New York Magazine‘s Sam Anderson — who is, in my opinion, a top contender for a spot on IHateYouAndIWantYourLife.com — has written a fascinating piece outlining his view of the way ambitious novels have changed in the past ten years.
Those doorstops from the late 90s — Infinite Jest being Anderson’s main example — have given way to smaller novels “obsessed with creating and capturing voices,” books like Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Anderson’s main counterexample to Infinite Jest, Junot Díaz’s Oscar Wao. Why is that?
Anderson argues that the web has indeed changed the way we read. No, it doesn’t mean the death of literature, but we have become accustomed to taking in dozens or hundreds of voices in a single sitting — everything from the single-line updates on Twitter to posts like this, and when you follow the links, articles and essays — and although we may stay engaged for hours on end, we’ve gotten used to constant novelty. And this is why he thinks Oscar Wao was such a successful book, artistically and commercially. Anderson observes that it took Díaz eleven years to follow his first book, and that
instead of pouring that time and energy into making Oscar Wao long and sprawling and sweeping and universal, Díaz made the book radically particular and condensed. It performs classic meganovel services— tracking a family through several generations, telling the history of an entire nation—in 350 pages. It’s rare to find a novel so short so often referred to as “epic.”
The really stunning thing about Oscar Wao, in true aughts fashion, is its style. Díaz turns the book over to a small crowd of narrators, each of whom seems to channel 100 different subcultures and dialects. The result is a reference-studded Spanglish loaded so densely with extratextual shout-outs (ringwraiths, Le Corbusier, Joseph Conrad’s wife) it practically requires the web as an unofficial appendix. The book could have been sponsored by Google and Wikipedia; you either have to consult them constantly or just surrender to the vastness of the knowledge you don’t have—which is, of course, its own kind of pleasure.
