Free the novel from the writer!

I have the day off and it’s snowing, so I spent the morning on the couch reading Dominick Dunne’s A Season in Purgatory, a book that definitely lives up to its reputation as a page-turner. The story seemed increasingly familiar as I read: Connecticut, Catholicism, cover-ups, panties. I Googled the book and duh – it’s based on the murder of Martha Moxley.

A Season in Purgatory reminded me of a literary issue I’ve been meaning to address in my blog for a while. Now that I am famous and at the pinnacle of my writing career, I think the time has come.

What’s up with all the novels narrated by “writers”? It seems like every other book I read is narrated by a fictional author – an impassive observer who loiters in the background of the story and then later writes it down. In the first half of Season, for instance, the narrator lurks woodenly around the members of a charismatic Irish Catholic family (the real protagonists of the book) and absorbs their secrets. The narrator later becomes a famous author, as do most of these fictional authors who live out the real author’s bestselling fantasies.

But there’s an obvious flaw in this narrative construction. Writers are so BORING. They don’t DO anything. They’re constantly taking NOTES. They never get LAID. They’re more interested in writing about life than in living it. Which is all well and good in reality – we can sometimes even dupe people into thinking we’re interesting – but I’m so sick of writers infiltrating the fictional world. Can writers really not remove themselves far enough from their own heads to give their main characters a profession that is not writing? As a reader, it’s easy to hear the narrative voice as an autobiographical voice, and then you are distanced from the fictional dream. Also, you are annoyed.

Don’t get me wrong – in a great story, I quickly get over my annoyance with this literary device. I love Philip Roth’s Zuckerman novels and even the narrator in A Season in Purgatory redeems himself in the second half of the book (i.e. he stops writing). But I’m still frustrated by the lack of creativity in these ubiquitous plots chronicled by fictional authors.

I know we all want to think that writing is an inherently interesting profession. There have been writers who have lived epic, soap operatic lives. But most writing takes place in isolation, in acute observation, in painful self-awareness. . .in abstraction, not in story. Hot dog vendors are way more interesting than writers. Ask John Kennedy Toole.

Why can’t more writers write writers out of their writing?

[Full disclosure: both the narrators in my unpublished novel are writers. But one is a really bad writer and the other one writes diet books.]

P.S. Sorry for geeking out yesterday about my C-Ville press. When the BBF came home from Court Square, he congratulated me and said, “The important thing is to act cool and nonchalant about the positive press. Whatever you do, don’t blog about it.” I was like, “Too late.”