`Something Has Been Beheld for the First Time'

My oldest son arrived Saturday from New York City, having already resolved a crisis familiar to every uncommonly common reader. He had almost finished reading Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, but left it in his dorm room in Manhattan. In the airport terminal in Newark he soothed his panic by buying two paperbacks, both novels by Dickens – Martin Chuzzlewit and A Tale of Two Cities. Say what you will of Philip Roth’s hometown, its airport services the needs of desperate readers.

Among other things, I’m reading After-Thought, a collection of reviews and essays published in 1962 by Elizabeth Bowen. She has much to say about our complex relations with fiction. In “Truth and Fiction,” based on three unscripted talks she gave on the BBC in 1956, Bowen writes:

“The novel does not simply recount experience, it adds to experience.”

Every common-sensical reader knows this, though many literary theorists do not. Good fiction – even some lousy fiction – has a way of displacing real life, making room for itself in our memories, imaginations and sensibilities. My son, now 19, is not the first man to have fallen in love with Natasha Rostova while reading War and Peace. Of course, his happiness when Natasha and Pierre Bezukhov are, at last, married, is mingled with jealousy. I suppose this is not very sophisticated (except on Tolstoy’s part), but it’s certainly human. Bowen understands:

“A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had. And like all experiences, it is added to by the power of different kinds of people, in different times, to feel and to comment and to explain.”

I read less fiction today than I did when I was younger, and much of what I read is a novel or story I have already read two, or three, or six times. Contemporary fiction, at least in the United States, holds little attraction. I remember reading only three new novels in 2006, all of which I reviewed for newspapers – The Prisoner of Guantanamo, by Dan Fesperman (pulp rubbish); The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers (dull, pretentious); and Everyman, by the aforementioned Philip Roth (a small masterpiece).

Fiction writers in the United States have suffered a failure of talent, obviously, but also a failure of nerve. Glibness, superficial cleverness and lazy irony have replaced “adding to experience,” as Bowen might put it. Novelists have internalized the instant gratification spawned and encouraged by television, much of the Internet, dumbed-down education and the resulting marginal literacy. How many of us, without classroom pressure, still read “Ward No. 6,” The Spoils of Poynton and Nostromo? And without such experience, can we still call ourselves educated – in books and life? Can we aspire to such things as Bowen describes in another essay from After-Thought, “The Roving Eye,” which concerns how fiction writers choose subject matter:

“Unsuspected meaning in everything shines out; yet, we have the familiar re-sheathed in mystery. Nothing is negative; nothing is commonplace. For it is not that the roving eye, in its course, has been tracing for us the linaments of a fresh reality? Something has been beheld for the first time.”