I have always admired the work of the Nouveau Roman authors especially that of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet. It's something about the minutiae, I guess: the detail Duras leaves out and the detail Robbe-Grillet includes.
In Duras' fiction she resists writing the crucial moments; she resists omniscient interpretation; she leaves this for the reader to fill in. In doing this, to the astute reader at least, the emphasis is doubled.
In Pour un Nouveau Roman Robbe-Grillet sets out the form of detail he is interested in: it's a detail of space and structure rather than movement and action. In his coded novel La Jalousie, plot and action is minimal, all emphasis lies in the detail of the exterior and interior construction of the banana plantation in which the novel is placed; the rooms the characters inhabit; the Venetian blinds the husband looks through when spying on his wife and her lover.
One thing these two great formal innovators have in common is the weight they manage to pack into rather flimsy little books. This has always intrigued me as a writer: how does one produce a slim volume that contains more literary weight per page than most fat, sprawling, literary epics? When I say "fat" and "sprawling" and "epic" I am not thinking of Gaddis, Pynchon, Foster Wallace et al. I'm thinking of the turgid, generation-spanning yawns that seem to pass for serious literature these days. You know the books I'm thinking about.
It seems today that in order for many novelists to be fully accepted by the literary establishment a gargantuan, ambitious work of Literature has to be produced. I tire of bland critics asking the age-old question: when is this writer going to produce something bigger?
David Jay's conclusion in his review of Gwendoline Riley's Sick Notes (her second novel published in 2004) is a fine example of this forced ideal: "Riley is clearly more a mood girl than a plot girl . . [but she] elaborates and defies her own promise, and says she's working on 'a big, proper book'."
I often think that debut novelists are under unfair pressure to move on to 'better' - ie bigger - things. How many times have we seen novelists fail when they accept this principle? Rebecca Ray is a fine contemporary example.
There's not that many who can resist writing more, and don't mistake length for depth. Heidi James understands the power of the novella. Short story writer HP Tinker seems to concur: in a recent interview he was asked when, if ever, he was going to produce a novel. If he did, Tinker said, that would be "failure".
And after reading Gwendoline Riley's latest novel Joshua Spassky I am completely convinced that she's as good as Marguerite Duras. Like the Nouveau Roman writers, Riley's prose is identifiable by its grave narrative pitch, choosing to ignore the ornamental metaphors and similes of dreary contemporary epics. Like Duras in particular her prose is ambiguous, it plays with time, space and perception.
Wouldn't it be great if there was more such less-ness?
