I Write Abnormal Fiction for Abnormal Times

I have come to use the phrase the civilizational novel for fiction in which the forces of civilization enter the lives of the characters and help make them who they are. I use the term loosely. Class and money enter the self, along with religion, war, institutions, technology, race, ideology and history.

The lineage is old. Dickens tied individual suffering to the economic world that produced it. In George Eliot, marriage and ambition exist inside money, inheritance and social rank. Tolstoy widened the field until private lives occupied the same novel as history and war. Dostoevsky let belief and political ideas get so far inside people that ideas became action. Many nineteenth-century novels had room for this scale. In them, the human being existed inside the world that had made him.

Modernism went deeply into consciousness, though Woolf and Joyce still carried the city, class, sex and history into the mind. A great deal of postwar American literary fiction moved further inward. I sometimes think of The Catcher in the Rye as a marker. Holden Caulfield gives us a world almost entirely through Holden Caulfield. That inwardness also fit increasingly well with the way fiction came to be taught. Ellison, Morrison, DeLillo, Rushdie and others kept writing at a larger social scale, but that kind of novel became one current among many.

I tend to think material conditions eventually produce the forms those conditions can sustain. A workshop has a teacher, a cohort of writers, a limited number of weeks and only so many pages everyone can read. The room favors work that can be read in a sitting, along with excerpts from longer work. Point of view, voice, dialogue, style and the construction of a scene can all be examined there.

Four hundred pages of causal architecture create another problem. In Lord Atlas, a joke written in one character’s bedroom becomes an ideology, acquires money and followers, passes through institutions, enters the life of a man who had nothing to do with its creation and eventually kills his son. No twenty-page excerpt contains that movement. A workshop can teach the mechanics of being a soldier. The civilizational novelist has to think like a general, across movements far apart, institutions that connect strangers, causes that take years to arrive and consequences no single scene can hold. We train stylists very well.

A publisher looking at five hundred pages sees another set of material pressures. The book costs more to produce and asks more time from everyone who has to read it. Sales and marketing still need to know where it belongs and what successful book it resembles. A famous writer brings a name the publisher already knows how to sell. A debut writer has the manuscript. It may cross satire, tragedy, politics, domestic life, history or technology because the world inside it requires those things. The marketplace still needs a quick answer to “What kind of book is this?”

AI has entered work and imagination while economic insecurity changes what people can picture for their own futures. A phone carries employers, markets, politics, surveillance, advertising and other people’s judgments into a pocket all day long. Power reaches consciousness through channels earlier novelists could hardly have imagined.

Much literary fiction still has a normalizing instinct. Familiar forms lower risk for institutions, and literary institutions live under the same material pressures as other institutions. Fiction can take an abnormal world and reduce it to recognizable private experience until the disturbance feels manageable again. I suspect some of the unsettledness around contemporary fiction comes from readers living under forces larger than themselves while encountering stories that keep returning them to the self. They want fiction that connects the private self to something beyond itself because their lives already do.

I suppose any creator decides what organizes their imagination. Some through psychology. Some through identity. Others through metaphysics. All creators are different. As for me, I see power. I see how my life has been shaped by power and by the structures of life I have been given, often more than by my individual choices. I see power working through individual lives, and I see how power works through the lives of the characters I create.

Isabel in The Narcissism of the Sacred lives inside class, Yale, family history and inherited power before she begins to understand what those forces have made of her. FERADIM reaches back thousands of years: Julian and Claire encounter an inherited story of power and each has to decide what to do with it. In 001-054, Whitman Kessler spends a lifetime resisting judgment and the categories other people use to define him. In Lord Atlas, Suzanne writes a joke that becomes Garrick’s ideology, and that ideology travels through money and institutions until it reaches Carson McCready and destroys the life he was trying to build.

Most entertainments, including much literary fiction, normalize the abnormal. We see it every day. Something impossible becomes familiar, then ordinary, then barely worth mentioning. Stories can help that process along. I resist it in my work. We live in abnormal times, and in one sense we always have; human beings have always been asked to live inside arrangements of power that eventually come to feel like the natural order of things. The novel has room to disturb that order. It can let the world press all the way into a life and then ask what happens when the person living that life begins to see it. There is no better place than the novel to upset the apple cart.