What is an American Writer, an American Novel?

 Reading The Paris Review's Space for Misunderstanding: A Conversation between A. M. Homes and Yiyun Li more out of mere curiosity rather than with great expectations, I have not read either author but only about them, I found this exchange interested me:

HOMES

For better or worse, I’m a very American writer, so I’m looking at the way we consume things. I’m increasingly interested in economics and how a person’s economic life affects their narrative and trajectory. Where and how a person lives, whether they have money or have access to health care, all these things change the course of their life profoundly. I always feel that, in fiction, and certainly when we discuss fiction, we don’t talk about those things enough, but I’m fascinated by their implications.

LI

I always say that every character has to have a job. Many students create characters who don’t have jobs. They don’t work.

Certainly the reason I’m so curious about the concept of the quintessential  American writer is because I am not one, although my coming of age as a writer happened in America. So I’m curious about how you define an American writer.

HOMES

That’s a good question—how does one define an American writer? To be honest, I think that raises another question that until recently I’ve been loath to discuss. That questions is, How does one define an American female writer versus an American male writer? The gender gap with regard to material and expectation and even who reads the books feels larger to me in America than in other countries. In the U.S., men write the Great American Novels—the books about the scale and scope of the American social, political, economic experience—and women are supposed to write the smaller-scale, intimate, domestic stories. In other countries things are not so divided. There is not Women’s Literature, or Chick Lit, and then Men’s Literature. This bothers me a lot, and I would say that my most recent book, The Unfolding, is an attempt to do both—to write both the large-scale, state-of-the-nation novel and also unpack the small-scale, intimate life of a family. But almost as soon as the book came out, a bookseller asked me, “Who is this book for?” and I was caught off guard. I didn’t know what she meant. Was she asking is it for men or women? Was she asking is it for people who agree with my point of view? I don’t know—when I am writing I never think about who this book is for—beyond the hope that my fiction is both entertaining, funny, and provokes thought, robust conversation, and debate about the issues of our time. Does that make any sense or say anything about the American novel?

LI

One thing I can relate to as an American writer is clarity. I was in a cab in Beijing recently, and the cab driver asked me what I did for a living. I said, “I’m a writer.” This cab driver, who had apparently read many books translated from English, and especially American writers, said, “American writers are very straightforward. In China, we consider writing as making circles. You do all these hide-and-seek games. You never say what you want to say.” He said, “American writers, they say what they want to say.”

HOMES

That’s a super-interesting idea—depending on what country someone is from, one has more or less freedom to say directly what they want to say or to code their writing in some way so that someone can extrapolate another meaning from it.

I think there is accuracy to the idea that there is a bluntness to American writing. It aims for an immediate connection with the reader. And it’s almost as though sometimes there’s not a lot of room to build the relationship, because the attention span is so short that either you connect immediately or it’s over. It’s almost like, Swipe right. You escaped that in The Book of Goose, which I think of as originating from a more European model.

I never thought of the distinction between male and female writers. Asking myself why not, Kurt Vonnegut comes to mind. He never wrote the big novel, the Great American Novel like Norman Mailer or Saul Bellow, but he never really wrote a domestic novel, either. He was onto other game. I think Joyce Carol Oates is a much blunter writer than Philip Roth.

About the bluntness... where to start with that other than Ernest Hemingway? Or Theodore Dreiser? Or Stephen Crane? Or Mark Twain? Certainly not Henry James or Melville. Maybe we have always had a certain problem with attention spans - making money is a distraction.

How much of writing is determined by what will sell? Well, most, if not all.

It also seems that clarity is a virtue fostered by Protestantism. Raised a Baptist, I find symbolism a tricky thing for me to use. 

And there you have my very random thoughts. May you be likewise be provoked. I say there is only two categories of stories: the well-told story and the poorly-told story.

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