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Permit me the indulgence this morning of being pissed off. Shveta and I went to see Zadie Smith and a debut novelist named Uzodinma Iweala read from their work at the 92nd Street Y last night. To be frank, what a load of rubbish. This fashionable tandem represents almost to the letter what I meant when I wrote of the Scylla and Charybdis of contemporary American letters in the Scriblerus mission statement. Iweala’s novel is written in a pseudo-authentic first person progressive argot intended to mimic the speech patterns of a child soldier in an anonymous West African postcolonial kleptocracy in the throes of civil war. (Apparently, in high school he read a Time magazine article about Sierra Leon.) Iweala read with passion and the writing itself was polished. But there he was, some effete Harvard ponce in a haut couture frock of gold faux-alligator skin and pointy shoulders, straps dangling dandyishly behind, essentially impersonating an impoverished and brutalized child soldier. A child soldier, for chrissakes. Granted, any novelist worth his two cents will stick to the claim that a writer has the right to draw on any material, and subjectivity, however remote and potentially problematic, for the sake of his art. But doesn’t this strike you as a bit of a pretense? What gives such a privileged and pampered scion of the bobo meritocracy the moral authority to speak for a child soldier in Africa. What, because he’s black and has an African-sounding name? This novel, Beasts of No Nation, is a decent example of what I mean by ‘Oprah-club marginal lyricism’. There are better examples, of course, more lyrical ones, such as Annie Prouxl or Jhumpa Lahiri, but Beasts will serve. The lyricism has transmogrified here into a rhapsody of brutality, but the underlying pathos remains. Recipe for a critically successful novel in America: choose a marginalized protagonist, preferably an immigrant of color or a subject extracted and imported from the high-brow tabloids, a pristine receptacle of liberal guilt and ethical indignation, and show with relenting rhythm and craftsmanship the murmur of his or her quotidian dreams, the quiet desperation of his daily struggles--with a dash of hope and empathy thrown in for good measure. It all just smacks, really, of so much hypocrisy. There’s a certain inertia to marginal lyricism, a symptom of the rot of pandemic consumerism. We are cloistered here in the First World in our prosperity--with only a mediated exposure to the miseries that dominate the world outside our gates and borders. This misery is packaged into guilt to be consumed, the packaging quickly discarded into a landfill of good intentions. Listening to this orgy of misery made me think of Rimbaud, the dilettante poet who delighted the salons of Paris with his precocious verse, only to reject the whole charade of literature, its ultimate impotence, to run guns in Africa. I wanted to ask Uzo, if he had to choose, what would he rather be, an entertainer or a politician? This question, however evadable, begs the question, what is at stake with literature? Are novelists doomed to be mere entertainers? If a novel presents anything more than a worldview only slightly dissonant to the one that its readers expect, then it simply will not be consumed, however well crafted. It is a marketplace morality.
Zadie, on the other, writes from the McSweeney school--she peddles comedies of manners, slight satiric fare, meant unabashedly to indulge a reader’s conviction that he or she is in possession of superior taste and judgment, can appreciate all the inside jokes. But ultimately, who really cares about these characters, all the more pathetic in their misery and confusion precisely because of the material abundance and abundance of abstraction piled up around them? Needless to say, my first impression of the Y wasn’t a great one. Shveta observed as we were leaving that if you looked at it, theirs, namely Zadies’ and Uzo’s job, was really quite a lousy one. They had to go around reading passages from texts by then old and stale to them, then field insipid questions from an audience rendered moronic by the cult of the celebrity writer. The Y itself simply colludes with this culture--a cushy place for the bourgeois to consume literary products at their leisure, to get a digestible, but not too spicy, dollop of insight.
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