Washington Post critic Michael Dirda is depressed. After the election, he couldn’t understand “how to live in a nation governed and controlled by people that even Ayn Rand, let alone Edmund Burke, would despise.”
To cope, Dirda recommends literature: “There certainly will be much to engage serious writers – whether novelists, journalists, playwrights or poets – in the years ahead.”
That’s true, but great writers in the Trump years need to open up their eyes to take in all of America — not just echo the literary and coastal elite. They have to actually see the people who voted for President-elect Donald Trump instead of writing resentful novels about “authoritarianism” or dystopian science fiction about the end of the world — although they are free to do that as well.
To that end, a brilliant new book, Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, is being published this week. It explores how the novel has mirrored, challenged, and even changed the world over the last century. The best of the books author Edwin Frank explores are expansive and open-minded. They are as vast and beautiful and curious as America, and the world, itself.
Frank is a legendary editor at the publishing company New York Review Books, and Stranger Than Fiction is an extraordinary, amazing work. Frank’s goal is not political: “I am interested not in what books prove, one way or another (and in the end it is surely nothing), but in their life on the ground and on the page, which is what I have tried to bring out.”
Rather, Frank is interested in how novelists in the 20th century sought to break free of the conventions of the 19th century, using new forms of language and expression to chart the subconscious, as well as address the horrors and social change of the 20th century. He writes, “Books like Lolita, Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, seek both to live up to and even outdo the spectacular precedent of the century’s early masterpieces while also trying to reckon with the scandal of the century’s history. That history becomes the overt subject of Elsa Morante’s no less prodigious History, while more concentrated books like Anna Banti’s Artemisia, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian.”
My favorite writer Frank’s book explores is Saul Bellow, author of Herzog, The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, and other masterpieces. Bellow also wrote a notorious novel in 1970 called Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Disgusted with the radicalism of the time, Mr. Sammler is a precursor to the commonsense American who would emerge decades later to vote for Trump.
“New York,” Bellow writes, “makes one think about the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world … with disintegration, with crazy streets, filthy nightmares, monstrosities come to life, addicts, drunkards, and perverts celebrating their despair openly in Midtown.”
Still, under Trump, novelists shouldn’t feel they have to be either too angry or too optimistic. Just capture the triumphs, scandals, humor, spirit, and craziness that have always been a part of America.
In a famous 1989 essay, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beasts,” Tom Wolfe, author of the novel The Bonfire of the Vanities and great pro-American nonfiction works such as The Right Stuff, criticized American novelists for shrinking from the vast, hilarious, romantic, crazy and beautiful subject of America herself. Too many writers were navel-gazing or producing works full of literary tricks that nonetheless missed the drama and excitement of life here.
“America today,” Wolfe wrote, “in a headlong rush of her own, may or may not truly need a literature worthy of her vastness. But American novelists, without any doubt, truly need, in this neurasthenic hour, the spirit to go along for that wild ride.”
In Stranger Than Fiction, Frank beautifully sums up Bellow’s early and best work: “In the great interior, where the great city of Chicago sits on the shore of the Great Lakes at the edge of the Great Plains, the great theme is trumpeted, America, but not pompously and without a trace of philistine narrowness—no, as an occasion of passionate inquiry and dazzled discovery, of adventure.”
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In The Adventures of Augie March, Bellow “looked back to fine American feats of the imagination like Huck Finn, while the mix of up-to-date lowlife detail and highbrow allusion, and of course the unapologetic Jewishness of the book, making nice neither to the American mainstream nor the immigrant enclave, gave the book an inclusiveness that, at this postwar, post-Holocaust moment, exemplified everything America had to offer. … The book was—another defining American quality—athletic, optimistic, and soulful.”
Athletic, optimistic, and soulful. That’s America, and that’s the stuff of great literature.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.