On Vox: Doing your research
There's a really interesting post at Mark Athitakis' American Fiction Notes on an essay by Leon Wieseltier. Wieseltier was dismissive of novels which involved lots of - or perhaps even not that much - research, and Mark Athitakis makes some good points in response.
What I'm wondering, though, is why research specifically is being identified as a problem, something that hinders literature.
From the original article:
But the culture of explanation, the illusion of mastery, extends also to our novels. So much contemporary American fiction also seems researched, worked up, instrumentalized, by skillful minds eager to display their skills. Writers go prowling through eras of history or fields of science in search of their next project, disguising the absence of a calling as curiosity. They become experts. (And critics call the results of their expertise “richly imagined.”)
As Athitakis' points out, he criticises Philip Roth's The Humbling for falling victim to this 'culture of explanation' based on, well, very little indeed.
What's also not noted by Wieseltier is that quite often novels can really benefit from some thorough research, when it is accompanied by imagination and skill. Yes, I know I've based on about Helen Dunmore quite a lot recently, but The Siege really is a good example of this. She works in a lot of meticulously researched information, giving historical context, and in that book it really supports and enriches the book. It's not done in an 'I've spent ages looking things up and must include it all in my book, no matter whether it fits or not' way; instead, the flashes of detail give the whole book a sense of atmosphere, and descriptive passages are written beautifully, albeit based on concrete information.
Equally, taken the other way round, a lack of detail can be really jarring. Both my mother and I loved Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach but the detail of its setting in time doesn't necessarily work, and my mother noted a few historical inaccuracies. They were admittedly minor, but slips such as that do have the power to jolt a reader out of a novel. While it might not always pay off to incorporate minutely detailed point after pointedly minute detail, getting it wrong really isn't so great.
So I find the Wieseltier's comment, above, quite misleading. What really seems worth criticising is material that feels compelled to lump in additional detail for the sake of it, making the narrative itself clunky and disjointed. I'd agree that that's the case for some novels. Wieseltier just seems to trying to chase down the wrong culprit, which seems more simply to be: bad writing.
Originally posted on jentastical.vox.com