns. He discovered that the essayistic digressions he had written and was planning to insert into his novel were themselves the book he wanted to write.... "Forms are there to serve the culture, and when they die, they die for a good reason—or so I have come to believe, the novel having long since gone dark for me."

I'm not going to stand in full Shields agreement here, or in agreement with every one else who says the novel is dead. Because I'm still reading and loving novels, and I'm still learning, from the best of them, what language can do, what stories can be, what humanity is capable of. The novel has not gone dark for me—not as a reader and not, if I can just stay focused, as a writer. Light is hard to come by, true. But I'm obsessed with the light.

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Reality Hunger/David Shields: Reflections

All right, then.  Along with the ten new memoirs that sweep into my home last week slides David Shields's manifesto, Reality Hunger—a meditation on and exercise in literary collage, appropriation, fusion, blend, bend, thought poem, risk.  Do you believe in, say, fiction as one category and nonfiction as another?  Go talk to Shields.  Do you actually believe that other people's thoughts or ideas should be housed inside quotation marks, that truth can be located, that plot is story, that fiction (or at least conventional fiction) has something to say?  Do you know what you love?  Do you honor beauty above raw?  Have you given enough space to white space?

Go talk to Shields, or read him.  Or, I should say, read this book, which is only, perhaps, 82% Shields, in terms of the lines themselves, the rest being borrowed from, say, Vivian Gornick, Patricia Hampl, William Gass, Margo Jefferson, John D'Agata, Lauren Slater, Philip Roth, Charles Simic, J. M. Coetzee, Ross McElwee, Anne Carson, and if I listed them all, I would be taking you through the 618 citations in the back of the book, reluctantly delivered by Shields, at the advice (or insistence) of his attorneys, though Shields, begging us not to refer to the citations at all, declares, "Reality cannot be copyrighted."

(Please, Mr. Shields, forgive my quotation marks.)

When you write across genres, as I do, when your autobiography of a river feels like the truest book you've ever written (the angriest, the most beseeching, the least afraid of either beauty or despair, the most unprotected and therefore the most vulnerable), you engage with Shields, you talk to him in your head, saying:  Yes, this is so.  No, not quite so much.  Or, Are you perhaps dangerously close to exhibitionism with your extremism, even if (I admit) this extremism is engaging?  And, Will you be offended if I thank you for this late-in-the-book chapter called DS, where it is you and only you straight for a couple of pages, you getting (unassisted) to your heart of things, your unmediated why of things, though I recognize, I obviously do, that appropriation and plagiarism are your method here, your trump card, your manifesto, your heart?

What does, indeed, offend Shields?  Boring does.  Boring gets him big.  Conventional forms, conventional ideas, conventional courtesies—these would not survive in the land of Shields.  What Shields wants, in his own words, is found under section 457:  "So:  no more masters, no more masterpieces.  What I want (instead of God the novelist) is self-portrait in a convex mirror."

That is what Shields wants.  And you?

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