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Kathryn Harrison and D.T. Max

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from: D.T. Max

What Ruined the Novel

Posted Tuesday, July 17, 2001, at 2:01 PM ET

Kathryn,

You are trying to take our breakfast to higher ground. Bashfully, cognizant that this is ground where the novelist commands and the journalist gets a little outcropping to plant as best he can, I follow. Here are two thoughts on what ruined the novel--and therefore, the good times for novelists.

First: A decline in religious repression. (Maybe I should rephrase that à la Times: "Wave of Religious Tolerance Sweeps City, Globe.") The novel is a code, a way to say what you want and get away with it. It is to memoir what the stars in the tousled bed smoking cigarettes, connoting "Sex was had here," are to the porno film: adult, symbolic, respectful of the imagination and its immense, slightly off the point powers. Novelists grew to love this code and improved on it. Hell, I love this code, too. It's an eagle; the memoir a duck. But where's the proof readers ever got more out of the novel than the memoir? Forget MTV. Don Quixote, the first fiction addict we have, took them to be real. It's a 400-year-old habit--except among those who write fiction. Novelists see--celebrate--the seams, the invention. This explains, I think, why they had trouble getting behind Salman Rushdie in 1989 when the Fatwa was declared. They couldn't believe that in some countries novels are still read as if they were loaded weapons. It was an ancestral memory for them, like climbing into a tree to sleep.

Point 2: with an acknowledgment to Philip Roth, who first pointed a variant of this out. Fiction's muscle is its lie. The lie was what kept us up, terrified us as children. Now, well, the nightmare is while we wake. After the atom bomb, the rise of the memoir was inevitable.

You'll think I'm some sort of obsessive, but I could not help but notice that in today's papers both the alleged Carnegie Deli killer, Sean Salley, and Sean Puffy Combs (no relation, as the Times might say) have come to grief in ... Florida. Combs is accused, allegedly, it is said, sources tell the New York Post, of literally leaving a friend holding the bag--one full of marijuana--in a Ferrari outside a Miami strip club called Goldrush. This rehash of his problems in New York in 1999 happened mere miles from where Salley was apprehended, and not so far from where our hapless sufferer dude looked down in the water at the shadow and saw nothing wrong; close to, too, where the boy had his arm clipped off by el tiburon.

There isn't a day I don't wake and am sad about the situation I outlined above, the crisis of fiction. Robert Penn Warren once said that California was where you went when you ran out of hope. I feel that Florida is that place today. Its rise to mythopoeic grace makes me hopeful, but for a roundabout reason. It goes back to your point about the 2000 elections. There was something touching about how the Democrats got outhustled. Anyone with a heart to love emerged a Democrat. So too California: Its fall from the Zeitgeist is touching. The novel emerged not just as a code to keep novelists and their readers out of prison but as a means of experiencing loss out of time. That's how the duck became an eagle. Novelists are Democrats because they have that smell of loss. (They'd never be Republicans, but they might otherwise be libertarians.) What do you do when your moment has passed? You become a fit subject for novelists. Look for a spate of superb novels about California in the coming decade.

Did you see the picture of Robert Downey Jr. at his arraignment for his latest in the Post? His sense of isolation, the lines emerging on his face make his beauty overwhelming. Is your daughter a fan of his? If I had one, I think she would be.

the breakfast table
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from: D.T. Max

What Ruined the Novel

Posted Tuesday, July 17, 2001, at 2:01 PM ET
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Kathryn Harrison's most recent book is The Binding Chair. D.T. Max is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine and is at work on a book on prion diseases and the landscape of illness.
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[Notes from the Fray Editor: Richard Riley lives in flyover country and has only ever come across 'Jewess' in the book Ivanhoe. A-Z says Jewish practices are matrilineal, not matriarchal. Sean Fitzgerald doesn't know what the deal would be if the intern was black, and asks for enlightenment. Whither the "Breakfast Table"? Regular readers make their comments in this thread, and have suggestions for future participants.]

First of all, it isn't about the supposedly unique attractiveness of Jewish women. Both Clinton and Condit had relationships with other women who were not Jewish. The attractive quality was not Jewishess, but availability. These guys, especially Clinton, had limited opportunities to meet available women. So how are Jewish interns available to Democratic politicians? Two American cultural traditions play a role:

First, internships go to families connected to campaign contributors, and American Jews are disproportionately represented among large contributors to the Democratic party. No surprise that many Democratic interns come from Jewish families.

Second, there is an American Jewish tradition of supporting adult children through more years of education (including unpaid internships) than is standard in other U.S. cultural communities, even at comparable parental income levels. Some connect it to the yeshiva tradition in Eastern Europe, where supporting a scholar who never holds down a job was a matter of pride for an extended family. Why this tradition stuck over the generations even among the nonreligious is an interesting question. Both Chandra and Monica were still apparently supported by their parents well into their mid-twenties.

Put these factors together, and a high proportion of young democratic DC interns are Jewish. It's not a surprise that some of the women get involved with the bosses.

This pop sociology comes from the inside, as I was young and Jewish in the DC intern world myself once, and later a parentally-supported Jewish law student.

--Arthur Stock

(To reply, click here.)


 As I see it this "Breakfast Table" manages to give any Frayster a choice of ticking time bombs to try and disarm (or throw at other Fraysters). First, a discussion of the sexual mores of Jewish women. While I have identified a Jewish conspiracy to take all my money and life-force, the conspiracy appears limited to my wife and children. Moreover, a first person comment on whether I think Jewish women are easy for Presbyterian men, would leave me in a deeply compromised position if my wife read it. So I will boldly leave this issue alone. The raising of the second issue reminds me of a little boy who has forgotten what happens when you hit a hornets nest with a stick. So I will simply confine myself to saying that Republicans are low-life fascists who don't deserve to ever hold office in a free country.

--Neill Hamilton

(To reply, click here.)


 It doesn't help anybody to understand these situations by pretending that the women involved were empty little china dolls broken by big, bad men. I don't know what the deal is with Levy and Condit, but anyone who read that turgid Starr report saw that Monica Lewinsky was a participant, not a puppet, in what happened.

There are women who are attracted to power, and there are women who play on the shortcomings of powerful men for their own reasons. To suppose otherwise is to deny them the very three-dimensional existence that women's empowerment is supposed to provide. To suppose otherwise is to do a shocking disservice to the thousands of young women who cycle through Washington, DC, every year, working hard and getting ahead and never once thinking that it would be all right to sleep with a married man who insisted you not bring ID on your "dates."

--Shark

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 (7/16)


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