Saturday, March 24, 2007

What Keats said

A conversation between Janna Levin and Jonathan Lethem at Seed Magazine. (Many thanks to Maxine for the link.)

Here's Lethem, anyway, on the fiction-non-fiction divide:

Well, one of the underrated aspects of novels per se, one of the forms of pleasure that we readers derive from reading fiction that is least discussed in traditional literary criticism, is factual material. People thrive on finding great chunks of information on how the world works in their fiction. One of the great secrets to the crime drama is that readers are almost always inadvertently thrilling to descriptions of how, for instance, a bank operates. These are the sorts of things that ordinary novelists feel that they're not allowed to talk about or get interested in—they're supposed to be concerned with the emotional or psychological lives of their characters and would never stop to tell you at what hour the teller counts her drawer and moves it to the back of the bank. And yet we're all hungry for those pieces of information about our world. We're nourished, without even noticing it, by this genre that's devoted to telling us quite a lot about them.

Lots more good stuff too, go and have a look--I like reading this kind of thing, makes me itchy to write something really good (though I must say that the conversation itself is far more metaphysical than anything I'd like to be embroiled in)!

Mention of metaphysics reminds me that my favorite Irish philosophy PhD is reading in April at KGB, this is one that I'm going to totally clear the calendar for even though it's the dreaded Sunday-night scheduling which makes me crazy: here's the link, April 22 at 7pm. It's the Hard Case Crime lineup (too lazy to paste in links, but this should be fun): Ken Bruen and Jason Starr, who have authored a sequel to last year's collaborative neopulp experiment, Richard Aleas aka Charles Ardai, Peter Pavia and Max Phillips. That's excellent...

9 comments:

  1. That's one of the more substantial, useful, and undeniably true things I've heard anyone say about fiction in a while. Thanks.

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  2. Bruno, I'm not sure about this. I think it's a Good Thing that Lethem points to factual material as a source of readerly pleasure, but people read for so many different reasons that it's difficult to make such judgements generally. I, for one, am much more interested in the stylistic and aesthetic qualities of the prose. My classically-trained husband, on the other hand, recently complained to me about one of his rare forays into fiction, The Kite Runner, that too much of it took place in the States, without enough information about Afghanistan. (You can imagine, Jenny, why I don't give him my fantasy writing to read!) I suspect such pronouncements say more about Jonathan Lethem the writer than readers in general. And I'm not even convinced that a writer is the best person to analyse what readers do and need - too close to his own process, perhaps.

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  3. I think the point he was making--certainly the point I was reacting to--was that factual material is underrated as a source of readerly pleasure, not that it's essential for readerly pleasure. You dig?

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  4. Bruno, I didn't mean to imply that Lethem thinks factual material essential. I'm merely objecting to his generalisations: 'People thrive on finding great chunks...' or 'we're all hungry for those pieces of information...'

    I understood his point but felt it could have been made more precisely.

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  5. It is a transcribed interview, we cannot hold the poor guy to essayistic standards of accuracy!

    As a reader, I find it extremely true, though. Maybe now I'm grown up and know less about the world, a bit less so; but surely this explains why I read anything by, say, Tom Clancy... and it certainly touches on my longstanding obsession with the novels of Dick Francis. It is too bad it's not the 1960s, then I could do a demented analysis of style and information in crime fiction sort of in the spirit of Robbe-Grillet combined with Bourdieu combined with the French narratologists, it would be hilarious! I would have a very primitive computer program to help me analyze texts....

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  6. It would be interesting, Jenny, to compare it to the 'facts' of world-building in, say, SF.

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  7. Yes--I think it is often more gracefully woven in to the main narrative in crime fiction than SF--and of course more likely to be real-world fact, though not always (Neal Stephenson's an interesting case in point, eh?).

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  8. I must try Stephenson again. I must admit I found him almost unreadable, but this whole matter of factual material/world building is beginning to interest me more and more, also in light of my own alternate-world novel. And then of course there's someone like Richard Powers, who has no compunction whatsoever in filling his novels with information and more information. In Gain it's terribly interesting too to see how he develops the history of a fictitious chemicals company in painstaking detail, though I personally find it rather tedious sometimes. Perhaps, as I've already suggested, I'm just not one of those fact-loving readers? (Which is not by any means meant as a criticism of others.)

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  9. The flip side of Lethem's comment is that many readers find the frame of the crime novel, spy novel, etc., comforting. It's been often noticed that the beginning of a genre novel can be so much fun to read, but the ending is usually disappointing. It's hard to make good on the setup.

    Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with Lethem, just pointing out that this nonfictional info is most digestible when presented in this convenient form.

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