On Being Told No, or, The State of the Sentence

I've thought much of late—been forced to think—about rejection. Literary, not romantic. I'm writing here now, not—I hope— to indulge my considerable self-pity on that score, but to—God, help agnostic me—transcend it. I've been thinking, too, about faith, about what it means to be faithful or faithless. I am a faithful wife, and daughter, and friend. But I lose faith too easily, suspect things will go to rot, I do not have faith that the ceiling above me will hold as I sleep in the night.

The two equal and opposing impulses of rejection: first, that one has been deluding one's self that one could ever truly be regarded as a writer (that precarious line between spending one's days writing and being a writer), or make one's living—however modest—thus, that one is mediocre at best, just not good enough; and second, that those who do manage to live and work and call themselves writers are hacks, that the people who publish and reward such hackery have become inured to cliche, to poor writing, and would not know a finely wrought sentence if it snipped them on the beak.

Neither impulse is attractive; both are irrational. And somehow these contrasting lines of thought—equally destructive—are not mutually exclusive. Like so much meanness, they each survive one another intact, pristine. The result is doubt, loathing—self, and otherwise, bitterness, resentment, torpor, and a general waning of the very thing one loves so deeply, one's former solace—books. I am writing here to rail against that waning of love, to force myself to keep faith at least with the sentence.

I've called this blog Monk's House as an homage to Virginia Woolf, who, with her husband, Leonard, started a small press in Hogarth House, where they lived on the outskirts of London. The Hogarth Press published books by Virginia and many of her Bloomsbury set (E.M. Forster, Roger Fry), her lover (Vita Sackville-West), her friends and rivals (Katherine Mansfield), that were beautifully illustrated by her sister, Vanessa Bell. They published English translations of Freud's work, too, and—how I love this detail—when the revered analyst met the revered writer in London, he presented her with the gift of a narcissus.



No delusions of that magnitude here—I am not Woolf. But if it comes to pass that to see my novels see print I must start my own press, I'd like to imagine I might do that, and call that press Monk's House, named for the Woolves cottage in Sussex, where they lived happily and unhappily, and from which sanctuary Virginia walked to the River Ouse gathering stones for her pockets.

This blog will be nothing if not melodramatic.

Of course, too, reading and writing are monkish pursuits, and here will be a devoted home to them.

In a recent interview in The Paris Review, the formidably smart and monkish Marilynne Robinson says, "In this culture, essays are often written for the sake of writing the essay. Someone finds a quibble of potential interest and quibbles about it." She goes on to explore her own reason for writing essays: "When I notice something that seems like an anomaly to me, I try to sort it out. It's an impulse. I think, Gee, this might lead me to refurnish my mind in a certain way." As usual, I feel chastened by Robinson. Reading her—in prose, and speech—is like a gentle flogging of one's flaccid brain. I think I might like essays that "quibble about" things more than she does, so long as the quibbler is idiosyncratic enough in his thinking and dexterous enough in his sentences. But I will borrow her "impulse" (I could benefit from new impulses), and take her lovely phrasing as a charge: I should try to refurnish my mind.

Few write the sentence as well as Robinson in the English language today. But one writer who does, I think, is Joseph O'Neill. This spring I heard O'Neill read from his novel, Netherland, and speak about coming to a point in the writing of the book after several years of work where he thought the whole enterprise a failure. He was away, at a cabin somewhere remote, and decided that if he could no longer write, he could at least read, and at a bookstore nearby he came across Robinson's Housekeeping. O'Neill acknowledged to his New York audience that his own novel was a very different book, but said that reading Housekeeping was what allowed him to see that the novel could go as slowly as one wanted, and with that discovery he began to rewrite the second half of Netherland, with less plotting, and fewer characters, letting the sentences build more slowly.

When I read Netherland, I also found it at a time of literary (though cabin-less) distress, and it was a discovery for me; I took such pleasure in those sentences. So, Zadie Smith's essay in the November 20 issue of The New York Review of Books, "Two Paths for the Novel," a kind of literary rumble she orchestrates between the effete novel of language (lyrical Realism), and the brawnier novel of ideas (the avant-garde), has made me miserable. (Her recent essay on Forster in those same pages brought me great joy, so what to make of it all?) I love Zadie Smith, and think her one of our best critics—so brainy, and so unpretentious; such a rare and wonderful combination. I also loved Netherland, and the mocking and dismissive tone Smith takes toward the novel ("And also: grapefruits?") gave me pause. I felt almost embarrassed, as though I'd been caught in the display of dubious aesthetic taste. Was I wrong in loving this book? A hopeless bourgeois with conventional preferences? Did I somehow miss all that silly stuff she cites about clouds?

Smith doesn't only criticize O'Neill. In particular, she praises the "anxiety" in the novel: "It's a credit to Netherland that it is so anxious. Most practitioners of lyrical Realism blithely continue on their merry road, with not a metaphysical care in the world, and few of them write as finely as Joseph O'Neill." Still, if I were choosing to be one of the two writers reviewed by Smith in this rumble, I'd choose to be the other, who comes off looking much hipper, cleverer, more original, and funnier—Tom McCarthy, author of the novel Remainder. In "Two Paths for the Novel," McCarthy's path is the ironic ill-fitting suit you might see a rock star wear, tight and short and slim-tied; Netherland's path is of the dreaded pleated pants.

Whereas in O'Neill's novel, "personal things are so relentlessly aestheticized," and "the world is covered in language," McCarthy's "is not filled with pretty quotes," or even a protagonist. Rather, there is an "enactor," who becomes a "re-enactor." Beyond ideas, we are in the robust and daunting land of theory. McCarthy has called himself the general secretary of the International Necronautical Society, and in that capacity issued, "The Joint Statement of Inauthenticity." Inauthenticity, I gather from Smith's retelling, is style. As she puts it, "while Dorian Gray projects his perfect image into the world, Necronauts keep faith with the 'rotting flesh-assemblage hanging in his attic.'"

I have no quarrel with McCarthy, or rotting flesh-assemblages. Smith, in her intelligent praise, makes a compelling case for Remainder. But in identifying O'Neill as the apotheosis of lyrical Realism, that long line of "literary language" knotted first by Flaubert and Balzac, and then pronouncing his book inferior due to its lack of theoretical underpinnings—McCarthy's standards—Smith seems to me unfair. She ends by comparing both authors on cricket (for both the sport is a metaphor, one for life, the other for death), and the comparison seems forced.

More, I do quarrel with her final analysis that "The literary economy sets up its stall on the road that leads to Netherland, along which one might wave to Jane Austen, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Yates, Saul Bellow. Rarely has it been less aware (or less interested) in seeing what's new on the route to Remainder."

From my perspective, publishers are in fact more and more interested in novels of ideas, or theories, and more suspicious of books filled with slow-building, beautiful sentences, books in corporate-speak called, patronizingly, "small," and "quiet" (the image of a homely and sad lady librarian forms in the mind). I worry about the fate of the sentence—the kind of sentence that can make you care about things you never cared for before. Cricket, say. Unlike Smith, who argues "that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition," I read Netherland and thought, why does no one write like this? And by like this, I suppose I meant, this well. As I read Netherland, I did not wave to those comforting old ill-panted friends. Rather, I found myself seeing familiar places—New York City, my home—anew. James Wood writes of this way in which great fiction defamiliarizes our world, and this is what O'Neill's descriptions did for me. Smith questions, "do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really realism?" I don't know if it's realism, or what realism in the novel is. But I do know I do not go to literature to see my own sense of selfhood reflected back to me. I go to see something in a different way—to refurnish my mind. Maybe even to see taxi cabs as sudden grapefruits.

Or does it come back to the narcissus? Maybe it's as Paul Valery said and all theory is autobiography. Maybe I see a prejudice against novels of language, against sentences, because the only thing of which I can be sure is that I have written a novel with some fine sentences, and I fear it will never be published. And maybe Smith in quarreling with Netherland is quarreling in part with James Wood, from whom she has famously diverged before, and who ecstatically reviewed O'Neill in the pages of The New Yorker.

But let us not waste time damning one style, or lack of style, in praise of another. It was Smith who in October 2001, wrote in response to Wood's accusations of 'hysterical realism' in The Guardian, "literature is—or should be—a broad church." Yes—more faith, not less. Let our tastes be more catholic, lest we risk tearing down the whole bloody world of fiction to stake out our ever narrower paths. We need more good novels, whichever sort they be.