Novels, and fiction, and life-writing
One of the things that novels do, if they work, is have an engaging opening that then allows them eventually to tie everything into something thought provoking at the end. The end has to be just that; a sense of having arrived at some place that offers at least a new view on life, if not a tidying up of themes.
Life, and life writing, is different. The challenge for us as we live and grow is the stuff that happens in the middle, between the exciting opening and the philosophical closure. That ‘middle stuff’ takes up the majority of our lives, is occasionally demanding in the extreme, and leaves us facing problems that recur. For example: in a novel one can happily see the heroine set out, face problems, find love, lose her insecurities, and steam ahead triumphantly. Yet we all know as we read that our own insecurities have a way of returning, often in a slightly different form, so that we have to buckle down and deal with them all over again. The scars of our childhood (we all have a few) tend to reappear in our children because, when we were arising them, we weren’t fully aware of how those scars affected our child rearing abilities. So even though I may have dealt with my relationship to my father to my satisfaction, the kids will still be working with their upbringing which happened when I was still confused, and they’ll have internalized that. Consequently I’ll be dealing with that same struggle in a different form as they try to work it all out with me.
Novels have attempted to deal with this kind of thing, and the multi-volume family saga was the extremely prolix result. The Forsythe Saga, The Dance to the Music of Time series, D. H. Lawrence’s trilogy that starts with Sons and Lovers, and other examples are evidence of this. But who reads those now?
The novel, in order to sell, has had to deal with snippets, with the edited highlights of life, like a baseball game watched on the TV news round up. This is a great pity because, as we all must be aware, the real essence of life is not just the high spots but the day to day of being alive.
The parent who wants to be with his children for ‘quality time’ is a symptom of this way of seeing. Not that there’s anything wrong with wanting to have a nice time with others. It’s just that all time spent with kids, or friends, or parents is quality time, whether the team loses, or Johnny sits on the bench throughout the game, or any imaginable variant of that.
It’s that ‘middle stuff’ that’s so valuable that we tend to forget, ignore and devalue.
