I started writing this essay in order to understand what fiction is made out of. The question is sort of like the one that always gets asked at the end of an author event, perhaps by a cute old lady whose sweater has a schnauzer on it: Where do your ideas come from? I was accustomed to thinking of most novels the way Nabokov wanted me to, or as Flaubert did—he once wrote that the most beautiful books depend “on nothing external . . . just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.”
Then something happened to change my thinking. I realized that the real world is full of people who, presumably, have feelings about being appropriated for someone else’s run at the Times best-seller list. In drafts five through seventeen of this essay, I was mostly concerned with them: with the experience of opening a book and finding yourself in its pages, and with comprehending the precise nature of that violation. In drafts eighteen through eighty-four, I realized that the stakes of this piece are less aesthetic or ethical than metaphysical. When an author plants a made-up character in a novel, that character gains breath, agency, life. But when an author plants a real person in a novel, she metes out a kind of death. Reading lightly autobiographical fiction—which is to say, most début fiction—or its cousin, autofiction, or really any and all fiction, becomes a matter of parsing degrees of realness. It’s sticking your hands through ghosts. I suppose one could reintroduce both ethics and aesthetics here. Is moving someone down the existence scale from “human person” to “character” anything like murder? Is moving someone up the scale anything like art?
Machines Like Me is not, however, science fiction, at least according to its author. “There could be an opening of a mental space for novelists to explore this future,” McEwan said in a recent interview, “not in terms of travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots, but in actually looking at the human dilemmas.” There is, as many readers noticed, a whiff of genre snobbery here, with McEwan drawing an impermeable boundary between literary fiction and science fiction, and placing himself firmly on the respectable side of the line.
On the face of it, it is as absurd for McEwan to claim he’s not writing sci-fi as it is for him to imply that sci-fi is incapable of approaching these themes interestingly: alternative history and non-human consciousness are established sci-fi motifs, thoroughly explored in defining genre works such as Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But genre is as much about what you keep out as what you let in, and science fiction – as well as being a label in its own right, suggestive of a certain tone and content – functions as a kind of insalubrious “other” against which literary authors can demonstrate their superiority.
In fact, if we look closely, it’s apparent that evolutionary psychology is due for an overhaul. Rather than hard-wired cognitive instincts, our heads are much more likely to be populated by cognitive gadgets, tinkered and toyed with over successive generations. Culture is responsible not just for the grist of the mind – what we do and make – but for fabricating its mills, the very way the mind works.
I’m sitting in a small glass soundproof booth. A microphone, suspended from the ceiling, hangs in front of me. This is huge and round, like a luxury showerhead covered with fine metal mesh. Below it, on a slanting surface, lies the glowing screen of an iPad. This contains my most recent novel, “Dawson’s Fall.” When you write a book, you know every word of it. If you are an obsessive, you have rewritten and reconsidered every one of these words, hundreds of times. It should be easy to read them aloud.
My publisher wrote me about an audio version, sending an actor’s audition tape. An actor seemed necessary for this complicated narrative. It’s set mostly in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1889, but the main character (Dawson, my great-grandfather) is English and grew up in London. He came here to fight for the Confederacy and lived the rest of his life in Charleston. He married Sarah, my great-grandmother, who was from Baton Rouge. They both spoke French, and they hired a French governess so the family could speak it at home. There are other characters, too, local friends and family, each with their own way of speaking. It’s a hot linguistic mess.
In graduate school, a female classmate told me I read like a girl. We were at a house party. Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Prep had recently been released in paperback, and I mentioned that I’d read it over the summer and enjoyed it. “Really?” my classmate said. Her face began at surprise and then traveled toward disapproval. “I don’t know any other men who liked that book.”
Or maybe I was only imagining disapproval. She was one of those people who likes to amuse themselves at parties by playing armchair psychologist. On another night, drinking canned beer in someone’s patchy backyard, she referred to me as “one of our program’s alpha males,” a claim so absurd I did an actual spit take. A couple of months later, at a post-workshop dinner, apropos of seemingly nothing, she turned to me and said, “I bet you were popular in high school.” That time, at least, I knew I was being insulted.
I long to be in Japan in the autumn. For much of the year, my job, reporting on foreign conflicts and globalism on a human scale, forces me out onto the road; and with my mother in her eighties, living alone in the hills of California, I need to be there much of the time, too. But I try each year to be back in Japan for the season of fire and farewells. Cherry blossoms, pretty and frothy as schoolgirls’ giggles, are the face the country likes to present to the world, all pink and white eroticism; but it’s the reddening of the maple leaves under a blaze of ceramic-blue skies that is the place’s secret heart.
We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it’s their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty. In the central literary text of the land, The Tale of Genji, the word for “impermanence” is used more than a thousand times, and bright, amorous Prince Genji is said to be “a handsomer man in sorrow than in happiness.” Beauty, the foremost Jungian in Japan has observed, “is completed only if we accept the fact of death.” Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying. How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth.
Pickle's Progress is a deeply weird novel that succeeds because of Butler's willingness to take risks and her considerable charisma — she's a gifted storyteller with a uniquely dry sense of humor and a real sympathy for her characters, even if they're not traditionally likable. It's not a perfect book, but it's a promising fiction debut from a writer who seems incapable of not going her own way.
Nothing better illustrates the change in our understanding of dinosaurs than the discovery of why they went extinct. Forty years ago, no one knew that an asteroid had smashed into what is now the Yucatán peninsula, ending the Mesozoic era. Similarly, 20 years ago, it was very much a minority position that birds should be classified as dinosaurs, and that dinosaurs had thus not been entirely wiped out. Benton is excellent on both these recent developments, but he is most interesting of all on an unsolved puzzle. We know where the dinosaurs went, but how and when did they originate? As one of the world’s leading authorities on the mass extinction that marked the start of the Mesozoic – an event even more devastating than the one that ended it – Benton provides the reader with an outline, but can do little more than that. The ancestral dinosaurs remain undiscovered. “This is a chapter,” he writes, “that will definitely need rewriting in ten years’ time.”