What happened reminds me of Malcolm Muggeridge’s marvelous conceit, in another context, of an army that wins a great victory and then, at the very moment of triumph, inexplicably runs up a white flag and surrenders to the enemy. No sooner does the American version of the naturalistic novel emerge triumphant on the world stage than American intellectuals begin pronouncing it dead, finished, exhausted, impossible any longer. A Columbia University English professor, Lionel Trilling, wrote a highly influential essay in 1948 in which he said that the realistic novel was no longer a plausible approach and that the day of the novel of ideas had dawned. It so happened that he had one in his desk drawer, which was duly published and praised, whereupon it sank like a stone to the bottom of a pond and vanished. Nevertheless, the idea caught hold in the universities with a vengeance. Dreiser, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Faulkner probably didn’t have four years of college between them, but from 1950 on, the great majority of novelists came out of university writing programs. Novelists who got going before 1960 still tended toward realism, although even among them the writer who, like Lewis or Steinbeck, headed off as a reporter or documenter into unknown territory had become rare. For the postwar realist the only valid experience was his own.
After 1960 came the era of young writers in the universities educated in literary isms, all of which were variants of French aestheticism, products of the notion that the only pure art is art not about life but about art itself. Absurdism, fabulism, minimalism, magic realism—all shared a common attitude. One way or another the novelist winked at the reader, as if to say, “You know and I know that this isn’t real. This is something more sublime: the game of art.” Occasionally a writer would
break off in the middle of a story to identify himself to the reader as an artist sitting alone in a room doing nothing other than demonstrating what an artist he is.
By 1980 the slump in the novel as a form had become noticeable. It was not that strong realistic fiction had completely vanished. Looking back over the past quarter century, I can think of any number of wonderful books: James Webb’s
Fields of Fire,
in my opinion the finest of the Vietnam novels; Richard Price’s
Clockers
, product of a reporting foray into the underbelly of the drug trade in Union City, New Jersey; Carl Hiaasen’s
Strip Tease,
a newspaper reporter’s romp through end-of-the-century South Florida; Pat Conroy’s
The Great Santini;
Louis Auchincloss’s
The Golden Calves;
Terry McMillan’s
Waiting to Exhale;
Jimmy Breslin’s
Table Money;
William Price Fox’s
Ruby Red;
Joseph Wambaugh’s
The Choirboys
; Po Bronson’s
Bombardiers.
But the young talent that half a century earlier would have been interested in the naturalistic novel was being steered in other directions. New fabulists, minimalists, magic realists, and the like emerged and were duly praised, but they never excited readers the way the naturalists did. The novel itself lost the hold it once had on the imagination of college students and young people generally.
I think it’s safe to say that many of them have turned to the movies and pushed the novel off into the margins so far as their interest in art is concerned. The critic Terry Teachout created quite a stir in 1999 when he wrote an article for
The Wall Street Journal
headlined “How We Get That Story” with the subhead: “Quick: Read a novel or watch a movie? The battle is over. Movies have won.” He spoke of “far-reaching changes in the once-privileged place of the novel in American culture.” “For Americans under the age of 30,” he wrote, “film has largely replaced the novel as the dominant mode of artistic expression” when it comes to “serious storytelling.” “It might even be that movies have superseded novels not because Americans have grown dumber but because the novel is an obsolete artistic technology.” The Nobel-winning novelist Saul Bellow was sufficiently aroused to write an article for
The
New York Times
going over Teachout’s piece point by point. He adopted what has become the familiar fallback position of novelists today when they gather at writers’ conferences and bring up the subject, as they inevitably do, of how irrelevant the popularity of movies and television makes them feel as storytellers. Well, the argument goes, great novels have always had small, special (read: “charmingly aristocratic”) audiences. Bellow cited Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
, Melville’s
Moby-Dick
, and, striking his own Twilight of the Gods note, the novels of Proust and Joyce, which “were written in a cultural twilight and were not intended to be read under the blaze and dazzle of popularity.” What impressed “the great public” even in the nineteenth century, he argued, was a minor novel like
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
But if
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
was a minor accomplishment in a literary sense (an eminently disputable proposition to anyone—Tolstoy, for example, or Edmund Wilson—who has actually read it), our
Götterdämmerungisch
novelists must still face up to the fact that the same “great public” also adored Tolstoy, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Zola.
I felt flattered, up to a point, anyway, when Teachout singled out
The Bonfire of the Vanities
and
A Man in Full
and said that not even novels like these could stem the movies’ victorious tide. As I mentioned at the outset, it is
others
—not me—who insist on bringing up my sales figures, and Terry Teachout is one of them. In order to make his point, he felt compelled (by the best of intentions, I am sure) to jigger the figures and imply that A
Man in Full
did not do as well as
The Bonfire of the Vanities
in the marketplace, when in fact it sold almost 50 percent more, placing it rather high up, I haven’t been able to avoid noticing (and once more I blush), on the list of bestselling American novels of the twentieth century, along with
The Bonfire of the Vanities.
And yet I don’t dispute for a moment his central thesis: “For Americans under the age of 30, film has largely replaced the novel as the dominant mode of artistic expression.” Over the past ten months I have made a tour of American universities doing the reporting for a novel I am now writing, and I can tell you that college students, at least, are excited not by new
novelists but by new movie directors. But I don’t think Teachout understands why.
Today it is the movie directors and producers, not the novelists, who are themselves excited by the lurid carnival of American life at this moment, in the here and now, in all its varieties. It is the movie directors and producers, not the novelists, who can’t wait to head out into that raucous rout, like the Dreisers, Lewises, and Steinbecks of the first half of the twentieth century, and see it for themselves. It is the movie directors and producers, not the novelists, who today have the instincts of reporters, the curiosity, the vitality, the
joie de vivre
, the drive, the energy to tackle any subject, head out onto any terrain, no matter how far it may be removed from their own experience—often
because
it is so far removed from their own experience and they can’t wait to see it for themselves. As a result, the movie, not the novel, became the great naturalistic storytelling medium of the late twentieth century. Movies can be other things, but they are inherently naturalistic—and I suggest that this is precisely what their audiences adore most about them: their intense realism.
Movies are team enterprises, the work of entire troupes of story creators, scene and wardrobe designers, technicians, and actors, most of them, even the actors, imbued with a reportorial zeal, an urge to get things right, and none of them daunted by their ignorance—this is entirely to their credit—of what they might be getting into. A producer at United Artists who knew nothing about the Nashville country music scene importuned a director, Robert Altman, to make a movie about it. He knew nothing about it, either, and wasn’t interested at first, but undertook the project anyway, assembled a team, and got interested. The team apparently started with written sources such as William Price Fox’s
Ruby Red
, headed for Nashville, took a look for themselves, talked to one and all, and produced
Nashville
. The director Oliver Stone’s movie,
Platoon
, about the war in Vietnam, was based on his own experience, but thereafter, without the slightest hesitation, he plunged into subject after subject about which he knew nothing, including, lately,
the world of professional football, resulting in the extraordinary
Any Given Sunday
. The director Francis Ford Coppola knew nothing about war, let alone about the war in Vietnam, but was nonetheless determined to make what became
Apocalypse Now
. So he signed on a writer who
did
know about war, John Milius, assembled a team that spent a year doing the research and reporting to get it right, and the result was a masterpiece. The director Spike Lee, famous for his movies about black life in America, turned to Jimmy Breslin and other sources to document a largely white world to make
Summer of Sam,
a brilliant naturalistic movie capturing New York City’s sweltering Zeitgeist of fear and pornoviolent excitement during the summer of 1977, when a publicity-crazed serial killer known as “Son of Sam” was on a rampage.
Terry Teachout argued that movies had won the battle for a story-hungry young public “because the novel is an obsolete artistic technology.” Bellow chided Teachout for “this emphasis on technics that attract the scientific-minded young,” since to treat the experience of reading a great novel in technological terms was to miss the point. But I personally find it highly instructive to treat the naturalistic novel as a piece of technology. After all, it was an invention—and a rather recent one, at that. Four specific devices give the naturalistic novel its “gripping,” “absorbing” quality: (1) scene-by-scene construction, i.e., telling the story by moving from scene to scene rather than by resorting to sheer historical narrative; (2) the liberal use of realistic dialogue, which reveals character in the most immediate way and resonates more profoundly with the reader than any form of description; (3) interior point of view, i.e., putting the reader inside the head of a character and having him view the scene through his eyes; and (4) the notation of status details, the cues that tell people how they rank in the human pecking order, how they are doing in the struggle to maintain or improve their position in life or in an immediate situation, everything from clothing and furniture to accents, modes of treating superiors or inferiors, subtle gestures that show respect or disrespect—“dissing,” to use a marvelous new piece of late-twentieth-century slang—the entire complex of signals that tell the human beast whether it is succeeding or failing and
has or hasn’t warded off that enemy of happiness that is more powerful than death: humiliation.
In using the first two of these devices, scene-by-scene construction and dialogue, movies have an obvious advantage; we actually see the scenes and hear the words. But when it comes to putting the viewer inside the head of a character or making him aware of life’s complex array of status details, the movies have been stymied. In attempting to create the interior point of view, they have tried everything, from the use of a voice-over that speaks the character’s thoughts, to subtitles that write them out, to the aside, in which the actor turns toward the camera in the midst of a scene and simply says what he’s thinking. They have tried putting the camera on the shoulder of the actor (Ray Milland in
The Lost Weekend
), so that the audience sees him only when he looks in the mirror,
and
having him speak his thoughts in voice-over. But nothing works; nothing in all the motion-picture arts can put you inside the head, the skin, the central nervous system of another human being the way a realistic novel can. The movies are not much better with status details. When it comes time to deal with social gradations, they are immediately reduced to gross effects likely to lapse into caricature at any moment: the house that is
too
grand or
too
dreadful, the accent that is too snobbish or too crude.
Which brings us to another major shortcoming of the movies as a technology: they have a hard time explaining … anything. They are a time-driven medium compelled by their very nature to produce a constant flow of images. Three movies have been made from things I’ve written, and in each case I was struck by how helpless perfectly talented people were when it came time to explain … anything … in the midst of that vital flow, whether it be the mechanics and aerodynamics of a rocket-assisted airplane or the ins and outs of racial politics in the Bronx. When a moviegoer comes away saying, “It wasn’t nearly as good as the novel,” it is almost always because the movie failed in those three areas: failed to make him feel that he was inside the minds of the characters, failed to make him comprehend and
feel
the status pressures the novel had dealt with, failed to
explain
that and other complex matters
the book had been able to illuminate without a moment’s sacrifice of action or suspense. Why is it that movie versions of
Anna Karenina
are invariably disappointing? After all, Tolstoy put enough action, suspense, and melodrama into
Anna Karenina
—think of Vronsky’s disastrous, melodramatically symbolic steeplechase ride on the mare Frou-Frou—for ten movies. What is inevitably missing is the play of thoughts and feelings inside the central nervous systems of the novel’s six main characters—and Tolstoy’s incomparable symphony of status concerns, status competition, and class guilt within Russia’s upper orders. Without those things, which even a writer far less gifted than Tolstoy can easily introduce, using the technology of print in a naturalistic novel,
Anna Karenina
becomes nothing more than soap opera.