Novel Trends: The Observations of A Book Critic

By Jenny Shank, 4-19-07

I’ve reviewed books for several publications for over seven years now, and over the years I’ve noticed that the books I’m usually assigned to review tend to be set on the East Coast.  I’ve had stretches where I’ve reviewed nothing but books set in Manhattan or Brooklyn for months at a time.  This year has been different, though, with many major authors publishing books set in the Western U.S. 

Jane Smiley’s Ten Days In The Hills was set in Hollywood, while Jonathan Lethem, best-known for his Brooklyn-based work, instead set You Don’t Love Me Yet in L.A.  Sherman Alexie’s new novel, Flight, is a time-traveling adventure that visits a lot of geographical locations, most of which are in the West, including Idaho, Washington, and Montana.  Although I respect and admire these three writers, these novels disappointed me, for various reasons, mostly because they were not up to the standards of the writers’ best work.

Never fear, though: when older writers hit mid-career off-notes, there will always be new writers turning out brave new work.  For me this year so far, that role has been filled by Alex Espinoza.  Espinoza’s debut, Still Water Saints, brings to life a fictional, predominantly Latino California town.  I plan to interview Espinoza for NewWest.net soon.

Another trend I’ve noticed this year is that many writers seem to have the apocalypse on their minds.  There’s Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road which just won the Pulitzer Prize and was selected by Oprah for her book club, and British novelist Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse, due out in May.  The Pesthouse is set in America in the future at some unspecified time, after all the cities have fallen and the land has returned to agrarian lawlessness and the people are reduced to hunger and desperation.  Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which also comes out next month, is set way out West—in Alaska, and also plays with apocalyptic themes. 

The apocalypse was a popular topic around the year 2000 and after the September 11th attacks, but now it seems to have gained critical mass, with several writers previously known for realist fiction turning to what might be classified as speculative fiction to tell their stories, stories which are difficult not to read as commentary on the current national and global political situation.

Although Smiley and Alexie’s most recent novels were not as overtly apocalyptic as the three books mentioned above, Smiley’s is set at the beginning of the current Iraq war, with that violence as the back drop, and Alexie’s narrator is a troubled young man who describes himself as a “time-traveling mass murderer.” Needless to say, it’s not the best week for this book to find an audience.

The somber themes of this year’s crop of novels belies the reason many give for the rise of nonfiction and the fall of fiction in the marketplace—supposedly, nonfiction does a better job of reflecting the state of the world in troubled times.  But fiction can sometimes probe these questions more deeply, in the subconscious reaches of the mind.  And with disturbing news from home and abroad reaching us daily, has there ever been a time when we needed the transportive power of stories more?