TY - JOUR
AU - Kelly, Adam
AB - Abstract This article traces a development in Jennifer Egan’s literary ethos across her career: from a worry about the negative effects of popular genre conventions in her early fiction to a dedicated embrace, in her most recent work, of genre writing and of realist fiction as itself a genre. I situate Egan’s development in the context of a shift in the American literary field more generally, from the moment of literary New Sincerity in the 1990s and early 2000s to the much remarked-upon “genre turn” in literary fiction since the mid-2000s. I argue that Egan’s work allows us to see how New Sincerity laid the ground for the genre turn and to understand this process of literary change in its aesthetic, economic, political, and gendered dimensions. In a central scene in Jennifer Egan’s second novel, Look at Me (2001), two characters discuss how best to narrate the turbulent life of the novel’s protagonist, fashion model Charlotte Swenson, for the consumers of her “PersonalSpaceTM” webpage. Irene Maitlock is a journalist-cum-academic and Thomas Keene a would-be internet entrepreneur, but in musing upon the shape of Charlotte’s “tragedy”—following the brutal car accident that opens Look at Me, she has received extensive reconstructive surgery on her face—they find common ground in a set of shared literary reference points. Here is a representative excerpt from their conversation, as recounted through Charlotte’s first-person narration: “Tragedy, okay. Yes,” he said. “But not Greek. Too cold. Has to be something warmer.” “Nineteenth century.” “Bingo. Hardy. The Brontës. Tolstoy. Sad things happen but they happen for a reason.” “Zola.” “Exactly. Stendhal. Or Dickens, for God’s sake.” “George Eliot,” Irene said. “Adam Bede.” “That’s the one where he—” “Gets her pregnant,” she said. “And then tries to find him after his regiment moves to Scotland.” “Oh, my God, where she’s hitching rides on carts and sleeping in the fields? That was the saddest book . . .,” Thomas said, his whole face opening at the memory. “But only the second half. The first half was kind of—” “That’s amazing!” Irene said, and she did look amazed. “I thought exactly the same thing.” “—schmaltzy.” I listened, my frustration at finding myself ignorant of these books offset by my wonder at the abrupt change in Irene; she was smiling, cheeks flushed. Books, I thought; she loved books. It made perfect sense. “Edith Wharton,” she said. “Yes! Wharton is perfect. Age of Innocence. House of Mirth. Or Flaubert,” he added, but then changed his mind. “Nah, Madam B.’s too dark, too modern.” “Too ironic,” Irene said. “Exactly, exactly. See, irony we don’t want – there’s too much of it out there! We just want the story without the built-in commentary.” (256-57; ellipsis in original) The final line above brings out the metafictional irony of this scene, which offers as much “built-in commentary” as it does story. Yet amid the evident comedy, there is a serious point being made: what we are witnessing in this passage is the grand tradition of the nineteenth-century novel, from Stendhal to Edith Wharton, signifying for these two avid readers as a kind of shorthand, a set of soothing generic story arcs. What is commonly called the realist novel—a form that began its existence, on Ian Watt’s famous account, with the task “to convey the impression of fidelity to human experience” so that “attending to any pre-established formal conventions can only endanger [its] success” (14) —has morphed for Thomas and Irene precisely into such a set of preestablished conventions (“sad things happen but they happen for a reason”). These conventions can now be exploited to map an emotional trajectory for the website’s reader, to shape through generic expectations the public consumption of Charlotte’s story. The reader of Look at Me is evidently meant to feel anxious about this development. While the boundary between realism and genre may be provisional and flexible, the implication is that it is a boundary worth upholding, lest literary fiction degenerates into a branch of online advertising. Fast forward a decade and a half to Manhattan Beach (2017) and things look rather different. In place of the self-reflexive questioning of realism and reality that typified Look at Me, Egan’s fifth and most recent novel embraces traditional realist conventions in the historical bildungsroman of Anna Kerrigan, a worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II. Eschewing the metafictional pyrotechnics of Egan’s earlier fiction, Manhattan Beach tells its story in a free indirect third person that moves fluidly and unobtrusively among its characters, exemplifying many of the very nineteenth-century conventions held up for interrogation in Look at Me. As well as interrogating literary realism, Egan’s second novel had explicitly marked out its own incorporation of popular genre forms: for example, a pulpy account of Charlotte’s life, written by Irene and “fed by the cheap detective novels she still gulped down when she had time” (244), is set off from the rest of the text in an alternative font. Charlotte’s subjectivity, the novel makes clear, is threatened by such generic renderings, to the extent that she eventually finds herself processing her own experience through language borrowed from Irene’s account: I tried to consider the question. How did it feel? But almost immediately, the breathless narrator who had taken up a pampered existence in one lobe of my brain . . . began piping in her own treacly reply: It had been nearly a year since the devastating event, and oh, the pain Charlotte felt on returning to the scene, the anguish of seeing those same fields scarred by terrible memories . . . (315). The shift in typeface signals the dividing consciousness that increasingly marks Charlotte’s narration as the novel progresses. Her awareness of past and future transcription distances her from intuitive feeling, and generic conventions begin to substitute for spontaneous experience, so that feeling gets immediately instrumentalized rather than felt. Look at Me shows us a world in which the female self becomes gradually suffocated by the discursive forms and norms of popular culture. With her inner life evacuated of organic feeling, all that remains are standardized stories, familiar images. Manhattan Beach, by contrast, features the unmarked deployment of popular genre conventions. In a special section of PMLA devoted to the novel, one critic observes “echoes of noir novels in Egan’s very style” (Hutchinson 394), another notes the genre borrowings from the sea-adventure novel in the story of Anna’s father Eddie Kerrigan (Cohen 372), while three contributors address Egan’s incorporation of disability into the novel through the depiction of Anna’s sister Lydia, linking this strand directly to questions of realism and genre. While in agreement about the “altogether predictable and stereotypical” depiction of Lydia’s character (Garland-Thomson 380) and the “shopworn plots” involving her (Lyon 405), the three critics do not accuse Egan of poor craftsmanship (or prejudice) but instead interpret the author’s employment of sentimental disability tropes in historicist terms, as part of Egan’s “exploration of the role of sentiment in framing disability and siblinghood during the period in which her novel is set” (Adams 367). All three nevertheless highlight the limitations of Egan’s approach, how while “the sentimental figure of Lydia contributes to the historical realism of Manhattan Beach” (Garland-Thomson 379) and reflects the author’s “exceptional command of literary form,” in the end the novel “offers little ground for thinking critically about the sociopolitical implications of presenting disability through the lens of sentimentalism” (Adams 367). All three critics go on to praise as an exception to these limitations the sole moment in the novel that clearly departs from realism—the linguistically expressionist scene of Lydia’s awakening on Manhattan Beach—and in so doing call for an experimental approach to representing disability more in keeping with “Lydia’s vibratory, transphysical communicative mode” (Lyon 408). But whatever their moral and political qualms with Egan’s approach, these critics’ collective reading of Manhattan Beach produces an important aesthetic insight: Egan’s most recent novel does not attempt to underscore an opposition between realism and genre (an opposition that Look at Me had tried to sustain) but instead embraces modes of genre writing in the service of treating and instantiating realism as a genre. What can explain this apparent shift in Egan’s literary ethos, from a worry about the negative effects of generic conventions in her early fiction to a dedicated embrace in her most recent novel of popular genres and of realism as a genre? The present article aims to answer this question in the context both of Egan’s career and of wider changes in the contemporary literary field. Indeed, Egan’s trajectory provides an ideal prism through which to observe these wider changes. In a 2011 article, “Beginning with Postmodernism,” I argued that Look at Me was characterized by a gothic relationship to the prior moment of postmodernist fiction and suggested that Egan’s subsequent novel The Keep (2006) made this gothic element explicit through its adoption of the frame and trappings of the gothic genre form (394). Yet what has become clearer since the publication of that article, the first extended treatment of Egan’s writing, is that The Keep has formed part of a broader turn among established Anglo-American literary novelists toward a more fulsome embrace of popular genre forms. In the same year that “Beginning with Postmodernism” appeared, Andrew Hoberek published “Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion,” wherein he reads McCarthy’s recent novels as part of “an emergent phenomenon in which genre fiction resumes its status as a respectable terrain for serious writers” (486). Responding to the marginalization of genre fiction from the modernist-inflected postwar literary values outlined in Mark McGurl’s influential The Program Era (2009), Hoberek’s essay on McCarthy became the opening salvo in a now burgeoning scholarly literature on “the genre turn.” Alongside many subsequent articles, the turn to genre has by now been the subject of academic monographs (Martin; Rosen, Minor) and essay collections (Lanzendörfer). In the list of novels most often invoked by critics as originating exemplars of the genre turn, Egan’s The Keep regularly sits alongside titles such as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake (2003), Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution (2004), Philip Roth’s The Plot against America (2004), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), and McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006). As the dates of these novels indicate, the 2001 publication of Look at Me pre-dates the full emergence of the genre turn in the work of writers typically recognized for their high literary ambitions and achievements. Instead, Look at Me belongs to a different moment in the development of contemporary American fiction, a moment that overlaps in its later stages with the genre turn but emerges more than a decade earlier. This is the moment of literary New Sincerity, and in this essay, I will argue that Egan’s early novels The Invisible Circus (1994) and Look at Me contribute to this moment, during which authors of Egan’s generation—those born in and around the 1960s—established their debts to and differences from their postmodern forebears. Beginning with The Keep, Egan’s later novels have gone on to participate in the genre turn that followed the New Sincerity moment. This is not, needless to say, a straightforward matter: while the genre credentials of the (still metafictional) The Keep are manifest, and Manhattan Beach exemplifies the full inter-embrace of genre writing and literary realism, Egan’s most critically praised and commercially successful work, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), has a complex and fascinating relationship with both literary sincerity and genre aesthetics, and notably with the genre turn’s commercial implications. Through its progression across these five novels to date (alongside some significant short stories), Egan’s career in fact allows us to see how the literary New Sincerity of the 1990s and early 2000s laid the ground not only for the turn to genre that followed but also for how that turn would be received by critics. If it is the case, as James Dorson has argued, that “the literary field is currently in a state of disarray and reorganization, where old hierarchies are crumbling and new ones are being formed” (2), then mapping the relationship between postmodernism, New Sincerity, and the genre turn is crucial to understanding this process of literary change in its aesthetic, economic, political, and gendered dimensions. The present article will explore Egan’s fiction as a means through which we might undertake such a mapping exercise. Jennifer Egan’s New Sincerity A striking element of the aforementioned discussion between Irene Maitlock and Thomas Keene in Look at Me is that neither character is depicted as cynical or insincere in the way they approach the task of telling Charlotte’s “tragic” story. Speaking excitedly of her favorite novels, Irene smiles, her “cheeks flushed,” while Thomas’s “whole face open[s] at the memory” of reading Adam Bede. Though she initially deceives Charlotte about her profession, Irene is otherwise presented in Look at Me as a broadly well-intentioned academic (at least until she becomes fully absorbed into the cultural and makeover industries in the novel’s brief concluding section). Thomas’s earnest (or “keen”) cyber-utopianism, meanwhile, is evident throughout Look at Me; as Charlotte notes in one passage, Thomas “truly believed he was making the world a better place.” “And maybe he was,” she adds. “What did I know?” (206). Charlotte’s question possesses a certain historical specificity: since Look at Me was written in the age of the commercial internet but before the full emergence of Web 2.0 and what we now call social media, the worldly impact of Thomas Keene’s proto-social media website Extra/Ordinary People would indeed have been hard to assess at its moment of conception in the late 1990s. Yet in asking how we should judge, evaluate, and weigh not only the technological innovations of a character like Thomas Keene but also the sincerity of his motivations in putting those innovations forward, Charlotte’s question is historically specific in another way: it is one of many elements in Look at Me that mark out Egan’s second novel as a contribution to the New Sincerity moment in American fiction. The emergence of literary New Sincerity can be dated to the publication of David Foster Wallace’s collection of short stories Girl with Curious Hair, and particularly its closing novella, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” Appearing in August of 1989, wedged between Francis Fukuyama’s article “The End of History” in July and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November, Wallace’s novella weaves an engagement with themes of imperialism and political exhaustion together with an aesthetic critique of American postmodernist fiction. Narrated throughout by a metafictional voice soaked in commercial metaphors while simultaneously decrying the commercialization of metafiction, “Westward” concludes with an ambiguously creepy and/or sincere address, aimed (implicitly) at the reader: “I have hidden exactly nothing. So trust me: we will arrive. Cross my heart. Stick a needle. To tell the truth, we might already be there. . . . Absolutely no salesman will call. Relax. Lie back. I want nothing from you. Relax. Lie back. . . . Hear it? It’s a love song. For whom? You are loved” (Girl 372-73). Closing addresses to the reader would go on to become a staple of literary New Sincerity, in Wallace’s own practice and that of his peers (Kelly, “New” 205-6). Four years after “Westward,” that novella’s attempt to break with postmodernism through the trope of sincerity would receive explicit theoretical support with the publication of Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” which ends with a clarion call for a new generation of literary “anti-rebels” who would risk eschewing irony in favor of appearing “[t]oo sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic” (Supposedly 81). Writing over two decades later, Jason Gladstone and Daniel Worden have noted the “predictive, or, perhaps, programmatic power” of this essay for contemporary American culture. Wallace’s appeal for “a shift away from ‘ironic watching’ and toward the embrace of ‘single entendre principles’” is now observable, they write, “almost everywhere” (1). Entangled at its birth with declarations of the end of history in the supposed worldwide triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy, literary New Sincerity emerged not only as a response to postmodern irony and its commodification—Wallace’s explicit targets—but also in a thorny relationship with the period of “normative neoliberalism” and “capitalist realism.” An atmosphere in which “the horizons of political hope had been delimited to a single political-economic system” (Davies 127) and “capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizon of the thinkable” (Fisher 8) can be detected not only in Wallace’s 1990s fiction but also, to cite two other prominent examples, in the early stories of George Saunders and the emergence at the end of the decade of Dave Eggers. Saunders’s down-at-heel but heartbreakingly sincere protagonists struggle within a system that exploits not only their labor but also their entire being. Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), meanwhile, highlights how capitalizing on tragedy by writing and selling a memoir raises urgent but irresolvable questions about an author’s sincerity. A period characterized by a thoroughgoing cultural emphasis on individualism, by the increasing privatization of the media, and by the transformation of the American welfare state, the early 1990s was notably an era of declining trust in government institutions (Pew Research Center) and of deteriorating social trust (Putnam). In response to these trends, New Sincerity writing explored alternative sites of trust, including less formal institutional configurations—the Alcoholics Anonymous program in Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), the community publishing venture of Eggers’s McSweeney’s—and, perhaps most fundamentally, the textual relationship between writer and reader. As the conclusion of “Westward” already signaled, the presentation of this writer–reader relationship—forced to hold the weight of neoliberalism’s cultural and material contradictions—would never be uncomplicated in New Sincerity writing. Yet agreement on the vital importance of that relationship underpins the aesthetic and political orientation of much of the most characteristic work of this moment. Wallace’s influence on Egan’s early fiction is palpable. The Invisible Circus dramatizes the concern with irony explored in “E Unibus Pluram” through the relationship between its post-boomer protagonist Phoebe O′Connor and her older boyfriend Wolf, who describes Phoebe as “so completely without irony – it’s like discovering one of those tribes untouched by civilization” (184). But while Egan’s first novel follows Wallace’s essay in highlighting a generational shift from irony to sincerity—while also pointing to the gendered assumptions underlying this shift—Look at Me appears to draw more directly on “Westward,” sharing Wallace’s novella’s central Illinois setting and movement from east to west, its structuring car journey, its apocalyptic ending filmed as an advertisement, and its dialogue with postmodern predecessors.1 But Egan’s second novel also offers a distinctively feminist revision of the aesthetic innovations familiar from the work of Wallace, Saunders, and Eggers. Addressing itself to the experience of women in the overlapping ages of postmodern image culture, postfeminism, incipient social media, and neoliberal capitalist exploitation at home and abroad, Look at Me begins from the viewpoint, delivered by the postmodernists, that reality is unstable, that we live in an age of artifice and rapid technological change, and that things can seem (and be) both real and unreal at the same time. Brian McHale famously defined postmodernist fiction as dominated by ontological concerns (10); Egan’s fiction accepts as its premise a world where the category of reality no longer holds out the promise of orientating the self and moves to consider the ethical implications of this scenario, asking how sincerity can continue to operate between people in such a world and how one can write “sincere” fiction after postmodernism. Look at Me’s main narrator Charlotte Swenson is obsessed by sincerity, regularly repeating phrases such as “The truth. I wanted to see it” (41) and “everyone is a liar. Including me” (76), while observing that New York nightclubs provide relief because “Nobody pretends to tell the truth, they just go ahead and lie” (154). “If I cared about someone, I did my best to mean what I said when I said it,” she acknowledges. “But I’d given up on the whole truth, much less my ability to tell it” (84).2 Rejecting the idea that truth can be revealed through sincere language use, Charlotte attempts to recover it through the visual realm. Significant moments of connection in the novel frequently happen through sight, as when Charlotte’s feels her gaze “interlock” with a North Korean model on an exploitative fashion shoot, “and something passed between us, a wordless acknowledgement of the depravity that surrounded us” (146-47). Sometimes these moments of connection are marked by the appearance of the novel’s titular refrain: “Can you look at me and swear that everything you’ve said is absolutely true, that none of it is bullshit?” Charlotte petitions Irene (77). Elsewhere, she asks a sexual partner to “Look at me . . . . If you were going to describe me, what would you say?” (42). His answer is verbal—“You look tired”—but its sincerity is revealed through the visual realm, as “the two halves of him fused in a moment of humanity” (42). Here Charlotte is accessing the man’s “shadow self,” a gothic-inspired trope that connects the protagonist’s ambiguous post-accident (in)visibility to her equally ambiguous capacity to see. Charlotte claims to be able to see shadow selves “by looking at people when they thought they couldn’t be seen – when they hadn’t arranged themselves for anyone” (42), and it is never clear whether the reader should take this claim literally or metaphorically, whether the shadow self is objectively visible or a subjective projection. Intriguingly, this equivocal power to see shadow selves—so often used by Charlotte to assess the sincerity of men—is initially conferred by her own act of insincerity, after she cheats on her beloved boyfriend Hansen while on a modeling trip to Paris. “He would lie in bed watching me for whole minutes,” she reflects on her final days with Hansen. “I would look back into his eyes and wonder, What does he see? How can he not see the truth? Where is it hidden? It made me ask, when I looked at other people, what possible selves they were hiding behind the strange rubber masks of their faces” (83).3 In the novel’s opening chapter, Charlotte Swenson meets a shadow self of her own in the teenager Charlotte Hauser, who will go on to become a key figure in the third-person strand of Look at Me. But in the brief concluding Part Three of the novel, a more threatening image of the shadow self emerges. “Afterlife” opens with a sentence that foregrounds lifestyle, branding, mediation, and audience, as well as their disavowal: “That woman entertaining guests on her East River balcony in early summer, mixing rum drinks in such a way that the Bacardi and Coca-Cola labels blink at the viewer haphazardly in the dusty golden light – she isn’t me” (411). At the foot of the page, following an exhausting (though probably not exhaustive) list of 62 sponsors of Charlotte Swenson, most of them are well-known consumer brands including Doritos, Calvin Klein, Kodak, and K-Y Jelly, the disavowal is repeated: that woman whose veins and stomach and intestines have opened their slippery corridors to small exploratory cameras; whose heart, with its yawning, shaggy caverns, is more recognizable to a majority of Americans (according to one recent study) than their spouses’ hands; the first woman in history to both conceive and deliver a child on-line, before an international audience more than double the size of those assembled for the finales of Cheers and Seinfeld combined – she isn’t me. I swear. (411) What the reader soon comes to understand is that the colonization of the private Charlotte Swenson by the public persona, a colonization first threatened by the packaging of Charlotte’s “real” experience for online consumption (and symbolized by the encroachment of third-person typeface into her narration), is now a completed fact. Nevertheless, in these closing pages of Look at Me, when the public Charlotte has become the protagonist of webcams, TV series, movies, chat shows, video games, books, photoshoots, and even an academic symposium—“The Semiotics of Physiognomy in Post-Deconstructive Visual Discourse” (412)—Egan holds out the possibility of a residual form of sincerity that resists the mediated world of public consumption, albeit a sincerity rather fragilely and dubiously figured in the isolated performative, “I swear.” “Afterlife” depicts a neoliberal utopia/dystopia, a near-future world in which everything is on display and on sale. It is also a highly gendered vision, in which Charlotte’s onscreen conception and birthing of a child are only the most extreme manifestations of an overwhelming media focus on her face, body, relationships, and consumption patterns. “Could it be that neoliberalism is always already gendered, and that women are constructed as its ideal subjects?” asks Rosalind Gill in an influential article on postfeminist media culture (164). Reading neoliberal capitalism through a Foucauldian lens, as characterized by self-surveillance and self-branding in a culture where everything can and will be commodified, Gill notes a high level of convergence “between the autonomous postfeminist subject and the psychological subject demanded by neoliberalism” (154). The public Charlotte is a paradigm of this subject, combining in one person the various elements—“lifecaster,” “voyeurtainment” entrepreneur, social media celebrity—that Sarah Banet-Weiser has anatomized in the branded postfeminist self (51-52). Indeed, Charlotte Swenson has become such a perfect synecdoche for neoliberal culture and postfeminism that her agent Oscar’s gothic-inflected words from earlier in the novel ring newly accurate by its end: “It’s truly uncanny; if you didn’t exist they would have to invent you” (72).4 In Desire and Domestic Fiction, her classic text of literary feminism, Nancy Armstrong revises Watt’s “rise of the novel” thesis by highlighting the importance of marriage manuals to early novelists in England, most of whom, as Armstrong points out, were not men but women. This analysis leads her to the provocative and much-cited claim that “the modern individual was first and foremost a woman” (8). The “Afterlife” section of Look at Me makes an implicit claim along similar lines, that the paradigmatic subject of literary New Sincerity is first and foremost a woman. Confronting her protagonist with the full glare of media objectification and capitalist commodification, Egan constitutes the New Sincerity subject by interrogating and rejecting the move by which, in Gill’s words, “the female body in postfeminist media culture is constructed as a window to the individual’s interior life” (150). The narrator of “Afterlife” refuses to connect the media visibility of Charlotte Swenson with the narrator’s own interior life, and indeed has attempted to keep that interiority private, “hoarding my occasional dreams and what few memories she hadn’t already plundered, camouflaging my hopes and future aspirations in a palette of utter blandness lest they be caught in the restless beam of her overhead camera and broadcast to the world” (413). “She isn’t me” and “I swear,” phrases that disavow public image and affirm private integrity, seem to indicate the residual existence of an authentic and sincere self, a real Charlotte under all the media layers. Yet there is a final twist: the terms of her contract with the Extra/Ordinary People website—excerpted at length on the penultimate page of the novel in a final burst of alternative typeface—allow the narrator to complete a “Transfer of Identity” for a negotiated price: “I sold Charlotte Swenson for a sum that will keep myself and two or three others comfortable for the rest of our lives, although not (I’m told) for nearly what she was worth” (414). Even in refusing her public image and postfeminist brand, Charlotte benefits financially from the terms of the contract, while—not insignificantly—her reaffirmation of a residual sincerity morphs into a kind of literary brand for Egan’s reader to invest in. This concern in New Sincerity fiction with the branding or commodification of the writer’s own sincerity—along with the way the writer-reader relationship can shade into a kind of contract—has been a subject of interest for critics, and I will return to it in the final section of this essay.5 But my aim in the next section is to reintroduce the notion of the genre turn and to connect it to the prior moment of literary New Sincerity. My contention is that the issues raised by the ending of Look at Me—particularly the notion of how literary commodification relates to authorial intention—will become important for the writing of the genre turn and its critical reception, as well as for Egan’s own later work. The New Sincerity and the Genre Turn In The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction, Paul Crosthwaite offers a helpful overview of literary New Sincerity and the genre turn as two successive moments in the development of contemporary fiction around the turn of the millennium (53-62). What Crosthwaite does not note is that New Sincerity writing in fact laid the ground for the turn to genre, and particularly for the way that turn has been understood by critics. The driving questions of literary New Sincerity—What is the relationship between expression and convention? Is “pure” sincerity possible, for characters or for authors? Is sincerity always valuable (morally, politically, economically)?—are to be found in transformed form in the reception of texts associated with the genre turn. When discussing these texts as a collective phenomenon, critics fall broadly into two camps: one camp reads the turn to genre as motivated primarily by aesthetic impulses, whereas the other detects the driving incentives of commerce. Many critics acknowledge both dimensions, but in all cases the question of the author’s intentional relation to their material and to the literary marketplace sits implicitly or explicitly at the heart of the discussion. A skeptical approach to authorial intention and motivation was openly invited by New Sincerity fiction. As we have seen with the endings of Egan’s Look at Me and Wallace’s “Westward,” many of these texts embed an urgent invitation/appeal/demand that is addressed (at least partially) to the reader. The implication of this gesture is that if the ambiguity of authorial motivation can be resolved anywhere (including the question of whether, in a culture so thoroughly steeped in neoliberal values, authors themselves can know whether their motivations are sincere), this will only happen “off the page, outside words,” as Zadie Smith observed in an introduction to the work of this generation of writers (xx). Yet for every reader or critic who has responded to the sincerity conundrum in this fiction with enthusiasm or recognition, there have been others not so convinced that the ambiguously sincere author should be given the benefit of the doubt. McGurl, remarking on the critically and popularly held consensus about reader participation in Wallace’s fiction, argues that “this sort of popularized poststructuralism is interesting more for how it seems to burden readers with responsibilities than for how it ‘liberates’ them to make of the text what they will” (“Institution” 42). Sarah Brouillette similarly sees the sincerity effects of Eggers’s early writing not as humble gestures to the reader but as “profoundly self-justifying,” cleverly disavowing financial gain only in order “to accrue capital in its other forms” (pars. 1, 26). The editors of Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture offer the most damning assessment of all: New Sincerity writers “treat formal literary innovation as a matter of competition, market assessment, and entrepreneurial risk-taking,” they write, with the result that this fiction’s “so-called sincerity and commitment to ‘single-entendre values,’ whether manifest through Wallace’s experimentalism, Franzen’s realism, or Eggers’s memoirism, reiterate neoliberal capital’s expanding investment in consumer affect and sentiment” (Huehls and Smith 8). While rarely attracting the same levels of critical opprobrium (at least not yet), the genre turn has made the division between such contrasting assessments of authorial motivation all the more stark. On one side, figures including Hoberek, Ramón Saldívar, and James Dorson have praised the genre turn for its aesthetic innovations and have highlighted what they see as its political promise for addressing twenty-first-century realities. Hoberek writes that through its combination of “postmodernism’s interest in alternative realities with realism’s commitment to accessibility and social impact, the genre turn opens up the possibility of a fiction capable of broadcasting visions of life not as it is, but as it might be” (“Literary” 73). Saldívar argues in a similar vein that the genre-traversing “speculative realism” of novelists such as Salvador Plascencia, Junot Díaz, and Colson Whitehead displays “ethnic literature’s utopian allegiance to social justice” in the service of conveying “alternatives to the contemporary world” (585, 577). Dorson goes further again, working from the premise that literary realism no longer represents reality in an accurate manner, with the old conventions that underpinned realism now challenged by “a new understanding of human beings (posthumanism), nature (the anthropocene), politics (the end of the ‘liberal consensus’), and economics (neoliberalism)” (7). Conceiving the genre turn as a “formal response to this crisis of reality,” Dorson observes that the turn to genre is also an institutional turn, since genre fiction does not display the anti-institutionality of the program era but instead “overtly recognizes institutionality as its condition of possibility” (8). We can see here that the perceptible, if tentative, revaluation of institutions found in literary New Sincerity has found more sustained articulation in this newer literary development. And yet, other critics have evinced skepticism concerning the constructive possibilities (and especially the authorial motivations) of the turn to genre. Some of this skepticism stems from the Bourdieusian orientation of much scholarship in this area, an orientation for which the question of authorial sincerity is less relevant than the structuring conditions of the literary field. Writing in this vein, John B. Thompson notes that part of the attraction for publishers of genre fiction stems from the need “to attach some value to the new book in advance of knowing what the real value is” (203). Jeremy Rosen thus calls genres “indispensible technologies for minimizing risk and targeting readerships” (Minor 123), and sees authors as keen to engage those readerships and target those markets, even if he admonishes scholars of the genre turn for “neglect[ing] the way these novelists pursue high cultural prestige and remain committed to an influential version of modernist political aesthetics that valorizes formal innovation and seeks to distance itself from the marketplace” (“Literary”). The key point is that cultural capital, as well as financial capital, no longer resides in quite the same way in the mainstream literary fiction that is often termed “lyrical realism,” and novelists have been responsive to this shift. McGurl contends that the “genre effects” found in contemporary novels are “the equivalent of special effects in movies, and they suggest a crisis of faith in lyrical realism, in its aesthetic and also, possibly, market potential” (“Novel’s”). Summarizing the significance for the literary marketplace of the global financial crisis of 2008, Crosthwaite remarks that: if, prior to the late 2000s, to be a “literary” author generally meant being located somewhere between a realist “core” and an experimentalist “margin,” then the sharp post-crisis contraction and subsequent flat-lining of the literary/general fiction segment of the fiction market, set against the relative buoyancy of genre fiction sales, provide strong incentives for authors and publishers to re-orientate their output towards genre forms. (60) From this perspective, the turn to genre is driven less by a sincere new engagement with reality or a positive revaluation of institutions than by the adaptive necessity for authors to make a living in harsh economic times. Some call this cynicism, others (capitalist) realism. Jennifer Egan’s Genre Turn Egan’s third novel The Keep is often cited as a contributor to the literary genre turn, although it has not received anything like the critical attention lavished on comparator texts such as McCarthy’s The Road or Whitehead’s Zone One (2011). This is perhaps because The Keep is itself a transitional work for Egan, with one foot in the New Sincerity of Look at Me and another in the more concerted genre experiments of A Visit from the Goon Squad and the short story “Black Box” (2012). In interviews, Egan has spoken of being attracted to the gothic genre because of its artificiality, its “fake medievalism,” its “sort of cheesiness” (Alford); as Alexander Moran points out, this description chimes with how critics have considered the original Gothic writing of the late eighteenth century as “pointedly fake and counterfeit from the beginning” (Jerrold Hogle, qtd. in Moran 233). Gothic would, therefore, seem the perfect genre through which to continue Look at Me’s exploration of sincerity and lying, and, as Moran notes, The Keep does indeed explore via gothic tropes the idea that telephonic communication in the digital age is “based upon an unspoken faith in the sincerity of whom one is speaking with” (232). But alongside staging this intellectual engagement with questions of sincerity and technology, the novel also exploits the strengths of the gothic genre as an entertainment form. Mobilizing motifs of ghosts, castles, entrapment, romantic love, and hidden manuscripts, Egan aims to give sensuous as well as cerebral pleasure to her reader. The key word in the novel is “imagination,” a term with both high and low cultural resonances. The Keep begins as a third-person narrative about Danny, a New York “goth” who travels to an Eastern European castle to work for his friend Howard, whom Danny had traumatized in his youth by leaving him trapped in a cave for three days. Suddenly, halfway through the opening chapter, a first-person voice enters the frame, and we realize that we are reading a fictional story written by a prisoner named Ray, who is taking a creative writing class while incarcerated. Responding to his provocations, Ray’s teacher tells him angrily, “My job is to show you a door you can open. And she taps the top of her head. It leads wherever you want it to go, she says. That’s what I’m here to do.” Ray wants to respond with cynicism: “I want to say, I’ve heard some crazy motivational speeches in my time, but that one’s a doozy. A door in our heads, come on. But while she was talking I felt something pop in my chest” (18-19). Ray’s initial response—“come on”—might also be Egan’s reader’s when confronted with The Keep’s framing, but the wager the author is making is that, by presenting her story self-reflexively within “cheesy” generic limits, she can generate an imaginatively valuable experience for the reader. The hotel owner Howard is in this sense a stand-in for Egan herself, since his full control of the customer’s experience aims to “Let people be tourists of their own imaginations” (45). The fact that his hotel is a successful business suggests that an imaginatively valuable experience can also be an economically valuable one. This raises the specter of commodification—a major concern of Look at Me—but The Keep does not go on to explore its generic borrowings in these terms. It is in A Visit from the Goon Squad that the concern with commodification returns, but in a way that seems transformed from its status in Egan’s early fiction. While its closing chapter, “Pure Language,” is clearly shaped by science fiction tropes, A Visit from the Goon Squad may not initially appear to fit the genre turn in quite the way The Keep does. This is because, I would argue, Egan in her Goon Squad moment treats contemporary technological mediums—the PowerPoint presentation, the magazine article, serial television, the Twitter platform (in the story “Black Box”)—as kinds of genre. If “writing genre fiction means thinking inside a ‘box’ of established conventions” (Dorson 6-7), then the (black) boxes within which Egan thinks in these works are less literary genres than nonliterary mediums that can be adapted to the ends of literature. This would seem to connect the twenty-first-century genre turn in which Egan participates to earlier avant-garde practices in twentieth-century writing, from modernist appropriations of cinema and radio to Oulipo’s adoption of literary constraints to enable creativity. Seeing the novel in this way, many critics have been eager to praise Goon Squad’s merits in high aesthetic and sociocultural terms, reading it as a text that “reframes the insights of Proust and Eliot at a century’s remove” (Cowart 243), that “keenly depicts the politics of positionality with regards to surveillance, metadata, and metafiction” (Johnston 156), and that “dialectically responds to the temporal shift in American exceptionalism” after 9/11 (DeRosa 88). Yet a different “dialectical truth” revealed by the novel—that “any political fantasy that dispenses with reification . . . risks dispensing with the grounds of political action” (Konstantinou 259)—is central to less celebratory readings of Goon Squad by Lee Konstantinou and Michael Szalay. For these critics, the novel’s experimentations with genre are no longer being mobilized in the service of a critique of commodification and capitalist appropriation but rather seem to countenance or even embrace such appropriation. Indeed, part of the originality of Goon Squad is here seen to lie in its very lack of squeamishness about commodification and reification. “What is genuinely new in Egan’s art is not some especially perverse, preemptive determination to sell out,” Konstantinou writes, “but the absence of any sort of scandal – any pretense to shame – around rituals of selling out in the first place. It is the anxiety of reification that has (almost) disappeared from her prose, and the prose of many of her contemporaries” (261). The difference from Look at Me, where commodification and reification remain central anxieties, is particularly clear in the two novels’ respective engagement with social media. Here prescient worries in Look at Me about the effects of Web 2.0 on gender, society, and literary narrative give way to Goon Squad’s “reimagining the form of the novel as a sort of Facebook wall” (Konstantinou 260). Konstantinou’s argument that Goon Squad “self-consciously depends for its most moving literary effects on shameless self-branding” (259) is echoed in Szalay’s claim that the novel shows Egan embracing the “author as executive producer” model that characterizes twenty-first-century US television. Exploring “what it means to make art a big deal” through publicity, Goon Squad allegorizes the “industriously propitious” move through which a famous novelist can become a brand, and in doing so take on—like Sasha the found object artist in the novel—the “ability to elevate materials not of her own making simply by signing her name to them” (268, 272). Addressing Goon Squad’s culminating rock concert, Szalay reads the singer Scotty’s “authentic” performance as a mask for Egan’s lack of resistance to the capitalist restructuring of the contemporary literary field. “Scotty’s body is not simply a conduit for capital,” he writes, “but a screen behind which Egan secrets [sic] all that she cannot acknowledge . . . about the place of literary relations of production within relations of production generally” (273). Szalay’s reading of Egan represents perhaps the most skeptical (or cynical) account thus far of the motivations of a writer participating in the genre turn. But despite the acuity and plausibility of his critique, Szalay tends to read backward from the importance of “quality television” for Goon Squad (which Egan has readily acknowledged was inspired by HBO’s The Sopranos) to make similar claims about Look at Me. This is despite the fact that all references to TV in the earlier novel—from explicit mentions of Unsolved Mysteries and The Making of the Making of (“a documentary about how documentaries were made about the making of Hollywood features” [Look 78]) to more buried allusions to Matlock and various other popular detective shows—make very little claim for the “quality” of such television or its potential as a model for literary quality. Moreover, the “Afterlife” section of Look at Me, while open to being read as a precursor to the “Pure Language” chapter of Goon Squad—where one character describes the idea of acting sincerely on ethical beliefs as no more than “atavistic purism” (Visit 315)—seems more anxious than the later novel about the implications of selling out, remaining concerned to articulate a path of resistance. That such resistance can nevertheless be read as a canny move in the literary marketplace is the structuring bind at the heart of New Sincerity writing, a bind that is typically dredged to the surface at crucial moments in the work of Egan, Wallace, Eggers, and their peers. If the turn to genre sees contemporary literary authors resolving this bind by making their peace with market considerations, then Look at Me belongs to an earlier cultural moment, a moment when the full literary and commercial embrace of popular genre forms, televisual models, or the genre realism of Manhattan Beach was not yet a done deal. If in Goon Squad, as Szalay suggests, “Egan struggles to resolve contradictions inherent in the opportunities now afforded novelists by the rise of a newly prestigious and ostensibly literary television format” (258), I would argue that the contradictions at the heart of Look at Me have less to do with television in particular and more to do with a broader neoliberal culture comprised of material and ideological components that bear upon the status and possibility of sincerity. Among these components is postfeminist media culture—for which, as Gill notes, “irony has become a way of ‘having it both ways,’ of expressing sexist, homophobic or otherwise unpalatable sentiments in an ironized form, while claiming this was not actually ‘meant’” (159). The critique of irony pursued in literary New Sincerity thus centrally contributes to the feminist critique that Egan pursues in Look at Me. With this in mind, it is notable that the implications of the genre turn for gender relations and representations remain underexplored. There have been some scattered comments on this issue: Hoberek, for example, argues that “the distinction between literary and genre fiction . . . has re-hardened in significant ways around gender,” with “the category of nonliterary genre fiction largely associated with work by women” (Hoberek, “Literary” 70), while Rosen claims that this overstates the case, since “many male writers like John Grisham, James Patterson and Dan Brown remain at the center of ‘the category of nonliterary genre fiction’” (Rosen, “Literary”). Here the venerable tradition of feminist criticism on the relation between gender and genre might productively be brought to bear on the contemporary context of the genre turn.6 So too might McGurl’s reading of Joyce Carol Oates in The Program Era: as a figure who arguably undertook a version of the genre turn well in advance of its mainstream acceptability in the literary field, Oates’s relative critical neglect has much to do, McGurl argues, with the way her productivity as a writer has led critics to tar much of her output with links to “disreputable genre fiction”: “Increasingly this prodigy of modern American letters would find herself freighted with an association to the ‘feminine’ forms of the romance novel and the gothic thriller, and with the middlebrow sentimentality of women’s realist fiction” (308). “This assumes, of course,” McGurl adds, “that genre is a bad thing, something to be ashamed of” (311). While it is too early to pronounce definitively on the gender politics of the genre turn (not least because most of the criticism on the phenomenon has thus far been written by men), the fact that the association between genre and shame may be in the process of shifting has implications not only for aesthetics but also for feminism too. An alternative view is that the turn to genre is no more than a passing phase, one that is already showing its age. From this vantage point, Emily St John Mandel’s widely praised Station Eleven (2014) can even look like “a belated if teachable example of ‘what the turn to genre was’” (Leypoldt). But whatever its staying power, the genre turn looks to have had a significant impact, not least when it comes to how we think about literary realism, the kind of aesthetics Egan is purveying in Manhattan Beach. “It is no longer possible to distinguish realism confidently from genre fiction,” Hoberek writes, since “returning to realism is no longer the same thing in a literary landscape radically changed since the beginning of the century – both because genre borrowing has become so respectable and because ‘the naturalistic story’ can itself now be seen not as the genre-less epitome of literary fiction but as ‘another genre’” (“Literary” 67, 68). In retrospect, and viewed against this background, Egan’s Manhattan Beach may eventually come to serve as the point when the idea of “realism as a genre”—no ifs, no buts, no metafictional hedging—became fully mainstream. Which is not, of course, to say that we know where Egan—a literary chameleon, however you feel about her various turns—will turn next. Footnotes 1 Michael Szalay has even suggested that the character of Moose in Look at Me was modeled on Wallace (258). By the time Look at Me was published, Egan had already written an acknowledged parody of Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) in a story that later became a chapter of A Visit from the Goon Squad (“Forty”). 2 This obsession with truth, lying, and sincerity can equally be seen in Egan’s early short fiction, collected in Emerald City (1996). In “Puerto Vallarta,” for example, the protagonist Ellen has a conversation with her father about lying, in which he tells her that a now-bankrupt colleague “lied too much,” and that “If you have to lie, you’re already in danger” (126). On the relationship between sincerity and truth, see Williams. 3 As I argued in “Beginning with Postmodernism” (402-04), Look at Me also has its own shadow self in those postmodernist texts that go unnamed within it but that clearly influence its aesthetics. This creates the uncanny formal effects of a “double life” and “mirrored room”—the titles of parts One and Two of the novel. 4 As Stephanie Lambert demonstrates, Look at Me is also sensitive to forms of neoliberal exploitation that go beyond the Foucauldian paradigm of the entrepreneurial self. The backstory of the aforementioned North Korean model is just one example in the novel of how “the unevenness of the capitalist world-system is even visible on its glossy surfaces, if we are willing to look closely” (402). 5 For now, it is simply worth mentioning the many critiques of the writer-reader “contract” endorsed by Jonathan Franzen (e.g. Greenwald Smith 33-37; Crosthwaite 182-83). 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TI - Jennifer Egan, New Sincerity, and the Genre Turn in Contemporary Fiction
JF - Contemporary Women's Writing
DO - 10.1093/cww/vpab036
DA - 2021-11-20
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/jennifer-egan-new-sincerity-and-the-genre-turn-in-contemporary-fiction-GUvdg0ixrc
SP - 151
EP - 170
VL - 15
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -