No Judgment by Lauren Oyler

Author:Lauren Oyler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

I Am the One Who Is Sitting Here, for Hours and Hours and Hours

For writers too lazy to keep a diary, too neurotic to report the news, too self-centered to review others’ work, and too prosaic to compose a poem, writing fiction is, really, the only option. Happily, writing fiction does not come with the disappointment of settling for the last resort; it is also the best option. There might be functions served better by other forms—education, information, advocacy, argument, gossip, prurience—but there is nothing better to write or to read than fiction, broadly construed. Fiction can contain any percentage of truth and retain its status as fictional; it can expand to fill a huge space or contract to fit in a dark, cramped one. To write it, one might conduct research, as in reportage; or make use of memory and personal experience, as in memoir; or comment at length on other works of art, or art in general, as in criticism; or use form and language provocatively and idiosyncratically, as in poetry. One might also insert, wholesale, a work in one of these forms into a work of fiction. “The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting,” Henry James wrote in 1884. “The ways in which it is at liberty to accomplish this result . . . are as various as the temperament of man, and they are successful in proportion as they reveal a particular mind, different from others. A novel is in its broadest definition a personal impression of life; that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression.”

Isn’t this nice? Isn’t this wonderful? Yes. Yes. But lately—this has always been a problem, but I’m concerning myself with it as of lately—readers have become skeptical of fiction and particularly of its possibilities. Over the past fifteen years or so, the “personal impression” part began to really upset people. It was overshadowing everything else, they said. It was gentrifying the novel form with its little observations about the internet and identity politics, with its unwillingness to build a world of its own. Why were novelists now always just talking about themselves? No one knew what to make of it, or even why it was so annoying to them. This led to all sorts of irritating things being said and written about the phenomenon, which, despite having a name coined decades ago, many people couldn’t really believe was actually a thing.

The personal, I felt, had done nothing wrong. It had done, actually, many things right. Its popularity in fiction at this particular moment made a lot of sense. Maybe everyone was mad about the historical moment we were trapped in—the past fifteen or so years? Not unlikely. The past fifteen or so years have seemed uniquely unglamorous, uniquely unworthy of being preserved in prose fiction, the best of all literary forms.

I became so

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