Not everyone in the 19th century went down the long slide to happiness, endlessly. Novelists said again and again they would never represent happiness. Tolstoy’s opening line about all happy families being the same is the best known, but Balzac, too, said, “Le Bonheur n’a pas d’histoire,” happiness has no story. The novel’s only actual version of happiness—marriage—came to seem, toward the end of the century, something of a dark joke. After all that trouble, went the joke, you marry Gilbert Osmond. Those who tried to get away from the marriage plot by seeking their own happiness—Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina—got just what they didn’t deserve. The novel didn’t make you any promises. Quite the opposite: it could have scared you off of life. But somehow its congenital unhappiness actually made you want to live.

In a row under the bed, a bit dusty, is the motherlode. Books upon books. So many candy-colored University of Minnesota paperbacks—Lyotard, de Man, Irigaray—actually, all kind of the same color as the pills. These books were going to be a rebuke to everything false. We were going to bring this false civilization down. Well, to hell with you, Foucault! And to hell with you, Lacan!

The bookstore clerk looks at his watch. “Theory’s dead,” he says. “A year ago.”

“Does that mean you aren’t going to buy the books?” we ask.

“If you’ll take store credit.”

The colossal face of Derrida stares up at us, in death, as in life, made of granite. This face was made for Mt. Rushmore. Derrida seems to say: “Take store credit.”

By the mid-’60s something crippling was happening to fiction, still quite hard to explain: articulate writers blamed the sheer craziness of American life (Roth) or the “exhaustion” of forms (Barth). There was the pressure of criticism, which could lead even a dyed-in-the-wool critic like Sontag to declare herself “Against Interpretation”; others pointed to academic writing programs and the group therapy of the workshop. In short order, 1968 arrived, and the chaotic Seventies, an era which received—in place of Germinal or Sentimental Education or The Posessed, or even The Grapes of Wrath!—Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and William Gaddis’s JR. One was a symbolico-enyclopedic epic unembarrassed beside Joyce, the other (in a mode stolen from the minor English modernist Henry Green, alternating dead-to-rights dialogue with brief descriptive passages of hallucinated brilliance, and elevated by Gaddis to demented majesty) a novel concerning nothing less than American capitalism. But in retrospect these books appear marginal where the “Great American Novel” was supposed to be central, heroic sighs of depletion instead of inaugural hymns.

Where, frankly, were you going to get your diagnosis of society—from Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho? Lyotard did it better in Libidinal Economy, and was much scarier—without pornographic bloodshed. A civilization that may have punished less, but punished better, administering its surveillance from inside one’s own mind (Discipline and Punish), or replaced the real with a mediatized world of simulations (Simulacra and Simulation), or had an economic incentive to reconfigure disparate knowledge as commensurable “information” (The Postmodern Condition)—well, that was very clearly the world we lived in. Whereas the itsy-bitsy stories of sad revelations in Best American Short Stories 1989—that was some trivial bullshit.

The best and most exciting novels of the same period, the ones that made you think the notion of a “Great American Novel” hadn’t been misconceived all along, were openly responding to theorists. Don De-Lillo’s White Noise brought in a theorist as a character. Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (OK, she’s British), and especially The Eye in the Door, triumphed as a controlled experiment in the application of feminist theory to stories (of World War I) a whole nation took for granted.

The big mistake right now would be to fail to keep faith with what theory once meant to us. You hear a great collective sigh of relief from people who don’t have to read “that stuff” anymore—the ones who never read it in the first place. But who will insult these people now, expose their life as self-deception, their media as obstacles to truth, their conventional wisdom as ideology? It will be unbearable to live with such people if they aren’t regularly insulted.

And all of us who spent our formative years on a critique of the sign can’t only have gone into advertising. So theory will return in unexpected ways. The Corrections, a monumental renewal of the critical social novel, spent its first hundred pages in the skin of a teacher of theory. Chip ended up the house-husband of a successful doctor; Franzen himself took up the bigger task, and made something properly novelistic of phenomena that he, too, like Chip, like all of us, had looked to theory to explain.

Theory is dead, and long live theory. The designated mourners have tenure, anyway, so they’ll be around a bit. As for the rest of us, an opening has emerged, in the novel and in intellect. What to do with it?

The novel is unexcelled at one thing only: the creation of interiority, or inwardness. How does life look and sound from the inside, where no public observes it and not even a friend listens in? No better instrument than prose fiction was ever developed for answering this question. Beside the novel at its best, even Wallace Stevens is a bumbling simile-monger and Tarkovsky a crude footage-purveyor. That’s not the half of it, you say, that’s just rococo phenomenology, that’s pantheistic camera work. You want “the one bright book of life,” as Lawrence called it. Lawrence had the novelist’s proper arrogance: “I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of man alive, but never get the whole hog.”

But to deliver up the whole interior hog, the writer needs to forget even the small sympathetic public seated attentively on gray metal folding chairs. The writer fails if he tries to become a useful tool, a hot commodity, even an objet d’art. He has to be something more like a set of passive measuring devices: perceptual calipers, emotional wristwatch, barometer of manners, historical astrolabe, social Richter scale. The measuring device never thinks about how it comes across—the question is absurd. What comes into the mind, what comes through the living person? Answer these questions with precision, and actual art has a chance.

Understandably, many people blame religion for all the ills of the world. But, as Gandhi suggested, it may be wiser to realize how the men claiming divine sanction only work out—if often more crudely than their agnostic counterparts—the nihilist logic of a purely secular morality: that nothing is sacred in the battle for worldly power, and that nation-states with economies built around the endless multiplication of individual desires are likely to wage the most destructive wars in order to impose or preserve their hegemony.

Living through the great moral disasters of modernity—Western imperialism in Asia and Africa, the world wars between rival nations and empires, and the rise of totalitarianism—Gandhi could see how the civic spaces of nation-states, which had been marked off as a secular realm, were increasingly dominated by elites swearing by the cold, amoral rationality of economic self-interest and national security.

It is why Gandhi wished to reintroduce religion into politics. This sounds as perverse now as it did to the many Indian admirers of Nehru. But then religion for Gandhi was inseparable from the practice of austerity, tolerance, and compassion.

Our addictions are a part of our modernity and a response to modernity, a choice to surrender. Addictions are also attitudes; at first a fact of the body, they become a perspective on the world. We still don’t know why, when given the chance, a rat willingly doses itself to death with nicotine. But if I were a lab rat I would smoke too. If addiction or the oral-compulsive character were truly destiny, why not simply embrace it? “Enjoy your symptom!”—as the Lacanians say—with the hope that a particular object of desire will, some day, fail to satisfy the primal urge. On that day, we will be free, for an instant, to choose the next thing we wish to dominate our lives.

For Richard Klein, author of Cigarettes Are Sublime, a book written with an odd intellectual boosterism about all aspects of smoking, the cigarette transforms anxiety at the overwhelming sense of impending death—your own or someone else’s—into a manageable death by bits and pieces:

By smoking a cigarette, ingesting a certain quantity of nicotine, the organism is hastening its death, is producing in itself more noxious effects than if it endured the discomfort of anxiety. But the death it is hastening is its own death; it substitutes its own path toward death for the process over which it otherwise had no control. Using cigarettes to master anxiety may be understood as preferring a certain form of dying over an intolerable form of living.

Travelers, however, like the poor, are not people whose lives are “insufficiently structured,” as Franzen would have it. Their lives are structured from above. The poor are also time-poor. They own their time as little as they own anything else. They are waiting in line to cash checks, or in front of an employment office, or at soup kitchens. Much of their lives are spent waiting, not for handouts but for real opportunities commensurate with their potential. Cigarettes are there to offer consolation and a feeling of choice amid the monotony, to transform waiting into hanging out. For people lucky enough to have a job, the smoke break becomes a momentary transgression against the time clock. It’s a little protest against time management which those on the side of time management, the managerial classes, cannot really share. For such people, including writers like Franzen, smoking is either an affectation, a form of reverse snobbery, or done out of a deep sense of estrangement from one’s own regulatory impulses. It’s this alienation from self-discipline in the very discipline of smoking that makes it an antibourgeois drug, and while writers may be lower class financially, they are virtual aristocrats of time.