I was never a creative writing major, or even an English major. At my state university—the only place that would take me—I majored in drugs, easy virtue, and skiing. Waitressing was a big part of that, too. I’ve taken exactly one writing workshop in my life. I started another but dropped it because I was having an affair with the instructor. I finished my BA in seven years. Then I went to film school because I love movies and I hated my job as a picture framer. I now have an MA that I am well aware is not a terminal degree, from a university not known for its film department. I write by ear, from reading and from my gut. Still, I’ve sold short stories and essays, and those three novels received some good reviews. My second book won a medium-size award, but at this pastoral fucking MFA program all anyone mentioned was my one unsuccessful straight-to-DVD movie. I was “the screenwriter.”

That first night in the damp, unair-conditioned faculty women’s housing, I puked up my anxiety in the shared bathroom. I was hoping this job would make me a real writer. I would know the right people; I would become part of that rarefied world; I would receive invitations and emails from accomplished novelists and New Yorker contributors. We would share ideas and opportunities. We would be friends. My face hurt from smiling so much. My brain hurt from trying to be witty. I washed lots of dishes in the faculty communal kitchen, but the women weren’t friendly and I think I made the straight guys nervous. I decided to give up my high heels and wear the flip-flops I had brought for the shower. I wanted to do it right. I wanted to be cool.

[...] What was missing from the older literary forms, in other words, wasn’t social justice, but the passage of time—a dimension the novel was specifically engineered to capture. The novelistic hero is by definition someone whose life experience hasn’t yet been fully described, possibly because of his race or class, but more broadly because he didn’t exist before, and neither did the technology for describing him. The durability and magic of the novel form lies in the fact that, having gained a certain level of currency, the latest novel is immediately absorbed into the field of preexisting literature, and becomes the thing the next novel has to be written against. In this dialectic, the categories of outsider and insider are in constant flux. For an outsider to become an insider isn’t ironic or paradoxical: it’s just the way things work.

Ironically, a preoccupation with historic catastrophe actually ends up depriving the novel of the kind of historical consciousness it was best suited to capture. The effect is particularly clear in the “maximalist” school of recent fiction, which strives, as McGurl puts it, to link “the individual experience of authors and characters to the kinds of things one finds in history textbooks”: “war, slavery, the social displacements of immigration, or any other large-scale trauma”; historical traumas, McGurl explains, confer on the novel “an aura of ‘seriousness’ even when, as in Pynchon or Vonnegut, the work is comic. Personal experience so framed is not merely personal experience,” a fact that “no amount of postmodern skepticism … is allowed to undermine.” The implication is that “personal experience” is insufficient grounds for a novel, unless it is entangled in a “large-scale trauma”—or, worse yet, that an uncompelling (or absent) story line can be redeemed by a setting full of disasters.

This is the kind of literary practice James Wood so persuasively condemned under the rubric of “hysterical realism” (“Toby’s mad left-wing aunt was curiously struck dumb when Mrs. Thatcher was elected prime minister”). Diachronicity is cheaply telegraphed by synchronic cues, and history is replaced by big-name historical events, often glimpsed from some “eccentric” perspective: a slideshow-like process, as mechanical as inserting Forrest Gump beside Kennedy at the White House. As Wood points out, the maximalist fetishization of history is actually antihistoric: the maximalist novel “carries within itself, in its calm profusion of characters and plots, its flawless carpet of fine prose on page after page, a soothing sense that it might never have to end, that another thousand or two thousand pages might easily be added.”

Call me a utopian, but I believe every entrant to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award would chuck the contest, the reality-show format, and all the tips on how to hype your book for a sense of cultural belonging. The Amazon “community” suggests a world in which everyone can publish a book, within a public space that may lead you belatedly to a special destiny. Of course, this community isn’t unionized, socialist, or cooperatively owned: far-reaching powers of inclusivity (a community anyone can join) often seem synonymous with far-reaching powers of exclusivity (be with Amazon or be alone). For the time being, the Amazon Breakthrough Novel seems less a promotion for the entrants than for the corporate sponsor, and the winner each year, no matter who wins the contest, is Amazon.com. This hints at a publishing revolution, though like many revolutions before it, it doesn’t look to be the one the revolutionaries truly needed, or sometimes thought they were fighting for. +

Mostly it sucked because there had been a moment in my life, I suppose as a younger person, when I knew that I aspired to be a writer. This is not the same as feeling at home writing, or feeling the need, the compulsion, to write, which I also felt. But there was this moment when I spied an image of myself as a writer, whole and intact and accomplished, and recognized that image as me—as who I needed to be in order to be me. As to the question of exactly what that image looked like, I really do think it involved coming home to Milwaukee and reading at Harry Schwartz, and my parents there proud, and the teachers who supported me and cared for me and encouraged me when I was completely and utterly alienated from my peers being there, and then maybe some of those peers as well, and me harboring no ill will toward them but instead being very charitable and forgiving in my success. And instead you find yourself in this beat-up old building in the middle of nowhere Los Angeles with no heat and holes in the walls and cracks in the windowpanes, teaching two days a week at a community college in Orange County and the rest of the time writing less to accomplish something than to avoid failing at it, and you see that image fading, and as it does being alive starts to feel haphazard and purposeless, not like destiny but like some unfortunate accident that has befallen you for no good reason at all.