Yesterday, I took a moment in this lull between jobs to return to something like a true academic summer: I met with two writer friends at a coffee shop lousy with university students, we broke out our laptops to kvetch and pick at our projects, we eventually meandered down the street for a sangria happy hour where, of course, we continued to talk through the killing of our characters, the problems of trying to work with real geography, the struggle of writing – realistically – what it is we’ve only experienced from a distance. It was exactly right, totally necessary, and also felt – as these days tend to – like the stretch of days we would need to finish the projects we were working on might only stretch on in front of us indefinitely. There’s never enough time, and the logic of why we’re writing what we’re writing is always unclear.
This is always the way. Yesterday, one friend was leaning into an assertion we each needed to just dig further into our bullshit, that now wasn’t the time to excise or cut or get hung up on the structures we overthought in grad school – and which we sometimes teach. That the novels we each love the most are, perhaps, not actually invested in any of those things in the ways we self-impose them. He’s right, of course. No one, it often feels, was telling Virigina Woolf or Faulkner or Henry James or Thomas Pynchon to not write their sentences like that or to avoid over-articulating a description or twisting perspective with a glut of commas. You can get away with it, sometimes, if you just commit. And, honestly, shouldn’t I be? Where, after all, are my strongest investments?
What strikes me about the landscape of contemporary fiction is, often, how low the bar is set. I read – I’m not going to pretend otherwise – a lot. I get caught up in the act of knowing, of keeping a pulse on what’s happening in a landscape of literary fiction. What this seems to mean – and I’m joking but also not – is I encounter a lot of ways of retelling the fallout of a relationship; a divorce, a death, a ghosting, a crumbling job, a failure of life, a distasteful friendship. What this also means is I see how few of the novels that really seem to ascend to any level of notoriety are all that concerned with their own language. Or, at least, I mean concerned with the beauty of their own language and what it’s possible to construct. Or, maybe, I mean with their own maximalist potential.
More often than not, contemporary fiction – literary or otherwise – tends toward the spare. Sometimes, this can be beautiful in its own right. Recently, I read a short, barebones slip of a novel called The Hearing Test which achieved this well enough. Minimalism, I think, succeeds the most when it obfuscates as much as it flatly reveals, and it’s in those margins a writer stumbles upon the profound and just, you know, has the option to let it sit there without pointing to it.
A lot of writers, though, can’t stop themselves from pointing a little too proudly. A lot of books, too, seem disappointingly more tethered to elevator pitch premise than actual plot. A lot of readers, even more disappointingly, seem even more attached to the idea of plot twists, character relatability and utterly useless bells and whistles (see: the rise in smut) than any sense of the writing as actually more than a propulsive mechanism to deliver a casual, palatable distraction.
So here I am: trying to write a novel in a moment where I understand that writing the thing I want to write should be, actually, really easy and also knowing that, of course, it’s almost impossible to sell. In a moment where the people most loudly identifying as “readers” are binging on numbing genre repetitions and looking for material they can skim, easily, and still follow the bouncing ball, I realize I can get fatalistic about the fact of my own writing. My former co-workers – all readers – loved a series. Wanted IP. Wanted episodic perpetuation of a thing they kinda liked for its familiarity. Against that, I mean, what, actually, am I doing? What, actually, is the point of it? Why, actually, do I even give a shit? Why do I think it needs a point?
In all of this, I went home and watched the first couple episodes of The Studio on AppleTV, a show that’s – in some ways – about all of this writ large in the landscape of the film industry. If you haven’t kicked this off, the premise follows the plight of a man truly in love with the cinematic arts (Seth Rogen) as he suddenly finds himself at the head of a major studio: in possession of all the power necessary to make art but burdened, immediately, by the fact of needing to make money. My sense is the show is more cringe comedy than the satire I’d like it to be, and the second episode was a positively infuriating case of that, with Rogen inviting himself to a “magic hour” staging of an auteur one-shot that he manages, of course, to repeatedly fuck up for everyone. I don’t recall the last time I wanted to strangle someone so badly through the screen.
Still, I bring it up for this reason: The Studio is consumed by its own version of these struggles I’ve been trying to work through as a person who writes. In this age of content, it feels increasingly like being someone who loves art, who wants to make art, who wants to defend art, who wants the fucking auteurist, weird, convoluted, innovative, niche little thing, is to be seen as – like Rogen’s character – the fool. The impossible dream of creating something for its own selfish sake instead of the perpetuation of franchise IP is a silly, stubborn endeavor. And yeah, I mean, it is. To be a person who doesn’t actually get what people mean when they say they “just want to turn their brain off” to watch or read something is totally foreign to me. I don’t know what that means, or how it’s possible, or what someone might get from idly engaging with constructed material vying for their time and attention.
And so I do wind up feeling, in some ways, like Seth Rogen’s character disrupting the fluid fact of “the oner” in the episode; throwing in an accidental conversational bomb, halting the streamlined enjoyment of someone’s smooth-brained experience, here to clutter up and ruin your shit by chattering away, knocking over the furniture, drawing your attention to something that needs to happen for pure style or visual rhetoric.
Bring back the joint, flick it into the pool.
love + squalor 