If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone
wrong since the War, it’s Workshop.
—Kingsley Amis, Jake’s Thing (1978)
The required reading list of an American high school student usually includes, along with works by Remarque, Knowles, and Salinger, a famously awful “anonymous” offering called Go Ask Alice. The book, billed as the real diary of an average Sixties teen, chronicles a terrifying descent into drugs and depravity. Picture Marcia Brady helping William S. Burroughs tie her off in a public lavatory and you’ve got the idea.
The thing is, it isn’t a real diary. Neither, unfortunately, are Jay’s Journal (descent into Satanism), It Happened to Nancy (descent into AIDS), or Annie’s Baby (descent into teen pregnancy). All of these penny-dreadful pseudographies were written by their supposed editor, an octogenarian Mormon former youth counselor and “music therapist” named Beatrice Sparks. You really can’t make this stuff up.
Bearing that in mind, I have to wonder at times whether there might be a similar entity behind much of the literary fiction seeing print these days. Consider some of this year’s releases and their purported authors:
Fireworks (Alfred A. Knopf): “Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop . . . graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2001. In 2004 she received her MFA in fiction from the University of California at Irvine.”
Born Again (Harcourt): “Kelly Kerney received . . . an MFA from the University of Notre Dame . . . she is twenty-six years old.”
St. Lucy’s School for Girls Raised by Wolves (Alfred A. Knopf): “Karen Russell . . . is a graduate of the Columbia MFA program . . . . She is twenty-five years old.”
Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Viking): “Marisha Pessl graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University.”
To Feel Stuff (Harvest): Andrea Siegel, in her own words:
[E]veryone keeps asking me what I’ve learned from my MFA. . . . Other Bennington students ask because they think my original “I’m learning that I’m going to get a degree” is a totally assholic answer and want to see if it’s changed into something more romantic . . . . I’ve learned . . . that it’s wholly impossible to escape the core version of yourself . . . . you’ll never overcome the same things you were crying about to your mom back in eleventh grade.
No wonder the bookshelves are dusted with the fallout of so many bad Junior Proms.
None dare call it conspiracy—but what if Twentysomething Grad Student is meant to function, like Anonymous Teenager once did, as a marketing strategy? How else to explain this astonishing proliferation? It isn’t limited to these five books: Show me an author bio without an MFA in it, and I’ll show you a celebrity chef or a former counterterrorism director.
Can a workshop produce a good book? Well, anything’s possible. But the publishing world’s reliance on MFA programs is, nevertheless, not only lazy but also profoundly detrimental to the art of fiction. Moreover, there are many ways in which the workshop system is rigged to yield books that primarily appeal to—I hesitate to say speak to, though it does suggest the one-sidedness of the transaction—other writers and would-be writers.
Take Marisha Pessl’s great cinder block of a debut, Special Topics in Calamity Physics. (No, really—I just used it to smash the biggest cockroach I’ve ever seen.) I haven’t yet finished it, and don’t wish to comment on its quality, but anyone who’s read a review of it can see how perfectly it illustrates the insularity now weakening literature. It’s modeled on a Great Books program, with each chapter named for—and shot through with allusions to—a classic work: Othello, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Madame Bovary, etc. Is this such a good idea?
The main character of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was modeled on the protagonist of Günter Grass’s Tin Drum. Zadie Smith’s On Beauty was patterned after E. M. Forster’s Howards End—an hommage, as she needlessly rendered it. And now this. Pessl’s heroine, Blue van Meer, falls in with a teacher and her circle, but we already had The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a better book than a fledgling author like Pessl could dream of writing.
Novels should be about people, not about other books. In one corner there is Nabokov, whose allusions are so deeply encoded that it’s neither possible nor necessary to catch every one of them—vide Jeffrey Meyers’s recent essay on Pale Fire (The New Criterion, May 2006), a novel which Pessl’s baroque mystery supposedly recalls. In the other corner, we have Pessl, who, wittingly or not, poaches on the authority of geniuses. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but most of her beloved luminaries are long dead. The only people she’s flattering are her educated peers, eager to get the jokes and check the boxes.
I mentioned “would-be writers.” More damaging than anything else, the recent spate of books by young grads gives aspiring novelists the impression that it can be easy. All one needs are the slightest bit of verbal facility and some familiarity with the tastes and prejudices of the average reader—the young, ambitious, Ivy-educated lit-lover or critic—and, voilà, success! But this raises an interesting question. When a young writer is praised for his insight into the human condition, one asks: Did he learn it from life? Or did he just read about it?
A delightful and unusual reference book, Brewer’s Rogues, Villains, and Eccentrics by William Donaldson, relates the story of Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770), “liar, exhibitionist, literary fraud, and by some accounts a genius”:
Born in Bristol, and raised by his widowed mother, Chatterton had begun to “medievalize” himself by the age of 11, brooding over old parchments in Bristol churches. In 1763 he produced his first literary forgery, Elinore and Juga, allegedly the work of a 15th-century poet . . . . His greatest work was The Legend of Thomas Rowley, supposedly a priest of St. John in Bristol during the reign of Henry IV.
The public always has been obsessed with youth and with child prodigies, but, incredibly, nobody ever stops to wonder what a young man or woman—having experienced little but the comfortable world of academia—can possibly know about the larger world and the people in it. What happened to debuts written by people in their forties? Shouldn’t there be struggle? Why are those who’ve done and seen the least expected to tell us the most?
I can’t count the emails I’ve received accusing me of writing negative reviews out of spite or envy. Before you point and laugh that I’ve hoisted myself by my own Dartmouth lanyard, I’ll disclose the truth: I’ve “workshopped” fiction of my own so abysmal that it should never have seen the assembly line. If I learned one thing from my hopeful peers (believe me, the professors can rarely be bothered to offer much criticism, what with their classrooms full of de facto teaching assistants), it’s that we didn’t have much to say. At least not yet. So: No, I don’t envy those who have had a halogen lamp shined on their fits and starts. And if I’m too hard on them, it’s because I see them as tools of an operation that has done plenty to embarrass the whole enterprise of literature.
Claire Messud’s new novel The Emperor’s Children is a wrench in these works. It reads like an exposé of the factories that give us writers like Marisha Pessl. One main character—named, in a bizarre and suggestive coincidence, Marina—is a beautiful, pitifully idle society girl, just barely at work on her first book. (Pessl, if not a society girl, is at any rate a model and actress.) Marina’s father, Murray Thwaite, is a celebrated liberal journalist, a more believable version of Pessl’s heroine’s father, a celebrated liberal professor. Will parallels never cease?
That Messud’s book is coming out at this moment suggests that the planets may be aligning to loosen the MFA stranglehold on fiction. The Emperor’s Children is a disturbingly credible tableau of the sort of people who develop in a cocoon of ambition, entitlement, and pride.
The aforementioned Murray Thwaite is a monster of false modesty, whose big secret project is a manuscript about—wait for it—how to live. He is assured of his own wisdom as only this species of pretentious, scotch-swilling adulterer can be.
The thirty-year-old Marina Thwaite’s debut book, The Emperor’s Children Have No Clothes, is a fashionable bagatelle about how children’s apparel reflects cultural mores. (If, as Auden had it, poetry makes nothing happen, then books like Marina’s at least have the effect of making us duller and more trivia-obsessed.)
It was a fine choice on Messud’s part not to make Marina a novelist. Marina’s subject reinforces what Messud tells us, explicitly and otherwise, about the perils of self-invention and the petty passions that can motivate it. It’s also true that a book about children’s clothing, unlike a novel, is all but guaranteed to be worthless: Even Murray muses, as he opens the manuscript (which he never really expected would be completed), that “the subject seemed at once so frivolous and so abstruse that Marina would have had to accomplish a major feat in order not to bore him.”
This is particularly cruel, not to mention hilarious, in light of conversation between Murray and his daughter much earlier in the book:
“Maybe . . . your friend has a point. Maybe you should get a job of some kind.”
“In journalism?”
“In anything that interests you. Teach school. Work for an aid agency. Work for an ad agency, for God’s sake. Just a job.”
“I suppose what I worry is—” Marina gave her father a self-deprecating smile, to his mind one of her most bewitching expressions— “I worry that that will make me ordinary, like everybody else.”
There are two threats to the serene self-regard of the Thwaite clan. The first is Frederick “Bootie” Tubb, Murray’s autodidactic, fanatically idealistic nephew, who comes to live with the Thwaites after dropping out of college. The second is Ludovic Seeley, the iconoclastic Australian editor of a new Manhattan-based magazine called The Monitor. (Seeley’s backer, Merton Publications, seems to be modeled on Conrad Black’s Telegraph Group.)
Bootie idolizes Murray, so Murray hires him to be his secretary (well, “amanuensis” is how Murray puts it). It isn’t long before Bootie decides that his uncle is a sickening fraud. It begins with little discoveries:
Murray, out for the afternoon, left him a list of things to do, among them a telephone call to a fund-raising dinner for a Harlem youth program . . . at which he was to have given a speech. He asked Bootie to cancel it, to express his profuse regrets, but something urgent, he was to say, had come up. And then there was . . . another phone call, an acceptance to a dinner given . . . in honor of two Palestinian activists who were coming to town. Bootie had even heard of one of them . . . . And yet the two events were on the same day. Murray . . . was blowing off the youth program for the Palestinian bigwigs, it was as easy as a simple sum.
Then Bootie finds and reads his uncle’s manuscript—a “tremblingly ghastly experience” which manages “so fully [to] clarify his vision of Murray that all he could see, now, was the small and deformed self, its grander outline vanished.” The final straw: Bootie accidentally learns of one of Murray’s dalliances. His answer is to do something rash—to write a scathing profile of his uncle for Ludovic Seeley’s magazine. Seeley, as it happens, not only detests Murray Thwaite but also is marrying his daughter.
The consequences of all this are tragic; we are left wondering which of the characters to loathe and which to pity. Messud leaves open the question of whether Bootie, in the end, is so different from his uncle. Readers will have to decide whether his idealism is merely another type of vanity.
Where does it come from, that unearned sense of importance we find in these characters—and so frequently in real life? From the workshop, for one, and its kids who can’t write pretending to appreciate other kids who can’t write, in a bewildering quid pro quo meant to preserve everybody’s delusions of grandeur. Nowadays, life imitates the workshop. Simply getting into a good school—which is often achieved by being a miserable grind in high school—is proof enough to a budding Marina that she ought to be heard. (Doting parents certainly help, too.)
All writing begins with a kind of pride—the belief that if you put yourself out there, it’ll be enough. The trick is to put that pride aside for curiosity, compulsive and overwhelming, about other people and what makes them act. Claire Messud has that curiosity in spades: Her portraits are done not from other people’s photographs, but from life. She is observant and honest, and the only complaint I can think of about her writing is that its delicacy and restraint aren’t as conducive to madcap comedy as her storyline is.
But, then again, we already have Evelyn Waugh, and, happily, we also have Claire Messud.
As for the workshop, I hope some of its denizens will put their publishing ambitions on hold until they’ve taken the time to find something worth telling us about. We could all do with less of the closed circuit, the echo chamber, the friends who share our interests and beliefs and jacket bios: Only in rare cases do they teach us to write good fiction. To paraphrase that great philosopher, Pogo, “Yep, son, we have met the Workshop and the Workshop is us.”