I don’t read many contemporary novels that aren’t mysteries or thrillers. To me it’s pretty clear that this isn’t an especially propitious era for art of ANY kind, and the "serious" novel I see seem to be either the same old ultimately uplifting middlebrow family romance melodramas (see Oprah books) or arid, unreal academic efforts that read more like classroom literary exercises than anything from this world. Either the writer’s imagination is spinning meaninglessly in cuckoo cloud land somewhere or mired in a kind of socialist realism that’s designed to reinforce beliefs rather than challenge them. Take the Detroit "alternative" weekly the Metro Times for instance, that just had a Fiction/Poetry contest. Instead of applying their usual generally perceptive counterculture derived critical apparatus, the one they apply to music and movies, they turned the whole thing over to the usual suspects – the academic establishment. The result was the winners, rather than being rock and roll, were about laid off auto workers and dead relatives, full of sanctimonious, politically correct sentimentality. I expect that kind of thing from the excreble winners of the always painfully PC Ann Arbor Current Fiction/Poetry contest but had hoped for more from the Metro Times. Proof positive: UBU didn’t even get an honorable mention! And look at the NYT bestseller list for 7/30/06 – at least 14 of the 16 books listed (I’m not sure how to classify Fannie Flagg – is anybody?) are genre – mystery, romance, horror. The only clearly "serious" work is "Water For Elephants" a piece of pretentious twaddle about a Depression-era circus. The reason for this is not the bad taste of the public, as the snobs would have you think, but rather their perspicacity. Genre fiction hasn’t surrendered its engagement with real life, with the way people actually think and live. In the future scholars can find out more about the fabric of our time from one mystery than from a hundred of the books cranked out by creative writing teachers. Genre writers respect the verities of plot, character and pace in a way that the newer literary artistes disdain, the same way that modern fine artists have forgotten how to draw. The professors may review the books of their circle as masterpieces, knowing full well that their book will be similarly treated, but the fact is that there’s no there there, and literature is in danger of becoming a tedious chore presided over by "experts" and semi-imaginative embalmers, like opera or classical music.

SO – it was with trepidation that I ordered a contemporary novel with the rest of my order from my book rep. The saving grace was that it was Norwegian, and since my favorite novelist, Knut Hamsun and my favorite artist, Edvard Munch are both Norwegian, I figured it might have something going for it., and I was right. Shyness & Dignity by Dag Solstad (Graywolf Press, $12.00) begins with Elias Ruckla, a high school master, teaching, as he has a thousand times before, a class on Ibsen’s "The Wild Duck," when he has an actual fresh, and to him exciting, insight into the play. But this insight becomes almost painful when he realizes that the modern classroom has become a place where insight and enthusiasm are out of place, and indeed dangerous to the carefully cultivated boredom and triviality. As he’s leaving a broken umbrella further reminds him of the intractability of things and he’s pushed over the edge, stepping out of his bland persona to lash out at the now lively students, before walking out, his life irrevocably changed. The rest of the book consists of his thoughts and memories as he meanders through Oslo, assessing and mourning his life.

Shyness & Dignity reminded me of several of my favorite authors: Saul Bellow, especially "Seize the Day," with its portrayal of an irrevocable moment of existential dread, Samuel Beckett for its painstaking examination of the world in so absurdly rational a way as to bring rationality into question, and Knut Hamsun, especially Hunger, in its presentation of consciousness, so vivid that it can be said that consciousness itself is the hero. It’s a novel so fresh and real that it puts the pallid productions of contemporary American academic "authors" to shame. Let’s hope more Dag Solstad gets published!

YR PAL,

UBU