fieldus

Interesting enough shoptalk with the former barrister:
Mark Sarvas interviews Joseph O’Neill (via Nigel Beale).

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah, I find the third person very difficult. I do it in short stories, but… I’m sometimes tempted by a baroque third person. But that’s, again, hard to do or, oddly enough, too easy to do. Nothing about writing is straightforward, but it’s not especially difficult to write a humorous, verbally tricky fantasia, because that’s a way of dodging certain big challenges. The big challenge for me, as I said earlier, is intimacy. The third person seems particularly apt if you want to write a novel that is less intimate; the satiric novel comes to mind.

TEV: It’s a different feeling kind of work. Both reading it and writing it.

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah. But it can work really well. I mean look at someone like Jonathan Coe. Great third person writer. Great panoramic view of society and town and country and all the rest of it. He’s writing in a very specific tradition and really knows what he’s doing and can really do plot. My problem with third person, from a selfish point of view, is that I find it hard to write sentences that are ungratuitously interesting and at the same time don’t intrude or lapse into formal incoherence; and I’m interested in sentences that are both ends and means, because that’s the most interesting, high-stakes stuff, the stuff I most want to read. Third person sentences, when I write them, seem to gravitate unduly towards the most efficacious, most simple, pared down. This raises the problem of reductiveness, of false transparency, of false authority.

Typically, a writer’s style matures towards simplicity and stays there. I’m attracted to the idea of arriving at simplicity and then going onward from there. There’s a part of me that believes that flat, conversational writing, which has undoubted strengths and is the most popular way of writing fiction, is playing it safe. It can be a little too well-behaved. It can reinforce established ways of seeing things. If your third person is a little frisky or frilly, people will ask, “Who is this narrator? Where does his personality come from?”

TEV: … to whom does this sensibility belong or who is it being generated by?

Joseph O’Neill: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It’s extremely hard to have that. And I’m not very interested in third person narrators (or first person narrators) who are distracted by their authorial existence, since at this point that is usually just too old hat for words and, if you’re not careful, drags the novel down to the level of a Wikipedia-deep philosophical footnote. And then you have the free indirect style, which means that you slide from the third to the first person. Herzog is a superb example. Also, third person narratives lend themselves, in my hands, to plottiness, and the problem with plot is that it becomes – and again, all this is from my point of view – it becomes excessively psychological and ordinary. Whereas if you want a narrative capable of the full, flickering range of empathies, the sort of empathies that everybody has, that approximate the depth and spottiness of human apprehension, you are able to draw that out much more in the first person. At least, that’s the case with me. I suppose it means I’m as limited as a writer.

and then this on lyrical moments:

TEV: Why do you think there is a resistance among young, American writers to what you have called the lyrical moment?

Joseph O’Neill: I don’t know, actually. If there is, it may be because it’s so hard to write.

TEV: So, we’re lazy?

Joseph O’Neill: No, I mean that if it were the case that everyone could write a so-called lyrical novel if they wanted to but had decided against it, then their resistance to it has authority. But is that really the case? I doubt it very much.

Take Zadie Smith, for example, who is resistant to the lyrical realist novel at the moment. I think she’s allowed to be, because she’s actually written that way in her last book, and has kind of shown that she can do it and has come away from it with reservations. She’s earned her resistance.

That said, there are a lot of critics, or readers, who don’t have a taste for so-called lyrical writing and can’t be expected to write lyrically before they voice a negative opinion about it. And again, you can’t really argue with taste. If people prefer to read something else, that’s fine.

You’ve mentioned this resistance of younger Americans, who are you thinking of, in particular?

TEV: No one necessarily in particular, really. Rather, I was thinking back to your comments about American writers under 65 and coupling that with things that you talked about in your interview about the lyrical moment. It seems to me like there is a nexus of those of those concerns.

Joseph O’Neill: Yes.

TEV: Because I agree with you. It’s interesting that you have brought up Zadie Smith because I was going to ask about her next. I think that a lot of people draw the wrong kind of conclusions with a piece like the one that she wrote. I think that it sets up some false oppositions. I feel like this form of the novel is capacious enough to accommodate all different styles

Joseph O’Neill: Yes.

TEV: And the notion that one has to chose between Netherland or Remainder just seems silly. I liked Remainder a great deal, as well. I don’t feel that they’re mutually exclusive, that one must declare an allegiance.

Joseph O’Neill: I’d actually read and liked Remainder before that piece. And I thought it was a perfectly good piece of writing. I’m not sure I would describe it as unconventional, not least because that description, as I’ve said, would not mean very much.

TEV: Yes. But I think that some of the sentiments that she expresses hold sway among this younger generation of writers, whether it’s people coming out of the McSweeney’s School or the purveyors of the uber-ironic, the tendency toward a hip nihilism or something like that that. That they mistrust, in essence, the idea of a beautiful sentence. Some people find that corny, the notion of a beautiful sentence.

Joseph O’Neill: Well, it depends on how you define them as beautiful. I mean, you know, Foster Wallace wrote many beautiful sentences. I mean, there’s nothing but beautiful sentences in his work. Even though he had a particular way of doing it. What makes a sentence beautiful, for me, is its conscientiousness. A hip, ironic sensibility is not necessarily conscientious. Neither is a sensibility that latches on to dusks and dawns and roses.

Relates to the Zadie Smith’s brace review of Remainder and Netherland in the NYRB.