Perennial Art

Art that seeks, in Goethe’s phrase, the “characteristic” of the era, tends to be valued, in later epochs, more for the historical insight it provides than for the aesthetic experience it affords. Goethe’s own novels, important as they are in understanding the history of the medium, as well as late eighteenth-century Europe, do not retain the verve of Tristram Shandy, Gargantua and Pantagruel, or Don Quixote, works which only incidentally deal in the representative or characteristic. Goethe may only have been following Aristotle, who suggested that poetry is nobler than history precisely for privileging the typical over the contingent. Yet an artwork’s vitality, particularly for future generations, may have far more to do with properties like ambiguity, richness, and even outright contradiction than with cogent summations of a historical moment. It is why nineteenth-century novelists who emphasized the latter—Balzac and Zola—are more often cited than read today, whereas the works of the more enigmatic Melville and Conrad retain their original luster. Consider, too, the case of Goncharov, whose first novel signaled his intentions plainly through its title, A Common Story, and who is now much less read than his contemporary Dostoevsky, whose books, while remaining emblematic of Russian consciousness, tackle weightier matters: freedom, God, evil, and the rest. More recently, the fate of many an American social novelist has followed the same pattern. Why are we no longer entranced by Dreiser or Anderson, Dos Passos or Wilder, each of whom aimed to give an account of the essence of country, the spirit of the age? What, too, of later writers operating in a similar vein, whether Mailer or Vidal or Wolfe?

It feels inevitable that the first significant twenty-first-century addition to this list will be Jonathan Franzen. The Corrections, a fine précis of its moment, already feels as though it has lost some gravitas, while Freedom and Purity both felt dated upon their release.

John Updike also aspired to chronicle suburban America in broad strokes. News value put him, like Franzen, on the cover of Time. But interest in Updike’s work today is already more aesthetic than informational. Style, concept, and vision are what survive in art, not the well-articulated facts of the moment. Updike had at least a version of the first: an effortless capacity for painterly description. It is this, and not his chronicle of post-war America, that keeps our attention, though I suspect his style is too conceptually banal to keep it for much longer. He is already on his way out.

Franzen has even bigger worries, being overmatched by Updike as a stylist. In his Paris Review interview, Franzen dismisses style, praising transparent language. Quiet prose isn’t the problem, though: the radically expansive realism of War and Peace—which contains whole essays on the philosophy of history—is put across entirely in it. It is only because the substance of Franzen’s project is so much humbler than Tolstoy’s that stolid language rates as a liability.

The reaction to much of Franzen’s recent journalism for the New Yorker is instructive. His long features on both bird conservation and the two-degree global warming target have both been roundly derided as shrill, misinformed, and dogmatic. His fiction is less marred by righteous indignation, but not by much, at least since The Corrections. That book inaugurated Franzen’s Dreiser period. And if literature is the news that stays news, as the old saw goes, this work isn’t quite it.

There remains Franzen’s early period, which yielded two heady novels at some remove from the social chronicles that followed. Though The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion are now hardly discussed, there are reasons to think they will become his most enduring contributions to literature.

One wonders, too, which of the novels of the decade just past will soon be regarded as period pieces. The fashion during this stretch for diary fiction—true journalism, if ever there were—suggests that the most widely discussed works of the 2010s will have more than a little trouble sticking in the mind.