A friend sent me a wonderful essay by Zadie Smith about why there are so few “great” novels published, and I’ve been crunching on it for a week now.
The part that struck me the most was the following:
Great styles represent the interface of “world” and “I”, and the very notion of such an interface being different in kind and quality from your own is where the power of fiction resides. Writers fail us when that interface is tailored to our needs, when it panders to the generalities of its day, when it offers us a world it knows we will accept having already seen it on the television. Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry – we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing – great writing forces you to submit to its vision. You spend the morning reading Chekhov and in the afternoon, walking through your neighbourhood, the world has turned Chekhovian; the waitress in the cafe offers a non- sequitur, a dog dances in the street.
I post this mostly because this is what I attempted to do with World Leader Pretend. I set out to write a book whose reality was a tad bit unreal. My first review was bad (It was very typical New York snark–I won’t do it the dignity of a link) but what was strange about it, was that what the reviewer disliked about the book was precisely the thing I was trying to accomplish. The reviewer called the book “messy,” to which I say YES! ABSOLUTELY! SO REFRESHINGLY MESSY! The reviewer called the characters “schematic,” to which I say YES! A GOOD WORD! THE MAIN CHARACTER SEES THE WORLD IN MATH AND SO THE BOOK’S WORLD IS THAT WAY TOO!
I seemed to have gotten the reviewer to “submit to my vision.” So in a way, I accomplished one of the supposed goals of great fiction. The only problem is that the reviewer didn’t think much of my vision…