A curious contradiction has overtaken contemporary literary fiction. Though nearly all its authors, editors, publishers, and readers would likely describe themselves as progressive, more and more of the stories that win acclaim and are published in top-tier magazines embody a conservative view of the world.
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By conservative, I do not mean that the people involved espouse right-wing politics. Rather, these stories are conservative in the way that Hallmark movies and the art filling Europe’s cathedrals are both conservative: they exist to confirm a reader’s preexisting beliefs rather than to help her discover new ones.
The shelves of literary fiction have grown crowded with novels proposing that environmental degradation has reached crisis levels; that oppression and trauma echo out through the generations; that the authoritarian governments everywhere on the march pose a particular threat to the already marginalized. In short, these novels reflect beliefs that the typical reader of literary fiction (female, college-educated, middle class) is likely to already hold.
Pointing out these grim but familiar truths may offer a valuable public service, but not the service that groundbreaking literature has historically offered: a new way of imagining the world and one’s place in it. Instead, these stories confirm a much more sobering notion of the individual. Namely, that the world is full of structural injustice so deeply entrenched that a single protagonist cannot effect lasting and meaningful change against the powers that be.
These stories therefore do not serve to help the reader imagine new possibilities for herself and expand the limits of her agency. Instead, they provide an aesthetic experience that makes the world’s most painful realities easier to bear.
Which poses a problem for authors: how to make stories seem original when they tell the reader something she already knows? Literary fiction lives and dies by freshness. New novels are rightly praised for breaking with traditional forms and criticized for turning to stale formulas and cliches.
In these stories, characters are not burdened with a name, a history, a context, or a unique personality.
As authors seek out craft innovations to solve that problem, three strategies keep reappearing: the collage, the fable, and the fantasy. Each one repackages familiar ideas in a form that feels new, but now threatens to lose its punch through frequent use.
Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional is characteristic of the first approach. At the start of the novel, an unnamed narrator takes a break from her marriage and her career as an environmentalist to stay at an unnamed rural nunnery, which she gradually decides to make her permanent home. Her new ordered life of ritual and prayer is disrupted three times—by a plague of mice, by the struggle to repatriate the remains of a murdered nun, and by the visit of a “celebrity nun” who made her name fighting for justice in conflict zones—before the accustomed peace and calm of the place prevail once again.
The story of a woman’s retreat into monastic life is familiar; somewhat less familiar is Wood’s use of the modular form. With sections ranging from a single brief paragraph to a few pages in length, the narrator touches on an impressively broad range of heart-wrenching social problems: poverty, pollution, child abuse, war refugees, terminal eating disorders.
What the book does not engage, however, are details of the narrator’s life. About her marriage and career we learn next to nothing, only that they could not compete with the nunnery. Her process of adjustment to monastic life receives still less attention: her first four years in residence are entirely omitted. Instead, scenes of life at the nunnery are interspersed with childhood memories, usually involving her mother assisting people in need or her classmates mistreating vulnerable children.
The experience of reading the book therefore resembles the experience of looking at a collage: seemingly disparate components are presented side by side by side, while the white space between sections is left to do the talking. With Wood scrupulously refusing to link cause and effect, it falls to the reader to stitch everything together herself.
The reader succeeds in doing so because she can draw on what she already knows to form a clear picture. The story of a burnt-out activist trapped in a dissatisfying marriage, struggling to envision a tolerable place for herself in the world, is one that is depressingly easy to conjure.
What makes this story work, then, is that it ratifies—even depends on—the reader’s preexisting ideas of “types” of people who, like the narrator, are unable to transcend certain familiar roles. Or, as the celebrity nun puts it: “If you don’t live the life you are born for, it makes you ill… If you don’t live your rightful dharma, then you will cause grave spiritual injury to yourself.” I can’t think of an idea more at odds with individual agency than the assertion that you must accept your place.
Wood is not alone in wanting to tell a story emphasizing the idea that people come in types. Indeed, it is the foundation of an emergent style of storytelling with its roots in fable. In these stories, characters are not burdened with a name, a history, a context, or a unique personality. Instead, these characters are simply “the soldier” or “the artist.” Often, they are defined by their relationship to another character, as in: “the father” or “his wife.”
These stories operate on the same logic as a fairy tale. The key to understanding each character is not what makes her unique but what she has in common with others of the same type. Just as “the princess” is going to be pure and beautiful, “the husband” is going to forget to do the dishes and leave something to be desired in bed. These stories therefore suggest an enduring social order in which characters are better understood by their identities than by their own unique choices and circumstances.
Though these stories offer a vision of liberation, that vision lies entirely beyond the impossible first step of otherworldly transformation.
In Patricia Lockwood’s novel No One Is Talking About This, the unnamed narrator is simply “she,” while moving in her orbit are “her husband” and “her sister” and “her mother.” Around these characters, however, are precisely rendered specifics, first of the crude, dazzling maelstrom of digital life, and then the death of “the baby” from a rare genetic disorder. This combination of specific circumstances with vague characters underscores the conviction that, no matter who we are, we are all reduced to our most fundamental roles in the face of unspeakable grief.
With her recent story “Fairy Pools,” Lockwood returns to familiar territory. At the center of this story is “she,” on a trip to Scotland with “her mother,” “her husband,” and “her sister,” who is this time grieving the loss of “the Child.” All names are withheld, as are any markers that would indicate class, race, ethnicity, or religion.
This story is more conventionally structured than Wood’s. It starts with the family’s arrival in Scotland, details one character getting sick and another briefly losing her phone, and ends with the family’s departure. Still, Lockwood, like Wood, is depending on the reader to fill in the gaps with what she already knows to make the family dynamics intelligible.
The husband, being a husband, is obsessed with itineraries and statistics. The mother, being a mother, finds fault and has embarrassing politics. We understand these dynamics perfectly because we’ve seen them before. Like with a fable, we can leap right in because of our previous exposure to similar stories (including Lockwood’s). We know what these characters can do—and what they can’t.
Indeed, the limits of what the central character (“she”) can do become the primary point of emphasis. In the story’s final paragraph, she settles for imagining herself taking meaningful action: “In her head she signed the petition for Scottish independence; in her head she signed the petition for Irn‑Bru to be sweet again. In her head she stacked a cairn.” In the physical world, she does no more than put a stone at a magic shrine and resign herself to life. “She walked through the world,” the story concludes. “The exchange rate stood. Everyone must pay.” In other words: the world offers a bad deal, but you must take its terms anyway.
There is one alternative to these terms, however, for characters lucky enough to find themselves in a speculative world: magic. In these fantasies, the author introduces a speculative element that allows for the impossible. The speculative element can take many forms—monsters, time travel, elevator operators with extrasensory perception—but the stories then usually adopt a more classic plot. A character takes action and changes her circumstances in a meaningful way.
This fantasy form even works in domestic settings. At the start of Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, “the mother” is struggling to lead a meaningful life while “her husband” is never home to help her raise “the boy.” Soon she begins to develop canine tendencies—sharpened teeth, thickened hair, raw meat cravings—and finds herself compelled, at first unwillingly and then gladly, to carve out space for her own wildness, her art, her excess, and other unladylike impulses she’s so long suppressed. In time, she regains her pre-motherhood life as an artist and connects with other empowered women (also part-time dogs).
Though these stories offer a vision of liberation, that vision lies entirely beyond the impossible first step of otherworldly transformation. The protagonist of Nightbitch is only capable of change because supernatural forces pick her out of the crowd—and so, by implication, real women who resemble this character are stuck in static, all-too-human lives until the impossible happens for them as well. This form therefore ultimately offers the same kind of imaginative possibility that Marvel movies offer: a brief, pleasurable escape through the hope that a superhuman power will come and save the day.
This is not meant to denigrate the value of escapism—or the value of the aesthetic experience any of these storytelling forms provide. It is, however, important to insist that such stories do not serve to challenge their readers’ beliefs, as is sometimes claimed for them. Instead, these books serve to make challenging times more bearable by assuring readers that they are not alone. In an era of doubt, gaslighting, and lies, the choir needs preaching, too.
Still, having one’s ideas confirmed too often risks complacency. Keeping that at bay requires fiction that not only evokes the need for change but demonstrates its possibility. At the heart of such stories is one of the progressive movement’s best ideas: that the social order is not fixed or given but is instead the result of people’s choices. Giving characters the opportunity to affect the world as they move through it—characters in whom we inevitably see ourselves—reminds the reader that the status quo is something we create, day after day, person by person.