The critic James Wood appeared in this paper last Saturday aiming a hefty, well-timed kick at what he called "hysterical realism". It is a painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth and a few others he was sweet enough to mention. These are hysterical times; any novel that aims at hysteria will now be effortlessly outstripped - this was Wood's point, and I'm with him on it. In fact, I have agreed with him several times before, in public and in private, but I appreciate that he feared I needed extra warning; that I might be sitting in my Kilburn bunker planning some 700-page generational saga set on an incorporated McDonald's island north of Tonga. Actually, I am sitting here in my pants, looking at a blank screen, finding nothing funny, scared out of my mind like everybody else, smoking a family-sized pouch of Golden Virginia.
But to my surprise I find I do want to say a few quick things about that article, and about book stuff in general. The first is this: any collective term for a supposed literary movement is always too large a net, catching significant dolphins among so much cannable tuna. You cannot place first-time novelists with literary giants, New York hipsters with Kilburn losers, and some of the writers who got caught up with me are undeserving of the criticism. In particular, David Foster Wallace's mammoth beast Infinite Jest was heaved in as an exemplum, but it is five years old, and is a world away from his delicate, entirely "human" short stories and essays of the past two years, which shy away from the kind of totalising theoretical and thematic arcs that Wood was gunning for. If anyone has recently learned a lesson about the particularities of human existence and their separation from social systems, it is Wallace.
But even if this were not true, frankly, literature is - or should be - a broad church. Whatever the weaknesses of the various writers Wood mentioned, I don't believe he would wish for a literary landscape missing a book such as Rushdie's Midnight's Children or DeLillo's White Noise; the very books, in fact, which have cast such a tremendous shadow over two generations of American and English fiction. Yes, Jonathan Franzen's soon-to-turn-up The Corrections is a blatant attempt to redress that imbalance and return the intimate voice to a DeLilloesque structure, but I wonder if even that isn't an artificial project. I read Flaubert and Nabokov for the varicoloured intimacies of life; I read Zora Neale Hurston to hear the songs of love and earth, and I read White Noise to experience, yes, a Frankfurt school comedy, in which every boy, girl, man, woman, black, white, lesbian, Jew and Muslim speaks in exactly the same way: like DeLillo. When you pick up DeLillo, you know that's what's coming, just as when you pick up Carver you give up the hope of finding talking dogs or octagonal cheeses. So it goes. (For flippancy and short sentences, Vonnegut's your man.)
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can. When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life. And now, when I finish a long day of CNN-related fear and loathing mixed with eyeballing my own resolutely white screen, I do not crawl into bed with 500-page comic novels about (God help me, but it's OK; I'm going to call on the safety of quote marks) "multicultural" London. I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
Sick of sound of own voice. Sick of trying to make own voice appear on that white screen. Sick of trying to pretend, for sake of agent and family, that idea of putting words on blank page feels important. I think - I'm not sure, but I think - that I and other "comic" writers Wood mentioned in his article now have the most pointless jobs in the world. Even Posh Spice et al surely fall into the cheering-the-troops department. We are more like a useless irritation; the wrong words, the wrong time, the wrong medium. Obsessed with our knowledge when the last thing people want is the encyclopaedic. I cannot be the only writer who took to heart Pynchon's call to arms in Gravity's Rainbow, many years ago now: "We have to look for power sources here, and distribution networks we were never taught, routes of power our teachers never imagined, or were encouraged to avoid... We have to find meters whose scales are unknown in the world. Draw our own schematics, getting feedback, making connections, reducing the error, trying to learn the real function... zeroing in on what incalculable plot?"
Except... er... it turns out that the plot is horrendously simple. It has to do with things like faith. Revenge. Poverty. God. Hatred. So what now? Does anyone want to know the networks behind those seeming simplicities, the paths that lead from September 11 back to Saudi Arabia and Palestine, and then back to Israel, back further to the second world war, back once more to the first? Does anyone care what writers think about that? Does it help? Or shall we sing of love and drawing rooms and earth and children and all that is small and furry and wounded? Must we produce what you want, anyway? I have absolutely no idea.
But still I'm going to write. If only because Wood is right; there are still books that make me hopeful, because they function as human products in the greatest sense. Bellow's Seize the Day, Melville's "Bartleby", Nabokov's Pnin - works that stubbornly speak and resonate, even in these image-led, speechless times. But it is a trick of the light that makes us suppose these books exist in soulful opposition to more recent examples of "dialectical devilry". These books are works of high artifice, and there isn't a decent novel in this world that isn't; their humanity derives from their reverence for language, their precision, their intellect and, more than anything, from their humour.
It's all laughter in the dark - the title of a Nabokov novel and still the best term for the kind of writing I aspire to: not a division of head and heart, but the useful employment of both. And I could mention dozens of novels (I haven't been writing, but boy, I've been reading) that create a light in my head in between the news bulletins. Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich - a miniaturist tale of a bourgeois man dying a bourgeois death - every time I read it, I find my world put under an intense, unforgiving microscope. But how does it work? I want to dismantle it as if it were a clock, as if it had parts, mechanisms. I wonder if Wood will take that question, then, as a replacement for my earlier one. Not: how does this world work? But: how is this book made? How can I do this?
But he might see even that question as too intellectual in approach. I think Wood is hinting at an older idea that runs from Plato to the boys booming a car stereo outside my freaking window: soul is soul. It cannot be manufactured or schematised. It cannot be dragged kicking and screaming through improbable plots. It cannot be summoned by a fact or dismissed by a cliché. These are the famous claims made for "soul" and they lead with specious directness to an ancient wrestling match, invoked by Wood: the inviolability of "soul" versus the evils of self-consciousness and wise-assery, otherwise known as sophism.
Well, it's a familiar opposition, but it's not very helpful (it's also a belief Oprah shares, and you want to be careful which beliefs you share with Oprah). I wonder sometimes whether critics shouldn't be more like teachers, giving a gold star or a black cross, but either way accompanied by some kind of useful advice. Be more human? I sit in front of my white screen and I'm not sure what to do with that one. Are jokes inhuman? Are footnotes? Long words? Technical terms? Intellectual allusions? If I put some kids in, will that help?
I want to defend the future possibility of some words appearing on pages that will be equal to these times and to what I feel and what you feel and what James Wood feels; that is, this fear that has got us all by the throat. He argues against silence and against intellectual obfuscation. He says: tell us how it feels. Well, we are trying. I am trying. But as DeLillo dramatised (again, in White Noise), it is difficult to discuss feelings when the TV speaks so loudly; cries so operatically; seems always, in everything, one step ahead. Yet people continue to manage this awesome trick of wrestling sentiment away from TV's colonisation of all things soulful and human, and I would applaud all the youngish Americans - Franzen, Moody, Foster Wallace, Eggers, Moore - for their (supposedly) small but, to me, significant triumphs. They work to keep both sides of the equation - brain and heart - present in their fiction.
Even if you find them obtuse, they can rarely be accused of cliché, and that - as Amis has argued so well recently - is the place where everything dies. Cliché, generalisation, symbol (think "west", think "east"); all put a tongue to the lie of how people experience their worlds. And particularity is the enemy of cliché. But clichés are made so very quickly these days (already the London of White Teeth - "multicultural", "trendy" - is a kind of genre), and these writers will need their wits about them (yeah, and their hearts) if they are to outpace them. I truly hope they are not cowed by these renewed assaults on "clever writing", calls for the "death of irony", the "return of heart". There was always a great deal of "heart", of humanity, in these writers.
If I could choose one story to be printed alongside this article as demonstration, it would be Foster Wallace's "Forever Overhead", a 10-page effort that has come to obsess me quite as much as the miserable death of poor, terminally middle-class Ivan. In this story nothing much happens. Just a boy on his 13th birthday. A swimming pool. A hot day. But it has every moment of my childhood in it, probably every moment of yours. And in lines reminiscent of Larkin ("it is a machine that moves only forward") he makes the queue to a diving board the story of every human being's progress to self-consciousness, the blessing of it and the curse.
Sometimes it seems purely an American trick, this ability to draw the universe, as Carver and Fitzgerald did, into a circumscribed artificial, yet human, space. Sometimes I get depressed about that. Then I remember that in a slightly quieter way (in so far as no one goes for them in Saturday papers), we have our own intelligent, young "human" writers this side of the water - Toby Litt, Lawrence Norfolk, Diran Adebayo, Tibor Fischer - but whatever, whatever. Let's not descend into lists, which are always partial and tempered by friendships and past sexual favours. Let's just be careful with terms like "human" and "civilised"; let's be careful of equating either of those immediately with "soul" or "heart". This is not the time for easy slippage between nouns and adjectives.
Finally, I want to explain how I feel about that mocking white screen. September 11 has, as Wood suggested, made this problem more urgent and intractable. Most mornings I think: death of the novel? Yeah, sure, why not? The novel is not an immutable fact of human artistic life, after all, just a historically specific phenomenon that came and will go unless there are writers who have the heart, the brain and, crucially, the cojones to keep it alive.
Personally, I find myself more and more struck by controlled little gasps of prose, as opposed to the baggy novel. I admire the high reverence for the blank page shown by Kafka, Borges and Cortázar. Cortázar (recommended to me, actually, by Foster Wallace) writes as if every extra word is a sort of sacrilege. The instinct is almost religious, as if to say: and if it is to be stained, proceed slowly and with the utmost care. Which seems the exact opposite of the American/ English instinct: I must cover the world in my shit immediately.
Is it this reverence, this care, this suppression of ego that Wood wants to see from us? It is what I want to see from myself, but whether I will manage it is another matter. It will take sympathy - a natural instinct, a sentimental reflex - but it will also take empathy, which I still contend is largely a matter for the intellect. Your brain must be up for it, for making that necessary leap. At the moment, my brain feels like catfood. So I may never prove to be much of a writer - a real writer, the kind I like to read - but then again, maybe I will. I'm not sure how much it matters any more. But we shall see.
© Zadie Smith