Article Preview
A Group of Recent Novels
- Abstract
We badly need a name for books that appear to be novels and are not. I would propose calling them “pseudo-fictions,” on the analogy of I. A. Richards’ “pseudo-questions” and “pseudo-statements,” which would not only name them accurately—they are false-fictions rather than non-fictions—but might lend our activities some of the optimistic semantics-will-save-us tone of a quarter of a century ago, as though all these complicated matters could readily be put in order. Here is a mixed bag of nine recent books published as novels, no one of which is a work of fiction if we insist, not on a definition, but on certain minimal requirements: that fiction is an exercise of the moral imagination; that it organize experience into a form with a beginning, middle, and end; and that it center around a dramatic action. A pseudo-fiction can be quite a good work of its sort—one thinks of John Hersey’s reportorial The Wall or Mary McCarthy’s diaristic The Company She Keeps—although most of them are not; what must be recognized is that its sort is not the form we have traditionally called the novel. The appreciation the pseudo-fiction aims at is “Yes, that is just what it must be like”; the inescapable sense any work of the fictive imagination, from Don Quixote to Miss Lonelyhearts, gives is “Life is surely nothing like this anywhere. This is art.”
About the Author
This article is available for purchase to subscribers and for individual purchase
Subscriber Sign In
Not A Subscriber?
