There's a lot here I love for many reasons, and I must say that the conclusion is especially satisfying because, indeed, "we’re all doing everything all the time and the only thing that changes is what five or ten culture writers in New York choose to call the moment." MOOD.
I love eavesdropping on you thinking Brandon ... the "character vapor" novels are not pour moi, but one small good thing about getting older is how little one cares. However, your parsing of such things is so smart, and gives me a frame to understand why that is not my thing, and why my thing is my thing, and as such, is deeply useful. Thanks.
I also love the idea of Ikea as a space of empty tableau, because my actual experience there is my dear late brother hissing "This probably works in *Sweden*, where people are *polite*" before insisting we leave.
This was just fascinating. These essays always feel like an invitation to spend half an hour in your head, where there is so much being considered, re-considered, second-guessed, projected. This piece was no different.
I was particularly excited by the way you pulled apart the premise of 'writer's manifesto' instead of simply doing one, in a way that reminded me of one of Zadie's essays in 'Intimations' last year, perhaps thanks to your James Wood/HR reference... and I agree that his terminology should get so much more flak than it did/does.
(Unrelated side-note: Brandon, I just DMed you something on IG as I didn't know the best channel to get in touch with you!)
This was the perfect set of thoughts to read this morning as I sat down to brood over houses as characters and reflections. 'A future for the novel in which we might no longer need characters, and, by extension, all of their crap' made me think of the Jules Feiffer character in Tantrum who is trying to make her body disappear. By starving herself, breaking her own bones.
Thank you so much for these thoughts. Is there a gendered aspect to all this? E.g. in Cusk's work, the idea of being a vessel, the idea of expressing character through witnessing / being a listening ear, etc, reminds me of what Woolf did with Mrs Ramsay in 'To the Lighthouse'. There's something potentially powerful about Faye's witnessing/receiving/recording, despite the lack of overt self-expression. That kind of presence/witnessing/receiving is something mothers have often been expected to provide…
In Sally Rooney, it often seems to me like sex is THE emotional expression in the otherwise IKEA-like space - desire is where her characters live? This makes me wonder if 'millennial' novels might be more romantic than you're suggesting - does intimacy offer, if not quite redemption, connection? None of the characters in 'Conversations With Friends' seem to like each other (the title being ironic as they aren't really friends), so seem to turn to desire for all their emotional needs - a world with attraction, but otherwise no real platonic support or affection.
I also (sorry if this is super annoying) wonder if you've read Anna Burns' 'Milkman' - though she feels in some ways close to the novelists you mention, she writes very fully-realised characters and conflicts that might converse with what you're doing in your fiction. I read Filthy Animals recently and loved Lionel very much.
Cusk was so scolded for her memoirs; she figured out how to sidestep ad hominem criticisms, I think; by making the idea of a self uninteresting compared to other aspects of the Trilogy. A character wrestling with their own self is hard to do well when we all know so very much. This essay is wonderful, thank you.
I was pointed at this and it's absolutely dead on. Ive been moaning about how everything I read feeling like the bastard children of Sally Rooney, always millennial women seized with a passivity, a lack of affect, a lack of agency I want to shake out of them. I now see sadly this is a wider phenomenon (and as you say it explans why so many people I know are finding genre far more satisfying than lit. I myself just took 3 of these books on holiday abd turned in desperation to YA sf for yeh, movement, life, moral agency, narrative .) But an outbreak of cloud atlases sounds like a fine event! Bring it on!
It's been 4 or 5 years since I last wrote fiction in grad school and so much of the writing I did then was born out of anger and rage and the desire to be adversarial because the school was overflowing in misogyny. I wrote a lot of vapor, dust, Ikea stories that were intense flashes of images created to make people uncomfortable. They were, at best, well-written and very pretty objects that made a few others feel that moment of "I'm seen." But nothing more. I remember a man telling me my perspective was "too female" in workshop, so the next set of stories were just an Ikea litany of "girlhood" stories- vibrant and dripping in hurt and silliness. A lot of joy in writing got sucked out by that habit and yeah I haven't written fiction in 4-5 years now.
I've been thinking about writing again and I love these newsletters because I feel like they're challenging me to think about wtf I was trying to do in the past and wtf I want to do now.
This is wonderful & wonderfully smart; thanks for it. Just what I need as I wrestle through revision of my queer, 1990s, Park Slope (pre-glam) novel here at a wonderful residency, having just discovered the book has become, weirdly enough, historical fiction.
Thanks for a great essay that hit home with me. I have enjoyed reading a couple of these novels, but when I’m done, nothing sticks. No characters or scenes stay in my head. My experience has not been expanded. Now I know why. I sometimes worry that as a reader and fiction writer, I’m too old-school. To hell with that! Dylan’s song Desolation Row was a bummer, but unlike these types of novels, it was compelling and full of drama and meaning.
"There is this slowly congealing idea that it is morally and aesthetically sufficient to merely recreate the alienating torpor of having one’s life organized ruthlessly and brutally by capitalism."
What a great insight. This pinpoints a lot of frustrations I've had with recent art.
All of these tenuously connected thoughts, all of these references to other critics and philosophers and thinkers, all this evasiveness to avoid saying directly what is obvious, and what has been obvious to anybody who has read any entry in this newsletter with the repeated contempt that bubbles up to the surface when other novels and authors are discussed: "These writers are incompetent, (and now immoral, apparently), I am better than them, why does the ~literary establishment~ shower them with the praise that I so obviously and richly deserve? I follow all the rules and dot my Is and cross my Ts but these cheats get away with not even using quotation marks."
There's a lot here I love for many reasons, and I must say that the conclusion is especially satisfying because, indeed, "we’re all doing everything all the time and the only thing that changes is what five or ten culture writers in New York choose to call the moment." MOOD.
I love eavesdropping on you thinking Brandon ... the "character vapor" novels are not pour moi, but one small good thing about getting older is how little one cares. However, your parsing of such things is so smart, and gives me a frame to understand why that is not my thing, and why my thing is my thing, and as such, is deeply useful. Thanks.
I also love the idea of Ikea as a space of empty tableau, because my actual experience there is my dear late brother hissing "This probably works in *Sweden*, where people are *polite*" before insisting we leave.
This was just fascinating. These essays always feel like an invitation to spend half an hour in your head, where there is so much being considered, re-considered, second-guessed, projected. This piece was no different.
I was particularly excited by the way you pulled apart the premise of 'writer's manifesto' instead of simply doing one, in a way that reminded me of one of Zadie's essays in 'Intimations' last year, perhaps thanks to your James Wood/HR reference... and I agree that his terminology should get so much more flak than it did/does.
(Unrelated side-note: Brandon, I just DMed you something on IG as I didn't know the best channel to get in touch with you!)
This was the perfect set of thoughts to read this morning as I sat down to brood over houses as characters and reflections. 'A future for the novel in which we might no longer need characters, and, by extension, all of their crap' made me think of the Jules Feiffer character in Tantrum who is trying to make her body disappear. By starving herself, breaking her own bones.
Thank you so much for these thoughts. Is there a gendered aspect to all this? E.g. in Cusk's work, the idea of being a vessel, the idea of expressing character through witnessing / being a listening ear, etc, reminds me of what Woolf did with Mrs Ramsay in 'To the Lighthouse'. There's something potentially powerful about Faye's witnessing/receiving/recording, despite the lack of overt self-expression. That kind of presence/witnessing/receiving is something mothers have often been expected to provide…
In Sally Rooney, it often seems to me like sex is THE emotional expression in the otherwise IKEA-like space - desire is where her characters live? This makes me wonder if 'millennial' novels might be more romantic than you're suggesting - does intimacy offer, if not quite redemption, connection? None of the characters in 'Conversations With Friends' seem to like each other (the title being ironic as they aren't really friends), so seem to turn to desire for all their emotional needs - a world with attraction, but otherwise no real platonic support or affection.
I also (sorry if this is super annoying) wonder if you've read Anna Burns' 'Milkman' - though she feels in some ways close to the novelists you mention, she writes very fully-realised characters and conflicts that might converse with what you're doing in your fiction. I read Filthy Animals recently and loved Lionel very much.
Cusk was so scolded for her memoirs; she figured out how to sidestep ad hominem criticisms, I think; by making the idea of a self uninteresting compared to other aspects of the Trilogy. A character wrestling with their own self is hard to do well when we all know so very much. This essay is wonderful, thank you.
love love love
I was pointed at this and it's absolutely dead on. Ive been moaning about how everything I read feeling like the bastard children of Sally Rooney, always millennial women seized with a passivity, a lack of affect, a lack of agency I want to shake out of them. I now see sadly this is a wider phenomenon (and as you say it explans why so many people I know are finding genre far more satisfying than lit. I myself just took 3 of these books on holiday abd turned in desperation to YA sf for yeh, movement, life, moral agency, narrative .) But an outbreak of cloud atlases sounds like a fine event! Bring it on!
It's been 4 or 5 years since I last wrote fiction in grad school and so much of the writing I did then was born out of anger and rage and the desire to be adversarial because the school was overflowing in misogyny. I wrote a lot of vapor, dust, Ikea stories that were intense flashes of images created to make people uncomfortable. They were, at best, well-written and very pretty objects that made a few others feel that moment of "I'm seen." But nothing more. I remember a man telling me my perspective was "too female" in workshop, so the next set of stories were just an Ikea litany of "girlhood" stories- vibrant and dripping in hurt and silliness. A lot of joy in writing got sucked out by that habit and yeah I haven't written fiction in 4-5 years now.
I've been thinking about writing again and I love these newsletters because I feel like they're challenging me to think about wtf I was trying to do in the past and wtf I want to do now.
thank you!
THIS. (also, this: killyourdarlings.com.au/article/so-much-this-the-sameness-of-internet-culture/)
This is wonderful & wonderfully smart; thanks for it. Just what I need as I wrestle through revision of my queer, 1990s, Park Slope (pre-glam) novel here at a wonderful residency, having just discovered the book has become, weirdly enough, historical fiction.
Emily St John Mandel? Hilary Mantel? They both sort of work in context!
Thanks for a great essay that hit home with me. I have enjoyed reading a couple of these novels, but when I’m done, nothing sticks. No characters or scenes stay in my head. My experience has not been expanded. Now I know why. I sometimes worry that as a reader and fiction writer, I’m too old-school. To hell with that! Dylan’s song Desolation Row was a bummer, but unlike these types of novels, it was compelling and full of drama and meaning.
"There is this slowly congealing idea that it is morally and aesthetically sufficient to merely recreate the alienating torpor of having one’s life organized ruthlessly and brutally by capitalism."
What a great insight. This pinpoints a lot of frustrations I've had with recent art.
All of these tenuously connected thoughts, all of these references to other critics and philosophers and thinkers, all this evasiveness to avoid saying directly what is obvious, and what has been obvious to anybody who has read any entry in this newsletter with the repeated contempt that bubbles up to the surface when other novels and authors are discussed: "These writers are incompetent, (and now immoral, apparently), I am better than them, why does the ~literary establishment~ shower them with the praise that I so obviously and richly deserve? I follow all the rules and dot my Is and cross my Ts but these cheats get away with not even using quotation marks."