That was the question recently posed in the New Statesman by writer Ben Marcus (who wrote the magical The Flame Alphabet).
From the article...
Yet, in American fiction at least, the end times has graduated into de rigueur subject matter. Increasingly novelists cut their teeth on it and it’s starting to look like a rite of passage. Long a preoccupation of science fiction and horror writing, the apocalypse, as it looms closer, has become more intriguing to writers of literary fiction, more necessary to address. The last days no longer seem like a harmless fantasy. If this is a new development, it is worth considering why the end of the world is poised to join the suburbs and bad marriages as a distinctly American literary fascination.
After 11 September 2001, American novelists, asleep in their lairs, took heat for not responding soon enough to the attacks. In this case, “soon enough” meant within 24 hours. The question was pressing. Why must novelists take so long to process history? Or, worse, why must the novelist neglect history altogether, obsessed instead with the politics and sorrows within homes and suburban neighbourhoods that, measured against the rest of the world, are among the safest?
No comments:
Post a Comment