Dwight and Parul, have you noticed any trends in the world of fiction that either started or intensified this year?
GARNER Well, we’re starting to see Trump-era fiction. Gary Shteyngart and Jonathan Lethem, in their new novels, to name just two examples, sent pilgrims out into an America that seemed vastly colder and more despotic. In both cases the results were mixed. The reckoning, in this country’s literature, is going to take some time. Who will make sense of the dissembling new forces unpinning so many of the mores of American life? Who will fully convey the bewilderment and loss so many feel, and remind us exactly what’s been compromised? It’s a tall order. We need a new Emerson as well as a new Hawthorne, in whatever race or gender they happen to arrive. I wish I were a bit more optimistic. Most of the Trump references in American fiction thus far read like tendentious tweets. But it’s so early.
SEHGAL I’m with Dwight. If early efforts are any indication, I’m leery about how this political moment will be metabolized by fiction writers. (The poets are another story: Terrance Hayes’s latest collection, which riffs on Trump, is spectacular.) I also noticed that Western writers are grappling with the refugee crisis and the West’s complicity and response. To name a few: Jenny Erpenbeck (“Go, Went, Gone,” from late 2017), Lisa Halliday (“Asymmetry”) and Donal Ryan (“From a Low and Quiet Sea”). They’re all trying to figure out how to approach what Erpenbeck calls “the central moral question of our time.”
To suss out the next trend, I say keep watching Rachel Cusk. From her 1997 memoir, “A Life’s Work,” so radically honest about the ambivalence of motherhood at the time, to her Outline trilogy, which finished up this year and laid waste to so many of fiction’s pieties and conventions, she consistently pushes the form forward.
Dwight, you read Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” books as they came out, and reviewed several of them for The Times. Now that they’re done being translated into English, will you miss their regular appearance?
GARNER No. I deeply admired — and deeply enjoyed — several books in the series, especially Volume Two. And Knausgaard clearly has an enormous gift. One condescends to him at one’s peril. But at this point I find myself in agreement with George Eliot, who said, “I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offense.”
