No one wishes to be frivolous about the current pandemic. It’s still real and should still be respected. Wear the mask. Pay attention to who is around you. Etc.
There is an aspect of the virus, though, that for me has been no problem at all. I spent many years in corporate business, an endeavor that I did not much enjoy and am glad to have left, a departure that took place about twenty years ago. Business did allow me to make some money, which very much helped in raising a family. It also enabled me to hone my skills as a conversationalist, skills that were always with me anyway, even without business.
I’ve been pursuing a different profession since I left business, which is to write fiction. (Full time. I’d been writing throughout my time in business, during lunch.) One can argue that that’s hardly a profession, since it is close to impossible to make enough money to support yourself and a family on creative-writing-wages. But the one thing you must have to make that pursuit fruitful is time alone. I suspect no one has ever completed a novel while working in one of those workplace offices that have been the rage for the last few decades. Everybody in one room, long tables, workstations everywhere, IT guys abounding, noise, and blather everywhere, and no privacy.
For the writer, solitude is the requirement for doing fiction. You are always alone and, if you have talent, are always involved in a complicated conversation with yourself. This sort of thing can be an enormous challenge, which I think explains much of the bad fiction being written today in the United States.
In a dark world, many fiction writers fall into the trap of simply accepting that darkness and feeling that they must write about it exclusively. So, these days we have buckets of novels written about how featureless life is. They are often slim volumes about small lives, in the manner of, say, Camus’s The Stranger, as in this, written by Camus himself: “She wanted to know if I loved her. I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn’t mean anything but that I probably didn’t.” It may be that Camus was a good writer…maybe. But, like his, most of the contemporary novels I’ve attempted reading that try to explain the current emotionally plain, viewless atmosphere are themselves viewless. Plain, as well. Yes, they give you an idea of what it is to live in these times of Corona virus shutdown and political cluelessness (except for President Biden and most, although not all, other Democrats.) But, to get that, all you need do is look around. To write well about it is another matter. Simply spelling out emotional barrenness —- one novel after another —- isn’t enough.
But, of course, the fine novel, rare as it is, is out there. You must keep looking. For me, at least for now, García Márquez will have to do. His work still has it in spades, although his time has passed. Edith Wharton too, although even she would have trouble these days, since so much of her work depended on fascinating conversation between compelling women. Wharton’s characters were unhappy, but very much more than just unhappy.
But try Sebastian Barry, whom I’ve just begun reading…his The Whereabouts of Eaneus McNulty. Vera by Carol Edgarian. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.
And…may I suggest another novel that I like, The Moment Before, the author of which is a particularly close friend.
It’s out there, that novel. It’s being written now…somewhere. We mustn’t give up. We’ll find it. Keep looking.
© Copyright 2022. Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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