Human Novels

A friend emailed me recently to say she thought she understood why I did not like Richard Powers' most recent novel, The Echo Maker, as much as I'd liked his others. She said, "it is by far his most human novel ever – I find the emotions in it to be so raw – it is almost painful to read and I hate to have it be over". I answered, somewhat amused, "you're saying I don't like 'human' novels??" She meant that it's more of a tearjerker, "like a chick flick".

I was amused by the initial comment, in part because I wasn't overly surprised, given that our tastes don't easily mesh (for example, she had a hard time finishing Tom McCarthy's fantastic Remainder because she found the narrator so unpleasant), but also because I am very aware that Powers has often been accused of being a cold writer, that his writing is not "human" (or concerned primarily with characters with whom the reader might identify). It's a strange criticism, and hard to respond to. Hard for me to respond to, anyway, not just because it's something I disagree with about Powers, but because it's not the kind of criticism I would likely ever make about anything. It's not a category of criticism I use or find helpful. As Dan Green might say "if it's not human, then what is it?"

In a post from February that I noticed only a few weeks ago, Scott Esposito wrote about his reading of another Powers novel, Galatea 2.2. Scott, relatively new to Powers, was not liking it as much as he had liked both The Echo Maker and The Gold Bug Variations. In Galatea 2.2, a fictional Richard Powers is Humanist-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Advanced Studies in Illinois. He becomes involved with Philip Lentz, a cognitive neurologist working on using a neural network to model the human brain (I've read the book twice, but for convenience I am basically paraphrasing the back of the book here). Lentz enlists Powers to teach the various iterations of the network the canonical Great Books. Scott praises this part of the novel, but there is a subplot that he had a problem with. Here's what he says about it:

This [subplot] one tells of Richard Powers the recent grad--his relationship with a woman he met while teaching an undergrad class and the writing of his first novel. The problem here is that it always feels like I am reading this narrative at a distance. The characters of young Richard and his love (only known as "C.") feel like 2-D representations of your typical couple at loose ends after college. This part is described, not told, which is a shame, because I have seen what Powers can do, and he can do much more than this. For example:

We were alone. For the first time in our lives, neither of us was going anywhere. We navigated from winter night to winter night, in a state where winter starts in October and rages on into May. In an apartment halfway along its forced march from genteel to desperate, we made a home too familiar for words.

Now, there's nothing wrong with this kind of fly-over narration if used sparingly to jet us past certain spots, but when virtually the entire story is narrated in these bland, distant terms, we have a problem. I don't want to be told that "we made a home too familiar for words," I want to see it being made. Moreover, there's no suspense in this plot. We know Powers will write his novel and become a famous author, that his relationship will end badly. The only thing in it for us is a vivid portrayal of it happening, but we're not getting that. And, lastly, halfway through the novel, I'm still not seeing the links between this narrative and the other one.

In a comment, Scott says that he finished the novel and ended up not liking it, finding the writing "loose" and "clunky" (I certainly disagree with this), the subplots never coming together for him.

It's difficult to argue with someone's dislike of a novel. It's more difficult when the dislike is couched in terms that seem so far removed from your own experience of the novel. In this case, I fear that Scott--who has shown an openness to various kinds of non-conventional fiction--is bringing expectations of a certain kind of book to his reading of this one. And I fear that Powers has encouraged this by his recent move toward more conventional psychological fiction (perhaps, too, Galatea 2.2's superficial resemblance to such books lends one to believe these kinds of expectations will be met). Worse, in his phrase "he can do much more than this" Scott appears to be privileging the aesthetics of this kind fiction, over even those more experimental novels he admittedly admires.

Essentially, with Galatea 2.2, Scott is telling Powers to "show not tell". Just as I think it's strange to criticize a novel for not being "human", I think this is a strange criticism of this novel. When Powers the character arrives in Illinois he is damaged, unsure whether he will be able to write again, whether he wants to write again. At some point he has obviously regained the urge to write (he is writing this book), and in doing so he writes about how he and C. came together, tentative at first:

By mutual agreement, we kept mum and avoided incident. I teased her about her previous incarnations. "Do you have any documentary evidence?"

At her next conference, she produced a photo out of her backpack. "Documentary evidence of prior lives." Flirting, under deniability's cloak.

He writes about his impetus to start writing, and about how his writing career had begun to flourish just as the depressive C. was becoming unreachable. His relationship with C. left him unsure of where he stood with himself. His writing in these sections is not "flyover", but I agree that there is a distance in it. Scott says that he has "seen what Powers can do"--that is, tell a psychologically convincing story, as he tried to do with The Echo Maker--write a tearjerker, as my friend would put it. Scott wants to "see" the relationship that Powers is instead describing. I assume this means more "natural" dialogue and psychological investigation into the mind of the Powers character. But to the Powers character, the narrator, these sections are not merely a narrative, they are the pieces of his former life, the damage to which has left him adrift, both as a man and as a writer. The distance is entirely appropriate, not least because he is never able to get to C. He is completely shut out; she recedes further and further from him. Her distance from him necessitates her distance from us. And his distance from her, effects his distance from other people.

The connection with the rest of the book becomes apparent by the end when in the course of his Great Books survey with Lentz's neural network, he finds himself attached to this network, needing the unlikely relationship that emerges with its artificial intelligence. Powers emerges, through this interaction, as well as through his contact with the other faculty and students at the Center (including Lentz and the grad student, A.; Scott inexplicably finds this latter interaction "creepy"), able to begin writing again, able to write something of the story of his life with C. and the distance that came between them.

Creating Writing

The other day, Dan Green wrote a post in response to Patrick at Litblog.com's misunderstanding of what Richard Powers was up to in his latest novel, The Echo Maker. Patrick basically accuses Powers of condescension toward his characters, an "inability to sympathetically portray characters whose mindsets are very different from his own". He then gives some examples that he claims are evidence of smug authorial intrusion, when frankly, as Dan observes, it should be clear that the opinions expressed are not those of an "omniscient narrator" but of the characters themselves. It would seem that the fact that the novel is told in the third person is confusing.

I bring this up because the rest of Dan's post is interesting. He talks about what he thinks might be common misconceptions about such third-person narratives. First, that the narrators are always "omniscient". Or, second, that the consciousness of characters depicted in such narratives are all, to some degree, "project[ions] of the consciousness of the writer". He's probably right that Patrick is assuming the latter with Powers. Dan then writes:

In either case, the aesthetic rationale for the development of modernist-era "psychological realism"--to extend realism to the reality of consciousness, to explore the way perception of reality shapes our understanding of it--essentially drops out. The merging of narration with consciousness has become invisible, now just the default approach of any narrative not related in the first-person, just the currently established strategy allowing the author/narrator to "say something." In my opinion, Richard Powers in The Echo Maker is attempting to retain something of the experimentation of modernist psychological realism--or at least its goal--but as I indicated in my post on the novel, its lackluster execution in this book is for me another signal that the technique has become increasingly shopworn.

Among other things, the reflexive use of the central consciousness narrator has made it more difficult to cultivate and identify style in the writing of fiction. Powers is still a sufficiently distinctive stylist that he is able to overcome to some extent the limitations of the strategy, but even in The Echo Maker the signature Powers style with its alliterations and startling figures and achieved rhythms is more restrained than usual. And in most ordinary literary fiction the strategy has become simply mind-numbing.

In the past, Powers' critics (and here I use the term in its "fault-finding" sense) have complained that his characters were not fleshed out, that his dialogue was unbelievable, that his prose was wooden. The latter complaint always struck me as way off-base, but the first two, and ones like it, just confused me. I mean, it never occurred to me to level these sorts of complaints, because it seemed clear to me that they were irrelevant. I felt similar confusion when friends told me that they didn't like, for example, Don Delillo's White Noise, because they didn't care about the characters--what happened to them, what they did, whatever. My initial reaction to such complaints was bewilderment. Was I supposed to care what happened to the characters in the novels I read? I thought there was so much else going on in Delillo, and in Powers, that the believability of their characters, and my need to care about them, seemed quite beside the point.

It wasn't until I started trying to find information about books online, and later reading blogs, that I realized that what I was objecting to, but having a difficult time articulating, was not only old-fashioned in some sense, but perhaps the dominant literary attitude, that in favor of "psychological realism", or the notion that the most important aspect of literature is "character". My tendency has always been to trust the writer and to take what he or she gives me. This does not mean that I simply like everything, but that if a novel doesn't have a certain feature--realistic characters, say--that I shouldn't assume that it's supposed to have it. The writing is the first thing.

James Wood, of course, is a major proponent of "character" in fiction. The first review of his I ever read was of John Updike's Licks of Love, which appeared in April 2001, in the London Review of Books (though I originally read it at the now-defunct FEED online magazine). After taking a couple of easy jabs at Updike's famous "abundance" of published words (the man is prolific, isn't he?), Wood then gets into the recurrence of certain themes and language in Updike's fiction over the years; the oral sex, adultery, wife-swapping, general misogyny. Wood writes:

In Updike's defence it is often maintained that these are the thoughts of his characters, not necessarily of their creator. But obsessions of this kind have recurred and overlapped thickly enough in his work to constitute, now, the equivalent of an artist's palette: this is how Updike chooses to paint the world.

Then:

The sentences have an essayistic saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too abstract. In 'The Women Who Got Away', for instance, the narrator tells us of his old lover, and how 'her voice and its quick inspirations of caustic perception painted the world, which seemed to me rimmed with a vague terror, in bright fearless colours.' But is this perfect sentence, with its delicate deferral so characteristic of Updike ('painted the world . . . which seemed . . . in bright fearless colours'), the expression of a man who really felt the world to be rimmed with a vague terror? Or does the terror not seem a little too vague, as if the narrator were paraphrasing a novel for a New Yorker review? In the same story, when we are told, 'yet we did divorce, in painful piecemeal, as did Maureen and Rodney,' we attend to that fine phrase 'in painful piecemeal', but are distanced by it from its piecemeal pain: if it was so painful, why does it disport itself in such dainty clothes?

One of the dangers for the stylist such as Updike - and one of the ways in which prose is unlike poetry - is that prose always forces the question: who is thinking in these particular words, and why? Point of view, a boring topic to most readers, is the densest riddle for the novelist, since words are either directly ascribed to characters (first-person narration) or indirectly ascribed to them (third-person narration). By contrast, the poet's words are generally assumed to flow from the poet, who wishes, as it were, to draw attention to himself. But the novelist may not, and should not, always want to. There is no doubt that the pleasantly alliterative phrase 'in painful piecemeal' is rather fine; but is fineness what is needed here, or does it slide a filter between the reader and the supposedly pained narrator?

I admit that when I read this review I was mightily impressed, and at the same time felt inadequate. I hadn't studied literature, I just read it, as best I could, and I saw this as a closer reading than I feared myself capable of. These kinds of questions just didn't occur to me. Subsequent Wood criticism I've read has fallen into two camps, those that are interesting but seem to miss the point (such as his critiques of the so-called "hysterical realist" writers, such as David Foster Wallace or Thomas Pynchon or Don Dellilo, found in The Broken Estate), and those that are good and appropriate to the material at hand (in reviews of the new Edith Grossman translation of Don Quixote, and of Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello). When he's reviewing a book in which character does seem of paramount importance, I've found him compelling. Looking back on the Licks of Love review, it seemed to me that his method made sense. And, I read his review of Updike's latest novel, Terrorist (in which Updike imagines a Muslim schoolboy in New Jersey who is "tempted to become a suicide bomber"), approvingly. Wood says Updike "proves himself relatively inept at the essential task of free indirect style, of trying to find an authorial voice for his Muslim schoolboy". I wasn't terribly interested in the book anyway, and given my general views of both Wood and Updike, I guessed that Wood's assessment was essentially accurate.

But, to return to Dan Green's post. Dan has written a lot about this critical predilection for psychological realism; he has also written a number of posts taking issue with James Wood's criticism (see here, here, here). I read these posts, and the ensuing comment threads (some of which Wood himself has contributed to), with great interest. But I have often wished that Dan elaborated a little more--not on just the question of whether "psychological realism", or character, ought to be the primary purpose of fiction (which idea I think he criticizes quite effectively), but also on what might be going on in some of those narratives that are criticized as failing on specifically those grounds. In light of this, I find it quite helpful that he closes this recent post with the following about Updike:

Most of [Updike's] novels are conventionally related in the third-person, but his language typically exceeds that which his characters are capable of summoning, as in this passage from Villages (2004):

After Owen had left it behind, his original village seemed an innocent, precious place, but it did not strike him as that while he lived there. It was the world, with a fathomless past and boundaries that were over the horizon. There were snakes in the grass and in piles of rocks warmed by the sun. Sex and religion had distinct, ancient odors, familes perched like shaky nests on tangled twigs of previous history; and death could pounce in the middle of the night. . . .

Regular readers of Updike's work would no doubt find this recognizably Updikean. It draws on Owen's mental storehouse of memories and images, but does not dwell in his immediate awareness. It creates writing out of that storehouse. It moves in and out of Owen's awareness, weaving a style out of the character's thought processes plus a something else the writer brings in addition to plumbing those processes.

I perked up when I read this. That a novelist's language might "typically exceed that which his characters are capable of summoning" is certainly something Wood and readers like him appear to have a problem with. And I think it's also something that might lead readers to accuse a writer of intruding on his "story". But I see no reason why it should be wrong for a narrator to "draw on [a character's] mental storehouse of memories and images", but yet not be attempting to convey that character's moment-to-moment consciousness.

Updike "creates writing" out of his character's "mental storehouse". It seems to me that these other writers are not necessarily interested in the traditional creation and exploration of character at all, but are trying to "create writing" out of other things they have imagined (though with David Foster Wallace this at times takes the form of a rather extreme exploration of a character's consciousness; the character people don't seem to like that either). And I agree with Dan that Powers has gotten away from what was most interesting about his fiction: he created writing--rich, vibrant writing--out of his imaginative use of science and ideas and multiple narrative schemes. His novels certainly had characters, but they weren't really investigations of these characters. I loved The Time of Our Singing, but I have to admit that the writing in it was often less interesting, less chewy (to borrow an adjective from William H. Gass), than it had been in previous novels. And with that novel and the new one it appears that he has, unfortunately, taken his critics to heart, and tried to invest his characters with a psychological realism that his novels didn't depend on before. Powers is certainly entitled to do what he wants as a writer, and there is still much to enjoy in The Echo Maker (which, of course, won the National Book Award, so what do I know?), but I hope that his muse takes him elsewhere in future novels.

Powers, etc

Recently I've only found time to blog on weekends, and I missed even that this past weekend. I have a bunch of things awaiting my attention that I hope to post sooner rather than later (including long-gestating posts on Despair and The Sleepwalkers, both of which are well past their sell-by dates).

In the meantime, I finished reading Richard Powers' new novel, The Echo Maker, yesterday. It's a very fine book and definitely of a piece with Powers' ongoing themes and concerns. Here he returns to an essential set of questions running through almost all of his fiction: who are we? how do we narrate ourselves to ourselves? how can we possibly recognize other people, and relate to them, when we can barely maintain ourselves (our "selves") from moment to moment? I may have more to say about it later, time permitting.

For more on The Echo Maker, be sure to take a look at the excellent five-day roundtable discussion over at Return of the Reluctant (parts one, two, three, four, and five, the last of which features Powers' own comments responding to points made by the roundtable participants). Also, at Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito responds to the William Deresiewicz lame attack-review in The Nation, which I talked about here (and Ed here).

On a somewhat related note, at The Pinocchio Theory Steven Shaviro reviews a science fiction novel by Peter Watts, called Blindsight, which is "a space opera, and a First Contact novel, and a vampire novel — and also a philosophical novel about the nature of consciousness." Shaviro then discusses at length the novel's exploration of consciousness. The novel sounds fascinating, and Shaviro's post is very interesting. Waggish responds with a thought-provoking post of his own.

What Novels are For

I haven't read Richard Powers' new novel, The Echo Maker, yet (it's on order), but I've noticed that the reviews have started coming in. This one in The Nation by William Deresiewicz is a pretty annoying James Wood-style takedown (link via The Written Nerd). Deresiewicz irritates immediately, attempting to take down Powers and his fixation on science:

Richard Powers has a lot of ideas: complex, articulate, deeply informed ideas about artificial intelligence, virtual reality, relativity, genetics, music and much more. But poems, as Mallarmé told Degas, are not made of ideas, and neither are novels. The Echo Maker will tell you a great deal about neuroscience, environmental degradation and the migratory patterns of the sandhill crane, but like Powers's other novels, it won't tell you much about what its laboriously accumulated information and elaborately constructed concepts have to do with what it means to be alive at a particular time and place, or what it feels like. And that, crudely put, is what novels are for.

Nice of him to decide for the rest of us what novels are for. I can only say that I've never found Powers' introduction of scientific ideas or themes off-putting or, as Deresiewicz later puts it, "textbookery". It's never been difficult to understand their relation to the narrative--or, rather, it's always been clear that they have a relation to the narrative, and part of the enjoyment in reading Powers is figuring out what that is.

Anyway, some other offending remarks: About The Time of Our Singing, he writes "Powers constructs an enormous novel to tell us, in part, that white people will never be able to understand or accept black people (so black people should stick to their own culture and their own kind)." Though I disagree with him, I'm not especially bothered by many of Deresiewicz's criticisms of this novel (for example, that he finds Powers to be more sentimentalist than humanist), but this comment is just lunk-headed. About The Gold Bug Variations, Deresiewicz says that it's little more than Powers "treating the novel as a container for scientific ideas". And: "One can't help but feel that Powers is more in love with his ideas than with his story."

I know I shouldn't get too worked up; if he's unable to figure out what Powers' "elaborately constructed concepts have to do with what it means to be alive at a particular time and place, or what it feels like", then that's his loss.

What if the World Were Already Lost?

I'm in the midst of re-reading Richard Powers' second novel, Prisoner's Dilemma, which was the first Powers book I ever read. In this book, Powers plays with history and time and family interactions and the question of how the individual can impact the world. The family in the novel is the Hobsons: Eddie Sr., his wife Ailene, and their four children, Artie, Lily, Rachel, and Eddie Jr. Eddie Sr. suffers from an ongoing illness that he refuses to have diagnosed and the rest of the family avoids talking about, has avoided talking about for years, finding elaborate ways of evading the issue. Powers' fiction is usually packed with puns and metaphor and allusion, and Prisoner's Dilemma is no different. Here, the engine of this language is Eddie Sr. and his battery of pedagogical tricks and referential tics. The children have all grown up under his dark, often tasteless humor and his constant barrage of movie quotes, literary allusions, bad puns, ad hoc mind games, science quizzes over breakfast--indeed, he speaks almost entirely in this language, leaving the children to figure out what he might be getting at with any given comment or joke or question. His way of teaching them how to make their way in the world. But the children, adept at playing the game, have each in his or her own way instead mastered the art of evasion: evasion of the topic and of having to admit their true feelings.

In the "present-day" narrative, as the book opens, it is November 1978 and the family is gathered for Eddie Jr.'s 18th birthday, and Eddie Sr. is increasingly, alarmingly ill. He is ill but somehow still able to bounce back from each seemingly awful collapse and maintain his cheerful, joking demeanor, and the rest of the family battles silently over how to confront him about it. The following passage is taken from the middle of the novel, towards the end of the visit, Rachel having finally coaxed the family into singing by providing the first line, "Lo, how a rose e’er blooming". The rest of the family joins in with four-part harmony:

All at once, the flash that each had tried so hard to evade was there, intact: a moment of tender visiting hovering over them as the tenors slid down that narrow half-step to the F sharp. They all felt it, momentarily. And each knew the others received a momentary hold on the instant, too. All six stood looking into a place before irony, before wit, before anxiety, before evasion. Surfaces dispersed, and in the still point underneath, they saw what was so terribly obvious to all of them, despite their long gainsaying: how hopelessly each cared what happened to the other. The care shouted out uninvited between them, like a candidate's criminal record. They had no choice but to tune their chord to it. They stood startled, flushed into that snare, aware for once of the connection between them that could reach down at leisure and destroy them. Caught in glorious chord, in facts gathered from each other's faces, they all felt the fissure--fragile, dangerous, and beautiful--close up and leave them in the incurable call back to tonic. The rose I have in mind.

That last sentence is too much of an apparent non sequitur to pass without notice. A short search came up with words to this Christmas carol:

Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming from tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse’s lineage coming, as men of old have sung.
It came, a floweret bright, amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night.

Isaiah ’twas foretold it, the Rose I have in mind;
With Mary we behold it, the virgin mother kind.
To show God’s love aright, she bore to men a Savior,
When half spent was the night.

So, as expected, it's clearly not a non sequitur. "The rose I have in mind" is just another line in the song. Or is it? The placement of the line in this manner implies a lot more than mere quotation. Why is Powers using this carol? It appears at least one other time in the book. What is he trying to say? I don't know much about carols, nor am I well-versed in Christian literature or imagery. But, at risk of being obvious, I'll take a stab at it.

In the carol, the "Rose" is obviously Jesus Christ. Or, given the reference to Isaiah's messianic prophecy, the Messiah, or Saviour, more generally. In the passage, I think the line means that here, in this singing, where the family realizes with a shock how much they care about each other, they perhaps see that it might be a way out of their standard evasion, it might save them. They might just be able to drop the act and get to the point. But it is as elusive as understanding. Singing is where they see past all their jokey facades to their intimate connections, where they realize that they matter to each other more than they might have been able to say. But when the song ends and they part ways, they're back where they were.

But I think there's more to the allusion than that. Ed Hobson learned something about the world, something about America, that ruined his youthful idealism, left him adrift in the world, unable to find the purpose for a small individual like himself in the vast billions and in the huge historical currents that happen without most of us being aware of the changes. His illness has a dark source, connected to one of these hidden histories, and he knows it. In a world that may already be lost (a variant on one of his favorite phrases: in many ways this book is a meditation on loneliness, and its opposite), he resorts to trivia, silly movies, fantasy, in order to survive, or so it appears. Alternating with the present-day narrative is a counter-narrative, Eddie Sr.'s "Hobstown" project, involving Walt Disney and a fictional scheme to free some of the Japanese Americans interned during World War II, in which Eddie imagines a world where history is redeemed. Where people realize that the way out of the elaborate Prisoner's Dilemma of the title is in fact not mutual mistrust, that self-interest is not in the self's interest, that they must hope against hope that the other party, the Other, will recognize this too. This might just save humanity. The rose he has in mind.

Politics and Literature: Richard Powers

Richard Powers is always an interesting, thoughtful interview subject. I first read this one, with Jeffrey Williams, several years ago (link brought back to my attention by wood s lot), which provides us with this (fairly lengthy) relevant excerpt:

JW: To put it in a more general way, you think that the novelist's job is to prortray the full complexity of life. On the other hand, is there a political component? Gain doesn't wave any flags or beat any polemical horses, but it would be hard not to see it as a political commentary on corporate life.

RP: The novelist's job is to say what it means to be alive. I don't think there are any wrong ways of doing that; I think there are wrong ways of not doing that, of avoiding it, but I think there's nothing that you could throw into that hopper that would be irrelevant. The more you can treat -- providing you can continue to synthesize it into something that's both intellectually and emotionally engaging -- the better. Right now a lot of fiction restricts itself totally to dramatic revelation, raising a lot of proscriptions about the way that fiction can and can't function. The direct introduction of discursive material has been considered anathema for a long time. I've been trying in different ways to violate that prohibition from my first book on. True, you can get more emotive power over your reader by dramatic revelation than by discursive narrative. But you can get more connection with discursive narrative! The real secret is to triangulate between these two modes, getting to places that neither technique could reach in isolation. Because that's how the human organism works. We employ all sorts of intelligences, from low-level bodily intuitions to high-level, syllogistic rationalism. It's not a question of which way of knowing the world is the right one.

JW: People would say that you're more "cerebral." That's a word I frequently see to describe your fiction.

RP: That's been a hard rap to shake, no matter what paths I've chosen to take. I try to include head and heart, to write using all the modes of knowing the world that we employ as we bump around in it. To open the novel back up to taking science as a legitimate subject, to let the novel treat the political without betraying psychological insight: these paths are full of emotional potential. I'm interested in reclaiming lots of intellectual territory for the novel, but I'd like to see that happen without a loss of emotional territory. The novel is a genre that presents unique opportunities to appeal to all sorts of different ways of knowing. It's one of the most powerful tools we have for saying what it means to be alive.

JW: That's fairly neutral; what of the political valence of the novel? To say what it means to be alive could lend to psychological stories.

RP: You're right. But politics is psychology as it plays out in
groups larger than two. The two exist along a continuous, if discrete, continuum. In Gain, Laura's death is not just the story of her own, private dying. It's also the story of what happens to her ex-husband, of what happens to her children, of what it means to the town to have another resident die of cancer, of what it means to the company to run this rear-guard action while simultaneously cutting the settlement checks for the class action suit. Political events have aesthetic valence, and private events always have their political component. It is possible to write a book that doesn't have an overt political component and still say something about what it means to be alive. But it's also possible to create rich psychological portraits without shying away from the questions of collective politics. Prohibiting a novel from taking on overtly polemical or ideological concerns is like making people swim with handcuffs on. It can only make the picture stunted and smaller.

JW: One could see it in a Chomskian vein as a question of manufacturing consent. There is a pressure in publishing, as our mutual friend Jim Neilson tells us, to prohibit overt, political material in the novel.

RP: More market forces at work. A huge portion of our lives, even as measured from within this fictional construction of the individual -- which Gain goes to great pains to see as a by-product of the rising technological and corporate world -- will always play out in the public sphere, in the social confrontations of polis-making.

JW: Rather than saying politics is generally part of life, what kind of politics would you espouse? Do you think the novel should espouse a particular kind of politics or maintain a certain remove from them?

RP: I do believe in fictional transference. If the novel wants to raise political questions resonantly, it will more profoundly move readers to discovery if its process is one of negotiation and interaction. The novel that deploys one inarguable, fixed, rigid, and reductive polemical position is more likely to alienate than to engage the reader. Yet the best of deeply committed literature can deploy an overt political position and still be so persuasive that it moves people despite a lack of rich, literary dialogism. The Jungle did produce essential legislation. And it's not a subtle book.

JW: Do you see yourself in that line? Earlier you also mentioned Frank Norris, I assume thinking of The Octopus.

RP: My desire in Gain was to provoke a political question and to suggest a political vision without declaring a simplistic resolution to the enormous questions raised by the ascendance of the corporation. I hoped that Laura's gradual awakening in consciousness following her cancer would strike the reader as too little, too late, thereby producing a dramatic discomfort that might encourage the reader to complete the steps that this woman had begun.

JW: What would those steps be?

RP: I want the reader to come to a deeper awareness of the material causes that control the terms of our existence, and to reach a more nuanced awareness of the myths that she has been asked to buy into. I'd like the reader to finish the book asking the questions, "What world have I been sold?" and "What world do I want to live in?" I don't think it's the task of novelists to say, "Here is what you must do to save the planet." But it is the task of the novelist to say, "Here are some things that desperately need doing."