Fiction in a Preeminent Reality

Young Adult fiction almost always has a simple theme. The hero or heroine is slowly unveiled as a unique and salutary figure, special by birth or heritage, and ideally suited to save the world. Their coming of age is a progression of minor crises, often spread out over multiple volumes, and the reader identifies herself with the protagonist thus lifting her thoughts from the humdrum life of school and social expectations that crowd in from daily life. It is escapism in the most earnest sense, but it is also a form of narcissistic manipulation through fantasy and play. Think of Harry Potter, the Twilight books, the Lightning Thief, Katniss. There isn’t anything to learn as the characters pinball around and the onion’s layers are peeled back to reveal the primary conflict that is finally resolved with a grand confrontation. It’s anesthetizing in the grandiose fulfillment of teenage hopes for being desired and special. And it sells and sells, and with plenty of merch, too.

Literary adult fiction can have a similar anesthetic effect. In this case there is the solemn effort to draw out characterization until the reader identifies parts of themselves in the personas. Katy Waldman at The New Yorker takes on the du jour authors Naoise Dolan and Sally Rooney, both earnest young Irish writers claimed to represent the souls of millennials, in a recent review of Dolan’s Exciting Times. But the books come across as dull counterpoint to YA fiction in most ways. Where Harry Potter is on a journey to confront his familial nemesis, this literature has characters nodding to class struggle while “reflexively” (per Waldman) engaging in self-awareness about that struggle. There is no revolution going on because these bourgeois women and men are rebelling only cognitively to the Sturm und Drang of crusty Hong Kong life. They like their worlds but passively cerebrate that it may be somehow wrong, and the smart millennial reader, raised on the chaste lusts of Twilight, sees herself amongst the purses and excursions into bisexuality as sliding against a gentler edge of transgression that just takes a mild shower to wash away. Or to set aside the book and return to daily life.

Meanwhile, we have the wonderfully creative writer/filmmaker Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, Synedoche) publishing his first novel, Antkind, that ranges freely over a fantastical landscape in pursuit of the most obscure film imaginable. Critical reviews have ranged from vague uncertainty to a lament of irritation at the formless nature of the undertaking. I get bad reviews, too. Opinions vary, as I like to say, and the reviewer’s job is to find a hook by which to form an argument about the worth or value of the product. The critic, like Kaufman’s B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, brings a collection of experiences to the game and then tries to fashion an intellectual framework around it. The thing must be justified in its existence and the motives of the author must be unraveled. There must be depth there, otherwise why write such a thing of inexplicable complications?

That reality is currently preeminent, in politics, in social change, and in revealing traditions as structural systems of oppression, may be the reason why fiction feels inert and unfocused right now. Fantasy, whether teenage hopes and longings, or the kinds encoded in millennial adult literature loaded down with constant self-examination, must feel more hollow than this complex maze of existential threats, lockdowns, riots, legalities, beaming conmen, competing moneyed interests, and diffused references to economic and social movements. Things aren’t just drifting along, but are crackling with the frisson of an anticipatory unknown. Fiction, streaming TV, and movies are now, perhaps more than ever recently, truly just distractions against this unraveling uncertainty. I may read Antkind, but I religiously read The Washington Post.

So I rarely see deep novelty in these offerings. Kaufman’s book strikes me as a rebellion against novelistic expectations, but that rebellion has been done hundreds of times before. But maybe he brings new grace to the effort that distinguishes it from Philip Dick or Pynchon or Calvino or Borges or Amis. I’ll know more if I crack it. Meanwhile, we get Lovecraft Country on HBO that hints somehow at HP’s infamous racism yet never lays it bare, stealing the name with little of the alien sensibilities. But we are still outsiders trying to infiltrate into the writer or director or character’s senses of time, place, and conflict. That hasn’t changed in music, writing, or video/film. Well, except in the case of video games, I suppose, and role playing ones as well.

I still insist that as artists we need to go in new directions, whether through interactivity or themes or character development. Not some psychedelic randomization like Kaufman, nor cataloging the banality of consumerism, or the failing bodies of old men, but something completely different. When I recently read about the quantum physics of magnetism in materials or the recent proof that MIP* = RE, I saw again how deep intellectual effort can really carry us. Fiction rarely does that. What’s missing?