'But We’re Living in a Backward Age'

“[Y]ou’ve probably noticed that I’m interested in details. Not themes, not big ideas, not messages, but details. Some readers only care about the story, some are more interested in structure and the overall shape of a literary work, I myself pay attention to details: descriptions, images, metaphors, motifs, some subtle gestures or moments of things left unsaid . . .” 

You are forgiven if you mistook the author of these thoughts for Vladimir Nabokov. After all, one of his students at Cornell quoted the author of Pale Fire as saying, “Caress the detail, the divine detail,” and Nabokov once told an interviewer: “In high art and pure science detail is everything. Only myopia condones the blurry generalizations of ignorance.”

 

No, the author is Di Nguyen, proprietor of the little white attic, a rare strictly literary blog. She has enthusiasm, good sense, little or no pretentiousness, and a hearty, old-fashioned appetite for literature. On Wednesday she wrote a post about “what I look for when reading, what I value and consider important in literature.” Nguyen carefully delineates her values. She’s no aesthete – “style isn’t everything.” Neither is she a message-monger. She’s no genuflecting admirer of, say, William H. Gass, the Ronald Firbank of our age – solemn silliness – but neither is she an adept of agitprop. I get the sense that a growing number of readers – and teachers, and critics – equate quality in literature with “stuff I agree with.” Nguyen cautions:

 

“I don’t enjoy style and language and wordplay just for the sake of style and language and wordplay; I don’t love metaphors just for the sake of metaphors; to some readers, style alone brings pleasure, style is all, but I’m more interested in what it conveys.”

 

In the hands of a first-rate writer, there’s no contradiction or even tension between style and substance. Try to imagine Moby-Dick as written by Hemingway, who also wrote a book about an ocean-dwelling organism. Nguyen goes on to give us a deliciously gratuitous defenestration of Joyce Carol Oates and Elfriede Jelinek (whoever that is).

 

Like generations of common readers, Nguyen is dedicated to characters in fiction, “characters who are full of contradictions.” She writes: “That’s why my favourite novelist is Tolstoy, as he can inhabit his characters’ minds and depict the minute changes in their consciousness better than anyone else.” Readers who have fallen for Natasha Rostov will understand. Nguyen endorses reading-as-self-forgetting and is refreshingly commonsensical when it comes to another recent vogue in reading:

 

“Questions about identity don’t interest me. I don’t read in order to find myself in books (don’t I have enough of myself in my non-reading time?), and don’t need characters to be the same sex, race, nationality, or whatever in order to relate to them. Nor do I necessarily relate to characters who supposedly belong to the same group—this shouldn’t have to be said, but we’re living in a backward age. I’m also not a fan of the Strong Female Character trope, which is tedious and has been done to death.”

 

I’m not one to handicap writers as though they were thoroughbreds. It can be amusing to rank them, if the pastime is treated with the seriousness of a parlor game and not as scripture. Nguyen writes: “I place Shakespeare and Tolstoy at the top, above everyone else.” I probably do too, though the rivals come relentlessly to mind: Proust, Henry James, Chekhov, Conrad, Sterne . . . It’s important to remember there is no progress in art, only multiple lines of individual evolution. Dante is more accomplished and sophisticated than anyone published in the twelve most recent issues of Poetry. How good it is to see mature discernment in a young writer:

 

“I love writers who say yes to life, to borrow Joseph Epstein’s phrase; writers who give me glimpses of beauty when I don’t find it in life [and even when I do – P.K.]. I love writers who see people as complex individuals, not just types or members of a group or products of their environment.”