Around a decade ago, people on Twitter had a shorthand for the kind of novel that is ruining literary culture. It was a novel written by a (white, male, rich) writer who taught creative writing, in which the protagonist, a (white, male, rich) writer who teaches creative writing, is having an affair with a student while struggling over his next book. I’m not sure what else happened in this novel, and from the sound of things, the readers and possibly the author of it weren’t either. It was talked about as being precious, overwritten, lacking in “aboutness” — clearly a daydream for the author. People talked as though every third novel were like this, as though they were being force-fed this book in every college English class.
Now, as it happens, there are some books that almost fit this description if you squint. In William Gass’s The Tunnel, nothing much happens, the protagonist thinks a lot, and — bingo — he has a long affair with a former student (although she’s “nontraditional”). He’s a historian, though. And you can’t really say the book lacks “aboutness” since it’s a 700-something-page meditation on Naziism and also, since it’s a Gass novel, about language: how language means nothing but look at what you can do with it. More to the point, almost no one has read The Tunnel. The professor who assigns it, even to graduate students, is braver than the troops. It is carefully constructed to be a novelist’s novelist’s novel. It belongs to what Gore Vidal snidely called the “R&D wing” of fiction, and what we’d more neutrally call the genre of experimental art. It’s fine; it’s good that it exists; it’s not for everybody and it shouldn’t be everything. I’m glad that there are musicians who are out there cataloguing all the sonic textures you can get by rubbing balloons together; I’m probably not gonna listen long. Lots of experimental fiction is horny in the way that The Tunnel is, by women (Chris Kraus; Kathy Acker; Rikki Ducornet) as well as men (Gass, Robert Coover, John Barth). You get the feeling they’re trying to stay awake at their desks.
I got the feeling The Tunnel was not this novel people were complaining about. So I started asking what, precisely, this novel was. What was the widely-taught and widely-assigned novel in which the author, a clear stand-in for the author, struggles to write his own boring novel, while banging a twenty-year-old? Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon is almost this, but the protagonist spends the book talking himself out of banging the twenty-year-old — he exhibits that much growth. And Chabon, whatever you think of him, is going out of his way to be “fun.” His novels, including that one, are self-consciously full of contrivances and capers and quests, in a way that felt new in the late-90s/early-2000s, what with all the grunge and shrugging. His novels said, “Enough postmodernism. Let’s have some showmanship.” It’s a novel in which a depressed kid steals a jacket that once belonged to Marilyn Monroe, with all manner of hijinks ensuing. More to the point, I have trouble imagining that book being assigned all that widely, at least not enough for people to feel so oppressed by it. It’s kept alive by its film adaptation, which is funny.
Another possibility thrown out is Philip Roth, of whose novels The Counterlife is the closest to fitting the bill.1 Maybe! Some of the people given to complaining in this manner seemed sad when Philip Roth died, though. The Counterlife is ultimately the story of a female character rebelling against her novelist, too, which seems like it would counteract the overall drift of the novel we’re looking for. Also, the “rich” part is missing: every Philip Roth novel is about a social outsider full of rage. It’s why his work sometimes seems prescient and contemporary2 precisely in this decade, when you’d think, between the Blake Bailey grossness and the general ethos of MeToo, he’d be a goner. Read Portnoy’s Complaint, all the stuff about how his father, and Jewish people in general, are ten times better than the pasteboard WASPs and other non-ethnic whites around them — it’s the whole idea of the white person as an un-person, an NPC, who exists to be mediocre, a kudzu that a triumphant member of a racial or sexual minority either triumphs over or rages against. This is a common idea now. And the section set in Israel, where Portnoy imagines that Jewish people will finally make enough violence and mayhem that they can’t be counted out: if you want an explanation for how a guy from New Jersey becomes war criminal Bibi Netanyahu, there it is. Hate him or love him, Roth is the opposite of airily irrelevant.
John Updike is, or was, still widely enough assigned for people to validly complain about him in this manner. (Every few years that hilarious passage where he describes a woman hearing a guy pee goes viral again. It’s a dumb description! He has it coming!) But the Updike novels that would fit this description are not ones that anybody’s assigning to undergrads. What, you think the kids are all being forced to read Bech is Butthurt or whatever? No: they’re being forced to read from the Rabbit books, which are about a sleazy used-car dealer who used to play basketball. He sleeps with hippie girls he picks up at a bar, with the wives of other suburbanites, and, ugh, with his daughter-in-law. And the whole point is that he couldn’t write this self-examination for himself. The other Updike that I’ve seen assigned would be early shit like “Pigeon Feathers” or “A&P,” which are about children realizing that God and/or girls’ butts exist.3
One time in grad school someone made me read Mailer’s Barbary Shore, which is about a writer, and which kind of sucks. So that’s two of our criteria down. It’s the only Mailer anyone ever thought to assign me, in all of college or grad school — the man’s star had dimmed that much even by the early 2000s. But the writer in Barbary Shore is young — his transgressive thing is to fuck his much older landlady, if I remember correctly. Also I think he’s a communist. The famous Mailer books, the ones I can still imagine being assigned, are “nonfiction,” and theoretically about other people or things, such as Gary Gilmore or the March on the Pentagon. None of this is a defense of Mailer, an infinitely exasperating and enraging writer — even before you know that he stabbed his wife and basically got away with it. Mailer is the ultimate proof that you can’t just have a great prose style or interesting voice; if your ideas are bad enough, they can sink you. His ideas are always bad. Even when he reaches the right conclusions, like “We should get out of Vietnam” or “Martin Luther King has a point,” he does so via a series of baroque cognitive distortions rather than, you know, moral principles or instincts of any sort, so he gets the very next problem he encounters all wrong.
Who else? John Gardner’s Mickellson’s Ghosts4 kind of fits our opening description, although a lot happens in the book (ghosts, nuclear dumping, a secret group of assassins run by the LDS church). But Gardner, outside of his creative writing textbooks, is not taught or assigned or read. That’s, like, the main thing John Gardner readers say about him. (The Sunlight Dialogues rules. Grendel rules. Anytime he’s messing about with the Middle Ages, he pretty much rules.) Richard Stern has a novel about a middle-aged writing prof fucking his students called — I’m a little grossed out — Other Men’s Daughters.5 Stephen King has a lot of writer protagonists, but you can’t accuse him of lacking plot. Saul Bellow’s writer protagonists are perfectly capable of condescending to women their own age, thank you very much.6 I’m told Richard Russo has a novel or two that fit our criteria, so maybe all this rage was about Richard Russo. I have not read Richard Russo. Maybe, as Taylor Swift sings, “It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem [because I have not read Richard Russo]. It’s me.”
My point is — I read a fair amount of fiction, and I could not recognize this novel that apparently everybody had read and gagged at, the existence of which constituted their whole beef with “contemporary fiction.”7
Now that novel has been dethroned. They are not making you read it anymore. They are making you read something else. The new novel that everyone hates and swears they’ve been made to read several times is a novel by a 25-year-old (rich, white) MFA holder from Brooklyn. It’s autofiction or as good as. Nothing much happens in this novel, either, but the author spends the whole time signaling her correct politics, her grievances, and her opposition to capitalism, and this is apparently very stifling of her to do, and so we’re all heartily sick of her.