Am I a Literary Luddite or do I Just Have Good Taste?

I read two books in British writer Rachael Cusk's much acclaimed trilogy and I have to tell you I don't get it—meaning I don't get what all the fuss is about. She's been quoted as saying that a novel's traditional make-up—characters, plot, description—is "fake and embarrassing," that because one has sufficiently suffered personally one only has to tell one's own story. I barely made it through the first book, Outline, where a writer in a first person narrative—has to be first person, remember, as there are no made up characters—gets on a plane and travels to another country to a literary event, runs into various people, has conversations with them where they tell her various things, and then she gets on a plane and goes home. It's neither autobiography, novel, or memoir, but is what is now called autofiction, like the unbelievably long books by Karl Ove Knausgaard that might not be so boring if they weren't so long. Is it because it has a new name that all the literary critics think it's so wonderful?

I skipped the second in the series, Transit, and made it through the third, Kudos, in which a writer gets on a plane, travels to another country to a literary event, runs into various people, has conversations with them where they tell her various things, and then she gets on a plane and goes home. This time I found the people she encounters a little more interesting than those in Outline, and their stories a little more emotionally engaging, but their suffering is not contextualized, their stories are fragmented and existential, and if there is something in this structure that is supposed to supplant the lack of theme and cohesiveness supplied by character, plot, and description, it's lost on me.

To not appear a literary luddite I have to say that I read another relatively new book that the critics loved called 10:04 by Ben Lerner, who is also a poet. If anyone had told me, you should read this book by someone who is a white Gen X guy who lives in hipster Brooklyn I would have said, not interested, but the book is beautiful and brilliant and I read it twice. Lerner's book could also be classified as autofiction, I suppose, but the difference between his conception of the genre and Cusk's is night and day: the warmth and breadth of the interplay between his muddled personal life and the neoliberal streets of New York or the art/fart of Marfa challenge the reader's imagination with humor and intelligence. In a passage in which he falls into the third person, Lerner summarizes the book: “His narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation.” This is expressed in numerous ways throughout. While dealing with his own serious illness the author agrees to become a sperm donor for his best friend Alex, scrupulously maintaining a Platonic relationship with her and trying to figure out what parenting might mean. He tries to establish community with an Occupy activist by allowing him to shower in his apartment and mentoring an eight-year-old boy while questioning the sincerity of his efforts. He volunteers at a food co-op as an ironic statement of capitalist consumerism while listening to a riveting story of a fellow worker's life. Ironies, contradictions, politics, personal dilemmas, humor, fear, and anxiety: the mixed bag of who we and what we confront explored by someone who's razor sharp intelligence makes every page a delight.

But then I had a conversation with my friend Terri, who I loaned Lerner's book to, and while she also thought it was an intelligent, funny book, especially the part about Marfa (she's a visual artist), as a working class lesbian she had more trouble with the white Gen X hipster Brooklyn genesis than I did. "Am I really all that interested in hearing the perspective of the dominant voice in literature again?" as she put it, even if he's smart and witty and entertaining?

I suppose what this all reveals is that I'm a white privileged secular humanist and that the literary trends that are correlative will resonate, and those that aren't, won't. That's why I never read Derrida, struggled with Foucault, could only read Pynchon and Burroughs in my twenties, gave up on Foster Wallace, am very picky with DeLillo, and am embarrassed that I've hardly read Borges.

But even within these boundaries there's something else at work, what you just have to admit is taste, or more presumptively, discretion. Just as when I thought the movie that won the Oscar year before last, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, was a racist piece of crap (eventually a number of other critics finally expressed this opinion as well) or Crash, which won a few years ago, was a contrived piece of crap. This may never happen with Rachel Cusk, but I'll stick to my opinion that her deadpan look at suffering doesn't do much to enlighten, entertain, or delight.