Please, Dear Novelists - Get Real

The Slumdog Kill-ionaire is back, and he is reminding us how exhilarating fiction can be when novelists finally leave their seminar rooms and dive into the real world. The Indian writer Aravind Adiga won the Booker Prize last year for The White Tiger, a story of an Indian slum kid who rises to riches by killing his boss. Now he has followed it with Between The Assassinations, an armoury of short stories about a typical Indian city as it rises with a great heave from poverty to power (for a few).

Adiga has become great by ignoring the clichéd advice given to all young writers, which has long since hardened into a dogma: write about what you know. He is from a typical, rich Indian family buffeted by servants who are treated as invisible. He is so talented he could have made that world interesting, for a while, in its small way. He could have done what too many British and American novelists are doing, and ever more exquisitely described his own navel.

But he chose instead to write about what he didn't know -- by going out and discovering it, like a journalist. Between The Assassinations enters into the heads of a panorama of 21st-century Indians, from rich kids tossing bombs at the caste system to women steadily going blind in sweatshops to rickshaw drivers slowly pedaling their bodies into broken sinew. He learned about their lives by going out into the streets and writing about what he found.

It is a return to the great realist novels of the 19th century, when fiction captured the tectonic shifts altering our world by showing how they changed the characters of individual men and women, one by one. It's Charles Dickens in a call centre; it's George Eliot adding credit to her mobile phone.

Through his perfectly observed characters, some of the transformations of our time become clear. To name just one, the great shift in power from the West to the East takes on human form, where we can understand it best. The narrator of The White Tiger writes to the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao: "Don't waste your money on those American books. They're so yesterday. I am tomorrow. This is the century of the yellow and the brown man. You and me." Yet as they wait for this new world, Adiga shows how most Indians have to sweat along, one screw-up away from destitution. As another of his characters says: "The rich can make mistakes again and again. We make only one mistake, and that's it for us."

There was a time when it seemed natural -- obvious, even -- for novelists to go out into their societies and describe them like this. As the mega-selling author Tom Wolfe says: "Dickens, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Zola, and Sinclair Lewis assumed that the novelist had to go beyond his personal experience and head out into society as a reporter."

Dickens was constantly charging out into the "Great Oven" of the London night to witness its endless churn. Emile Zola went down the coalmines at Anzin so he could capture their dark dust-filled world in Germinal. John Steinbeck bought an old pie truck and drove down to live in the squatters' camps filled with people fleeing the dustbowl, and it gave birth to The Grapes Of Wrath. Graham Greene trawled across the dictatorships of the Caribbean and Latin America before writing his novels about them. George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway went to the Spanish Civil War before they smelted their masterpieces about it. Reporting didn't smother their imaginations, it fertilised them.

Yet there are so many talented young novelists I have read who seem to think the real, heaving world outside their study is a vulgar concern to be left to journalists and TV series like The Wire. They prefer to write books that ruminate on how epistemologically hard it is for "The Novel" to describe the real world, or to retreat into the stories of the distant past, or to concentrate on endless tales of middle-class adultery in Hampstead.

Occasionally, they find great work there, but I long to drag them to a run-down estate in Bradford or one of the climate change protest camps in Kent or to the club scene in Shoreditch or anywhere real and alive, to give them the best fuel for their talents.

In the 1950s it became popular (thanks to critics like Lionel Trilling and George Steiner) to say the realist novel was a dead form, belonging to the dull brickwork of the 19th century. The world now is too fast, too chaotic to be captured that way. But what could be more fast and chaotic than an Indian city at the birth of the age of the East, where a rickshaw-driving skeleton is pedaling a fat man who is merrily texting New York? Adiga makes it seem like the realist novel was designed to describe just this juxtaposition, on just this day. When it is written with skill, the realist novel is always -- yes -- real.

Wolfe, one of the great champions of the journalistic novel, warned a decade ago: "The American novel is dying not of obsolescence, but of anorexia. It needs food. It needs novelists with huge appetites and mighty unslaked thirsts for America, as she is right now." He says it would be "a revolution not in content, but in form."

The same goes for the fiction of the wider world. It's not that there aren't other great types of fiction -- I love Jorge Luis Borges and Philip K Dick, and it's impossible to imagine either of them going down a mineshaft with a notebook. But Adiga has reminded us that the big realistic novel has enough adrenaline to draw in millions of readers. His was the best-selling Booker in years, because it wasn't some abstruse literary experiment, it was alive.

There are many bold writers in the West who are still acting on these reportorial impulses, from Dave Eggers to Monica Ali to Irvine Welsh -- but there are not enough. I ran into John le Carre in the war zones in Congo, researching his novel The Mission Song, and I thought, "Where are the others?"

Wouldn't Greene have decamped to the Green Zone in Baghdad? Wouldn't Hemingway be in Helmand and Orwell in Burma -- or at least in the abandoned mill towns of the North of England? How many great novels are going unwritten today, because novelists are not being urged to make these journeys into reality?

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

To read Johann Hari's latest article for Slate magazine - about the life and death of the Asian babe - click here.

There's an intelligent response to this by Jessica Duchen, who rightly corrects a partial error of tone in this article. There's also an interesting (highly critical) response from Sunny Singh here.

Norman Geras has a critical response here and Max Dunbar answers him really well here.

 

Follow Johann Hari on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johannhari101

Comments

[Soundofthunder]

What I'm hearing is a desire for a return to the good ol' days when writers strove for the "great American novel". And to that I say: bosh. We need a return to the good ol' days of unbridled imagination. Today even the fantasy genre suffers at the altar of appeasing the gods of formulaic prose. Read (I dare you) any installment in the Sookie Stackhouse series (the basis of "True Blood") and you'll blush at the unabashed blandness and unparalleled laziness of such gems as calling the special unit in charge of wrangling newly sired vampires the "vampire police". I wish I were making that up. Kurt Vonnegut's best books were him taking his lofty imagination out for a very rigorous stroll, not the result of a long investigative junket in the Australian outback or posing as a hobo and hopping rail cars with Boxcar Willie. Besides, not many of us who write, such as myself, have the time and resources to spend a year undercover with a street gang. Furthermore, this automatically discriminates against writers, such as myself, who don't plot their work. Yes, I have the unmitigated gall to take an idea and just run with it, see where it goes...lik­e a certain author did in the 1860s when he followed a Rabbit in a waistcoat down a rabbit hole.

SOT

[Tom Matlack - Huffpost Blogger]

I totally agree but we broaden the point out to our popular culture in general. We all seem to want to hide in some fantasy world filled with reality tv and people magazine rather than looking deeply into the mirror. Fiction is just a reflection of this broader impulse to stick our collective head in the sand rather than seeing, feeling, and dealing with what is true of our circumstance at home and around the globe.

[JohnJeter]

Johann. Great piece. My novel received tepid reviews that totally missed the thematic point about the decay of the American character, from the Greatest Generation to Generation X, drawing from my 10 years' experience as a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times and St. Petersburg Times and from travels in Vietnam, Honduras, Europe, China and elsewhere ... all places in the novel. As I've seen in other places, I guess critics/readers either 1) want their "hard" reads in non-fiction; 2) prefer to have their ficiton "lite" as escapist in these brutal and stressful times; 3) dressed as dramatic literature that is so profoundly, so brutally sad (The Kite Runner, etc.) that Westerners can just sort of feel immune from that much grief; 4) that the Dickensian nightmare of Indian slums, say (as alluded to above) is just "too exotic" for comfortable suburban readers. "Too much" reporting from, let's just say, the Deep South or, again to use an example, my pot-smoking, attitude-filled, pierced, hardware-denimed punk'd-out teenager who flips off his snarky wheelchair slacker dad (who himself has to go fetch his own father from a Honduran prison) might be just a bit "much" for post-Dickensian Western readers in this hard, hard world. But, seriously, I agree with you 100% ... and if I ever write another word, the reportage will be all over it.

[LMPE]

I bet that a lot of people think that they don't need to do this, and instead can learn about it through the Internet.

[magentagreenx]

Loves it... thank you.

[JustAnotherJoe]

Good article. Questions though:

Are novelists really not writing realism or are publishers not publishing and marketing realist writers with the mistaken belief that it won't bring home as much juice as yet another vampire romance novel would (not that vampire romances don't have their place, just not disproportionately so.) How many publishers would actually publish something along the lines of Slaughter House Five or Catch-22 today?

[FirstBiteBooks]

I love the article and second JustAnptherJoe's comment.

The publishing industry is in crisis, so they can't afford to go with unknown "new" author. Instead, they opt for the safe old patterns of publishing work that often dilutes literary standards.

[Tlanice]

That is very true but if there is a demand out there for the realist novel then publishers will respond. But it seems people sway with the wind. If we are told "romance is dead but supernatural romance is the new thing" many will leave Nora Roberts behind...j­ust because. I completely intend to buy this book. I love the "real".

[BlackJAC]

More like the author's background is becoming just as emphasized, if not more emphasized, than the book in question.

[BlackJAC]

Steve Hely already had "Include Nothing From Your Own Life" as one of his 16 rules for becoming a successful commercial writer in his own book HOW I BECAME A FAMOUS NOVELIST.