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Sad people who do not know what they want in life, Leo Tolstoy remarked on reading Ivan Turgenev’s novel On the Eve, should not write novels. But without melancholy and confusion, where would fiction be? No literary genre is more haunted by self-doubt than the novel—but only the novel affronts the minutiae of existence with such subversive particularity. If the heroic and sublime are the stuff of drama and poetry, fiction seeks transcendence in the quotidian.
Yet this project—at once modest and disturbing—has always attracted hostility, both from critics, who have accused the novel of everything from immorality to insignificance and, perversely, from novelists themselves. From Tolstoy’s gibe at Turgenev to Will Self’s lofty characterisation of Joanna Trollope as “a lower middlebrow novelist who has just enough sophistication to convince her readership they are getting an upper-middlebrow product,” the intellectually superior love to anathematise domestic fiction as the opium of the reading classes.
In her 1920s essay on modern fiction, Virginia Woolf compared the development of the novel with that of technology—the one a steady, coherent advance; the other a looping, digressive journey, as wayward as the trajectory of Corporal Trim’s stick in Tristram Shandy. “It is doubtful,” Woolf wrote, “whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle.”
No fictional genre more eloquently exemplifies this circular tendency than the domestic novel. Marginalised, neglected and patronised, the fiction of small incidents and family life is regularly rediscovered—often with exclamations of astonishment at its quiet excellence from the same people who were once disposed to ignore or dismiss it. The exhilaration of rediscovery is invariably accompanied by a tendency to regard the new-found oeuvre as though it were a species of literary unicorn: unique and without precedent rather than a creative reinvention of a genre whose subversions are no less devastating for taking place among the shopping baskets and coffee cups of domestic life.
Critics of domestic fiction suspect it of complacency, of a lack of ambition, a tendency to celebrate and affirm—rather than challenge or disturb—the milieu that it describes. The savage indignation that once animated the fictions of Margaret Drabble and Doris Lessing has dwindled—so the argument goes—to the tepid cosiness of the Aga Saga. Great convulsions in the history of humanity seem to demand an equally momentous fictional response—the American novel continues its struggle to address the events of 9/11. Yet as the structures of society become more inchoate and overwhelming, a new generation of modern novelists finds fresh meaning not in public events but in the drama of individual lives. More interested in character than plot, intensely preoccupied with fictional being, rather than doing, these writers affront the melancholy disorder of existence with discomfiting intensity.
One of the most startling new anatomists of domestic life is the Norwegian novelist, Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose quasi-fictional six-volume project My Struggle has become an international bestseller. Knausgaard’s inspiration is Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu; like Proust’s narrator, he is obsessed with passing time, and the relationship between lived experience and memory. As a novelist, his interest is in the “small incidents that... have no more gravity than the dust stirred up by a passing car, or the seeds of a withering dandelion dispersed by the breath from a small mouth.”
My Struggle demands an act of surrender from the reader: it is total immersion or nothing. But once immersed, the effect is strangely mesmerising: the potency of grief, love, horror and boredom of Knausgaard’s experience distilled into a narrative that is not so much a description of life as it is life itself.
It is hard to imagine a greater contrast to the lacerating self-exposure of Knausgaard than the provocative self-effacement of Elena Ferrante, whose tetralogy of Neapolitan novels—My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Lost Daughter—is an excoriating account of a friendship between two women that evolves over six decades. The brutal candour of Ferrante’s fiction is matched by a stringent distaste for publicity. She writes under a pseudonym and—with the exception of a recent Paris Review interview conducted by her publisher—declines to discuss her work.
What Knausgaard’s fiction and Ferrante’s have in common—the one loose, discursive and self-obsessed; the other tense, fiercely wrought and secretive—is a fascination with the relationship between the act of living and the consciousness of existence. Ferrante’s narrator, Lena, is herself a successful novelist, and a recurring theme in her relationship with her childhood friend, Lilu, is their continual struggle for control of their joint narrative. While Lena finds a route out of the Neapolitan ghetto to live in a world of ideas and the intellect, and Lilu continues to live in the narrow, violent and restrictive milieu in which the pair grew up, their lives remain inextricably entwined: Lena’s is the voice that tells their story, but her relationship with her material is bereft without Lilu’s authenticating presence.
When the trajectory of a life is declined or interrupted, what form might the ensuing narrative take? This is the question addressed in Rachel Cusk’s novel Outline, whose protagonist finds herself at odds with the very medium—language—in which she works. A novelist who travels to Athens to teach a week-long creative writing class, she becomes a kind of receptacle for the narratives of the people she meets, who pour out their accounts of disappointment, desire, intimacy, ambition, longing and pain in a series of monologues of which she is the all but mute recipient.
Her interlocutors’ insistence on their own emotions contrasts vividly with her own enigmatic self-effacement: “I had come,” she says, “to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible. There was a great difference... between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.”
This willed passivity has not blunted the dangerous edge of the narrator’s sense of the preposterous: on the flight out to Athens, she falls into conversation with her neighbour, a wealthy, elderly Greek man who, on learning that she is a writer, hastens to reassure her that his trashy airplane reading, “a well-thumbed Wilbur Smith,” does not represent the full extent of his literary taste. “He could recognise a fine prose style; one of his favourite writers, for example, was John Julius Norwich.”
An insistent alienation gives Cusk’s narrator the impression that she is observing her life, rather than inhabiting it. “Of those two ways of living—living in the moment and living outside it—which was the more real?” she wonders.
This theme of a disconnection between lived experience and perception is beautifully explored by Colm Tóibín in his most recent novel, Nora Webster. Marriage—so often represented in fiction as a prison—has been for Nora a liberation: “She thought of the freedom that marriage to Maurice had given her, the freedom, once the children were in school... to walk into this room at any time of the day and take down a book and read; the freedom to... look out of the window at the street and Vinegar Hill across the valley, or the clouds in the sky, letting her mind be idle.” But now this transcendent stillness is lost. Nora’s husband, Maurice, has died young from cancer, leaving her with four children to support, and she is beset by the ugly clamour of bereavement.
Tóibín describes the daily collisions between Nora’s inner life, raw with grief, and the onslaught of the small brutalities of daily life—a bad haircut, a humiliating audition for a local choir, the incessant visits of condolence from neighbours—in prose so elegantly stripped of conscious style that it seems almost to dissolve the boundaries between author, character and reader.
“Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall,” wrote Virginia Woolf. “Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.” This is what the best domestic fiction does with distinction: finding beauty and meaning in the melancholy and confusion of ordinary lives.
Sad people who do not know what they want in life, Leo Tolstoy remarked on reading Ivan Turgenev’s novel On the Eve, should not write novels. But without melancholy and confusion, where would fiction be? No literary genre is more haunted by self-doubt than the novel—but only the novel affronts the minutiae of existence with such subversive particularity. If the heroic and sublime are the stuff of drama and poetry, fiction seeks transcendence in the quotidian.
Yet this project—at once modest and disturbing—has always attracted hostility, both from critics, who have accused the novel of everything from immorality to insignificance and, perversely, from novelists themselves. From Tolstoy’s gibe at Turgenev to Will Self’s lofty characterisation of Joanna Trollope as “a lower middlebrow novelist who has just enough sophistication to convince her readership they are getting an upper-middlebrow product,” the intellectually superior love to anathematise domestic fiction as the opium of the reading classes.
In her 1920s essay on modern fiction, Virginia Woolf compared the development of the novel with that of technology—the one a steady, coherent advance; the other a looping, digressive journey, as wayward as the trajectory of Corporal Trim’s stick in Tristram Shandy. “It is doubtful,” Woolf wrote, “whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle.”
No fictional genre more eloquently exemplifies this circular tendency than the domestic novel. Marginalised, neglected and patronised, the fiction of small incidents and family life is regularly rediscovered—often with exclamations of astonishment at its quiet excellence from the same people who were once disposed to ignore or dismiss it. The exhilaration of rediscovery is invariably accompanied by a tendency to regard the new-found oeuvre as though it were a species of literary unicorn: unique and without precedent rather than a creative reinvention of a genre whose subversions are no less devastating for taking place among the shopping baskets and coffee cups of domestic life.
"Critics of domestic fiction suspect it of complacency, of a lack of ambition"A certain species of literary novelist—clever, speculative, well versed in literary theory—inclines to the opinion that fiction becomes more serious the further it travels from home. From George Eliot to Jane Gardam, there is no shortage of evidence to refute this view. And now there is a new trend for contemporary writers to reimagine the domestic novel—to show how the power to unsettle and disturb can be contained within the most ordinary of surroundings. They deliver a conclusive rebuttal to the view that the domestic arena is no place for the life of the mind.
Critics of domestic fiction suspect it of complacency, of a lack of ambition, a tendency to celebrate and affirm—rather than challenge or disturb—the milieu that it describes. The savage indignation that once animated the fictions of Margaret Drabble and Doris Lessing has dwindled—so the argument goes—to the tepid cosiness of the Aga Saga. Great convulsions in the history of humanity seem to demand an equally momentous fictional response—the American novel continues its struggle to address the events of 9/11. Yet as the structures of society become more inchoate and overwhelming, a new generation of modern novelists finds fresh meaning not in public events but in the drama of individual lives. More interested in character than plot, intensely preoccupied with fictional being, rather than doing, these writers affront the melancholy disorder of existence with discomfiting intensity.
One of the most startling new anatomists of domestic life is the Norwegian novelist, Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose quasi-fictional six-volume project My Struggle has become an international bestseller. Knausgaard’s inspiration is Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu; like Proust’s narrator, he is obsessed with passing time, and the relationship between lived experience and memory. As a novelist, his interest is in the “small incidents that... have no more gravity than the dust stirred up by a passing car, or the seeds of a withering dandelion dispersed by the breath from a small mouth.”
"My Struggle demands an act of surrender from the reader: it is total immersion or nothing"Written in the first person, with a narrator also called Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, although described as fiction, is indistinguishable from autobiography (a fact that has begun to irk some of the people described in its pages). At moments it can seem as though Knausgaard has undertaken to describe his entire existence in real time: “After putting down the receiver I remained in the chair for a long while, sunk in something that was not thoughts, nor feelings, more a kind of atmosphere, the way an empty room can have an atmosphere. When I absent-mindedly raised the cup to my lips I drank a mouthful and the coffee was lukewarm. I nudged the mouse to remove the screensaver and check the time. Six minutes to three. Then I read the text I’d written again, cut and pasted it into my jottings file. I’d been working on a novel for five years, and so whatever I wrote could not be lacklustre. And this was not radiant enough.” And so, relentlessly, on, in Knausgaard’s flat prose, for almost 500 pages (and that’s just volume one).
My Struggle demands an act of surrender from the reader: it is total immersion or nothing. But once immersed, the effect is strangely mesmerising: the potency of grief, love, horror and boredom of Knausgaard’s experience distilled into a narrative that is not so much a description of life as it is life itself.
It is hard to imagine a greater contrast to the lacerating self-exposure of Knausgaard than the provocative self-effacement of Elena Ferrante, whose tetralogy of Neapolitan novels—My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Lost Daughter—is an excoriating account of a friendship between two women that evolves over six decades. The brutal candour of Ferrante’s fiction is matched by a stringent distaste for publicity. She writes under a pseudonym and—with the exception of a recent Paris Review interview conducted by her publisher—declines to discuss her work.
What Knausgaard’s fiction and Ferrante’s have in common—the one loose, discursive and self-obsessed; the other tense, fiercely wrought and secretive—is a fascination with the relationship between the act of living and the consciousness of existence. Ferrante’s narrator, Lena, is herself a successful novelist, and a recurring theme in her relationship with her childhood friend, Lilu, is their continual struggle for control of their joint narrative. While Lena finds a route out of the Neapolitan ghetto to live in a world of ideas and the intellect, and Lilu continues to live in the narrow, violent and restrictive milieu in which the pair grew up, their lives remain inextricably entwined: Lena’s is the voice that tells their story, but her relationship with her material is bereft without Lilu’s authenticating presence.
When the trajectory of a life is declined or interrupted, what form might the ensuing narrative take? This is the question addressed in Rachel Cusk’s novel Outline, whose protagonist finds herself at odds with the very medium—language—in which she works. A novelist who travels to Athens to teach a week-long creative writing class, she becomes a kind of receptacle for the narratives of the people she meets, who pour out their accounts of disappointment, desire, intimacy, ambition, longing and pain in a series of monologues of which she is the all but mute recipient.
Her interlocutors’ insistence on their own emotions contrasts vividly with her own enigmatic self-effacement: “I had come,” she says, “to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible. There was a great difference... between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.”
This willed passivity has not blunted the dangerous edge of the narrator’s sense of the preposterous: on the flight out to Athens, she falls into conversation with her neighbour, a wealthy, elderly Greek man who, on learning that she is a writer, hastens to reassure her that his trashy airplane reading, “a well-thumbed Wilbur Smith,” does not represent the full extent of his literary taste. “He could recognise a fine prose style; one of his favourite writers, for example, was John Julius Norwich.”
An insistent alienation gives Cusk’s narrator the impression that she is observing her life, rather than inhabiting it. “Of those two ways of living—living in the moment and living outside it—which was the more real?” she wonders.
This theme of a disconnection between lived experience and perception is beautifully explored by Colm Tóibín in his most recent novel, Nora Webster. Marriage—so often represented in fiction as a prison—has been for Nora a liberation: “She thought of the freedom that marriage to Maurice had given her, the freedom, once the children were in school... to walk into this room at any time of the day and take down a book and read; the freedom to... look out of the window at the street and Vinegar Hill across the valley, or the clouds in the sky, letting her mind be idle.” But now this transcendent stillness is lost. Nora’s husband, Maurice, has died young from cancer, leaving her with four children to support, and she is beset by the ugly clamour of bereavement.
Tóibín describes the daily collisions between Nora’s inner life, raw with grief, and the onslaught of the small brutalities of daily life—a bad haircut, a humiliating audition for a local choir, the incessant visits of condolence from neighbours—in prose so elegantly stripped of conscious style that it seems almost to dissolve the boundaries between author, character and reader.
“Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall,” wrote Virginia Woolf. “Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.” This is what the best domestic fiction does with distinction: finding beauty and meaning in the melancholy and confusion of ordinary lives.
