True as that may be, the boring can often be a starting place for discovery. In fact, I managed to win over several skeptics by sifting through the seeming narrative nonsense and helping students to discover what mattered in the story and how we might engage with its strangeness. It’s basically what we literature professors do on a daily basis, point to how the patterns, forms, and structures in language and storytelling create meanings of which we’re not always aware. Teaching formally and stylistically complex works is especially challenging in this respect, but it’s pretty fun to turn the boring into the interesting.
The larger lesson here is that boredom can be counteracted, though never completely avoided, because attention can be directed as well as distracted, cultivated as well as captured. This is an essential theme of the undisputed “king” of contemporary American novels about boredom, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published and unfinished The Pale King (2011). The initial reviews of the book, which follows the personal lives and political intrigue surrounding a number of IRS workers in the 1980s, revelled in calling it a novel “about” boredom. An Internal Revenue Service (IRS) novel, seriously? Yet the “boring” parts of the novel—a description of IRS employees turning pages while auditing, for instance—are actually no more boring than other dense and difficult passages in Wallace’s oeuvre.
The problem, of course, is that all the male novelists who actually did terrible things, and then wrote about them, are now dead (or, as with James Frey, have subsided into irrelevance). You can’t be angry at these guys on Twitter – what would be the point? Jonathan Franzen, on the other hand, is neither dead nor irrelevant – his books are bestsellers, his essays are widely disseminated. That he doesn’t happen to fit the mould of “toxic male writer” is, for many of his critics, beside the point. Certain intellectuals and other literati (and we might remember, at this point, that the original literati, in ancient Rome, were slaves who copied out official documents, often without understanding what they wrote) are conducting a campaign against an extinct generation of white male novelists, with Jonathan Franzen as their proxy target. The sense of cognitive dissonance produced when a reader familiar with Franzen’s work encounters the online commentary about him derives, in large part, from the gap between what Franzen actually is and what people want (or need) him to be. If he were, in fact, a Norman Mailerish self-promoter, he might very well make some interesting art out of this crux. But Franzen is Franzen: an altogether more inward, and inwardly riven, figure.
Is “draft” simply the word that we use when we want to signal that some form of notable progress has been made?
Or is “draft” just what we call whatever it is we have when it’s time for us to send it to a reader?
Not long after she was told that she would never be able to have children, Lorna Gibb travelled to Doha, to begin teaching at Qatar University. She had spent time in the Middle East, researching a biography of Lady Hester Stanhope (she has also written a novel, and a biography of Rebecca West). Gibb had some idea, she thought, of what to expect. But she was not prepared for the degree to which a woman only made sense in that culture if she could give birth. Gibb describes the strategies she developed to explain, to deflect; finally she meets Halima, seemingly the mother of one of her students, but, in fact, only a first wife: when she was unable to conceive, her husband married again, and all four family members lived together. Halima points at the dusty ground. “I am like that,” she says with breath-stopping bluntness, “the barren place where nothing grows. Ayesha is like the palm trees … See how the green parakeets congregate and sing and nest in her branches.”
“I think it’s possible to draw a line between Standing Rock and Sharice Davids, and Deb Haaland,” Treuer said. “The kind of energy that they exhibited around what life is like in flyover states, and how to fight against interests, many of them corporate, that don’t care about us, natives and non-natives, in places like Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska, and stuff like that, I think empowered and affected those elections.” Even at this moment, and even as contrarian as he is, Treuer said, “I’m more hopeful than I’ve been, I’m more hopeful than I probably should be.”
In Black Is the Body, Bernard proves herself to be a revelatory storyteller of race in America who can hold her own with some of those great writers she teaches.
The Collected Schizophrenias is riveting, honest, and courageously allows for complexities in the reality of what living with illness is like — and we are lucky to have it in the world.