11th
Passionate Virtuosity
“‘Making love and telling stories both take more than good technique — but it’s only the technique that we can talk about.’
The Genie agreed: ‘Heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal, Dunyazade; so does heartless skill. But what you want is passionate virtuosity.’”
I’m a fan of John Barth’s “Dunyazadiad,” from which the above excerpt is taken, but it’s pretty clear to me that he never achieved the passionate virtuosity he desired. Still, he at the very least possessed enough heartless skill to give us these useful, pithy phrases and get me thinking: Which of our contemporary authors truly write with passionate virtuosity?
It seems like a good way to describe our best writers, after all — those who can move you and destroy you and reorient you and everything else that the best art — the kind that you love and respect and think about and feel in equal amounts — is uniquely capable of. There are a lot of skillful writers out there, but very few are able to achieve passionate virtuosity. It’s an especially apt category when we’re talking about fiction in the postmodern age, too, since postmodernism’s critics seem to think it’s nothing but heartless skill and meaningless games. (They’re wrong, of course, but they’re still worth acknowledging.) But it’s a rare feat in any age, one that only the greatest writers wholly realize.
With that said, I thought I’d start a list of contemporary passionate virtuosos (necessarily limited by my reading limitations). This is a provisional first effort, so feel free to add, subtract, and generally debate in the comments. Here we go:
The Majors
Thomas Pynchon
Roberto Bolano
The Minors
Michael Chabon
Junot Diaz
Pynchon: There are plenty who see Pynchon as a writer of the utmost skill who’s completely devoid of heart. Two and a half years ago, for example, Salon’s Laura Miller had this to say on the subject: “Maybe [Against the Day] would be sufficient, if by now we didn’t have, say, a writer like David Foster Wallace, who can give us a novel every bit as antic and intellectually demanding as “Against the Day,” and can also populate it with believable people whose fates not only interest but break our hearts.” (DFW, it should be said, was, like me and I’m sure several others, obsessed with Pynchon and concerned with the same question I’m addressing now. “I want to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff,” he wrote to his Infinite Jest editor. If you’re wondering why DFW’s not on this list, by the way, it’s because (1) I haven’t read Infinite Jest (yet), and (2) I’ve found the DFW fiction that I have tried to read (mostly the stories collected in Oblivion) inaccessible: he’s a Tin Man Pynchon — a writer whose sentences creak beneath his burdened but brilliant mind and are never lubricated by a beating heart. That said, I’ll definitely be giving him another chance soon.)
Anyway, the basic point here is: these people miss something essential about Pynchon. His prose is overwhelmed with feeling. Have you read the Roger Mexico sections of Gravity’s Rainbow? The way he and Jessica Swanlake are in love (fuck the war) but he knows their love can only exist during the war because she’s got another upstanding chap she’ll return to once peace comes and then his wartime intellectual counterparts will go off to cushy corporate jobs and he’ll lose it a little bit and find himself whipping out his dick and pissing all over their boardroom table? That’s heartbreaking stuff. Or what about the famous story of Byron the Bulb? The poor, immortal lightbulb sees the corporate conspiracy that dominates his life and knows that bulbs can do so much more than convey light-energy (“Bulb can give heat. Bulb can provide energy for plants to grow, illegal plants, inside closets, for example.”) but can’t do anything with this knowledge (“Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before.”) And man, those last lines about Byron are so tragic and pointed: “He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get off the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit, and he will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it…” Or what about Pynchon’s pervasive concern with colonialism and racism and white hegemony? Hell, what about his deep fundamental desire to just reach out through the darkness and feel another hand, to sing together, to truly come together? (And yes, the sexual pun on “come together” is, as it always is in Pynchon, very much intended.) You know what? Just go read through some of the Pynchon quotes collected here. (I recommend in particular the GR bit about Breakfast and the Mason & Dixon line about Britannia dreaming of America.) Thomas Pynchon is the undisputed great American novelist of the past half-century, and for good reason. (Okay, it’s disputed, but it shouldn’t be.) He’s passionate about his characters, and he’s equally passionate about his deep ideas and complicated concepts (which of course matter for people). Don’t listen to those who can’t appreciate the feeling that infuses everything he writes: Pynchon is a passionate virtuoso if ever there was one.
Bolano: Bolano, I think, is what Barth wished he could be when he wrote that bit about passionate virtuosity. You’ve gotta be a writer, or a wannabe writer, or at least a reader who’s obsessed with fiction qua fiction to enjoy Barth’s narratological narratives. Bolano, though? He’s a master. He writes about writers who are in the world and about words that interact with the world. At one point in The Savage Detectives, a character hides from soldiers in a bathroom stall with a book of poetry that she reads and a roll of toilet paper that she writes on. Her musings are quintessential Bolano: “I thought: the vanity of writing, the vanity of destruction. I thought: because I wrote, I stood my ground…I thought: the two acts are related, writing and destruction, hiding and being found. Then I sat on the toilet and closed my eyes. Then I fell asleep. Then I woke up.” I’ve written a fair amount on Bolano elsewhere (here and here), so I’ll cut this short and just say: yes, I know Bolano is dead, but I’m still including him on this list of contemporary writers — not only because he’s just been translated into English over the past few years, but because, even beyond its obvious brilliance, his writing just feels so vital and present. That’s the mark of a passionate virtuoso.
Chabon: Compare me to Seth Cohen all you want. I don’t care: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a fucking awesome book. It’s so entertaining and imaginative and inventive, so deeply structured and deeply felt, so well-written, so American in the best sense of the word. Escape, illusion, magic, boyhood, art, comics — I could read about that stuff all day. “[Joe] had escaped, in his life, from ropes, chains, boxes, bags, and crates, from handcuffs and shackles, from countries and regimes, from the arms of a woman who loved him, from crashed airplanes and an opiate addiction and from an entire frozen continent intent on causing his death. The escape from reality was, he felt—especially right after the war—a worthy challenge…That was the magic—not the apparent magic of the silk-hatted card-palmer, or the bold, brute trickery of the escape artist, but the genuine magic of art. It was a mark of how fucked-up and broken was the world—the reality—that had swallowed his home and his family that such a feat of escape, by no means easy to pull off, should remain so universally despised.” How can you not love writing like that? Chabon is reliably good, but Kavalier & Clay is his only truly amazing book, so he’s stuck in The Minors for now. But he’s still young and has plenty of time to keep writing, so let’s hope he can replicate the feat.
Diaz: I loved The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Loved it. The sheer variety of linguistic registers that Diaz seamlessly amalgamates creates one of the most engaging and inimitable voices in contemporary fiction, one which he uses to address a heartbreaking tale of national and familial history with such biting humor and genuine pathos and impressive indelibility. I have nothing but praise for Diaz’s first novel, which justly won last year’s Pulitzer, but for some reason, I have a sense that it lacks the ineffable quality of transcendence that the greatest novels have. Am I the only one who felt this? That you really really really liked Oscar Wao, maybe even loved it, but didn’t quite love it like it was one of your children? I dunno. I’ll have to read it again at some point and see how I feel now. Regardless, it’s a wonderful novel, and Diaz is only 40, so I’m sure he’s got plenty more great work in store for us.
So that’s it for now. Four writers. Two who are already canonized, two who have given us reason to think that they (or at least one or two of their books) might merit canonization, and probably many more I’ve forgotten to include. It’s a small list, but it should be. What do you think?
