I hate being proven right when I want to be wrong. I wrote in my last post, as a sort of afterthought, about Mark Z Danielewski’s new novel, Only Revolutions, and asked the somewhat ambiguous question “Sink or swim?”. Here’s the first page:

Hailey.Large-1

Now, I’m not sure if you can read that properly, but let me help you make note of the layout, the coloured letters in the text (something he’s inherited from his last novel, The House Of Leaves – which, I might add, I thought was spectacular), the small diagram, the snaked lines, the different sections. Then read the words, and oh! look. That first page seems to make no sense. I would go so far as to say that it’s nigh on unreadable – and that isn’t a statement about it’s quality, rather just that I have no idea where to start reading. Sense says start with the “Samasara!”, but it isn’t the first type on the page, and what line do I follow when reading – where’s the pace? Where’s the guiding reader-lines that most experimental for novels seem to provide? House Of Leaves went all crazy formed at certain points, but I always knew where to go next with it. I’ve bought this book already – I preordered it, as, as I said, I really liked House Of Leaves – but I wonder if would have done had I seen it first?

I saw the layout of the novel just after a conversation with a fellow writer in which we touched upon the topic of pretension in fiction, something that I think we – and probably all writers – are all too aware of when working on new pieces. It came up when speaking about McSweeneys Literary Magazine, and Dave Eggers’ story “There are some things he should keep to himself”. I say story – really, it’s just some blank pages published with a title and page numbers. It’s very witty, in an Eggers way – he famously published his life in the form of a novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – and this references his own history. Clever. But, also, in my opinion, blindingly pretentious. I mean, I have paid money for his novels, for his collection of short stories so that he could publish what is, in essence, a private joke.

And it’s a fine line, I know; there are no doubt lots of people who don’t think that blank pages are pretentious, who don’t think that abstract writing such as that in Danielewski’s novel is anything other than original. And there are people who think that anything that falls into the somewhat dubious literary fiction genre is pretentious, just by its very existence (one website gives an example of pretentious fiction as the literary writing of Iain Banks – but not his sci-fi writing!). And if you google the topic Pretentious fiction, the first link that appears mentions John Updike as being worthy of remark for his pretentious fiction – the same John Updike that is mentioned numerous times in the previously mentioned 25 Greatest American Novels list. So, pretentious fiction is the the “pompous, portentous tomes” that used to consistently win the Booker prize (and have actually been ‘banned’ from the contest now), yes? Well, maybe. But Carl Olson, a book reviewer on his own website, thinks that Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is pretentious. Really? Had he used “badly written”, “melodramatic”, broken”, or any number of other insults I would have agreed with him, but I think it was what it was – a mass market thriller for people designed for and sold to people who don’t generally read books, but want something to spend a week reading on a beach. It wasn’t pretentious – at least, not by my definition of the word. But then, I suppose that maybe it’s a sliding scale. I know somebody who gave up on Everything Is Illuminated because they thought it was pretentious – and where they saw an author “being difficult” in his use of language, I saw one having an enormous amount of fun – but, I feel crucially, never at the expense of the reader, or the story (that part of novels that seems to get forgotten when form and message get in the way).

So, to bring this full circle, I would like t talk about Danielewski’s fans – the hardcore fans, that is. They post on Danielewski’s forums, and decode parts of the novels, and decipher them and work through them – and, seemingly, like them unfailingly. Nobody there talks about the fact that, yeah, maybe the novel is slightly impenetrable. Why? they haven’t read it yet, and already they are willing to love it. They have accepted the pretension, and they are willing to run with it and get out of the novel what they want, and, no doubt, what Danielewski wants readers to. But I would really love to go to a beach and swap somebody Da Vinci Code for Only Revolutions, and see what happens.

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