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.
There is this interview where Louise Glück talks about how she had an eating disorder as a young person, because she wanted to disappear and burn off everything not essential. It’s haunting!
This! As a mom/wife, I have this Melissa Broder type impulse to be like, behold, I am a tall woman never not doing laundry, but as somebody with cyclical mood stuff going on, the impulse to render character and setting meaningless feels suicidal, like when I took the posters off the wall at the same time I stopped eating for a bit in college. Maybe because I'm also from Alabama, character still seems really important? People are expected to have more going on in the affect department than in these novels, and there is more variety in both external and internal spaces.
This is also explicit in the work of this micro-genre's godmother (Chris Kraus). From Aliens and Anorexia: "To question food is to question everything. To question food is to recognize the impossibility of 'home'"
I got obsessed with Simone Weil in college and for some reason she's shotgunned through a lot of this (Kraus: makes a book about her; Heti: claims Motherhood was going to be a book about her; Nunez: names a book after a quote from her; Taubes: wrote a dissertation on her). An obvious strong irony to Weil and the fiction she inspired: a revolt against identity so strident it loops back into personality.
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.
I've given the gendered aspect a lot of thought, but I can't figure out if it seems gendered to me because it -is- gendered or if it seems gendered to me because...I mostly read women, haha. I think it's significant that a lot of the precursors of the style are male, and there are certainly male writers who write this way about these themes, but I am certain there is a gendered aspect as well. Because how could there not be. And thank you for the kind words about Lionel. I haven't read Milkman tho it's on the ever-towering list.
Just thinking out loud on Rooney. Your point about their intimacy being the space they inhabit is a really good one, it's the only real sense of place one has, most specifically in Normal People. But in light of that, and how often her prose is described as "spare," it's interesting how the series adaptation received massive acclaim for being so completely atmospheric. The light, the sounds, the physical appearance of the characters themselves...a very precise mood that was somehow both always and never present in the writing.
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!
And reading below, i agree, there is something weirdly cyclical here, first wave feminism rejected sex as the only route to power, now women are so numbed by neoliberalism it feels like sex ( and, note, self hating sex often) is the only route to create movement from the tableau. See also btw Promising Young Woman
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."
Every writer I cite in this newsletter is a writer I admire deeply and fully. This is a kind of wild misread of my intentions and of this piece, and real yikes behavior on your part.
If you do not like this newsletter, then you do not have to read it. But for me, this newsletter is a space to think through the things I am reading and to figure out what kind of art I respond to and want to make. There is nothing uncharitable in this piece of writing. And I am far from parsimonious. I cite writers whose work influences my thinking because that is how it should be. I quote them because I am not a thief and I do not steal people's work. If you think it's evasive, that's up to you, pal. Go start your own newsletter. They are free.
hello, Brandon. A friend suggested your writing and I'm glad she did, but she also added that you hate/dislike Cusk, though here above you say every writer you have mentioned you admire. Including Cusk too?
Every writer chooses how to make a point, wage their battle against whichever targets they so choose to take aim at: the means and style they employ to do this—whether direct or subtle--are entirely up to them.
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.
I love IKEA and also, your brother sounds like he was an absolute gem. <3
IKEA is a challenge for the ADHD set ... and yes, he was a gem!
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.
There is this interview where Louise Glück talks about how she had an eating disorder as a young person, because she wanted to disappear and burn off everything not essential. It’s haunting!
Wow. Yes.
I am also having so many thoughts about domestic labor but need to get back to work this morning!
This! As a mom/wife, I have this Melissa Broder type impulse to be like, behold, I am a tall woman never not doing laundry, but as somebody with cyclical mood stuff going on, the impulse to render character and setting meaningless feels suicidal, like when I took the posters off the wall at the same time I stopped eating for a bit in college. Maybe because I'm also from Alabama, character still seems really important? People are expected to have more going on in the affect department than in these novels, and there is more variety in both external and internal spaces.
You hit the nail on the head for me. From southern Appalachia. If character and setting don’t matter. . .
This is also explicit in the work of this micro-genre's godmother (Chris Kraus). From Aliens and Anorexia: "To question food is to question everything. To question food is to recognize the impossibility of 'home'"
Wow!!!
I got obsessed with Simone Weil in college and for some reason she's shotgunned through a lot of this (Kraus: makes a book about her; Heti: claims Motherhood was going to be a book about her; Nunez: names a book after a quote from her; Taubes: wrote a dissertation on her). An obvious strong irony to Weil and the fiction she inspired: a revolt against identity so strident it loops back into personality.
Yessss
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.
I've given the gendered aspect a lot of thought, but I can't figure out if it seems gendered to me because it -is- gendered or if it seems gendered to me because...I mostly read women, haha. I think it's significant that a lot of the precursors of the style are male, and there are certainly male writers who write this way about these themes, but I am certain there is a gendered aspect as well. Because how could there not be. And thank you for the kind words about Lionel. I haven't read Milkman tho it's on the ever-towering list.
Just thinking out loud on Rooney. Your point about their intimacy being the space they inhabit is a really good one, it's the only real sense of place one has, most specifically in Normal People. But in light of that, and how often her prose is described as "spare," it's interesting how the series adaptation received massive acclaim for being so completely atmospheric. The light, the sounds, the physical appearance of the characters themselves...a very precise mood that was somehow both always and never present in the writing.
This is why frankly the adaptation is so much more appealing than the novel
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!
And reading below, i agree, there is something weirdly cyclical here, first wave feminism rejected sex as the only route to power, now women are so numbed by neoliberalism it feels like sex ( and, note, self hating sex often) is the only route to create movement from the tableau. See also btw Promising Young Woman
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.
I hope you do write again! This essay got me fired-up too--just wrote 2 short chapters. As you say, write for the joy of it., that's the ticket.
thank you!
THIS. (also, this: killyourdarlings.com.au/article/so-much-this-the-sameness-of-internet-culture/)
oh this is a vibe, ty
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!
Haha, a kind reader pointed this out over email--I don't know what happened there, total brain glitch.
I mean their powers combined would create an unstoppable force, and I'm here for it
I do love your comment tho because, lol, you are 100000% about Mantel also working, haha.
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."
Every writer I cite in this newsletter is a writer I admire deeply and fully. This is a kind of wild misread of my intentions and of this piece, and real yikes behavior on your part.
If you do not like this newsletter, then you do not have to read it. But for me, this newsletter is a space to think through the things I am reading and to figure out what kind of art I respond to and want to make. There is nothing uncharitable in this piece of writing. And I am far from parsimonious. I cite writers whose work influences my thinking because that is how it should be. I quote them because I am not a thief and I do not steal people's work. If you think it's evasive, that's up to you, pal. Go start your own newsletter. They are free.
hello, Brandon. A friend suggested your writing and I'm glad she did, but she also added that you hate/dislike Cusk, though here above you say every writer you have mentioned you admire. Including Cusk too?
Project much?
Every writer chooses how to make a point, wage their battle against whichever targets they so choose to take aim at: the means and style they employ to do this—whether direct or subtle--are entirely up to them.