How to Read Contemporary Fiction

for Robert Maurer

At the age of twelve I discovered fiction in the form of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Because I am an old man and came of age in a distant and unenlightened time, I read that book secretly at summer camp, where it was passed around from boy to boy with the same sense of forbidden pleasure that we passed around the copies of Playboy that some braver, stealthier boy purloined from a counselor. When the counselor, a psych major at City College, discovered the theft, he dutifully explained that real women did not look like the-all-but-naked females in the magazine. These pictures, he said, were carefully airbrushed. I am not sure that any of us knew what he was talking about. I certainly didn’t. However, I sincerely believe that I found the words of Salinger’s novel more exciting than the parade of polished semi-nudes who displayed their ample breasts on Hugh Hefner’s glossy pages. I would like to think that this is because I was a highly imaginative child, fully capable of fabricating my sexual fantasies without visual aids, but perhaps also I was something of a prude.

I don’t mean to suggest that The Catcher in the Rye was the first novel I read. I had been reading pretty steadily since the age of five, when my father, then gainfully employed as an educational psychologist, first presented me with a thin volume recounting the exploits of Dick, Jane, and their unforgettable dog Spot. At about ten I received a card permitting me to take home volumes from the adult section of our local library, and I wasted no time falling upon volume after volume of H.G. Wells and Howard Fast. J.D. Salinger, however, was the first writer who spoke directly to me, whose words pulsed through my nervous system in a way that even the instant coffee I was already addicted to never did.

Fast-forward fifty-five years, and I recently realized that for the past year or so I’ve been reading almost exclusively contemporary fiction and finding it perhaps even more electrifying than the misadventures of Holden Caulfield. Below, I briefly profile nine of the books I’ve read in the last year or so, chosen largely with an eye to variety of content, style, and geography. As a result of my deciding to limit the choices to nine, some geographies and, more importantly, some superb writers have been omitted. My Eastern European candidate, Olga Tokarczuk, I ruled out for the sin of winning the Nobel Prize. I know I am not being consistent in this. Elizabeth Strout has won the Pulitzer, Bernadine Evaristo the Booker, Jacqueline Woodson, and Sigrid Nunez the National Book Award. Sue me.

My original idea was that these mini-critiques would imitate the style of the “Briefly Noted” reviews that accompany the extended book reviews in the New Yorker, but that model in practice (at least in my practice) sounded to me pretentious. Who am I to gaze down from some Parnassian height to pronounce judgment on these excellent volumes? The assessments I offer, therefore, are more personal and probably considerably more idiosyncratic. Interspersed with these notes I offer some suggestions on how you, dear reader (hypocrite lecteur), may improve your enjoyment of contemporary fiction.

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson. I would like to begin this whirlwind tour of my recent reading by looking at this short novel. (So short that some of the individual short stories in Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again are longer.) For me, it represents a kind of Ground Zero of what contemporary fiction can do. In a series of brief scenes, chronology fragmented and point-of-view changing from chapter to chapter, the book centers on a middle-class Black Brooklyn girl, Iris, who in the mid-1980s gets pregnant at the age of fifteen, and the subsequent life of Melody, the daughter she gives birth to. The reader meets a small, indelible cast of characters (Iris, Melody, Iris’ parents, Melody’s father, and his mother) and observes their intense interactions, touching on most of the basic emotions (love, anger, despair, hope), all recounted in language that is simple and direct.

What We Owe by Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde (translated from the Swedish by Elizabeth Wessel). This novel had me at its first sentence: “’You have at most six months left to live,’ the fucking witch says to me.” The “fucking witch” in question is an oncology nurse, and the narrator, Nahid, is reacting with characteristic vehemence to being told she has inoperable cancer. Another short novel (although roughly twice as long as Woodson’s book), What We Owe tells the story of Nahid’s life before and after receiving her diagnosis. Before, she was the first girl in her Iranian family to be admitted to university, medical school no less; at school she very quickly falls in love and gets married, becomes involved in the 1979 overthrow of Reza Pahlevi, and, shortly after the birth of her daughter, is forced into exile in Sweden by the fundamentalist regime that comes to power after the ouster of the Shah; in Sweden, she works as a nurse and grows estranged from her violent husband. After the diagnosis, she gradually comes to terms with her life, her death, and her daughter, from whom when the book begins she is also estranged. What I particularly liked here is the book’s account of two exotic (to me) cultures, that of Iran and Sweden; the intensity of Nahid’s life and character; and, again, the simple, direct language.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo. I have long outgrown my adolescent infatuation with experimentation in literature. The long arc of history may or may not bend to justice (and I sincerely hope it does), but I no longer believe that art moves forward in any sense, nor is this non-progress led by the heroism of a small, dedicated avant-garde spurred on by a desire to disgust the middle-class. Yes, art changes, but it changes only because the world changes as well. Heraclitus was right. History is a river in which we never bathe in the same stream twice. Girl, Woman, Other is a river unlike any I had ever plunged into before. Told in long-line free verse, stanzas (paragraphs?) filled with run-on sentences separated only by commas, In spite of its syntactical innovation, this novel is both completely new and highly accessible. Each chapter presents the story of one of a group of loosely related (either by ties of friendship or blood) Black women living in contemporary England. The language changes to suit the style of the character, from the slang-infused talk of a teenager to the formal English of a rather stodgy schoolteacher. For those keeping score: This is the first novel I’ve encountered in which the gender-neutral pronoun they is used to refer to a sexually non-binary character. (As in: “they look over at the overblown buildings on the other side of the river,” when it is clearly one person, standing alone, who is gazing at the structures across the Thames.) The result is, for this very CIS-gendered old man, at first confusing but, once I’d broken the code, immensely liberating.

First Piece of Advice: Work with, fall in love with, or simply hang out with people from different backgrounds

One manner in which my current reading differs enormously from that of my Holden Caulfield (mon semblable, mon frère) stage is that now I read for difference, not for similarity. I do not say this to disparage those students and teachers who correctly argue that most of what generally passes for the Western Canon – with its marked preferences for the dead, the white, and the male – is nothing short of a deliberate attempt to reduce them to invisibility. My inclination to read for difference is in large part made possible by the richness and intense visibility of the tradition I was born into. Jewish-American fiction is so central a part of the mid-twentieth-century American scene that even so distinguished a goy as John Updike tried to join in the fun. (Not with any particular success. I prefer the Rabbit novels.)

Oh, and as for that Western Canon. Does it need to be replaced by a universal Canon, with room for The Tale of Genji and the Mahapbharta, among other deathless classics written by people with brown and black skins? Maybe for the revisers of secondary school and university curricula, prisoners of the unfortunate idea that they must force-feed the best of the world’s best books to reluctant matriculants before unleashing them upon the world. But as for me, I find myself reading contemporary fiction with no regard for whether the words in front of me will become immortal or forgotten in a generation. (All nine of the books I am talking about in this essay will, I believe, last at least a generation. Beyond that, I make no predictions.)

I could say that I read for difference to heighten my empathy for people with backgrounds other than my own, but that goes against a basic precept of mine, that one should not read fiction for self-improvement. This is not because I believe I do not need to improve myself. On the contrary, I need to improve myself in so many ways that the task seems altogether beyond me. I read fiction for pleasure and excitement. If I want to learn something about the world, I read non-fiction. If I want to make the world a better place, I do something to improve the world, such as (pre-pandemic) tutoring inner-city students or (during our current emergency) calling homebound senior citizens who live in public housing. I would go as far as to say that the reason I enjoy reading for difference is that in the last fifteen or so years I worked with a range of people from backgrounds vastly different from my own. In short, I urge you to diversify your life in order to become a better reader.

Way back in my immediately post-Holden Caulfield days when I began to explore more fully many of the Western Canon-type novelists – Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Thomas Hardy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, to name probably too many – it never would have occurred to me that I was neglecting the few females who had somehow managed to smuggle themselves into the fiercely guarded palace of literary immortality. Reading these women – I’m thinking of Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf, to name the usual suspects – seemed somehow effeminate. As a lousy athlete who (worse yet) wrote poems, I felt a need to protect my masculinity, although from whom or what I was never sure. Oddly enough, works by openly homosexual men (Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsburg) didn’t bother me. It wasn’t until I arrived in graduate school that I permitted myself – under the tutelage of a feminist girlfriend – to sample the mistresses of the Canon.

And now… I was tempted to write exclusively about women authors for this piece except that such a strategy seemed (to me at least) to require some grand statement about the centrality of women’s writing to the present moment. And even if I could formulate such a statement (and of course I could), I’m afraid it would just be another case of mansplaining the eternal (or perhaps just the contemporary) feminine. I will stop somewhat short of a grand statement, with a semi-grand statement. One of the most exciting things about contemporary fiction is that the voices of those who have so long been excluded – I’m thinking primarily of women and people of color – from that great dialogue across epochs, cultures, languages, nations, continents are now finally being accorded their well-deserved place in the conversation. It would be a simple matter of justice, human dignity, whatever, to listen to them now. But, really, I do not read to primarily to promote justice and human dignity, much as I am very much in support of them. The reason to read the writings of the previously silenced is that they have urgent things to say and say them beautifully.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder. When I began working on this piece and choosing which books to write about, I told myself: No genre fiction. It is only now, with the piece nearly finished and my selections set in stone (at least in my imagination), I realize that I have not kept to my rule. I had not really thought of The Memory Police and Tyll as genre fiction at all and had permitted Article 353 to penetrate my defenses only because I love crime novels and could not imagine a personal list of recent books that did not include at least one. But Tyll is undeniably a work of historical fiction (even if it is no bodice-ripper), and The Memory Police, if it must be categorized, could well be placed on the science fiction/fantasy shelf (although I would hope it will disappoint true fans of those genres). I don’t, in principle, like historical fiction and have only a slightly higher tolerance for science fiction/fantasy, but there you are: I like these books very much. The short, dreamlike Memory Police presents a gentle fable about the persistence of forgetting on a fictional island; imagine a story of Kafka’s rendered in watercolors, soothing on the outside, sinister at its core. On the island, things are disappearing, and as they vanish they pass from human memory as well. The mass amnesia that afflicts the island’s residents is state-sponsored and enforced, but what makes it chilling is the calm, quiet manner in which the population, including the narrator, a novelist, acquiesces to the obliteration of their past. The only holdout is the narrator’s editor, a sure sign, it seems to me, of how little hope there remains in this world.

Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin. In a recent e-mail to the editor of these pages, I wrote that this is the funniest German novel I’ve read since The Tin Drum and then immediately realized it was perhaps the only German novel I’d read in the past forty years. (Okay, I had consumed a few books by Heinrich Bôll in the interim. They were easily digestible, and I can remember little other than their titles.) My knowledge of Tyll Ulenspiegel, a trickster-hero of medieval German folklore, is about as spotty as my knowledge of contemporary German fiction. I’m aware that Richard Strauss wrote a tone poem based on his exploits, but I’m not sure if I have ever listened to it. In this novel, Kehlmann transposes Tyll from his traditional era, the time of the bubonic plague, to the seventeenth-century thirty years’ war, an entirely manmade plague that pitted Central Europe’s Catholics and Protestants against each other. (This is the conflagration in which Brecht’s Mother Courage watches her children perish.) The novel shifts point-of-view and shatters chronology to portray a society on the brink of annihilation. (Fortunately, nothing like that could happen today.) But what makes the book worth reading is its irrepressible delight in exposing the humor in human folly.

Article 353 by Tanguy Viel, translated from the French by William Rodarmor. This novel is a nifty switcheroo on the traditional mystery. In the opening chapter, the reader sees Martial Kermeur throw real-estate developer Antoine Lazerac off Lazerac’s yacht. The rest of the short novel consists of Kermeur’s interrogation by a (so far as I remember) unnamed judge with a result I will not even hint at. (Okay, one hint: Recall the end of Renoir’s The Crime of M. Lange.). One gratifying aspect of this intriguing why-done-it is the uncanny resemblance between the unscrupulous and thoroughly detestable Lazerac and the forty-fifth President of the United States. (Uncanny, because the book was published in France in 2017, which means that – unless French publishers are significantly speedier than their U.S. counterparts – this novel must have been written before the still astonishing results of the 2016 election.)

Second Piece of Advice: Read not just for distraction or entertainment but for immersion.

I talked above about the pleasure and excitement of discovering The Catcher in the Rye and reading now to try to recapture those emotions, but what is perhaps more important to me at present is the immersive quality of my reading experience. As a brooding, bashful, bookish pre-adolescent, and now as a brooding, bashful, bookish old man, I find fiction to be the ultimate immersive artistic experience. In my late adolescence/early adulthood I thought movies gave me a similar experience, perhaps because movies were better back then (I’m thinking of the films of Godard, Truffaut, Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, Fassbinder, Scorsese, et al.), perhaps because I saw them in movie theaters and not on television, and perhaps because all these directors seemed to be the start of an even greater wave of cinema artistry, a wave that (I firmly believe) never arrived, at least to my shore. As Norma Desmond remarked (prematurely then, accurately now), “It’s the pictures that got small.”

That reading to me is the most sensual artistic medium may seem a paradox. Don’t film and television (at present, they are nearly the same thing) – along with theater, opera, and ballet – offer a feast of sight and sound that surpasses what mere words on a page (or screen) can hope to offer? Not at all. For someone who has spent much of the last sixty years cultivating – both as a defense against the world and as a way of entering a much better world – a sense of inwardness, sight and sound can feel more like a distraction than an enchantment.

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai. I am not particularly fond of the concept of the writer as a seer. I mean, I do think that Octavia Butler’s vision (in The Parable of the Sower and its sequel, The Parable of the Talents) of climate change pressing down particularly hard on people of color is singularly prescient. More recently, I’ve read two pre-COVID-19, pandemic-themed novels, Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel and Severance by Ling Ma, both clearly written before the onset of our current woes and both worth reading. And yet, Rebecca Makkai’s novel focusing on the effects of the AIDS epidemic on the Chicago gay community in the mid-1980s seems to me to capture the mood of menace, fear, despair, survivors’ guilt, and hope that characterizes our present moment. Also interesting, because I’ve haven’t seen this comparison made elsewhere, is the parallel Makkai draws between this devastation of AIDS and that of the war-scarred veterans who wandered, ghost-like though still alive, through the Parisian bohemia of the 1920s. Perhaps we are all lost generations.

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout. I include this book in this essay because I believe Elizabeth Strout is the best writer currently active on the American scene. And I admit that I’m going out on a limb here with that statement; my e-reader says I’ve only read forty-one percent of the book so far. The reason for this slowness is that I’m reading these stories aloud to my wife while she knits. (Similarly, I read the much shorter Red at the Bone aloud to her.) It’s not that we’ve been pressed for time this pandemic summer, but we’ve not always been in the mood for the sort of emotional workout each of the stories we’ve read so far has provided. These interrelated short stories pick up the life of Olive Kitteredge (the eponymous central character of Strout’s Pulitzer-winning story collection), who is now a cantankerous widow and retired teacher living in a small coastal Maine town. She was cantankerous in the earlier book, but now she is beginning to realize how her difficultness seeped into her relationship to her late husband and all-but-estranged son. As always, Strout creates characters whose desires exist just outside their ability to communicate them to others, but entirely within the author’s skill to delineate them to us.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. I bought this as a heavily discounted e-book and left it to gather the virtual equivalent of bookshelf dust because I had been led to believe it was a book about a novelist, a woman of a certain age (that happens to be very close to my age), who adopts the dog of a friend after said friend commits suicide. Facebook has essentially eliminated all interest I have ever had (and it was never much to begin with) in people’s relationships with their pets. And in The Friend, an unnamed woman writer, the narrator, does adopt a dog, a Great Dane named Apollo, orphaned by the suicide of his owner, the narrator’s long-term friend and one-time lover. He is also a novelist, also unnamed. But, as perhaps you have already guessed, seeing that the only character in this book with a name is a dog, this is not a conventional novel. I am tempted to call it an anti-novel. It is filled with philosophical and literary asides, debates (between the narrator and her late friend) about the importance and future of fiction, as well as analyses of the role of dogs in literature and in life. And yet, it is a novel, and one that leads the reader eventually to care deeply about the narrator, her friend, and, most important of all, the dog.

Last Piece of Advice: Try writing some fiction yourself.

I have already told you to vary the folks you surround yourself with (so that you can better grasp and enjoy by fiction by people from different backgrounds) and to throw yourself headfirst into your reading (so that it will be more engrossing than more passive forms of artistic appreciation). You might think that was enough, and that I should wrap up this little excursion right now without making additional unreasonable demands. But why stop? This is an online publication, and a few more sentences will not require any additional outlay from my publisher for either ink or paper. So, if you really want to understand and take delight in the great international outpouring of storytelling, possibly the most important thing you can do is attempt to join it. This has certainly worked for me. “To have great writers, there must be great audiences, too,” Walt Whitman nearly wrote. Perhaps to have great writers, we must all strive to be great writers ourselves. Reading – as much as writing, hell, as much as filmmaking, pottery, painting, what have you – is an art. I believe we should do as much as we can to cultivate it.

How to Read Contemporary Fiction

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