Recommendations 1/25/2021: Autofiction Ain't a New Thing
Some things are just irksome.
This week’s column is the product of being irritated by some of the online chitter-chatter over Bo Burnham’s recent Netflix special, Inside.
I don’t want to repeat too much that you can read in the column itself, but I tie Burnham’s work to the current trend around “autofiction,” where authors seem to get extra credit when we know their books are closely drawn from real experiences, the credit coming specifically because those experiences actually happened. This gets the creation of art exactly backwards. A quality work of autofiction is impressive not because it adheres to real events but because it transforms real events into something much more interesting than - for example - a daily blow-by-blow YouTube video of an influencer.
Anyway, just as important, none of this is new.
Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (also known as Remembrance of Things Past) is like 4000 pages of a dude mining his memories for material and turning it into fiction.
There is also the Roman à clef, which literally translates to “novel with a key,” (because a strict Roman à clef comes with a key telling you who is who), but essentially means, “a book with a lot of real people and events where the names are changed, but you can basically tell who they’re talking about.” The Bell Jar, On the Road, just about everything written by Charles Bukowski, lots of Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, all could be labeled autofiction by contemporary standards.
While a certain amount of interest in those books and authors originated from the facts that they were drawing from their own lives, the emphasis on the work was still on the fiction, rather than the fact. To my eye, that ratio has been reversed in today’s culture.
Perhaps this is a consequence of so many of us living some kind of public life via social media, or because the public lives of others are so visible and accessible for the same reason. For example, we can learn that Bo Burnham has indeed suffered from panic attacks and other mental health difficulties, which caused him to withdraw from public performance, so his choice to live in his guest house and work obsessively on a comedy special alone fits the public narrative.
Maybe I’m just a grump about this stuff because I don’t care how closely anyone’s art hews to their life. The object itself is the thing. There’s no bonus points just because you lived it if the art itself isn’t any good. I’ve taught a lot of introductory creative writing courses in my time and lots of people - me included - are tempted to try to take the most interesting or bizarre thing that happened to them and then put it on the page with the hope people will be as amazed and astounded as you were when the thing happened to you.
Inevitably, during critique and comments someone will say how they just didn’t believe something in the story as it was rendered on the page. The story’s author will then triumphantly declare that it really did happen, but of course this is irrelevant to the reader. If we don’t believe it on the page, who cares if some amazing thing happened to you?
The inverse is also true. A great book can make me believe the impossible did happen.
I’ve liked lots of works of Roman à clef novels, and I enjoy my fair share of autofiction, but their relationship to real events has nothing to do with why.
<end grumpiness>
Links
Interesting article from Alex Shepard on how all those Trump books do (or don’t) sell.
Wonderful profile of Ishmael Reed, a true American original at the New Yorker. Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo is one of the most important books on race in America of all-time. Juice! a part fictional, part non-fictional exploration of the O.J. Simpson case is a savage satire of basically everyone.
Are TV adaptations of books changing contemporary fiction? Some digital humanists crunch the numbers.
The New York Times is recommending 11 books this week. Or last week, whatever.
For some writers, quarantine appears to have been an aid to productivity. Emily St. John Mandel was one of them. The author of Station Eleven, and The Glass Hotel, revealed the cover of her next one, Sea of Tranquility.
Reading companion of the week
Baron has a head that rests at a convenient height for simultaneous reading and patting.
Recommendations
All links to books on these posts go to The Biblioracle Recommends bookshop at Bookshop.org. Affiliate income for purchases through the bookshop goes to Open Books in Chicago. Continued steady progress on our annual tally: up to $108.65 for the year.
If you’d like to see every book I’ve recommended in this space this year, check out my list of 2021 Recommendations at the Bookshop.org bookshop.
As always, recommendations are open for business.
1. The Sea Runners by Ivan Doig
2. Vagabond by Bernard Cornwell
3. Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson
4. Premonition by Michael Lewis
5. Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown
Shel S. - Cornwall, VT
This is a list begging for something from John McPhee. Just about any book will do, but I’m going with Coming into the Country, a story of Alaska.
1. Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad
2. I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sanchez
3. Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
4. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
5. Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn
Arleen P. - Morton Grove, IL
Going back a few years for a book that’s relatively short, but gathers emotional power with each page: The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat.
1. Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wrag Sykes
2. Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It by Derrick Jensen, et al
3. The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells
4. Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change by William R Caton Jr
5. Humankind by Alexander H. Harcourt
John A. - Albuquerque, NM
Clearly a reader drawn to some deep philosophical and existential challenges. This brings to mind one of my favorite contemporary thinkers, Garret Keizer and his book, Help: The Original Human Dilemma.
This is an evening edition because we had some gloriously (relatively) mild weather this weekend in my Charleston, SC residence, and I could not help but take advantage of it. I hope you were able to do the same wherever you are.
John
(The Biblioracle)