Tough Days for Literary Fiction, by Darin Strauss

(View entire post here)

At dinner last night at the Luxembourg Gardens with Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated), Nicole Krauss (The History of Love) and Joseph O'Neill (Netherland, which is the book Obama is reading), I realized something that should have been obvious.

When you're intent on something-when you look at it too closely or too often-every now and then you can't quite place it. It's like this with words. Stare too long at something as common as Hello: it can verge on the sense of trying to remember where you met.

And so. What I miss, too often, is how lucky I am to be a working novelist in America. These are, as the whole world knows, tough days for literary fiction. And it's never been the easiest career, even in boom times. Rejection. Financial uncertainty. Mean or dense critics. Good publishers that nevertheless have, at the end of each quarter, to answer to corporate bosses. Plus, the difficulty of composition. Blah blah blah. Everyone knows about this job, about the privations and snags of it.

But it's wonderful, too.

I like being in the company of other writers. I've found little (spoken) jealousy or pettiness. I think we all know what a hard field it is, and so are pretty kind to each other. And, of course, most good novelists are good talkers. Their minds make hairpin turns. (I admit that sometimes last night I fell off the edge of a conversation.)

And it's always a joy to see your work in an unexpected place. (For me, it was my books Chang & Eng and More Than it Hurts You, shoulder-to-shoulder, thin twins, on the shelves of a tiny antique French bookstore.)

I'm about to publish my fourth book, and I teach young writers at NYU, so I've met hundreds of aspirants -- maybe more -- all of whom want, of course, to be published. What I often feel is a fervent worry for them: worry and sympathy. I want to say: it's a hard career, why do it? Wouldn't you rather be a banker? Or, if you're not a materialist: wouldn't you rather do something that makes a difference in the world?

But Nicole Krauss said something that I've been fixed on all day. A fiction writer often feels, even when she manages - against the odds - to publish something, that it's a solipsistic activity. But the best books do what no other art form can; that is, they make us inhabit the minds of other people. We may not like these peple sometimes, but we can't help but gain a modicum of empathy if we see the world through the eyes of someone we don't like. Being a reader, therefore, could just possibly make you a more sympathetic person. (I know if you subtracted, say, ten important books from my life - Anna Karenina, Lolita, American Pastoral, Herzog, others, others - I'd be lessened personally by the sacrifice.)

Anyway, feeling a part of that process can be wonderful. At least it felt so last evening, with the champagne bubbles of the Eiffel's new lights fizzing in the background.

Darin Strauss, More Than It Hurts You, family, drama, doctor, accident, literary, Penguin Books, books