Report: A Modern Good

19 May 2011

Panel Discussion:
The Good of the Novel
London Review Bookshop
16th May 2011

Max Liu

“The novel has always meant freedom to me,” says James Wood, at the start of tonight’s discussion at the London Review Bookshop. Wood is here, along with three other panelists, to discuss issues raised in The Good of the Novel, a collection of essays by eminent critics about some of the finest novels of the last three decades.

“Questions as to what the novel does and what kinds of truth the novel tells are best answered in practice,” Ray Ryan and Liam McIlvanney, the book’s editors, write in their introduction. These questions make reading Wood, who contributes a piece on Ian McEwan’s Atonement, compelling and it’s exhilarating to hear him speak. With unrivalled exactitude, his criticism explores, and often renews, the rewards of fiction. In his first book, The Broken Estate, he examined how, in the mid-nineteenth century, the novel offered readers relief from the dogmas of religion by inviting them to disbelieve; tonight he talks about growing up as the son of a vicar, reading The Brothers Karamazov which lead him to reassess religious faith in his teens.

Discovering Wood as an undergraduate, I was energised by his unapologetic contemporaneity; he showed that it was not flippant to construct critical arguments about fiction by Zadie Smith, David Foster Wallace, and that just as these novelists strive to match the pace of the modern world, the critic can too. True to that tonight, he says, “There hasn’t been a novel of fundamentalist belief yet. Maybe it’s coming.”

Encountering analysis of an isolated passage from V.S Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, reading it over and over, nurtured what Amit Chaudhuri calls his “spatial” interest in fiction. Chaudhuri writes about Arundhati Roy in The Good of the Novel and he’s excellent on the question of “storytelling” and “character,” fundamentals which can be confusing for the young novelist but which are rarely discussed frankly. “Not being a realist doesn’t make you free,” he says, answering a question about the potential impact of social media on fiction. He praises the work of the New York based journal/website N+1: “Super-smart, full-blown, theoretically aware post-moderns. What they’re doing is very interesting.”

Publishers must, argues Lee Brackstone, editorial director of Faber, reach beyond traditional avenues and modes in order to remain relevant and challenge a world which “increasingly celebrates the grey.” Had the editors concurred, the vast majority of those writing and being written about in The Good of the Novel might not be white, middle class males. But Brackstone’s rejection of cultural homogeneity is inspiring, and it’s exciting to know that someone in such an influential position is a reader who rules out nothing. There is, of course, absolutely no reason why this shouldn’t be so, and every reason why it should.

Frances Wilson embodies The Good of the Novel’s unabashedly practical approach to criticism. “David Shields,” she says, “has no interest in the line between fiction and non-fiction.” Wilson is fascinated by the question Shield’s book on the ambiguous territory between life and fiction Reality Hunger poses. It is an increasingly fruitful source of creative tension and she strikes me as a writer who, by discussing how we might negotiate a distinction, ends up doing so with aplomb. She mentions James Frey too but there’s something very democratic, and amusing, about her discussion of Hanif Kureshi’s Intimacy as she brings the text out from behind the curtain of artifice to consider it in terms of choices that afflict writers and readers alike.

An audience member quotes Joyce and asks if novels can change the world. “Certainly,” says James Wood before a man says that he doesn’t know what he gets out of reading great novels or why, all he knows is that he gets a lot from them. Wood’s response:“I can’t tell you why that is,” he says, “any better than you just told me.”