Is Quality Fiction a Victim of Declining Attention Spans?

I’ve written several posts in the past about Young Adult (YA) fiction, not because I have any interest in it per-se, but rather because it is apparently about the only genre where sales are actually increasing. And this is at least in part because it is popular with adults as well as with the target audience. 

What is behind the trend, one wonders? Is it yet another indicator of the failure of our much maligned education system? 

A Powerful Story of Quiet Desperation

“The Apartment," in the Aug. 31, 2015 issue of The New Yorker, is a powerful story of quiet desperation, set in Sweden, a country more “buttoned up” than America, author Jensen Beach says in one of the magazine’s regular author interviews.

Louise, married with a grown child and seemingly leading a comfortable middle-class life, is actually a hollowed-out alcoholic who hates her husband, her son and presumably just about everyone else. In the background, is the road not taken – an affair with an Iranian graduate student when she was at university. Instead of pursuing that, she opted for a conventional marriage with another Swede.

Certain Porous Boundaries

One of the themes of this blog has been the interaction between fiction and life – what I have from time to time referred to as the dotted line between fiction and non-fiction. 

Rather than attempt to address this issue in an essay, I’ve been posting some hopefully interesting and illuminating examples. Readers can make of them what they wish. 

In that vein, here are a couple of stories from the July 14, 2015, “New York Times” that attracted my attention. These artistic endeavors don’t involve writing, but the principle is arguably the same. 

The first story reported that Tania Bruguera, a New York-based Cuban artist, had been chosen to be the first artist-in-residence for Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Office of Immigrant Affairs – a year-long appointment. At the same time, the NYT said, the Museum of Modern Art announced that it had acquired a “politically charged” video Ms Bruguera had created called “Untitled (Havana 2000).” 

What interested me about these developments was that Ms Bruguera was described as an artist “whose work blurs and sometimes obliterates the line between socially conscious performance art and straight-ahead social work.”  

When the NYT story was published, Ms Brugura was in Cuba and uncertain when she might leave due to a dispute with the Cuban government over whether she will be free to return to that country if she departs with a passport that was recently returned to her. But she is hoping that the recent improvement in U.S.-Cuban relations will allow her to take up the NYC residency where she believes a melding of the artistic and the civic is “rife with possibility.” 

Art, which is arguably akin to fiction, can interact with real life is by showing people how to imagine their identity in creative ways, the artist believes, arguing that this is particularly important for immigrants who, as a result of their dislocation, may have lost their ability to dream. 

Artist residencies can bring new kinds of thinking to city programs, NYC cultural affairs commissioner Tom Finkelpearl told the NYT, adding “Tania is obviously at the forefront of this kind of art.” 

The other NYT story reported that Joe Gibbons, a filmmaker and performance artist who once taught art at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), had been sentenced to a year in prison for robbing a bank – an event he filmed with a pocket-sized pink and silver video camera. It was also apparently captured by bank video cameras. 

Mr. Gibbons “claimed it was an act of performance art coupled with dire financial straits,” the NYT said. The paper also noted that Gibbons’ MIT   profile “cites his predilection for exploring the boundaries between fact and fiction.” 

Gibbons is not a marginal figure. “His work, mainly film installations, has appeared four times in the Whitney Biennial and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou in Paris,” the newspaper said. 

“While acknowledging that Mr. Gibbons had dubious legal standing, Ann Pellegrini, a professor of performance at New York University, called the case a classic example of ‘performance becoming performative,’ an act that questions ‘the relationship between actor, audience, and enactment,” the NYT article said. “In the robbery, the bank teller and the police unwittingly played their roles ‘without knowing that they were at the same time performing in Gibbon’s art performance of a bank robbery,’”  Pellegrini explained to The Times.

The newspaper article went on to quote art critic Ed Halter as saying that the robbery might only be part of a larger, future work.  “His [Gibbons’] work has always incorporated diary elements, and very often in a way that the viewer can’t quite be certain about what’s true and what’s not.” 

Perhaps the bank surveillance video of the Gibbons robbery will also eventually make it onto the art market, or be acquired by a major museum.

Where to Start When Writing a Novel?

One often hears that good stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. So it might seem logical that someone wishing to write one would start where the tale begins and march forward to the conclusion. But that’s not always the way it works.

The New York-based Center for Fiction recently interviewed Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves, which won the Center’s 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan prize for a first novel.

Among other things, Thomas was asked to identify the “entry point” – where he began writing – because the novel took over 10 years to complete and because it covers a great deal of ground.

“The very first thing I wrote in the novel was an in medias res [in the middle of things] moment -- a version of the section in the book where Eileen gives Ed a surprise party for his birthday. I had an idea of the sweep of the life of this character and this family, but I wanted to start somewhere in the middle. There's something useful about getting into the middle of something and looking around to see where you are,” Thomas explained.

Then he wrote Eileen’s back story before continuing forward.

Is The Food Industry Next in Line for "Disruption?"

The business section of the July 31, 2015, San Francisco Chronicle featured a story entitled “Food Industry Ripe for Disruption,” which brought to mind a short story in the June 22 New Yorker by Ben Marcus entitled “The Grow Light Blues.”

The story is about a rather sad individual named Carl who becomes badly disfigured after he agrees to be a guinea pig for a start-up named Mayflower, the maniacal CEO of which believes grow lights could be used to deliver nutrients to humans in place of conventional food -- while people are involved in other activities, such as using a computer.

“The Appearance of Real-Life Chaos”

What makes a good work of fiction? 

In the view of Richard Ridley, an author and contributor to Amazon's "CreateSpace," an important element is “the appearance of real-life chaos.”  Subplots, which give depth to characters, are also valuable in that they create familiar disorder, he maintained in a short advice-to-authors blog post entitled “The Resolution Matrix.”

In other words, human events rarely proceed in a predictable, straight-line fashion so to be credible, fiction shouldn’t either.

Ridley’s advice on that front is probably well taken, but his main message is somewhat curious.

Yet More on the Dotted Line

I've written earlier posts on the idea that there is a dotted line between fact and fiction, not because I want to suggest that non-fiction is fundamentally flawed. Like almost everything else in life, it has its shortcomings from time to time, but as a former journalist I'm inclined to believe what I read in credible publications unless I have strong reasons to suspect it isn't correct.

As someone who now dabbles in fiction, it is the other side of the line that is more interesting to me: how should fact be used in fiction?  I will have more to say about that in another positing, but for the moment, I want to call readers' attention to a quote in a recent "Bookends" feature in the Sunday "New York Times" Book Review section.