PART II OF “WHAT’S WRONG WITH AMERICAN LITERATURE?”

Where are the stars? Where are compelling personalities who can draw the public back to what was once and should be again the culture’s central art form?

Where are they?

Where’s the charisma in today’s writers? It’s to be found neither in person nor on the page.

Do we find it in Jon Fosse, recent Nobel Prize winner, or in his work? In Margaret Atwood? Joyce Carol Oates? Jonathan Franzen?! Mary Gaitskill? George Saunders? Colson Whitehead? Paul Murray? Marilynne Robinson? Junot Diaz? Jeffrey Eugenides?

What about popular authors? Stephen King, you say. Uh, not really. George RR Martin– not! The biggest-selling novelist in America currently is Colleen Hoover. Is there a city or town in America where she would be recognized– by anyone?

Maybe we should consult our society’s esteemed literary critics, the acknowledged experts. They’ll tell us.

Or will they? They’ve spent the last couple decades touting recluses like Don Delillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Thomas Pynchon. Front men for a cultural band on its way to oblivion.

HOW TO GROW A CULTURAL PHENOMENON

History tells us you need a few larger-than-life personalities to do so. Popular music had Elvis, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, and so many others (while “serious” music has all but vanished).

What’s the most prominent cultural force in the U.S. at the moment? Judging by interest, I’d say NFL football. Sixty-five years ago, the NFL ranked far behind Major League Baseball for sports fans. Three things turned this around. 1.) A more exciting product, geared toward the society’s faster-paced lifestyle. This included giving the position of quarterback a more prominent role in the game. More passing improved the aesthetics. 2.) A yearly Big Game which became the focus of the entire nation: The Superbowl. 3.) New stars. One of the most important of them was quarterback Joe Namath aka Broadway Joe, who played in the media capital of the globe and carried around with him bold talk and a truckload of swagger and charisma. His leading the New York Jets to a win in Superbowl III put himself– and the National Football League– on the map. Afterward there was no looking back.

WHAT ABOUT LITERATURE?

What’s the template for renewed importance? Among our literary intelligentsia, there isn’t any. They’re like slow-thinking clerks in a Charles Dickens novel– like the proceedings of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce: allowing the wheels of the activity to turn slowly, while they go through the motions of preserving remnants of the once-exciting and entertaining literary art.

The blueprint to follow as alternative is clear. Faster-paced, better-designed, more thrilling novels, stories, and poems, with better aesthetics. The merely competent, the simply adequate, isn’t good enough. We also need a few writers with energy, smarts, and swagger willing to take the cultural stage instead of hiding in cabins in woods or in dusty academic monasteries– writers willing to engage this mad tumultuous world, in their persons and in their art.

Let’s hope they’re coming.

-KW