If The English Don't Do Novels of Ideas, What Hope Is There for Americans?

 My question comes from reading Parallel Lines by Edward St Aubyn by Paul Genders in the Literary Review. I think Gore Vidal disparaged the genre, too. I know I read it somewhere, and he seems the likely culprit. This review does leave me wondering if the English are still not ready for ideas.

St Aubyn is too old-fashioned a writer, though, to linger in abstraction. Sebastian’s tribulations provide the element of human interest that, according to many of the reviewers, was undersupplied last time around. When the anti-psychotics are working properly, he’s uncommonly good-natured, helping the more privileged but jaded people around him to appreciate small, everyday pleasures (‘You say incredible things, Seb, you should be on TV,’ the hospital’s art therapist tells him). And the novel is rooted in an essentially humorous English tradition. As in many of St Aubyn’s previous books, the action builds up to a climactic party scene. The occasion is the opening of an exhibition of the installations of an acclaimed artist, James Turrell, whose work blends, in Francis’s admiring words, ‘psychology, and physics and meditative practices, and astronomy, and aviation’. Characters who weren’t supposed to bump into each other do; Martin’s professional ethical dilemma is resolved, but not in a way he would have liked. It isn’t hard to imagine the whole thing on stage, albeit back when Noël Coward still ruled the West End.

Society comedy, with the odd blast of farce, may not be the ideal vehicle for the exploration of ‘ideas that def[y] common sense’ (the words come from one sceptical character, eavesdropping on a high-flown chat). A more formally ambitious approach might have allowed the cerebral talking points to be treated with greater expansiveness. Parallel Lines is entertaining, tidily put together and, when St Aubyn subdues his fondness for rambling metaphors, sparklingly well written. Yet, for all the deep research on which the novel clearly rests, the final effect is slight.

Ouch. 

I can think of only two literary novels that I have read that I would call novels of ideas. Those are Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and Ross  Lockridge, Jr.'s Raintree County.

However, that is literary fiction. One genre does privilege ideas: science fiction. That it has not always also privileged style or characters, or both, is also true. I would suggest Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, where science fiction and memoir and a war novel all meet. Even more aligned to science fiction is Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem. Then there is The Maddaddam Trilogy by Margaret Atwood.

Meanwhile, I am still not working on my own fiction.

sch 5/23