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Riff

Dear Important Novelists: Be Less Like Moses and More Like Howard Cosell

Credit...Tom Gauld

“To start with, look at all the books.” That’s the promising first sentence of Jeffrey Eugenides’s new novel, “The Marriage Plot,” due in bookstores this fall. The book is about three college friends from Brown University, and at first taste — I’ve been toting around an advance copy — it appears to be luscious: humane, recondite and funny. Part of the heavy anticipation for “The Marriage Plot,” though, is a simple emotional response: We’ve missed this man. It has been nine years since Eugenides’s last novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Middlesex.” It has been a long, lonely vigil. We’d nearly forgotten he was out there.

Eugenides, it turns out, has always worked on the nine-year plan. “The Marriage Plot” is only his third novel in 18 years. His books, like certain comets, are rare events. So much time elapses between them that his image in dust-jacket photographs can change alarmingly. On the flap of his first novel, “The Virgin Suicides” (1993), he seemed shy and earnest; he had some baby fat and a bit of hair. By the time “Middlesex” appeared, he was thinner, balder and possessed of a wily Van Dyke beard. Suddenly he resembled Ezra Pound or Errol Flynn in a swashbuckling role. I’m a bit afraid to look at his next one.

“To start with, look at all the books.” That’s a terrific first sentence. But at the pace he’s publishing — Eugenides is 51 — there will never be many of his books at which to look.

Distressingly, this kind of long gestation period is pretty typical for America’s corps of young, elite celebrity novelists. Jonathan Franzen took nine years to follow “The Corrections” (2001) with his next novel, “Freedom” (2010), and “The Corrections” itself was nine years in the making. Donna Tartt vanished for a decade between “The Secret History” (1992) and “The Little Friend” (2002); at this pace we’re due for a fat new Tarttlet next fall. Michael Chabon has gone seven years between major novels. David Foster Wallace was still working on his follow-up to “Infinite Jest” (1995) when he died in 2008, though in between he published excellent books of nonfiction and stories.

Obviously, some of this is about personal style. There have always been prolific writers as well as slow-moving, blocked, gin-addled or silent ones. It’s worth suggesting, though, that something more meaningful may be going on here; these long spans between books may indicate a desalinating tidal change in the place novelists occupy in our culture. Suddenly our important writers seem less like color commentators, sifting through the emotional, sexual and intellectual detritus of how we live today, and more like a mountaintop Moses, handing down the granite tablets every decade or so to a bemused and stooped populace. We roll our eyes at how seldom Time magazine puts writers on its cover — it once did so quite often — and sense this is evidence of the public’s shrinking appetite for quality literature. Perhaps it has got more to do with our novelists’ lagging output, their eroded willingness to be central to the cultural conversation.

Take, as a counterpoint, Saul Bellow, who over 11 industrious years delivered four novels, several of them among the 20th century’s best: “The Adventures of Augie March” (1953); “Seize the Day” (1956); “Henderson the Rain King” (1959); and “Herzog” (1964). Bellow snatched control, with piratical confidence and a throbbing id, of American literature’s hive mind. “We are always looking,” he once said, “for the book it is necessary to read next.” For this vivifying span, the book to read next was nearly always one of Bellow’s own.

Bellow could have spent those 11 years differently. He might have toiled on a “grander” book, let’s say a slablike “Augie March.” This hurts my head to ponder. Philip Roth, who has been on a phosphorescent late-career run, issuing nearly a novel a year from 2000 through 2010, might have instead decided to decant all that strong sinister wine into a single 1,200-page vessel that you would be tempted to title “Horny Goat Stares Down Death.” Thank you, Philip Roth, for not afflicting us thus. Among the mesmerizing things about his recent work is that we’ve felt as if we were reading him in something close to real time; this has given his books heat as well as light.

John Updike kept up a casually herculean pace his entire career. He wrote so much — 60 books during his lifetime — that Martin Amis called him, memorably, a “psychotic Santa of volubility.” When Updike reviewed a novel by another sadistically productive human being, Joyce Carol Oates, he wondered aloud if she needed “a lustier audience” of “Victorian word eaters.”

Updike and Oates are extreme examples, but there’s something to be said for what might be called the Woody Allen Method: Good times, bad times, you keep making art. Many of your productions will hit; some will miss; some will miss by a lot. But there’s no time for the flatulent gas of pretension to seep into your construction’s sheetrock. This is how Trollope, Balzac and Dickens worked. Each would have agreed with Gore Vidal, who once declared of those who moan about writer’s block: “You’re not meant to be doing this. Plenty more where you came from.”

This is not a plea for hasty work or for the death of the big novel. If there’s a “Middlemarch” or a “Magic Mountain” or a “House for Mr. Biswas” to be had, yes, please, bring it on. These novels are sustained and sustaining; they are also extreme rarities.

It’s not hard to sense what these modern, parsimonious writers are rebelling against. Surely they’re in flight from the shackling apparatus of modern publishing: the long press tours (“Hello, Cleveland!”), the much-hated publicity stops. The very economics of being a writer function as a set of speed bumps. Most novelists hold down teaching positions that subsidize their work; these jobs are also work-thwarters.

Some novelists may be in revolt against today’s almost militarily mechanized pop writers. Not so long ago a dignified genre writer — a John Grisham, let’s say — was expected to issue a book a year. Now we confront James Patterson, who publishes as many as nine a year; they pop from the chute like Krispy Kremes. Many of Patterson’s books are composed with other writers, as if he had a tree filled with Keebler elves outfitted with laptops and wee kegs of Red Bull.

For some novelists who write long and slow, there may be a subconscious critical strategy at play. As the critic Dwight Macdonald once put it, “It is difficult for American reviewers to resist a long, ambitious novel: they are betrayed by the American admiration of size and scope, also by the American sense of good fellowship; they find it hard to say to the author, after all his work: ‘Sorry, but it’s terrible.’ ”

Another result of the once-a-decade approach is that you feel obliged to put out novels that appear to have genuinely taken 10 years to write. Franzen’s “Freedom” (576 pages) could have stood some liposuction, and Tartt’s “Little Friend” (640 pages) would have benefited from a great deal of it. Few readers wished these books — or Eugenides’s “Middlesex” (544 pages) — longer. The Brits have always been better at not overstaying their welcome. In the 1980s and ’90s, Julian Barnes delivered a running master class in the shortish novel, and Ian McEwan, running alongside him, picked up the baton. But here in America, we respect girth. “Middlesex” may go down as Eugenides’s signal accomplishment. But it’s his ethereal and almost novella-length “Virgin Suicides” I’ll reread first and perhaps even often. I feel about it the way its young protagonists did, watching one of the teenage Lisbon sisters in an intimate moment: “The zipper opened all the way down our spines.”

Art is supposed to emerge, unless you are Jackson Pollock or Banksy, slowly; it drips rather than flows. We are suspicious of ease. It has always been easy to poke fun at overwriters. Most-prolific lists are packed with regrettable names like Barbara Cartland (700-plus books), Isaac Asimov (400 plus) and the South African Mary Faulkner, no relation to William, who wrote more than 900 books. At minimum, a writer’s book should be like his or her serious boyfriends or girlfriends; if there are some you can’t remember, you have had too many.

Serious writers are sometimes mocked for logorrhea as well. According to the novelist and biographer Jay Parini, himself no slouch in the production department, there’s a story about a graduate student who telephoned the great literary critic Harold Bloom at home. Bloom’s wife answered and said, “I’m sorry, he’s writing a book.” The student replied: “That’s all right. I’ll wait.”

A long silence can, on occasion, help a writer. Thomas Pynchon’s spectral reputation only rose in the 17 years between “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973) and “Vineland” (1990). A long silence can wound as well. William Styron’s inability to complete a novel in the last 27 years of his life became entangled with the depression chronicled in his memoir, “Darkness Visible.”

You sense this generation of writers’ relative absence in other ways. It’s a calamity for our literary culture that so few of them write criticism on anything close to a regular basis. Not so long ago, writing occasionally about your peers was seen as part of being in the guild. It provided a different way for a writer to walk his or her wits, in ways that often reflected back on their own work. Attending to criticism was a way of stumbling upon new and articulate voices. I recall ordering my first Diane Johnson novel after reading her coruscating review of some books about food and entertaining in The New York Review of Books.

I’ve picked on Franzen and Eugenides, writers I admire, more than enough in this small essay. (And I’ve ignored many fine writers who publish more frequently.) But let me conclude with this autumnal observation. At their current rate of production, by the next time a novel from either appears, my children, not yet in high school, will have graduated from college. Actuarial tables inform me that my dogs, their muzzles not yet close to gray, will have died and been buried in the backyard. Two presidents may have come and gone.

I won’t entirely have forgotten these writers, but I will have learned to live without them. They’re like old friends who are never around enough to quite miss. The sign I’ll hang in my mental shop window will read: “I’ll be around when you get back. Sort of.”

Flip that sign over, and it will declare: “If you and your peers wish to regain a prominent place in the culture, one novel a decade isn’t going to cut it."

 

A correction was made on 
Oct. 2, 2011

The Riff column on Sept. 18, about nonprolific novelists, misspelled the surname of an artist who was mentioned as one whose work “drips rather than flows.” He was Jackson Pollock, not Pollack.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 72 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: ‘I Won’t Entirely Have Forgotten These Writers,But I’ll Have Learned to Live Without Them’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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