Wonderbread Fiction: Quasi Magical Realism and Pseudo Tragedy

I came across this article called Wonder Bread, by Melvin Jules Bukiet in The American Scholar. In it, he identifies a brand of writer, mostly young, hailing from the nether borough, writing in a particular style, that he calls Brooklyn Books of Wonder. He takes on the recent books of Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss and others. Read the entire article here, it is quite entertaining. How could you not enjoy Manhattanite sniping at 'latte-swilling sensitives' over in Park Slope and beyond.

This article caught my attention because I've been thinking about emotion and art, reading Aristotle's Poetics and considering the experience of emotion in response to a work of art. Unlike Plato, Aristotle did not disdain imitation, or mimesis. In direct contrast to Plato Aristotle regards catharsis, the experience of emotion in response to drama, as edifying.

The Brooklyn Books of Wonder, or BBoW, are self indulgent pseudo-profound preening, according to Bukiet, that use trauma to provoke mawkish sentimentality instead of a robust confrontation with the human condition. In other words, a BBoW is kitsch.

He takes issue with these writers, leveling the charge of narcissism against them. Using tragedy as a backdrop, they disguise solipsism as profundity. He also finds common threads of sentimentalism in their writing, and is impatient with its self obsession. For all its apparent 'dark' subject matter, he calls them 'sheeps in wolves clothing.' In his view, their books resemble young adult novels, "that ostensibly face “issues” but pull punches for their tender audience." This is because "Like many YA novels, which are constructed for a pedagogical market, the BBoWs insist on finding a therapeutic lesson in their dark material."

If the whole point of this memoirish trend is that the author "learns something," this fails to satisfy. Why might this be?

First, it sands down the edges of the human condition, where there isn't always a lesson in every tragedy. Things don't always happen for a reason. Second, the text hovers between an orientation towards plot, which moves toward a resolution, and characters, who strain toward action. Hovering, but unfurling neither plot nor character, these characters think, and they think about thinking. A lot.

Bukiet is particularly harsh toward Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones:

Every impulse in every sane reader must shriek No! at this pabulum. It’s not lovely that Susie’s been slaughtered, hacked, and dumped in a pit. It’s not lovely that icy Mr. Harvey gets his comeuppance by a conveniently dropped icicle as the pit containing Susie’s body parts is being drained, leading us to assume that her remains will be found and that she will finally get a lovely stone.

Hands down the best sentences I've read all year:

Unfortunately, it’s false to all human experience to find “growth” in tragedy. In fact, the dull truth is that pain is tautological. The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering.

This is not a disdain for wonder. Philosophy begins with wonder, as Socrates famously said. Rather, I think Bukiet is impatient with literary tricks.

"BBoWs are escape novels, albeit garnished with intellectual flourishes. They’re kitsch, which Milan Kundera defined as “the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.”

Serious fiction, literature, even if it’s fabulist, sharpens reality. BBoWs elude reality to avoid the taint of anger or cynicism or the passion for revenge felt by real people in similar situations. Instead of telling a story of brute survival, BBoWs indulge in a dream of benign rescue."

This distinction between art and kitsch rests on the conviction that art reveals something about the world, beyond a writer's solipsism. Even when the subject is the self, as in memoir and other autobiographical writing, when it is good it turns the reader outward.

Writing helps us to see and understand the world better. Kitsch, on the other hand, is a mirror that we hold up and look into and smile and laugh and cry with, experiencing the self and not the world.

I share Bukiet's feeling that The Lovely Bones sifted out the grist, leaving refined white flour, soft 'everything happens for a reason' wonderbread.

Art fails where 'I learned something from it' is the height of understanding. That's after school special shit. The experience of emotion through drama is instructive, but not more about me - more about humanity in general, and the world.

In evangelical churches one abhorrently mawkish form of storytelling is the conversion 'testimony,' where someone tells of the good that came out of their two year old's death from leukemia, because the parents were there every day and they got to tell the hospital staff about Jesus (yes, I have been in an congregation where someone really did tell that story about a couple who lost their child.) Repulsive.

Finally, Bukiet also unmasks a few their tricks - pop culture references, blending 'high' art with 'low' and the profligate use of hyphens, for example. I cannot comment on that criticism, except to say that as a reader I do dislike seeing the strings, so to speak. Thinly veiled metaphors, MFA constructions like 'morning sharp as the back of a fish' are a turnoff. (Again, I say this as a reader)

It does feel as though contemporary writing has taken a magical realist turn, as with the current hoopla over Junot Diaz' The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Whatever you make of Bukiet's criticism, wonder is here to stay, for a while at least. But absurdity without reprieve is a recipe for insanity, so I understand the inclination toward a softer version, soft in the middle and devoid of substance.