Why some novels are better than journalism
If columns had names, I’d want mine to be called The Way We Live Now, after the Trollope novel of that title. He was writing an “issue” novel about financial scandals, specifically railway fraud, in the 1870s, so no change there then.
Anthony Trollope rose at five each morning and wrote for three hours — 250 words every 15 minutes — before leaving for the office at nine, which is how he managed to write 47 novels. In a strange way, he was like columnists of today in that he wrote in a naturalistic style based on social realism and issues of the day, and he never ran out of material.
The way for journalists to stay current is to notice things, in daily life and in fiction, which is often as useful as nonfiction. For instance, I see salespeople are getting older. Women in their sixties are working in the towels section of department stores, and they’re not terribly happy about it nor about my refolding skills. The new 2016 Ikea catalogue (“It’s the little things that matter”) is packed with small inexpensive objects rather than large pieces of furniture. My cabbie is an accountant working 12-hour weekend shifts to earn extra money. Along with economic statistics, these snapshots show how much Canadians are suffering.
Here’s another story: small green homemade Fentanyl pills are killing people nationwide. Why are they taking the risk? Fiction is as helpful as fact in explaining why healthy, prosperous people might use a weekend drug to ease the pain of a humdrum existence.
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, the novel I have loved most in my life — I’ve bought a copy for each floor in my house — is about Theo, a boy, then a man, spending his life essentially alone after his mother dies in a terrorist bombing. It’s about polish and roughness, high and low, Tartt told Chatelaine.
Thanks to Tartt, I am closer to understanding post-traumatic stress disorder. “Certain configurations of people in public places could trigger it, a wartime urgency, someone cutting in front of me the wrong way or walking too fast at a particular angle was enough to throw me into tachycardia and triphammer panic.”
I see why serious self-medication might be called for. Theo has been knocking back handfuls of the Vicodins and Percocets he inherited from his father. Then he discovers tiny weaklooking pills that are 10 times as strong, powerful enough to kill someone without a tolerance, which is what they’ve been doing in Canada.
Theo uses opiates to survive loud, cruel, abrasive New York. For someone like him “afflicted practically to the point of spasticity and cerebral palsy — pills were the key to being not only competent, but high-functioning.”
Self-medication is Tartt’s big theme, but she’s also prescient about other American things: the weird self-storage industry, massive abandoned Las Vegas subdivisions so remote they can’t get pizza delivered, drought and heat, social class, the Golden Age of Dutch painting, and visual beauty in people, clothing, decor and architecture.
Other authors who were good on drugs easing the rub of life on the nerves: Coleridge, De Quincey, David Foster Wallace. DFW’s huge 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, centred on drug rehab, a subject he knew to his hurt core. The scene where Gately, in agony, is refusing painkillers and as a result losing his mind is a long, astonishing read: “The ceiling was breathing. It bulged and receded. It swelled and settled.”
The police recite time and places of the deaths. News stories tell you more about the dead. But Tartt and DFW teach you compassion. You walk in their characters’ shoes. This is particularly painful in the wonderful novel DFW left unfinished on his desk when he went outside to hang himself. The Pale King is about the U.S. Internal Revenue Service in 1985, a huge deliberately boring novel about the torture of boredom twinned with excessive sweating.
From trauma to taxation to esthetics, the strange habits and preferences of our era are tracked in fiction perhaps better than they are in non-fiction. Everyone’s now recommending Naloxone as a quick antidote to drug overdoses but no one tells you about the horror of this particular remedy, that you wake up feeling worse than you will ever feel.
Tartt, the novelist, has already explained this. She’s my sourcebook on everything from group dynamics to academia, snake-collecting and furniture repair. She contains multitudes. Journalists should dream of painting the world as well as she does.