Notes on the American Novel

by Dex Quire

1
When did the novel become a giant Hallmark Card? A thick phone
bookish stack of clichs?
Get rid of your manuscript dealing with the difficulty of life after you get
your MFA degree in novel writing.
2
Lets start by banning any more novels about writers or poets.
3
Next we can ban novels about junkies and how they show us the
phoniness, the truly hideous face of middle-class bourgeois society.
4
How did we ever get fooled into believing that you could get a degree in
Fine Arts with an emphasis on the novel? The novel is street currency, like
matches dope rolling papers or cock or pussy. Shameful for universities to
offer degrees in a craft whose validation comes from the marketplace and
only from the marketplace. Rather they should teach an entire walkthrough
course of printing binding editing marketing and distribution. And writing
cover letters.
5
Forget about writing the Great American Novel. It is not yet to be. It has
nothing whatsoever to do with Tom Wolfes exhortation urging writers to
take to the streets, the police beats and blotters to soak up lots of swell
action-packed detail. That is sufficiently well-covered both in low and high
quality by TV and the Movies.
6
There will be no great American novel until we get to know each other.
Presently, we look at each other in a few limited and near meaningless
ways: movie star, criminal, consumer, welfare mom, soccer mom, rich guy,
poor guy, Negro, whiteygay, straight
7
Great novels are written in nations whose citizens know each other; they
may not like each other but they know each other.
8
There are too many transactions in contemporary American novels that
do not correspond to reality (which is the only ground of fiction whether
magical or realistic) as experienced in America. Dialogue, for example. We
drug this technique over from Europe and, in America, in contemporary

novels, it is an odd fit. One of the few obvious facts running high and low in
America is that we do not talk to each other. We boast at each other. We do
not yet possess the personal/psychological security for extended meaningful
interchange. We do not yet have the vocabulary for each other. Hey white
boy how do say hello to a black boy? Sup! Or Hi! Or Hello? Or do you just
nod? Probably you do not greet him at all. Take the easy way out. We inhabit
a static country in which huge blocks do not even know how to address each
other without crisis, confrontation or insult. Yet our novels bump along on
fantasias of dialogue. How are you going to write a novel with dialogue if we
can only relate to each other on the most beastlike terms?
9
The novel is nothing if not a study in subtlety. All these Americans talking
to each other fluently does not correspond to any known contemporary
American reality. We do not talk to each other. We live in an hysterical fear
of each other, we are at war with each other perceptually. We are
complimenting ourselves too much to think we can be rendered as
communicating with such fluidity. We do hustle each other, we do fight; we
throw chairs at each other. We do not dialogue.
10
By the way, what is a poor man in America? Rich American record
producers look to bone-poor Mississippi Delta for authentic American
Culture. 95% of all American culture comes from the Negro church.
Multiple European vacations will not change this fact.
11
What are the real flashpoints of American life? The panic of poverty. The
shame of not owning the right stuff. The complete sense of panic and terror
moving under your skin when you are the only white among a group of
Negroes or vice versa.
12
Americans can get away from each other too easily. We fuck up, break
down the circus tent and move on.
13
In America he who screams the loudest plays guitar the loudest, laughs
the loudest, gets the attention of othersthe most obviouswins. This is
not the ideal environment in which to develop the subtle art of the novel.
14
Hemingway bashing is in style now but he made some attempt to get
down the cadences of American inarticulateness, the gaps and silences; the
killers that are lonely Americans (D.H. Lawrence). American novelists avoid
the working world as much as possible. Notice how most protagonists of

novels are in the soft professions: journalism, photography, teaching and

of course writing. Novelists never gain much sense of process a vital
component in the lives of non-writers. American novelists do not grasp the
world in any way recognizable to readers; they write about their own world
of becoming a writer or a poet or they cannibalize some other writer or
artist from the past and work that into their novel.
15
Forget the Great American Novel. The novel is an urban artifact and
American sensibility is rural and pastoral. Incurious, isolated, provincial.
Until we attain some degree of urbanity (definition: fluency with multiple
adult idiom, perspective, epoch, comprehension of the other up to the point
of hatred but not crossing that dark line) we will continue to see the usual
coming-of-age stories, puerile attacks on the middle class, further
adventures of this or that lusting teacher or horny journalist or alienated
writer.
16
Dont write your novel completely in the present tense. Hayseed,
obnoxious, distracting and just plain stupid.
17
It makes no sense in novels to first describe somebody. We do not observe
others. It makes no sense to describe others. The only people who describe
others in America are novelists and no body reads them.
18
The novel in America is not considered a legitimate place of perceptual
business, of intellectual endeavor or inquiry. Nothing is advanced or looked
for beyond titillation and sensationalism. In America the novel is what you
do at the end of the line; after you retire from film directing or acting you
write novels.
19
No matter how wretched of the earth our Latin American brethren
nonetheless possess or are possessed of manners. In our America we each
are so busy blowing our horn when do we have time to develop manners? To
operate within a sphere in which the techniques of the novel operate you
must move in some sphere of manners: you must know how to talk to other
people. In America and especially in the west we barely know how to greet
each other let alone carry on a conversation. A more typical conversation
among American men will have the other man agreeing and trying to one up
the other or just outright lying. Yes Ive heard of that book that movie that
star that player, etc.. yes know that company that semi famous CEO
20

I have read all my life and during some years I was poor homeless and
suffering and through it all I read. I read Robert Stone and I remember
thinking as fucked up as his characters lives are at least they are living
awash in the honey of Robert Stones prose. Theyre better off than I am
now. Down with fine writing!
21
American writers need to marry their subject matter to form as
Hemingway tried to do. (I do not think he succeeded I think he trimmed too
much perceptive fat from his prose but at least he tried which is more than
any writer today is attempting to do.)
22
How about description? Do we always notice the tree is green the bark is
brown the hair is blond? No, but the writer sure as hell does. Does any
writer think: how can I match my writing to the means of perception?
23
Why are writers so beholden to standard means of rendering?
24
The only transaction that has any meaning in America is the transaction
of buying and selling; we have no concept of each other outside the narrow
bounds of our economic transactions.
Faithful to your own sense of things? What is clear is how few American
writers question the form they have been given from Europe. What in the
hell we are doing? The unreality of most novels: clich saturated gobs of
drivel.
25
Most American writers feel so beholden to the popular media they take
their cue from the movies.
26
When will we get novels without resolution, without epiphany? Joyce
could sign off his short stories with epiphanies because he knew his
Dubliners. Again most of us we Americans do not know Jack Shit about
our fellows. And we dont care. We are the most incurious nation on earth
other than for prurient or titillating detail or to make sure the Joneses are
not better off than we are.
27
Crime and detective fiction is so puerile. How little violence there is in
our lives, really.
Young writer: be sure to write your novel in the present tense no matter
that this device is a strain on the reader carried over hundreds of pages.

Doesnt matter. Do it because your editor or writing teacher tells you to. Do
it because every one else is doing it.
28
Young writer title your book in the genitive case Da da das Dadada. That
is the fashion nowadays and you would hate to go against fashion.
29
Fucking is no big deal and yet most writers, who I assume dont get
enough, magnify this act into transcendence and epiphanies.
30
We live in a society in which transaction is more important than thinking.
We havent the slightest idea of how to react to anything. And worse, we do
not trust our reactions unless they are backed by millions of dollars or
unless millions of other people have made the same purchase or decision.
We simply do not trust our own reactions unless they are well-represented
by nationwide public relations or merchandising. When was the last time
you really hungered for something that was not a induced by media shill?
(Why would you have to hunger anyway when you have a tube feeding you.)

31
We are tube-fed music that is not really music, novels which are not really
novel. How can originality flourish in such an environment? It cant. Shit
can and does but not originality.
Most of our actions and reactions are anchored in some economic or
careerist transaction.
The Indians who lived here before we came and stole their land had a nice
life; perhaps it wasnt an elegant life; they didnt have engineering or
masonry equal to first century Rome but they had a life and it was the life
they felt they owed themselves to live. Which we took from them. Politics,
Law and Capital will never offer restitution much less apologize but perhaps
we artists can at least speak to their ancestors by saying that we tried to be
honest and cut through the bullshit and offer that as a prayer, a reason why
we should be allowed to stay instead of them.
32
So much for the problem. There is no cure but I have some idea of what
might take us there, courtesy of C. Connolly: "Though in Petronius we
possess a fragmentary Roman Proust, how few have studied him; how little
known to generations of boring novelists is the secret of his rapidity of style,
of his visual clarity, biting dialogue, intellectual fastidiousness or of the
haunting fugacity of the picaresque - that art which keeps characters on the
move from waterfront to waterfront, brothel to palace, adventure to

adventure. The analysis of such a book could help many young writers to
give movement and montage to their characters, the lilt of transience which
is the breath of readability." ("On Re-reading Petronius," from Selected
Essays of Cyril Connolly, ed., Peter Quennell [New York 1984] 152-156.)
33
Novelists (and by extension I include poets and artists imaginers all
and going back to Homer and before) give the world its imagination, its
ideas. Novelists are the leaders of consciousness, its pilots. Presently, the
world flounders while we write adolescent twaddle. What do we write about
then?
34
Look at the shit that software engineers come up with: video games,
hyper animation, virtual reality (Oohwee!) For all their brains and
concentration they are slaves to a very given, very mundane version of
reality.
35
Software engineers all over the world are getting rich off video games,
creating virtual worlds: groovy imitations of flying, road racing or mass
murder.
36
Novelists have always avoided this trap by asking: whats so great about
reality? Reality is the thing that fucks you up, that snuffs your life like a
flame between two fingers of spit, that kills your best friend in a war, that
drains your vitals and pains you, that causes you to reach for the bottle a
needle or a gun. Or a pen.
37
This is not to beat up on engineers. Novelists have failed them. If
novelists are the pioneers of consciousness then we are lost just now.
American novelists are simply feeding them their own food with novels of
technological imitations of flying, road racing and mass murder. Or they
look to themselves and retreat into tales of adolescent coming-of-age or
addiction or sexual putrescence.
38
Has one movie or novel dealt with the cost to us of winning the cold war?
What was the cost? That you, American citizen, cannot claim ownership
over one fine slice of your consciousness.
Look to any pleasure center of your soul, a favorite song, a painting, a
childhood memory, something that you think helps explain the mystery of
your existence and youll find that it has been strip-mined for commercial

purposes, scooped up and tapped to get your attention for some

advertisement.
39
Consciousness is a battlefield. We deserve, on occasion, to come up from
the trenches to reminisce with a mate about something non-battle related.
This is where novelists are supposed to come into the picture. Trouble is it
takes great imagination to transcend, to lift oneself from the battle. It is
much easier to wallow in the mud, the blood, the fray.
40
How eager we are to surrender of every bit of our consciousness to
advertising, capital, PR. This is the war for consciousness and novelists are
loosing.
41
Signs of battle fatigue: trying to concentrate on Platos Symposium and
worrying about Michael Jacksons nose.
42
When the blade of the cold war was pulled from our consciousness maybe
we were left with nothing. Maybe there is nothing going on. No real
passion, no real joy, no love for anything in and of itself, only the spasmic
flare of buying and selling, only commerced events. There is nothing going
on.
43
That cold blade that lay sandwiched in our consciousness has been
removed and we are left with foodstuffs, gadgets, porn, a fluffy edgeless
world: the world, our American world, has become one giant fake silicon tit.
44
As boorish and crude as are our captains of industry (and they are
boorish and crude) they have mastered difficult processes that require an
adult grasp of the world. For too long novelists have huddled in a romantic
hut (coffee shop!) to distance themselves from successful men and women
and from whence to denounce them as without sensibility or higher
appreciation of art. But why should captains of industry read novels? What
are we giving them? Only the limits of our cage: adolescent romance, heroin
addiction, hatred of the bourgeoisie, ressentiment.
45
The world has filled up with things and processes beyond the novelists
grasp. Look in any manufacturers directory. Spend a day flipping through
trade journals in any area of human activity. The detail is overwhelming. At
the beginning of the Renaissance Rabelais could compile lists and

categories of all human knowledge some genuine, some fake but that is
impossible today. We are surrounded by goods that represent the mental
force of thousands perhaps millions of invisible and specialized minds at
work. The novelists job is to set an imaginative agenda beyond the bogus
tyranny of technology.
46
Back to Latin American writers: they review each others work and take
each other seriously; I am sure that there is much infighting and jealousy
and literary politics among them but still they make efforts to fight their
isolation. As a result, their novels are inevitably about adults or adult
concerns. They are taken seriously and read by taxi drivers schoolteachers
bank clerks housewives businessmen. Latin American Novelists are good
because their audiences demand that they be good.
47
Maybe American novelists should take up Spanish; English, being nearly
reamed by advertising and PR.
48
America does not really have a culture of anything. We dont all break for
green tea (Japan) or coffee (Guatemala) at 3:00 p.m. or get universally
excited over soccer (the rest of the world). There is not one thing you can
count on all Americans to do or say.
49
Americans do not joke about money. Money is sacred and not to be fucked
with. Remember, not all that long ago, before time was money in America,
people were money in America.
50
Probably the outstanding cultural trait in America is summer Bar-B-Q.
This is our universal defining cultural trait and it has taken us over 400
years to evolve it. Our biggest export is the happy ending.
51
The novel qua novel has its ready-made forms that ask for filling:
dialogue, explanation, narration, character description, exposition.
American novelists fill these forms, dress them out readily and often
skillfully. That these forms are often without correspondence to anything
real in America life goes unquestioned by most American novelists.
52
Dialogue. There is little communication of the kind delineated in novels
going on anywhere in America. There are no epiphanies, Americans do not

realize things, do not talk things out and then grow into new stages of self
awareness. At least not outside of psychiatrists offices.
53
Without a vast apparatus of judges, shrinks and lawyers how would
Americans know how to communicate with each other? We wouldnt.
Mouths, eyes and ears are something you pay for.
54
I concede, in the southern American states people actually talk to each
other so southern writers can and have gotten away with dialogue to great
effect in novels and plays. But in the north and west of America we
communicate by a kind of Neolithic sign language based on our
commodities and purchasing power.
55
I dont know but damnit we have to do something to wrest the terrain of
the novel away from the agents and editors who think that the novel is the
province of milk-brained adolescents carving away at their first coming-ofage sagas. Is it possible that the novel can be rescued as a means of adult
moral and intellectual entertainment a la Rabelais, Cervantes, Apuleius?
56
Dont American writers question anything? Is sex always such a fabulous
thing? What about family? Is family always such a great thing? Look at the
way we enshrine a writer like Dan Savage just because he souped up the
middle-brow, middle-class advice column with a needlefull of four-letter
words. Dont the tingles just go down your spine? I say fuck sex. Fuck the
family. How about a novel about a Trappist monk that is so moving, so
convincing that an entire generation of young men in their 20s enters the
priesthood? That would be revolutionary. Instead, American writers fluff the
metaphysical pillows that cushion readers delicate drowsy heads. I say lets
decapitate those heads or at the very least jettison all the therapeutic
horseshit. American writers should be questioning everything, bearing
down with flaming swords on all the bullshit in America not promoting it.
57
The extreme reverence for history and philosophy that writers hold. Burn
it down. Do not pander to the taste of the middle class. They will never
accept you. They are too busy watching the Disney channel.
58
I hate all the reverence thats crept into American and European
fiction. Theres not enough high-flying bullshit in American Letters. Theres
not enough leaping towards the marvelous in American novels. This is
evidenced by writers cannibalizing some other art form mostly painting

and shaping their novels around a work of art or some historical figure. This
marks the shrinkage of imagination; shows how intimidated we writers are
in the face of technology. Just because electronic gadgets are making people
a bunch of money writers have retreated into a somnambulistic romanticism
wherein we stand some art object upright and urge readers to marvel at it.
We cant make cool electronic gadgets but we are associated with
greatness in this form seems to go the thinking. Instead of grabbing life by
the balls and giving it a good twist, American writers fall into a sycophantic
trance and write as though something were far greater than their own
vision. Search and Destroy should be the motto of the imaginative writer.
Believe nothing. Make up everything. Lie lie lie and twist the world to your
vision.
59
But maybe you have no vision.