POP legend Sir Elton John wants the internet closed down. “The internet has stopped people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff. Instead they sit at home and make their own records, which is sometimes OK but it doesn’t bode well for long-term artistic vision. We’re talking about things that are going to change the world and change the way people listen to music and that’s not going to happen with people blogging on the internet. In the early Seventies there were at least ten albums released every week that were fantastic. Now you’re lucky to find ten albums a year of that quality. And there are more albums released each week now than there were then.”^
I don’t know enough about pop music to care either way regarding his claim, but it applies quite aptly to the world of fiction or as it was once called, literature. Over the past decade I’ve been the hovering dragonfly listening at parties, noting down potential scores in the realm of the Good Read, and I’ve prowled Half Price Books and indie bookstores until my feet hurt. At the store, it’s easy to make the first cut, and I took the rest home. Probably a hundred books over the past decade representing the “best” of the new work out there, from Vollman to Danielewski.
I’ve just gotten done throwing out the last it. It was dreck. I feel all of it is incredibly well-written, very aware of its market, and yet completely devoid of anything meaningful to say. These are novels by lonely artists about being lonely artists, and there’s no solutions, no growth, no desire for anything different. Most of what it seems to show off is the author’s cleverness, in that cloud-style postmodern style pioneered by Pynchon, where a general idea (sameness is entropy) becomes an umbrella for disconnected observations preached at you rather than shown.
It’s the self-satisfied novel, and it reminds me a lot of the rather silly blog postings I see around the internet. “Today I ate this, I watched this, and then this and that happened, and I thought this, and now I’m ready for tomorrow.” It’s like we’re so afraid of dying we won’t even acknowledge the day to day changes of life, so we’re hiding out in these little mental ‘hoods of our own creation. Literature should be, as Vonnegut put it, the canary in the coal mine not just of “society” but of our own souls. If these books were our soul guardians, we never had a chance.