On Excuse Writers
On Excuse Writers
John Updike and David Foster Wallace
But X does it, so why can’t I?
This is often behind what I read in novels that aren’t working.
They can be not working for lots of different reasons, many of which I’ve already gone into — woozy POV, lack of cause and effect, basic bad taste — but in many cases it’s because they are trying to do something another writer does, and does badly or does too much of, but they are doing it even worse.
(Some of these novels may be my own, in retrospect.)
The writer I always think of as an excuse writer is John Updike. He’s no longer a big influence on anyone, not so far as I can see. Correct me if you know of examples. David Foster Wallace’s review of Towards the End of Time (Observer, 1997) summed up the case for the prosecution —
Most of the literary readers I know personally are under 40, and a fair number are female, and none of them are big admirers of the postwar G.M.N.’s. But it’s Mr. Updike in particular they seem to hate. And not merely his books, for some reason–mention the poor man himself and you have to jump back:
‘Just a penis with a thesaurus.’
‘Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?’
‘Makes misogyny seem literary the same way Limbaugh makes fascism seem funny.’
This is no way merciful and somewhat Oedipal.
Updike, at his best, is a grander, slinkier, more nuanced prose artist than Foster Wallace — but it’s the kind of self-admiring fine mahogany veneer writing that Wallace’s foursquare flatpack pine did so much to discredit.
Or disavow.
There’s a lot of Vladimir Nabokov behind them both. Lolita’s attempt to ‘get’ America, to metaphorise and travelogue and list it, is all through Infinite Jest. It’s also behind most of Updike’s late career tics — his cuter similies, and his lyrical-empirical word-music, and his malingering descriptions of female anatomy. Though these tendencies had been there from the beginning. Especially the eye-pawing.
Boys’ stuff, as DFW’s review is pointing out.
I’m not here to continue the pile-on. John Updike has true virtues, chief of which is a vague but basic cloudy-core essential to all writers of Big Novels — he has a lust for life. He wants to include as much human life-experience as possible, including lust.
This is awkward for us in 2024, but we are self-censoring if it’s not there. Male as well as other lusts.
As with D.H. Lawrence or Henry Miller or Martin Amis, this may lead to occasional appalling chasms of embarrassment. But if your ambitions to stretch to being continental, then chasms are an inevitability.
They’re there to give a sense of appalling scale, like planet-designer Slartibartfast’s work on fjords in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
But maybe it’s the whole bigly big thing that’s problematic.
Someone has to look at the male gaze, still.
Back to excuse writing.
Our excuse writers can be of any sort — it’s not just they write long lush descriptions of the water dimpling the outside of an icy amber glass of truckstop water, and the cool mottled shadow it casts coruscatlingly aslant the ultramarine formica tabletop. They may have taken the hard No Adverbs pledge. They may seek out violences of plot and syntax. They may include every detail of their research into seventeenth century belt buckles or the mechanics of nuclear fission come what come may.
No, it’s not just that.
It’s that excuse writers do their thing and that is taken by us as justification for our doing it, too.
Which isn’t good enough. What we do has always to be it’s own justification.
A story can’t be pointing out of itself at another story and saying, Look, Dr Who plays fast and loose with the logic of time travel or Mary Gaitskill gets away with these kinds of letdown endings or Spark snatches scenes or Dostoyevsky digresses.
If you see a way something could and should be better, you need to try and make it better.
No excuses.
P.S.
I recently watched the The End of the Tour, the 2015 movie based on David Lipsky’s non-fiction book about journalistically getting to know, distress, buddy up with and mourn David Foster Wallace.
Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (Broadway Books, 2010).
I found it a lot better than expected although, as with almost all films about writers, there’s no writing in it. (Not no writing at all. There’s note-scribbling. But there’s no writing writing.)
In one scene, as the camera moves around Foster Wallace’s house, following the Lipsky character, who has waited until DFW is outside — scraping ice off his car’s windscreen — before conducting a voice-noted detail-tour, we see a postcard of John Updike stuck to the side of the fridge-freezer.
In case we missed it, this is pointed out by Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) saying —
Postcard of John Updike.
Perhaps the flattest, most deadpan line in the film.
Followed immediately by —
Brain comparison — male/female/dog cartoon.
Which, given the review quoted above, is perhaps the most niche joke in the film.
If there is a more niche joke, I missed it.
I know it’s really unfashionable to like John Updike, but I do. So many men still behave like some of his male characters. They just won’t admit to it. I grew up on the “Rabbit” novels. I didn’t love all of them.
But even at a young age, when I hadn’t even had relationships, his characters’ interactions reflected what I was seeing all around me.
Never read Updike or Foster Wallace (always meant to, now I think they’re unfashionable or even a bit cancelled?) But I get the excuse writing thing. Thanks for making me think about this. It’s just lazy of me when I start thinking - well, so and so does it, why can’t I? In fact this morning I was pondering using excessive footnotes in my novel. Why? No idea. But I figured that if Foster Wallace could do it so could I (you know, the writer I’ve never read). Then your post popped up and saved me a lot of trouble 😁