The curse of cultural hand-holding
Laird Hunt laments the moral simplicity of contemporary literature
In a recent essay for the New Yorker, Namwali Serpell rightly bemoans the capture of much of contemporary cinema by what she calls the New Literalism, movies that don’t just take their viewers reassuringly by the hand but feel they have to condescendingly yank them along. Heavy dollops of redundancy are central to the phenomenon. In Gladiator 2, for example, the main gladiator bro, played by the brilliant but slightly miscast Paul Mescal, doesn’t just kill someone, he has to immediately offer up some five-cent philosophy about what he’s done. Serpell detects similar sledge-hammer gestures in Oscar contenders like Emilia Perez and the gorgeous but kinda boring second instalment of Dune.
The stylistic ‘Raid kills bugs dead’-ification of film isn’t limited to big content vehicles according to Serpell. Ramell Ross’s ‘artsy’ first-person adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s third-person Pulitzer winning Nickel Boys can’t resist intersplicing explainy, emotion-charged historical footage and clips from The Defiant Ones to make sure we know that he knows what’s what. As Serpell says in evoking Roland Barthes’ apposite notion of studium — photographs which by way of historical, social, or cultural meanings provoke enthusiastic buy-in and get people on side — ‘This is useful, in its way, but it’s not art.’ ‘Saying the quiet part out loud has given way to a general loudness,’ she goes on, having pointed to, along the way, the heavy-handed image of an upside-down Statue of Liberty (immigration for the desperate and destitute isn’t straightforward, guys…) in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. Hard agree. This all got me thinking about analogous contemporary novels.
I wasn’t doing said thinking in a vacuum. I was in the middle of reading Peter Levi’s translation of The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis (NYRB Classics) when Serpell’s essay caught my eye. Negotiating Papadiamantis’s glittering 19th-century nightmare of a novella, which was written in a prickly, vernacular-inflected Greek that Levi carries across with resourcefulness, about a woman on the Sporadic island of Skiathos who murders babies and drowns little girls because of the unspeakable fate she believes awaits them, I’d already found myself wishing there was a more prominent place in our contemporary literary eco-system for books like Papadiamantis’s. Unlike so much of what these days most frequently earns praise, The Murderess is both utterly gripping and complicated: if there is fiery love, deep gratitude, extraordinary landscapes, madcap capers, and enduring friendship, there is also the aforementioned murder of innocents, mother beating, sister stabbing, gang rape and both implicit and explicit patriarchal malfeasance.
Never once does Papadiamantis make clear, as so many contemporary writers apparently feel they must, whether in the pages of their novels and stories or in essays and/or interviews and social media feeds, where he stands on either the sublime or awful of his character and her world. We are very far away indeed in his pages from the snappy work-place sendups, DeLillo-esque conspiracy vehicles rife with cultural commentary, funny-sad autofictions, post-The Road-apocalyptos, and pick-your-hashtag satires that take up most of the space in the few review outlets we have left. When you throw in Papadiamantis’s sometimes/sorta/it depends-on-who’s-doing-it crime of telling a tale that isn’t his to tell, because, you know, his wildly complex protagonist is an impoverished, illiterate woman, its dangerous particularity by today’s puritanical standards, comes fully into view.
It isn’t that contemporary analogues for the complexity and unwilling-to-talk-down-at-us-edness of The Murderess aren’t out there, it’s that with some exceptions, all you hear about online and off are the literary equivalent of the critically acclaimed movies Serpell finds so deadening: novels that may well touch on big issues (indeed ‘big issues’ are almost inescapable in the most celebrated fiction of the last decade) but inevitably bend with their broad strokes and crystal-clear indictments toward the obvious. Which is to say art ain’t in it or that it too rarely is. Art’s flashy cousin, artifice, meanwhile, abounds. In an introduction to the audiobook of J. F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, which was reproduced in Harper’s, Donna Tartt makes the distinction nicely:
A work of artifice, intent on pushing the audience into a predetermined direction or point of view however well-intended, is incapable of suggesting a way forward through a dilemma of any complexity without being preachy and simplistic. But in helping us think with the world, instead of about it, art—which has no agenda other than being itself—always reminds us that all human-created systems are contingent, for if we wade around inside a great work of art, all sorts of rifts appear, ambiguous open spaces free of opinion and preconceptions, where light breaks through unpredictably, revealing trapdoors and hidden connections—and even possible escapes.
Isn’t the latter more like what we signed up for? Isn’t it the latter, which might help us dream or fight the way forward — precisely by not setting out to help do anything at all — that we need in this time of increasing cruelty, dreadful clarity and terrible consequence? When did we start so broadly mistaking novels that don’t make us think — or don’t make us think much — for novels that do? It wasn’t so long ago that wildly complicated, morally ambiguous works that were rewarding on a first read and even richer on a second, like Beloved by Toni Morrison or the more recent The Known World by Edward P. Jones or Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, blew our brains, received widespread acclaim and circulated widely. Can we go back to that, at least a little more often, please?
It’s not like there aren’t exciting alternatives to the latest buzzed about things that don’t just get front tabled everywhere but also fill up best-of-year announcements, prestigious fellowship slots and prize list: engaging and uncompromising books that would fit the bill are out there in number. And they are languishing. Serpell writes, ‘It is the warped note in a Nina Simone song, the uncanny stutter of Samuel Beckett’s prose, the trippy trail of Andy Warhol’s prints, the eerie flatness of David Lynch’s films, that we love.’ Considering the majority of what’s been most celebrated in literature these last years, and what’s been mostly ignored, it may be worth asking: ‘Do we, though?’
Laird Hunt’s novels include Neverhome and Zorrie, a finalist for the National Book Award. A 2024 Guggenheim fellow in fiction, his most recent book is Float Up, Sing Down, a collection of stories set across a single day in Indiana, which was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction