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In sync with this season’s literary fiction zeitgeist—formally speculative, yet utterly realist novels—Kurt Andersen, seemingly beloved participant of catty podcasts, sets his new novel “The Breakup,” in a liminal 2045 United States of America, a few years after a second civil war. Thank god, I thought, one more reader unable to bear any more estrogen-fueled, domestic-drama fiction, which the publishing industry has been churning out over the past fifteen years. Finally! No more family-and-friends conflict that comes to a head during a wedding/wake/Thanksgiving/July Fourth table. What a relief. Just give me some shots of Dickensian (okay, let’s not get too excited: Tom Wolfe-esque) dopamine and adrenaline: socioeconomic strife with personal stakes and a historical arc. If it’s good writing, I promise I’ll surrender my fiercely defended oxytocin.
No such luck. Domestic drama has a geography, and despite having done everything in my life to steer clear of it, by chapter two of the novel, wham-bam, I’m back at its epicenter: empty-nesters breaking up as they tour prospective colleges for their younger child. The luridly meta-Trumpian, post-culture wars America is just wallpaper.
Much of the relentlessly promoted publishing output of the moment feels more like slop. Whether AI or MFA-generated, whether token literary fiction with minimal capacity for emotion, intensity and movement or romantasy reliant on the oldest and most banal tropes, algorithmically calculated themes, plots and characters, reproduced in endlessly similar variations, ignite neither the imagination nor the senses. They are fiction that mistakes constraint for depth and repetition for universality. And the fact that so many literary industry gatekeepers, from august literary magazines like Granta, to US acquiring editors of fiction, have very recently “fallen madly in love” to the tune of millions of dollars with stories and manuscripts entirely AI-generated, merely highlights this hollowness that has predated AI’s emergence by more than a decade.
Novels and writers whose work is so singular no algorithm can predict, reproduce or market it barely make it through—and if they do, it’s because of an unexpected convergence of unrelated circumstances and chance. Like Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt, daughter of Suzy Boyt and Lucian Freud, and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, and Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus, both of which traditional publishers shunned in the US. Or like Makenna Goodman’s Helen of Nowhere, which only Unnamed Press would publish.
All these novels, unseen by New York’s pseudo-erudite literary industry, contain worlds whose seeming smallness demolishes the worlds we build to blind ourselves to the human condition. These novels’ worlds took abode in readers’ minds. This is the closest thing to magic that I know: to take a private invisible state inside your mind—idea and emotion—and code it into words, and have that pattern reconstruct itself inside another person’s mind, sometimes even thousands of years later. That is the real portal to other worlds.
Take almost all great New York novels, where the real principal character is the city itself. Most would be considered as small, domestic in some sense. Yet all, in some way, capture timeless aspects of our New York lives, riddled with dreams, delusions, persistence and aftermaths. And to make even this contained world, even smaller: take the Upper West Side and the pantheon of novels that emotionally map its grid, Central Park West through Riverside, from Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal, Thomas Pynchon’s The Bleeding Edge, Teju Cole’s Open City, and, of course, Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetryabout her relationship with Philip Roth. Infinite worlds within forty-odd blocks.
Reading these novels, some of us see strangers we had forgotten—ourselves, still in our New York firefly days—falling in love with the city, looking up at the skyline instead of the sidewalk, falling hard, breaking things that healed and things that didn’t. Some of us see ourselves in various stages of our New York life like figures in Hopper’s paintings, under the sway of something or someone, until we reverted to the self we did not break free from.
We observe our lives even as we know we are being observed, participants in the kind of evanescent stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives people turn stories into. Life as narrative and display. The complicatedness, solitude, subsumption. The moments of grace that elude you; that you elude.
“The Isle is full of voices”, as Richard Rowan, the hero of James Joyce’s Exiles, said, and so is the city. It wasn’t, though, in 2020. When the only traffic on streets and avenues were wild geese and screaming ambulances. When many at the apex of the city’s socioeconomic divide fled the infectious city for the Hamptons, Catskills and other parts of New York State, to watch their money multiply as they played golf in the company of robot caddies following them silently through the greens of their paradisiacal sanctuaries. When those of us who remained in the city during the pandemic actually believed the state-of-emergency propaganda that deluged us from billboards, Link NYC screens, bus-stops, even on messages chalked on the sidewalks: We are alone together. We are New York tough, smart, united, disciplined, kind, loving, and all those GIF versions of The Epitaphios speech Pericles delivered in 431 BCE to the inhabitants of Athens, when they and their empire were dying. When we felt we were staying true to a living entity, not an impersonal, indifferent god of globalized capitalism, a lucrative myth of infinite opportunity and possibility, but an empire of community forged by our common mortality, a city humanized by its vulnerability. When we wanted passionately to believe it mattered that we did not abandon the city, that at pivotal times in history, bearing witness can change this world in indefinable yet real ways. When, of course, that soon proved delusional, because empires are built and maintained on power, capital and bodies. That’s why we have novels. That’s why we can’t live as ourselves without them.
The aquamarine bronze roofs of New York’s old, grand buildings emerging from under the snow like deep-sea organisms rising to meet the light. The American Ballet Theatre where only when I first watched Onegin did I realize what Pushkin meant by superfluous men, and how many of them I knew. These streets and subway stations where people are dying and we’ve all become a little bit immune to it. Faces like real-estate. Apartment-buildings whose lit apartments form a face at night. People who have lost their minds yelling accusations at the wind. Brown-winged cockroaches skittering across the sidewalk from May to October. Roots of trees breaking through the sidewalk’s concrete. Manholes steaming and drains stinking as if the city is a layer of thick make-up under which a beast lurks. Scaffolding turning the sidewalks into cages. Push to enter say the signs on the store doors. Everyone is pushing, everywhere. The message inside the Little Hungarian Pastry Shop’s WC: Please don’t flush the following down the toilet: paper towels, sanitary napkins, toy dinosaurs, old phone bills, goldfish, your hopes and dreams. Thanks.
We run around the Reservoir in the Park: running toward, running away, West to East, East to West, then the loop closes. We grow and we grow older—not wiser, just more practiced. We are shocked, elated, terrified and hopeful that there are still places where emotion penetrates.
It is still you, we tell the city, much as the chorus tells Helen of Troy, in Euripides’ play “Iphigenia in Aulis”. It is still you, even if that is no more than a story with no meaning. Because there are no stories without meaning. Begin small, begin from the end or the beginning. Tell me a story.
