The stories that might be told
I thought this was going to be awful: Bookforum contributors on the risky books they’d like to read now (because is this a moment for risky books?) but some of them are not bad at all: My favorite books have a headlong quality, a sense that the author was having fun, saying “fuck it” at some point in the process and letting go of the idea of controlling an imagined audience’s reaction. There is a kind of deliberate messiness that always thrills me.... Aliveness is the opposite of trying to get an A+ in novel writing.
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What a relief it would be to pick up a novel without the sense of participating in an attenuated dance with the author, the object of which is to keep the form we both know and love alive. The “risk” that interests me now involves retreat from that dance, an end to the mania for renovation, shallow politicking, and aesthetic primacy. Its result seeks to inhabit not a single consciousness but an intricate context, putting at its core not one striking voice but a set of bristling relationships and ideas.... In a cultural landscape more apt to fetishize its own alienation than consider it, finding a way forward for the sweeping, intimately observed social novel might be the most ambitious, surprising task a fiction writer could undertake.
This is also asking for more complex network of relatonships rather than the single important Chosen Protag: The Protagonist Problem (Ada Palmer and Jo Walton). It brings in the concept of 'tapestry' narratives: [I]n tapestry books the points-of-view can truly be as tiny as threads, and may not have arcs in themselves.... a tiny thread but have power, agency, even though... personally have no arc.
It put me in mind of a Twitter thread which I didn't alas bookmark I was reading where somebody was saying what they wanted just now was stories about people working together to improve things, not necessarily big world-shattering things, but to make things better even if only on a small and limited scale.
And I've never, to the best of my knowledge, ever seen a single glimpse never mind a whole episode of this, but this appreciation of the programme is just lovely, and says something about a certain kind of narrative: The Quiet Genius of Call the Midwife: Cake, death and the romance of mutual aid. This is a story, more than anything, about the mundanity of heroism. Not only is there no traditional protagonist - there’s also no real villain. There’s no cackling bad guy you can shoot in the face, or even defeat in the marketplace of ideas. there are no winners, and no losers, just people doing their best to keep each other alive.
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