‘You see how it’d go. If I let you have your way. It’d be like that poem. Your desire would be sent out of sight. Yes, Martin. Somewhere becoming rain.’
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The accelerated novel is a literary response to the accelerated world.
September 11 verified what many had already sensed: the world was speeding up, history was accelerating, time was flying faster and faster. An accelerated world: no human being in history had experienced even a murmur of this feeling until, say, 1914 – and in 1614 (to paraphrase something of Saul’s) it was an idea that would be as likely to occur to you as it would to the dog sleeping at your feet. The other accelerant is of course technology.*3
Serious fiction could respond to the accelerated world; but serious poetry couldn’t. Naturally it couldn’t. A poem, a non-narrative poem, a lyric poem – the first thing it does is stop the clock. It stops the clock while whispering, Let us go then, you and I, let us go and examine an epiphany, a pregnant moment, and afterwards we’ll have a think about that epiphany, and we’ll…But the speeded-up world doesn’t have time for stopped clocks.
Meanwhile the novelists subliminally realised that in their pages the arrow of development, purpose, furtherance, had to be sharpened. And they sharpened it. This wasn’t and isn’t a fad or a fashion (far less a bandwagon). Novelists aren’t mere observers of the speeded-up world; they inhabit it and feel its rhythms and breathe its air. So they adapted; they evolved.
The world won’t be slowing down, either, and so poetry will give ground (as the literary novel may sooner or later do), becoming a minority-interest field – more shadowy and more secluded…We can if we like fondly imagine Phoebe, in a cheap hotel, on a certain half-deserted street, in a sawdust restaurant with oyster shells: Phoebe reviewing the discomfiture of poetry – serve it right – and giving a contented smack of the lips before showing the ferocious finish of her teeth.
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What doomed them, the unreliable narrator, the stream of consciousness, and all the other dead strains? What was the morbidity they shared?
A rational form, a secular form, and a moral form, the novel is in addition a social form. That’s why social realism, always the dominant genre, is now the unquestioned hegemon. A social form – you might even say a sociable form. And the fatal character flaw of experimentalists? They’re introverts, they keep themselves to themselves, they prefer their own company. They’re antisocial, in a word.
I don’t want to sound too alchemical here – but did you know that ‘guest’ and ‘host’ have the same root? Though ‘reader’ and ‘writer’ are less tangibly interconnected, the affinity is there and it is both strong and strange. Now you’re a naturally sensitive reader, and a naturally sensitive guest…So while you’re away I want you to imagine novelists as hosts, as people who answer the door and let you in.
And I want you to think about the desperate importance of the opening pages. That’s your greeting to the reader, that’s your generous welcome to the reader. And remember the warning a wise friend put to Christopher Hitchens in 2003. It was during a talk they had about the failing occupation of Iraq. He said,
You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.
*1 And leaves behind it, so far as I can ascertain, only one long-term survivor (apart from Ulysses): Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. This is a language novel, written in a futurised farrago of Romani, rhyming slang, and Russian; and it can still be read with steady engagement and admiration. It is, in addition, appropriately short…The most iconic ‘B’ novel by far is Finnegans Wake (1939). Nabokov hailed Ulysses as the novel of the century, but called the Wake ‘a tragic failure’, ‘dull and formless’ – ‘a snore in the next room’ (that last phrase captures not only its tedium but also its extraordinary indifference to any likely concern of the reader’s). Finnegans Wake, which famously took seventeen years to write, resembles a cryptic crossword clue that goes on for more than 600 pages. And the pithiest thing ever said about it, satisfyingly, appeared in a cryptic crossword clue: ‘Something wrong with Finnegan’s Wake? Perhaps too complicated (10)’. The solution is an anagram (signalled by ‘complicated’) of ‘perhaps too’: apostrophe. This clue involves general knowledge (which slightly diminishes it) but remains almost as perfect as ‘Meaningful power of attorney (11)’, whose solution is significant: sign-if-i-cant.
*2 I fixed this in the paperback edition, where I spelt it out (almost in italic capitals) on page 3. And I did so rather resentfully – and rather furtively, I admit. Venus’s ethnicity was structurally cruciaI. I’d done wrong (how could I be so out of touch?), and now I was ham-handedly covering my tracks.
*3 ‘Intel engineers did a rough calculation of what would happen had a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle improved at the same rate as microchips…Today, that Beetle would be able to go about three hundred thousand miles per hour. It would get two million miles per gallon of gas; and it would cost four cents…’ Thomas L. Friedman, Thank You for Being Late (2016).
Chapter 3 Jerusalem
Seeing is believing
Without Israel, Saul Bellow said to me (in Israel), Jewish manhood would’ve been finished. I could get his drift, but it took me a while to get his meaning.
He said it in Jerusalem – Jerusalem, ‘the terrestrial gateway to the divine world’ (Sari Nusseibeh), ‘the shortest path between heaven and earth’ (Nizar Qabbani)…
Jerusalem would come later. First, though, Saul and I (and a couple of hundred others) had to do our duty in humble Haifa, a merely temporal city ninety-five miles to the north-north-west. It was the spring of 1987. I was nearly thirty-eight, and Saul was nearly seventy-two; I would be there with my first wife, and Saul would be there with his fifth.
But
