Should Literary Novels Be More Like The Wire?

Walter Benn Michaels, the punchy professor of American literature and theory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, came to New York last week and delivered an emphatic message to novelists: Please start writing more about class issues and the social order of contemporary life! It was a rainy evening, and Mr. Michaels spoke as part of a panel at the New York Public Library. At the center of the evening’s discussion was a brief, polemical essay that Mr. Michaels had recently published in BookForum in which he argued that the leading voices in American letters had, in their work, rendered “the reality of our social arrangements invisible.”

In his essay, Mr. Michaels implicated three groups of writers: those who traffic narcissistically in memoir and self-examination; those who write fiction about past horrors like the Holocaust and slavery; and those who focus in their work on the tribulations of individual characters while ignoring the societal pressures that determine those characters’ lives. 

None of them, Mr. Michaels argued, would ever produce great art unless they reversed course. What novelists need to do, he said, is take a cue from David Simon, the creator of the The Wire, a show that portrayed over the course of five seasons the inner workings of Baltimore. (Mr. Simon, a former crime reporter for The Baltimore Sun, was among Mr. Michaels’ fellow panelists.)

While young novelists don’t actually need to heed Mr. Michaels’ call, they do have to decide if they agree with him.

Is the point of writing fiction in 2009 to represent, as accurately as possible, the way the world really works? And is there a meaningful distinction to be made between works of fiction that are overtly about actual places during actual moments in history (like Joseph O’Neill’s post-9/11 New York novel Netherland), and novels whose emphasis is elsewhere (like Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, in which setting is incidental)? 

Pub Crawl called up a few friendly emerging fiction writers who, based on recent work, could be expected to offer diverging points of view. 

Wells Tower, author of the universally lauded short-story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, said he’d been surprised to see that a critic in Esquire who’d reviewed his book had expressed admiration for its “robust representation of ‘the America we actually live in.’”

“I found that really surprising because I feel like I really kind of wrote into my own world, without thinking too much about anything that was going on politically or technologically or any of that,” Mr. Tower said. “Somebody like Tom Wolfe considers himself a kind of historian of the moment, and Philip Roth, as well. I don’t think of myself as a writer with those kinds of preoccupations. … For me, too much deliberate timeliness somehow doesn’t fit in the weird, private space my fiction comes from.”

Mr. Tower indicated that one of the side effects of his approach is that his stories include few references to real or recognizable locations or historical events, and provide few clues as to when they might be taking place. Setting, in other words, is very much beside the point.

That is not the case for Joanna Smith Rakoff, whose recently published debut novel, A Fortunate Age, was originally called Brooklyn, after the borough its main characters inhabit. Conceived as a 1990s update of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Ms. Smith Rakoff’s novel follows a group of Oberlin grads working in various creative industries in fin de siècle New York. In building the soundstage for her story, Ms. Rakoff worked meticulously to replicate the real New York and the real Oberlin down to the details. And yet, she said in an interview, the purpose of that work was not to imbue the novel with some social commentary or an argument. 

“My novel is set in a recognizable New York, but it’s still a fictional New York,” she said. “It’s still my New York that I’ve created for the purposes of this work.”

Nevertheless, Ms. Smith Rakoff’s novel is distinctly a period piece, and as such it is full of proper nouns and references to things like Bedford Avenue, Pellegrino, Lingua Franca, McSweeney’s, etc. Did Ms. Smith Rakoff ever consider writing a novel whose story line was not so vehemently situated in a real time and place? A novel whose setting was smudged, or even left unaddressed altogether?

She did think about making up a fictional college for her characters to graduate from, she said, instead of using her actual alma mater, Oberlin. She added that she is considering setting her next novel in a fictional African country.