INTERESTING

"Interesting" is not a word we much care for.  It's weak, vague, and is generally deployed when we're avoiding saying something else, usually something bad:  "I thought your debut novel was ... interesting."  "The films of Edward Zwick are ... interesting."  You get the idea.

That said, when we came across the reading list for Zadie Smith's upcoming fiction seminar (via), we couldn't help but find the list ... interesting.  Here it is, reproduced:

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace
Catholics, Brian Moore
The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka
Crash, J.G. Ballard
An Experiment in Love, Hilary Mantel
Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, David Lodge
The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis
My Loose Thread, Dennis Cooper
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
The Loser, Thomas Bernhard
The Book of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow
A Room with a View, E.M. Forster
Reader's Block, David Markson
Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov
The Quiet American, Graham Greene

A respectable list, indeed, one that any student of fiction would do well to study closely.  So wherefore, then, our "interest"?  Well, in light of Smith's overheated revanchist New York Review of Books essay last November, we're surprised to see how overwhelmingly the very "lyrical realist" novel, whose supposed stranglehold she decries, dominates the list.  Sure, you've got your Markson, your Bernhard and your DFW.  But how does one reconcile this list with the cri de coeur of that Manichean essay?  Is there one standard for readers of the NYRB and another for Columbia fiction students?  It's hard to know for sure, but what better way to seed the ground with future Remainders than to get the buggers while they're young, no?   Inconsistent?  Provocative?  Conformist?  We're just not sure.

All of which we find, well, interesting.  Wise readerly thoughts welcome below.

Comments

[tim]

i would say that muriel spark is also not v 'lyrical realist', and what abt kafka? anyway, i think this list is just going to show that maybe she thinks ppl should read a variety of things which is obv a shocking viewpoint.

[Nicholas Richards]

Just to give this list a bit of context here's what it says on the Columbia website:

Sense and Sensibility
Seminar - Zadie Smith

What does 'having a sensibility', literary or otherwise, mean? Is it something one acquires, something innate, or something else again? We're going to read a selection of very good 20th century novels (and one book of poems) concentrating on whatever is most particular to them, in the hope that this might help us understand whatever is most particular to us. The reading list is long* and heterogeneous in the hope of encouraging sympathy for a broad range of literary sensibilities regardless of what our own natural inclinations may be. Students will give short presentations, and at the end of the course will write a piece of fiction, or a piece of literary criticism, of at least five pages.

The course will be punctuated by secondary readings of literary criticism and philosophy.

* Most of the novels are short.

Among the books we will read:

A Room With a View - E.M. Forster

The Complete Short Stories - Franz Kafka

Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov

Frost - Thomas Bernhard

The Book of Daniel - EL Doctorow

Pastoralia - George Saunders

Remainder - Tom McCarthy

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men - David Foster Wallace

The Rings of Saturn - W.G. Sebald

The Atrocity Exhibition - JG Ballard

Selected readings from - George Orwell

My Loose Thread - Dennis Cooper

Eleven Kinds of Loneliness - Richard Yates

From:
http://wwwapp.cc.columbia.edu/art/app/arts/writing/courses.jsp

[Mr. V.]

I found her two paths for the novel article extremely lame. There is this more than obvious resentment towards James Wood, specially since he doesn't name him. Note how she keeps constantly repeating "anxiety" writing about the "lyrical realist" novel. It took her years to take the "painfully accurate" calification of "hysterical realist" find the way of converting it into a strength and attack Wood with it. Not with much fortune.

I get the notion all over it she's getting everything wrong and not realizing the absurd positions she is placing herself in. "Insert [a piece of Netherland] into any nineteenth-century novel (a test first suggested by Alain Robbe-Grillet and you wouldn't see the joins". I fail to see why that is bad. She's, in the end, defending that novel is a means to know human nature, that lyrical realism can't go further anymore, and that novel must advance towards a higher ability to provide knowledge of human nature, In short, that there is progress in art, and that it can provide knowledge about human nature. Both claims are, in 2009, tremendously naive.

”.. a nicely constructed sentence, rich in sound and syntax, signifying (almost) nothing. Netherland doesn't really want to know about misapprehension. It wants to offer us the authentic story of a self. But is this really what having a self feels like? Do selves always seek their good, in the end? Are they never perverse? Do they always want meaning? Do they not sometimes want its opposite? And is this how memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent, lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really Realism?”. Wtf!? Why in the name of God does a sentence have to tell us how nothing feels like, provide meanings, signify whatever she feels is proper to signify, or ¡explain how memory works! ¿what is this, neuroscience?

She's 35 or so and now having a seminar.. it just looks to me as if she's too eagerly accepted a role of literary theoretician nobody seriously offered her, and performs with sad naivety. Tha's leaving aside the failed attempts at scholarship and pedantry by namedropping and making inaccurate or plainly wrong cfrs. about Aristotle's and Plato's views on poetry.

[Dagger DiGorro]

Well, to paraphrase her article, the list is full of . . . anxiety. Again, the list is an anxious list. In fact, it is conscious of its own anxiety, which makes it all the more anxious. And its response to this consciousness of its own anxiety, which is an anxious reaction, makes it all the more anxious. In fact, this is a list that has obviously not come to terms with its feverish anxiety.

I think you're wrong, Mark, about the much-maligned word "interesting." Its very ambiguity is sometimes pregnant with meaning. But when a reviewer relies on tropes like "anxiety" you know she is merely grasping for gravitas, as if by using it over and over a reviewer can convince the reader that she is . . . Harold Bloom.

The two lists (the one Mark posted and the one above in comment) differ slightly, but am I to assume that ZS's "long and heterogeneous" list does not include more than one novel written by a woman (and the awful The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, at that)?

At any rate, I don't think her division is all that new or . . . interesting. I recall reading a comment of Robert Coover's that serious novelists of his generation seem to have been partisans of either Auggie March or The Recognitions, that those two novels formed the divide of literature from the 50's onward.

[Matt]

Perhaps she disliked Netherland, particularly, and not lyrical novels in general. I read the NYRB essay when it appeared but haven't gone back to it, so I can't cite specifics, but writing for myself only, I found Netherland beautifully written but ultimately "interesting." It didn't move me, nor did I see a great impulse compelling Hans to tell Chuck's story. I know Smith had different criticisms, but not liking Netherland doesn't have to mean chucking lyrical novels altogether.

[Nicholas Richards]

Muriel Spark is "awful" ? It seems strange to start slagging off Zadie Smith for choosing one "branch" of the novel over another (perhaps simplified as the "experimental" over the "realist") and then to dismiss such a work as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as awful. Personally there are writers that I (and presumably Muriel Spark is one such writer for you) that we do not "get along with" or just plain hate. Perhaps the fault lies not with Muriel Spark but with us? Interesting eh?

I find this whole debate around Zadie Smith's article as a bit too reactionary. Surely such debate is healthy. Why should people have to choose sides anyway? Why can't you read Augie March and the Recognitions with equal enjoyment or Remainder and Netherland. I found Remainder to be interesting but with a number of passages I just didn't care about or indeed "get". I ended up skipping a bit to the end. There was nothing truly "new" there especially for anyone who has read JG Ballard. As for Netherland - lovely writing but a bit ...well, boring. Give me (to give a few current names) Ali Smith, David Mitchell, David Peace or Zadie Smith over those two books anyday...

[Nicholas Richards]

And why shouldn't she attack James Wood? Or the ideas he represents? As much as I love his criticism (which is truly great) he's not the only game in town and Zadie Smith's criticism such as her essays on Kafka, Middlemarch and Forster are as much worth reading as any of Wood's. Wood was lukewarm -without good reason - on Coetzee's Disgrace wasn't he? He doesn't always get it right. Nabokov dismissed whole swathes of writers for personal reasons he could never really qualify: Thomas Mann, Dostoyevsky, Camus, Henry James etc.
But ultimately it's all just a matter of taste isn't it?

[Antoine Wilson]

Remind me why we're nitpicking this syllabus? It's not like this came off smokinggun.com. Lots of writers with lots of sensibilities teach lots of different books. Meh.

[Capybara]

I thought Zadie Smith's NYRB article quite interesting, in an entirely non-pejorative sense. It was clearly overstated if one takes it as a manifesto, which I don't. Psychologial criticism of the piece as really being about James Wood I think is even more overstated. James Wood is an articulate advocate of a certain style of literature (though he's capable of appreciating literature outside that tradition -- and I think the same can be said of Smith.) But one can find that tradition wanting without making it really all about a feud with Wood. Personally, I find real value in the critical writings of both Wood and Smith. I don't get the animus directed towards either.

And there is nothing about the syllabus of her course inconsistent with the article. The article advanced a thesis; the course explores a variety of recent literature, perhaps with the aim of allowing students to develop a thesis or two of their own.

But the NYRB article of Smith's that really interested me was her more recent one on Obama's styles of speech.

[TEV]

Antoine, I'm sorry you see this as nitpicking. I think there's a bigger, legitimate point. I'll try to frame it differently.

Here's what Smith said in her essay in November:

"Yet despite these theoretical assaults, the American metafiction that stood in opposition to Realism has been relegated to a safe corner of literary history, to be studied in postmodernity modules, and dismissed, by our most famous public critics, as a fascinating failure, intellectual brinkmanship that lacked heart. Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, David Foster Wallace—all misguided ideologists, the novelist equivalents of the socialists in Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. In this version of our literary history, the last man standing is the Balzac-Flaubert model, on the evidence of its extraordinary persistence. But the critiques persist, too. Is it really the closest model we have to our condition? Or simply the bedtime story that comforts us most?"

This is in the framework of a much larger essay arguing that the novel is at some kind of critical crossroad (a thesis, by the way, that I reject). So, if I were the author of such a polemic, and I now had the chance to argue on behalf of these underappreciated modes at one of the best universities in the country, I would do more than include merely one - DFW - of these wrongly maligned writers. Assuming the argument made in November was deeply felt and not mere provocation.

That does not strike me as nitpicking. It seems to me to legitimately ask what someone espouses. And obviously, I am not suggesting a list should be all one flavor or another - anyone who thinks that's my intent is being fatuous. (Not referring to you, Antoine.) But this is a list that seems to be ensure realism's ongoing "freedom of the highway" which Smith is at pains to decry.

Finally, in case there's any question, I should be clear - I am a genuine fan of Smith as a novelist, especially White Teeth which influenced my own book in its way. I did think Autograph Man was rushed, and though I found On Beauty conventional, it was finely wrought. And I think her recent essay on Obama and lanugage in the NYRB is stunning, nearly perfect. Hard to credit both are the work of the same writer, but the point is I am no Smith basher. I just have never felt that the original arguments she raised in November felt sound, and with this list, she reinforces that impression to my eye.

[Richard]

Smith's essay was excellent, but not perfect. Her main flaw was to make it seem as though she's positing a battle between so-called realists and so-called post-modernists. Her inclusion of Barth, et al in the passage you cite, didn't help in this regard. But the problems she discusses are real. And her list you present includes many writers--DFW, Nabokov, Spark, Bernhard, Markson--who do not fit comfortably in the vein of "lyrical Realism", as she terms it. I see no contradiction between the list and the main thrust of the whole essay, her listing of major postmodernists notwithstanding.

[Alvy Singer]

Well, the affaire Wood-Smith is very sad. I love the new Joseph O'Neill's work, but I think that Wood review of Smith is Wood's worst. I feel that Wood's review it's very very uninteresting because it's like talking (or dismissing, if you prefer) about something that requires more preparation.

I'd never talk about Matrix without reading Baudrillard and Dick (the Wachowskis were readin' it), so I want reviewers that at least could understand, in the way that Northrop Frye announced, the work. Not just his aesthetic approach or something.

Thinkers and books are tools. In my opinion, Wood have done fine reviews (and interesting essays), but talking about Zadie Smith without trying to understand his work, his postmodern view is a mistake. I simply don't imagine Wood reading Smith's references and trying to know what he intended first, and not in what supposedly failed. The same goes for Miss Smith which confrontation with Wood it isn't in the right place. O'Neill and McCarthy deserve another treatment, I think. I'd prefer a versus essays, a la Smackdown but in intellectual magazines, of Wood confronting Smith ¿Hysterical Realism: truth or not? than this.

[Stephen]

This is a lame attempt to cry foul. Mr. Sarvas' snooty appraisal of the reading list doesn't make any logical sense, since Zadie's essay doesn't deride all of lyrical realism throughout history but merely points out the (apparently to many of you) deeply disturbing truth that capable, predictable rewrites of the same comforting lyrical realist novel from here to eternity will add little to the history of great literature but rather will keep alive the stifling dominance of Establishment Literary Fiction. The refreshing thing about Zadie's article and her class list is her nuance and varied appreciation. Her essay is much-needed (much as B.R. Myers' brilliant http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200107/myers
evisceration of pretentious literary prose in the Atlantic was much-needed back in 2001 and ever after). The beauty of Zadie and her taste is precisely that she digs both E.M. Forster and David Foster Wallace. That's a great taste to expose Columbia students to (the class sounds brilliant).

[Niall]

I'm looking hard, but not finding the "lyrical realist" novel that Sarvas claims to find in her list.

But even if her list had several examples of this, Sarvas' critique of this fact is assinine. Because it assumes that the purpose of teaching is indoctrination into the teacher's pet dogmas. Perhaps his teachers were like this, but I was lucky to have many in my lifetime who were happy to include examples of writing and writers they weren't very happy with. Because the goal of teaching is to expose students to a wide variety of styles and approaches, so that they can make up their own minds.

Who is the real Manichean in this argument Mark?

And am I the only one to find this "feud" between Wood and Smith, and the sniping among their various supporters, entirely juvenile? I don't know about you, but I left junior high a long, long time ago, and I have no desire to return there.

[TEV]

Well, clearly I have touched some sort of nerve here. Based on the responses, I'm absolutely willing to concede that I've missed something here (I'm not nearly as dogmatic as my critics here would have, dogmatists that they are).

I thought I was asking a very simple, straightforward question, which I foolishly try one last time: Zadie Smith effectively drew a line in the sand about where the novel should be looking/moving. You can cavil left and right about whether a book is strictly "lyrical realism" or not, but if you plot the points along a line with Forster at one end, and DFW at the other, this list bunches up at the Forster end.

And all I'm saying is that this is an interesting stance for someone who has argued that the future of the novel lies elsewhere. No one posting here has yet seemed to address that simple point, they've simply retreated (for the most part) behind their preconceived notions.

Which is fine, just not very ... interesting.

But as I said when I started this point, I'm not entirely sure what it means. I was inviting the examination. I hope the discussion will continue.

[TEV]

I should also add that nowhere in this post or its comments have I once mentioned James Wood.

[Niall]

Well, Mark, as I said the problem with this "question" is that it assumes that teaching people literature and writing is a form of indoctrination. Such that you would never expose students to examples of literature you don't approve of. This is a very sad understanding of the purpose and practice of teaching.

And you didn't have to mention Wood. Just as Jennifer Anniston doesn't have to mention Angelina Jolie.

[Niall]

Another reason you don't have to mention Wood: You've already discussed Zadie Smith's criticisms of him when you shared Wood's preferred reading list earlier.

You wrote:

"(One wonders whether Zadie Smith bothered to read through this list before kneecapping Wood in the pages of the NYRB.)"

It's clear from this passage that you don't support Zadie's criticisms of Wood (otherwise her piece wouldn't constitute a "kneecapping".

Also, Zadie herself never mentioned Wood in that piece. Yet that didn't stop you from supplying the target's name by inference.

Which is all I am doing now.

[Jacob Silverman]

I think repeatedly using the word "interesting" in the manner you have is just a way of refraining from saying what you really mean.

As for the reading list, just because she wrote *one* essay in the NYRB that was supposedly concerned with the future of the novel, that does not mean that a reading list she devises for a class has to mirror the principles espoused in that essay. Who cares? This is one class she's teaching, devoted to a general notion of "sensibility" and with a reading list explicitly aimed at providing a broad sampling of good 20th century novels. I feel like nitpitcking this list -- passively at that, by way of repeatedly calling it "interesting" -- is a way of chasing an argument that's simply not there. When she teaches a class called "Two Paths for the Novel" or something even remotely similar, then maybe you'll have the debate you want -- and it may just be interesting.

[Alvy Singer]

I'm sorry if my comment did not make sense. In my case talking about Miss Smith's list it implied James Wood because she's talking about lyrical realism and she's against a certain aesthetic approach. So that's Wood approach. It was all implicit, wasn't it?

I don't understand this distinctions by the way. Fiction is richness, is imagination and is coherence. I'm with Barthes so that's my point (and was brilliantly eposed by the best James Wood in hist last essay "how fiction works"): Wood has praised Eugenides and other writers that are postmodern. But this literary movements aren't certain at several times. One of the most interesting anaylisis of Herzog is "A stylystic analysis of Saul Bellow’s Herzog: a mode of postmodern polyphony" by the japanese academic Masayuki Teyanishi from Hyogo University. How about Lorrie Moore? Moore is so postmodern in his more "realistic" (for the critics) reviews because she's critical at the same anxieties of the postindustrial age that we're living.

Miss Smith dismisses lyrical realism, but she's always loved EM Forster's novels. So that inclusion isn't surprising at all. The surprising is the term "lyrical realism". And I explained why, I think.

[TEV]

Jacob, I hear you. And I honestly "who cares?" is an entirely legitimate response to this. When the smoke clears, maybe I'm the only one who sees something there, and as the old saw goes, if enough people say you're drunk ...

However, Niall, in response to your question, you show yourself to be the true Manichean in this discussion. Indoctrination? That's a bit much. I'm merely talking about emphasis - something I hope even you will agree is more subtle. There's a decision to emphasize certain kinds of work - as there is with any kind of list, and its omissions - and I merely found the nature of the emphasis vaguely contradictory. Vaguely. And the tone may have belied it but I genuinely was trying to sort out if there was any there there. But you're the one shouting "Indoctrination."

[Alvy Singer]

Two mistakes, I'm sorry (I'm spanish but it's a mistake anyway): I wanted to say his more realistic works. And analysis.

[Jacob Silverman]

I also wonder how much any writer who to have read widely and been influenced by a wide variety of books can claim to be a partisan. Sure she may have been advocating a certain path in that much talked about November essay, but again, that was more about directions for the future than what has come before. I would think that Smith, as much as any other well educated writer, would have an expansive appreciation for the diverse pleasures of 20th century literature.

[Niall]

Mark, can it really be true that, in the course of a single day, you have completely forgotten what you yourself wrote about Zadie Smith's list? Let me give you a brief reminder:

"Well, in light of Smith's overheated revanchist New York Review of Books essay last November, we're surprised to see how overwhelmingly the very "lyrical realist" novel, whose supposed stranglehold she decries, dominates the list. Sure, you've got your Markson, your Bernhard and your DFW. But how does one reconcile this list with the cri de coeur of that Manichean essay? Is there one standard for readers of the NYRB and another for Columbia fiction students? "

This is not anything like your current characterization of your opions as "vaguely contradictory". Moreover, you clearly characterize Smith's essay itself as Manichean. Which tells me you didn't read it, or didn't read it in its entirety. For in it she is at pains to NOT take a Manichean stance towards lyrical realism:

"It's a credit to Netherland that it is so anxious. Most practitioners of lyrical Realism blithely continue on their merry road, with not a metaphysical care in the world, and few of them write as finely as Joseph O'Neill. I have written in this tradition myself, and cautiously hope for its survival, but if it's to survive, lyrical Realists will have to push a little harder on their subject."

That is nothing like a Manichean position. In fact, in the NYRB article Smith clearly treats realism as a literary tradition in crisis, which is precisely what makes it interesting to her. And probably the best way to get students to understand her thinking on realism would be to show her students examples of realism in crisis. It is in fact entirely consistent with her position on the matter to do so.

One could only interpret this as a contradiction on the basis of a Manichean view of Smith's far more nuanced position.

QED

[LML]

A literary sensibility amounts precisely to the unique connections one draws between texts. My guess, based on the generally formidable thinking in Smith's writing, is that she has more "interesting" things to say about these books than that some are works of classical realism, while others are not.

And it's not my feeling at all that they cluster at the Forster end of the spectrum. DFW would not, in fact, be the extreme point at the other end of the spectrum. That honor would go to Bernhard or Markson, depending on how you're scoring. Ballard, Cooper, and Nabokov (OK, maybe not Pnin) are at least past the halfway point in that direction, too.

[TEV]

While you're selectively quoting me, Niall, let's add these bits:

"It's hard to know for sure ... "

"Inconsistent? Provocative? Conformist? We're just not sure."

It seems to me you're reading what you want to in all this, which is your prerogative.

Incidentally, I have read Smith's essay in its entirety, several times, marked it up even, for a planned (but still unwritten) reply. And my interpretation of the piece is that the statement you note is essentially lip service, a passing nod in an essay which also includes the section Mr. V. quoted above and part of which I briefly reproduce here:

"But is this really what having a self feels like? Do selves always seek their good, in the end? Are they never perverse? Do they always want meaning? Do they not sometimes want its opposite? And is this how memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent, lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really Realism?"

More contradiction, now within the space of paragraphs. Realism's survival is "hoped for" even as it's repudiated.

Incidentally, I am also not saying contradiction is inherently bad or problematic, and these are complicated notions that deserve nuanced appraisal. But I do find this particular contradiction, sigh, wait for it ...

... interesting.

So, I see your QED. And do try to lighten up, we can disagree without being disagreeable.

[Niall]

A quotation is be definition selective, no? The quotations I provide are representative both of your stance and Smith's. They are not edited or selected to distort the entirety of the point either of you is trying to make. You did in fact accuse Smith's essay of being Manichean, and you did in fact, on that basis, claim that it was contradictory for her to include realist literature on her syllabus.

You have yet to offer any convincing, or coherent, defense of this position. As I pointed out, Smith has every reason to include realist novels in her syllabus, precisely because she sees it as the dominant form of literary practice, and therefore is forming her own literary theories in response to it.

Perhaps Smith's essay, and the position it stakes out, are contradictory. But that is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether it is Manichean. The attempt at nuance often provokes the charge of contradiction, so you are actually supporting my point here.

[TEV]

Well, Niall, I've been enough of these kind of things to recognize a bloggish impasse when I see one, so it's probably best to leave it here, that we agree to disagree.

That said, your fair point that "includ[ing] realist novels in her syllabus, precisely because she sees it as the dominant form of literary practice, and therefore is forming her own literary theories in response to it." is something I will take away and give more thought to. I think it's well-stated, whatever our other disagreements here today.

[Carl]

A bit off point, but my reaction is, I'd love to read a varied list like this for class, and often did as an undergraduate, but for each class, it was a novel a week, times four and five classes at times. I know I read all of Henry James, but can't remember anything about them. It was all a blur.

[Anonymous]

I'm with LML on this one, Mark. I don't know "Catholics," but otherwise I count four "lyrical realist" books on this list. Neither Doctorow nor Cooper count, if we're defining "lyrical realism"as narrowly as Smith herself seems to be doing.

I would disagree with Niall, however, about the contours of this comment-thread debate and their provenance. Though no one has really acknowledged it above, On Beauty is, more than Netherland, the realist novel par excellence of the last several years. Which I'd say is on balance a good thing (as it is with Netherland). That is to say, Zadie Smith, figured here as the scourge of the realists, is one of the best of them, and knows it, and is somewhat uncomfortable with the mantle, as any artist should be.

I read the NYRB essay as Smith working out anxieties about her own (wonderful, realist) sensibility via a critical reading of Netherland and a mildly tendentious coronation of Remainder - a book I liked a lot, but which, if it's truly some kind of pinnacle of avant-gardism (it's not) doesn't speak very highly of the avant garde's ability to change our lives.

Which (however loath may be to admit it) is the point, right? Changing lives? Well, that and "make it new."

That is, I saw Smith doing actual thinking on the page, which is rare, and though I often found the thoughts incompletely worked out, I admired the attempt. Though the readings themselves struck me as a bit forced, and the tension she attempts to adumbrate struck me as already exhaustively documented (see, e.g. Wallace's "E. Unibus Pluram," Franzen's "Perchance to Dream," the N+1 symposium on fiction, et cetera, ad nauseam), it also does seem to be the very tension that most of the novelists I find most, um...interesting...are currently wrestling with.

I kind of wish I'd written about the Smith essay earlier, but maybe soon... Anyway, the whole contretemps seems like an elaborate head-fake that a lot of people have fallen for. I sometimes feel this way about James Wood at his most programmatic.

In summary:

• 1) Smith's next great novel will be grounded in the realist mode.
• 2) "Lyrical realism," like "democracy" or "justice" is a wonderfully unstable compound we'd do well not to attempt to freeze in time (maybe this is what Smith was trying to say, somewhat fumblingly?)
• 3) It must mean something that we get ourselves so worked up defending "lyrical realism," or "metafiction," as the case may be. But what?
• 4. That's the really interesting question.

[Jake]

"Interesting" is not a word we much care for. It's weak, vague, and is generally deployed when we're avoiding saying something else, usually something bad: "I thought your debut novel was ... interesting." "The films of Edward Zwick are ... interesting." You get the idea.

Funny: I just put up this post on that subject, since "interesting" is apparently my favorite word during interviews. I didn't realize this at the time. Now I'll consciously try to avoid it.

[Nicholas Richards]

Schoolboy error alert: The Manichean essay to which Mark refers is CS Lewis's The Screwtape Letters I think and not Zadie's NYRB one...Perhaps some references are just a little *too* subtle sometimes...

[Nicholas Richards]

or perhaps not...

[Nicholas Richards]

If he was referring to Zadie's essay being "Manichean" as I see that he actually was, then it actually moves from the world of schoolboy error into that of sophomore pretension :-) Does Zadie Smith really characterise Netherland and Remainder as the light and dark of contemporary fiction? I think not.

[Niall]

In what way is The Screwtape Letters "Manichean"? Aren't we really stretching the use of that term at this point? And does it apply to his literary approach or to his literary judgments?

Can we just drop the word at this point and come up with some other historico-religious term we can lustily abuse?

[Nigel Beale]

Mark,

By 'interesting' I take it you mean predictable. This reading list is perfectly in line with all of the inconsistencies that riddle Smith's NYRB article - one that praises what requires criticism, and criticizes what deserves praise, and erects straw men in order, simply, to blow them over. It presents arguments, which, when valid, are so for the wrong reasons, and displays thinking that is convoluted and self contradictory.