Great novels are user's manuals for reality and society.
Don Quixote is an owner's guide for living in an insane world. Most of Defoe was about explaining all these different new levels of social mobility and recent history.
Demon Copperhead for sure, resonates on community, social workers, pulling oneself up by own bootstraps. Almost put it down after a few pages, thinking it was about addiction, but Kingsolver did a masterful job.
Agree about Bonfire of the Vanities. Keeping with same author, A Man in Full. The early scene where the bankers shake him down in the too-bright room with a dead plant, hilarious.
Very broadly speaking, the "cash nexus" or "realist" novel you describe doesn't get a lot of attention today, although people will still read them instead of much better examples like the ones you list. Franzen and Tartt are likely to have the shelf life of milk, since literary history is cluttered with their dead doubles. (Updike is a much better chronicler, including in terms of turning a sentence, and I'm not sure anyone will ever read him again, which is a pity.)
A long time ago Samuel Delany observed that reading Austen is essentially reading science fiction: a SF "universe" that is easier for us to imagine, perhaps, or even to identify with, but no less science-fictional for all that. To write in that mode now, the mode of Collison's list, is an archaism, the equivalent of a 2025 pulp novelist trying to write two-fisted stories of planetary conquest with atomic rocket ships. Too many things (physical, technological, cultural...) have been invented in the meantime for our pulper to be anything more than a parodist. After Proust and Joyce, a serious writer can't use Middlemarch as a model. Those two are the Scylla and Charybdis of contemporary writing...and generally you can classify great contemporary writers in terms of which monster et 'em (DeLillo: Joyce. Roth: Proust. Hemingway: also Proust, lol.)
This is such a good post - thank you! I love the broadband/narrowband distinction. The broadband mode also something that I find the best historians - writers like Juliet Gardiner or David Kynaston, say: they somehow manage to zoom in to individual diaries and lives, and zoom out to global political economy (or vice versa), to evoke the relationship of the two in a way which fills me, as a novelist and creative non-fictioneer, with awe and envy.
(Profoundly tedious terminology nitpick of the original Patrick Collison quote: none of his examples are historical novels, though we could have a conversation about Middlemarch. As far as I'm aware, the rest are all set within the conscious lifetime of the author (Margaret Atwood's definition of historical fiction), and less than 50 years before the date of publication (the usual industry definition). Forgive me ;-) - my creative writing PhD was about historical fiction.)
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton ranks high, peeling back the recyclable wrap from an environmental group of idealists who can’t agree on the way forward.
This was an excellent piece. As to your question about who might be the heirs to Dickens and Eliot today I am suggesting Donal Ryan. I have just come across a review in The Guardian by Erica Wagner of Donal Ryan’s Heart, Be at Peace. The sub heading of the review is “The inner thoughts of an Irish community speak volumes about the state of the nation.” I have only read one of Donal Ryan’s books – From a Low and Quiet Sea. It was quite extraordinary and has stuck with me. I am not planning to read this latest book.
This was an excellent piece. As to your question about who might be the heirs to Dickens and Eliot today I am suggesting Donal Ryan as one. I have just come across a review in The Guardian by Erica Wagner of Donal Ryan’s Heart, Be at Peace. The sub heading of the review is “The inner thoughts of an Irish community speak volumes about the state of the nation.” I have only read one of Donal Ryan’s books – From a Low and Quiet Sea. It was quite extraordinary and has stuck with me. I am now planning to read this latest book.
How do you ever reconcilethe different spectrums into the one book? It becomes an ad hoc approach rather than one derivative of the theme or story. The disconnect makes it impossible to ever grasp the story. We do grasp the story so I'm wondering what the underlying approach is there. Also I'm not sure if one can privilege wider bands over shorter bands. You can say the beatniks were hardly as engaged as the later hippies were with wider bands but then again the hippies came from the beatnik culture among a few others like blues which were similarly unengaged.
A goal for this year—for the coming 2025–is to rewrite a novel I completed in my thirties about a man who runs away from an old age home to die on his own terms, of course against his families wishes. Now in my mid fifties, I can understand more closely the exquisite and horrifying loneliness of the end coming nearer, of a life lived but not quite in one’s own terms but now the window of possibility slowly but quickly closes.
I’m looking forward to using this full spectrum idea in my work, to use the novel to explore the many interior monologues of a single character. Deleuze and Guattari begin their great 1000 Plateaus by writing that since each of them is multiple, they were already quite a crowd. Let everything admit the multiplicity of possibility the—if I may—adjacent possible!
I’d suggest that Richard Powers is a VERY close match for what you call “full-spectrum” writing, particularly in the latter half of his career.
Yes! With Trees!
I'd agree with that, certainly.
Great novels are user's manuals for reality and society.
Don Quixote is an owner's guide for living in an insane world. Most of Defoe was about explaining all these different new levels of social mobility and recent history.
I recommend Maryline Robinson Gilead , Home , Lila and Jack ( US )
Also Donal Ryan The Spinning Heart , Heart be at Peace & Queen of Dirt Island ( fallout in Ireland after financial crash )
A Fine Balance Rohinton Mistry ( epic panorama of India )
Demon Copperhead Barbara Kingsolver
Rohinton Mistry just fantastic writing. I miss his writing. He hasn’t written for years. Does anyone know why?
Marilynne Robinson up there with Eliot.
Demon Copperhead for sure, resonates on community, social workers, pulling oneself up by own bootstraps. Almost put it down after a few pages, thinking it was about addiction, but Kingsolver did a masterful job.
I too came here to suggest Marilynne Robinson
Regarding who is doing this today… I thought Bonfire of the Vanities was in the same league. And maybe Norman Mailer
Agree about Bonfire of the Vanities. Keeping with same author, A Man in Full. The early scene where the bankers shake him down in the too-bright room with a dead plant, hilarious.
Very broadly speaking, the "cash nexus" or "realist" novel you describe doesn't get a lot of attention today, although people will still read them instead of much better examples like the ones you list. Franzen and Tartt are likely to have the shelf life of milk, since literary history is cluttered with their dead doubles. (Updike is a much better chronicler, including in terms of turning a sentence, and I'm not sure anyone will ever read him again, which is a pity.)
A long time ago Samuel Delany observed that reading Austen is essentially reading science fiction: a SF "universe" that is easier for us to imagine, perhaps, or even to identify with, but no less science-fictional for all that. To write in that mode now, the mode of Collison's list, is an archaism, the equivalent of a 2025 pulp novelist trying to write two-fisted stories of planetary conquest with atomic rocket ships. Too many things (physical, technological, cultural...) have been invented in the meantime for our pulper to be anything more than a parodist. After Proust and Joyce, a serious writer can't use Middlemarch as a model. Those two are the Scylla and Charybdis of contemporary writing...and generally you can classify great contemporary writers in terms of which monster et 'em (DeLillo: Joyce. Roth: Proust. Hemingway: also Proust, lol.)
This is such a good post - thank you! I love the broadband/narrowband distinction. The broadband mode also something that I find the best historians - writers like Juliet Gardiner or David Kynaston, say: they somehow manage to zoom in to individual diaries and lives, and zoom out to global political economy (or vice versa), to evoke the relationship of the two in a way which fills me, as a novelist and creative non-fictioneer, with awe and envy.
(Profoundly tedious terminology nitpick of the original Patrick Collison quote: none of his examples are historical novels, though we could have a conversation about Middlemarch. As far as I'm aware, the rest are all set within the conscious lifetime of the author (Margaret Atwood's definition of historical fiction), and less than 50 years before the date of publication (the usual industry definition). Forgive me ;-) - my creative writing PhD was about historical fiction.)
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton ranks high, peeling back the recyclable wrap from an environmental group of idealists who can’t agree on the way forward.
Good insight 😌 Can i translate part of this article into Spanish with links to you and a description of your newsletter?
Correction: I am NOW planning to read Ryan's latest book.
This was an excellent piece. As to your question about who might be the heirs to Dickens and Eliot today I am suggesting Donal Ryan. I have just come across a review in The Guardian by Erica Wagner of Donal Ryan’s Heart, Be at Peace. The sub heading of the review is “The inner thoughts of an Irish community speak volumes about the state of the nation.” I have only read one of Donal Ryan’s books – From a Low and Quiet Sea. It was quite extraordinary and has stuck with me. I am not planning to read this latest book.
This was an excellent piece. As to your question about who might be the heirs to Dickens and Eliot today I am suggesting Donal Ryan as one. I have just come across a review in The Guardian by Erica Wagner of Donal Ryan’s Heart, Be at Peace. The sub heading of the review is “The inner thoughts of an Irish community speak volumes about the state of the nation.” I have only read one of Donal Ryan’s books – From a Low and Quiet Sea. It was quite extraordinary and has stuck with me. I am now planning to read this latest book.
How do you ever reconcilethe different spectrums into the one book? It becomes an ad hoc approach rather than one derivative of the theme or story. The disconnect makes it impossible to ever grasp the story. We do grasp the story so I'm wondering what the underlying approach is there. Also I'm not sure if one can privilege wider bands over shorter bands. You can say the beatniks were hardly as engaged as the later hippies were with wider bands but then again the hippies came from the beatnik culture among a few others like blues which were similarly unengaged.
I would recommend A Suitable Boy - I think it's one of the richest, and most interesting, books that I've read.
A goal for this year—for the coming 2025–is to rewrite a novel I completed in my thirties about a man who runs away from an old age home to die on his own terms, of course against his families wishes. Now in my mid fifties, I can understand more closely the exquisite and horrifying loneliness of the end coming nearer, of a life lived but not quite in one’s own terms but now the window of possibility slowly but quickly closes.
I’m looking forward to using this full spectrum idea in my work, to use the novel to explore the many interior monologues of a single character. Deleuze and Guattari begin their great 1000 Plateaus by writing that since each of them is multiple, they were already quite a crowd. Let everything admit the multiplicity of possibility the—if I may—adjacent possible!