Thursday, January 18, 2007

Zadie Smith on fiction

In The Guardian (UK), Zadie Smith, who rarely produces an essay but always produces a good one, has published a piece about literary failure that is in fact more about all that it takes for literature to succeed. When the novelist, particularly a young one, sets out to write a book, she sees an image of perfection in her head that makes her giddy, drives her forward.

What emerges on the other end invariably falls short -- though often it is only the writer herself who knows just how distorted and misshapen is the final image. Often, Smith says, critics, who concern themselves with craft more than with art, don't notice. Smith is perceptive about the difference, in a way that makes her aesthetic pleasingly old-fashioned. She also can write:

A skilled cabinet-maker will make good cabinets, and a skilled cobbler will mend your shoes, but skilled writers very rarely write good books and almost never write great ones. There is a rogue element somewhere -- for convenience's sake we'll call it the self, although, in less metaphysically challenged times, the "soul" would have done just as well. In our public literary conversations we are squeamish about the connection between selves and novels. We are repelled by the idea that writing fiction might be, among other things, a question of character. We like to think of fiction as the playground of language, independent of its originator. That's why, in the public imagination, the confession "I did not tell the truth" signifies failure when James Frey says it, and means nothing at all if John Updike says it. I think that fiction writers know different. Though we rarely say it publicly, we know that our fictions are not as disconnected from our selves as you like to imagine and we like to pretend. It is this intimate side of literary failure that is so interesting; the ways in which writers fail on their own terms: private, difficult to express, easy to ridicule, completely unsuited for either the regulatory atmosphere of reviews or the objective interrogation of seminars, and yet, despite all this, true.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:10 AM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss