Joyce Carol Oates invented oats and bodied every contemporary novel I love

Wan little husks of auto fiction? Yum.

Hopefully Twitter won’t exist by the time I’m 82, though if it does, I hope I use it like Joyce Carol Oates. When she’s not posting horrific pictures of her infected foot, she’s disregarding a whole era of novels as “wan little husks of ‘auto fiction’ with space between paragraphs to make the book seem longer”.

Tao Lin, the alleged rapist whose novel ‘Taipei’ I did my honours thesis on and whose drawing of a ‘hampster’ I have tattooed on my right bicep¹, responded with a correction. Um, it’s ‘autofiction’! Not ‘auto fiction’.

Bec Shaw, of course, responded by quote tweeting the all-time Tweet I reference in the headline.

Hardly the critique of ‘great ambition, substance and imagination’ Oates is searching for in contemporary lit — mostly because I don’t think that’s what most authors want to do.

I’ll try to not give him too much praise for obvious reasons, but Lin’s response is, regrettably, perfect: pedantry is the internet’s base language, sure, but it’s also in keeping with his (and most other ‘alt-lit’ writers and successors’) fixation on arbitrary importance.

The space between ‘auto’ and ‘fiction’ underscores Oates’ point that they’re so incompatible the words can’t even be hyphenated, but Lin disagrees, given all he’s ever done is thinly veiled descriptions of his own life and psyche (where his works painstakingly detail mundane movements/thoughts to the point one reviewer said Richard Yates made him suicidal).²

Because, uh, what the fuck else are we supposed to do? Oates laments a lack of ambition to write a great, all-encompassing, epoch-defining novel that captures the human condition, but that metric feels increasingly ‘high school English teacher’ rhetoric — aka, incredibly important and a lifeline to me as a teenager, but utterly useless now. I’m sure there have been a thousand attempts since, but Oates seems to wish novels were Freedom 2.0, an arrogant form of literature where the author writes with the obvious intention of creating an epoch-defining novel.

Obviously race, gender and class come into this — Zadie Smith, Elena Ferrante and Min Jin Lee write similar generation-spanning family epics, but they are praised for the way they translate specific, rather than ‘universal’ experience. Universality is a ridiculous aim, and most zeitgeist-y novels of the moment simply have no interest in achieving it: the only ‘universal’ thing is the air of most of them, a kind of listlessness and ephemerality of character (My Year Of Rest And Relaxation, the Outline trilogy, Rachel Kushner, Milkman, all notably female examples). Nothing feels more shared than a feeling of alienation from your own life, where we all pretend to be the protagonist and mine our thoughts to create ‘wan little husks’ of meaning, pointing towards it desperately. As Lady Gaga famously sung in Artpop track ‘G.U.Y.’, “love me, love me, please retweet!”

Brandon Taylor, who wrote the excellent novel Real Life last year, had his own Substack rant about Oates’ crusade against what he calls the “millennial novel”, which is undoubtedly much more informed than mine. I really liked his point about how most of these ‘wan little husks’ are very intentionally thin.

“What the Millennial Novel recreates to the delight of its audience (me, I am the audience) is an attitude, a posture toward the world. What physicality there is to a Millennial Novel exists solely to create the pattern of a social life. The physicality in a Millennial Novel is a kind of anti-physicality. Character vapor…. The primary virtue of the Millennial Novel is the thinness of its surface.”

Duh! And that thinness doesn’t always work, especially if you’ve just read something similar that pulls it off better (Rachel Cusk has ruined 90% of novels I try to read). I recently read Melissa Broder’s eating-disorder-novella Milk Fed after the hype online, and found its protagonist way too, um, thin, an amalgamation of ticked boxes (Jewish, abused, queer) than a fully formed person.³

I liked the beginning of it a lot, which mostly established the protagonist Rachel’s routine around eating, the calory counting and obsession that structured her days. It was morbidly pathological — it was clear that the author had distance from the first person and was clearly showing how sad this thinking was. But then, as it went on, that distance shrunk, and the protagonist became a mouth-piece for pro-Palestinian rants, as if she were merely a cypher for an Instagram infographic.

Which, to be honest, I feel a lot: I feel passionately about, say, Palestinian independence, but can’t really articulate it when I get in an argument with my family about it. It’s always embarrassing to be caught outsourcing our arguments, and when we speak, it’s clear that while they’re our own thoughts, it’s not our own words. That’s not what happens in Milk Fed: the novel’s tone sides with the protagonist’s indignant attitude, as if assuming that the reader has read all the same posts (and, uh, I have!).

It’s lazy, and possibly built out of fear of overstepping a line (and for good reason!). We collectively are more comfortable when it comes to speaking of our own individual experience (again, that’s not a bad thing), and so most writing at the moment centres the idea of “write what you know”.

Autofiction is a course correction against the arrogance and violence within speaking for other voices. It’s all very that joke from Girls’ pilot, where Hannah says she’s not ‘the voice of her generation’, but ‘a voice of a generation’, though, of course, secretly she hopes she is the voice. I’m projecting here, duh, but so many of us hold that contradiction: we want to be the voice. Wouldn’t that validate our ‘wan little husks’ of our lives?

I don’t really disagree with Joyce’s tweet, though I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Sure, we probably don’t need another novel about a disaffected novelist, but the intentional ephemerality of these ‘millennial novels’ together feels like ‘the’ voice of ‘the moment’ — the space in-between to make the books and our lives weightier.

1. This was all done, uh, before the allegations. In short, we simply no longer stan, sis!

2. I hate that I wrote my thesis in 2015, haven’t read it in years and can still remember specific details about it. I guess I worked on it for a year, making it by far the most I’ve ever thought about anything I’ve written: it’s also easily my least-read work ever, save potentially for this newsletter (time will tell). Writing for writing’s sake? May as well do honours.

3. Shaad pulls me up in the comments on this, I think he’s right to point out this is a bit unfair. He’s right to say it’s a Red Scare-ism, one I’ve used instead of unpacking what I meant - box ticking isn’t quite right so much as surface scratching, for me. Anyway I respond to his comment below and hopefully that is clearer.