Material: Self Awareness in the Novels of 2011                                         Brendan Kerr

There is a special feature on the DVD of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man that documents the director’s professional relationship with the acclaimed guitarist Richard Thompson as they collaborated to record the music for the film.  This feature is fascinating for many reasons – not least of which is the precision of the music – but it is most thrilling when it provides the opportunity to watch the auteur interact with his work.  Part of the thrill of watching any Herzog film, especially his recent documentaries, is that we, the audience, have the chance to see him self-consciously observe and narrate his subjects and footage.  Even more fascinating is this feature, which allows us to watch him, post-production, guide the niceties of the product.  The feature grants us the opportunity to watch Herzog watch himself watch his movie.

Aside from narrative skill and editing genius, it can be argued the Herzog’s most important contribution to Grizzly Man is his personality.  The majority of the footage (and the film’s most impressive images) is shot by the documentary’s subject, naturalist Tim Treadwell.  The music – necessary to the experience of the film – is recorded by Thompson and his band.  The special feature highlights a new sort of authorial self-awareness in an age when the creation of narrative is sometimes less an act of imaginative invention than one of compiling, moving and rearranging existing content.

I feel a similar insider thrill as I read the novels of 2011.  The most successful (and, oddly, the least successful) novels of the year are, like Herzog watching Grizzly Man, strikingly self-aware persons, busily and timelessly locating themselves amongst their surroundings like junior high school kids in a lunchroom, improvising their soundtracks.  I’d like to take a look at some of the year’s successes and failures in order to track the new self-awareness and how it is operating in fiction today.

The action of Tom Perrotta’s novel The Leftovers occurs within an eerily familiar suburbia reeling from the shock of a “rapture-like event.”  This dystopia is developed not with the odd detailed rigor of, say, the organ-farming prep school of Kazuo Ishuguro’s 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go.  Its rules are more crudely defined, relying more on a collage of carefully twisted references to familiar American life.  Perrotta wittily name-drops media sources, celebrities and corporations to identify himself, the self-aware author, as an active consumer.  There are multiple veiled references to 9/11, locating the book as an aftermath novel, but really providing no larger claim to the importance of that event.  The result pushes the novel to the limits of satire, the lack of Ishiguro-like detailed rigor leaves the book’s conceit feeling implausible, at times flimsy, borderline farce.  The book’s most rewarding moments, ironically, occur when Perrotta sets himself aside and allows the characters to operate naturally in their unnatural environment.  A middle aged man who has taken in his daughter’s beautiful young friend resists answering personal questions the girl asks about the new woman in his life.  “For a while, Kevin just said, She’s fine, and moved on, trying to let her know it was none of her business, but Aimee refused to take the hint.  Then one morning, without making a conscious decision, he blurted out an honest answer.”  Sentences like this – completely free of authorial self-awareness – do more to establish the mood of a house, a character’s desires and weaknesses, and the nobility sought in a confusing time, than any of the book’s “wittier” self-conscious moments.

It is not surprising that the year of Twitter might also be a year of hyper self-awareness.  If pithy brevity poses a problem for the novel, the most sophisticated and direct treatment of that problem was also the year’s best – and most self-conscious – novel.  Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot cannot be placed in opposition to any sort of wit, even the 140 character kind, just as Jane Austen cannot be replaced as a splendid writer of dialogue.  The book takes place in the 1980s, a recent world, but though merely 30 years ago its deep-living and deep-thinking characters are not the sort to trim their thoughts for the sake of sound bites.  These overeducated characters are apt to elaborate, complicate and reconsider.  The plot follows a classic love-triangle, self-consciously positioned by the triangle’s central character, an ambitious young academic named Madeline.  In the age of semiotics and deconstruction, Madeline chooses to study the unfashionable “Marriage Plot,” boldly (and sometimes wildly) arguing against professors and dark-spectacled students who claim that sexual equality and divorce have killed the novel.  As the book follows Madeline’s career and the careers of her suitors (one a spiritually-searching wanderer, the other a brilliant, but emotionally damaged biologist) the book becomes a self-aware defense of itself, a living anachronism that reads like a rallying hoorah for lovers of the form.

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding is an example of a different sort of self-aware novel, what I call the “discipline novel,” in which a singularly dedicated individual sets out to master a specific craft.  The self-locating references at use in such a book do not derive from the world at large – our media, corporations and personalities – but from the limited frame of the character’s field.  Michael Byers’ 2010 book Percival’s Planet springs to mind.  In the case of The Art of Fielding the fields at work are baseball and academics and the novel is rife with allusions sure to reward those familiar with Melville or, say, the ‘79 Pirates.  There is a moving conflict in such books in which our sympathy for the characters’ brave efforts battles what we know to expect from novelistic outcomes.  There are clearly great consequences for failure, because why else would a character care so darn much and devote oneself so relentlessly, but by the end of the book it is hard to remember what those consequences might have been, since in the discipline novel character is destiny and everyone is bound to end up wiser, more exhausted versions of themselves.  In this way, the discipline novel is really a novel about writing, itself, the character’s arena of interest a substitute for that of the novelist.  As such it is the ideal forum for moments of literary flourish and allows for an appealing sort of 19th century stateliness.  Often the tragic flaw of the disciplined hero is over analysis – the failing of Hamlet, the heroes of latter Franzen and millions of self-aware authors.

The next two books I’d like to take a look at are by established authors, names familiar to anyone reading seriously today, writers whose stature creates a new set of considerations as to the self-awareness problem.  By now many readers are familiar with the voice of Russell Banks, a generous writer who takes on specific issues in order to reflect on larger American realities.  His book A Lost Memory of Skin is ostensibly about the treatment of sexual predators, but in a greater sense it is about the isolating effects of the internet.  The book’s title refers to the distance created by digital images and the loneliness created by this distance.  It’s a very modern subject and Banks – a self-aware unhip writer who isn’t afraid to drop some street lingo despite knowing it may sound clunky – doesn’t try to play it cool, but wisely allows himself to say what needs to be said with his occasionally awkward slipper-and-robe intrepidity.  His novels exist on the edges of society and are fueled by moral complexities and borderline judgments.  The novel’s 18-year-old protagonist is named simply “The Kid.”  He lives in a colony of sex offenders on a tiny strip of land beneath a causeway – the only bit of land the requisite (by court order) distance from any place where children gather.  The kid has a single friend, an iguana named Iggy, and after years of internet abuse he finds himself lost in the mystery zone between reality and fantasy, unable to tell the difference.  Unlike The Kid, Banks sees clearly and he speaks what he sees from a self-aware, but forgiving distance.  The novel’s judgments are left up to a remarkable 500-pound character named “The Professor” who takes an interest in the kid and – not without some self interest – sets out to rescue and study him.  The Lost Memory of Skin recalls Banks’ earlier brilliant work Continental Drift.  In the midst of his own moral crisis, the protagonist of the earlier novel at one decisive point stumbles across morally questionable ex-baseball great, Ted Williams.  In this book The Kid at one point comes across OJ Simpson eating in a restaurant.  Banks’ view of the nearly 30 years between the books can be marked by this progression.  From Williams to OJ, redemption is harder won than ever.

Self-Awareness, in an established author, is always to some extent a matter of marketing and when we’re talking about marketing there is always the danger of self-parody.  There are some writers whose brand has been so specialized that reading a tweet: “There is a new Murakami novel” offers nearly the same experience as reading the novel itself.  Why write the book at all?  Especially a 1000 pager decked out in a glossy, edgily transparent dust jacket?  Nearly everything about Murakami’s 1Q84 is repetitive and vaguely embarrassing.  It’s tempting to place the blame for some of the novel’s flaws (insistent italics for no reason, for example) at the feet of the translators, but this makes little sense because the people who built Murakami’s brand are the same people who here so mismanage it.  Each page is littered with superfluous pastel redundancies and breast fixations.  Every modifier is, itself, modified – a room is “frighteningly pristine,” a character’s eyes are “piercingly intense,” every woman is “flawlessly beautiful.”  Perhaps self-parody is what happens once self-awareness becomes self-blindness.  If so, here is a trend in fiction’s self-awareness movement that writers would do well to avoid.

2011 provided many other examples of the self-aware novel.  Donald Ray Pollock thrillingly pushed Southern Gothic beyond Flannery O’Connor to terrifying new levels of violence, religious extremism and unredeemable human monstrosity with his novel The Devil All the Time.  Many local collections emerged in the small press world, re-locating regional identity in a regionless age.  In one of the most fascinating turns of literary events, The New York Times named Stephen King’s new novel, 11/22/63, one of the year’s five best.  It seems fitting that King, who somehow epitomizes the confluence of boyishly ambitious storytelling and meticulous branding, might be so acknowledged in 2011 of all years.  I just picked up the book and am looking forward to it.  I may be in for some pandering nostalgia and political short-sightedness, but it’s Stephen King and I know (and, importantly, so does he) that I’m in for a fun ride.

Brendan Kerr lives and writes in Polish Hill, Pittsburgh.