The Din in the Head
By Cynthia Ozick, Houghton Mifflin, 2006

      Cynthia Ozick has a point — and a good one — when she claims that they don’t write novels the way they used to. Any honest critic would admit that contemporary novels too often privilege artifice over thoughtfulness, formal innovation over writerly craft, gimmickry over narrative. In The Din in the Head, a collection of critical essays, Ozick bemoans the absence of respect for the transcendent tradition of novel writing in the age of postmodernism. I’d certainly be the first to agree with her on her most basic points, but the essays in the volume contain enough contradiction, elitism and conservatism to make them slightly off-putting even to a reader as anti-postmodern as myself.

      In her introduction, Ozick takes exception with the assertion by critic Susan Sontag, first expressed in the mid-1960s, that the literary tradition as we had known it was dead and that the line between high art and popular culture had been erased. That in the future, writers who engaged with, say, pop music carried just as much artistic clout as did those who continued in the tradition of, say, Shakespeare or Henry James. Ozick did not, and does not, agree; artistic quality, she argues, is not some arbitrary, relative thing. Standards are valid, tradition has value and art is not impossible to define.

      In the 40 years since Sontag’s statements, we’ve certainly seen the fallout from the post-modern revolution. Popular culture has invaded the literary world, and it’s often difficult to tell the serious writers from the empty-headed stylists (that is, until you read their books). But for the most part, Ozick doesn’t concern herself with the here and now; the essays in Din — many of them critical reviews of particular books, others merely literary musings — are focused primarily on the writers that Ozick admires, and most of them have been dead for a long time.

      Ozick’s heroes are sometimes obvious (Henry James, Isaac Babel, Saul Bellow, Sylvia Plath). At other times she jumps to the defense of writers who aren’t generally considered part of the canon, as when she fends off those who would cast Rudyard Kipling as the creator of trifles. At still other times, she’s not nearly as enamored of the greats as one might expect; she has a few problems with one of Tolstoy’s early novels, and her praise of John Updike borders on the lukewarm. Still, there’s nothing remotely iconoclastic in Ozick’s approach, and that’s the point: she comes to praise the literary icons, not to bury them.

      One of her most withering criticisms, though, is fairly contemporary, and it’s the one that I most wanted to stand up and applaud. She recounts the rejection by Jonathon Franzen, author of the much-praised novel The Corrections, of an invitation to be part of Oprah Winfrey’s book club. “I feel like I’m solidly in the high-art literary tradition,” Franzen said in explanation of why he felt himself above participation in Oprah’s project. Ozick mercilessly attacks Franzen, not just for his poor grammar, but for his immature and self-conscious inclusion of himself in the stratosphere of literary talent. Those legendary writers who established Franzen’s “high-art” tradition, Ozick argues, never considered themselves high-artists — they simply made art. Kids today, she seems to want to say, spend too much time telling themselves that they’re artists and not enough time honing their craft. And for Franzen, she has a retort much like Lloyd Bensen’s famous admonishment of Dan Quayle: I’ve read high-art, she suggests, and you’re not high-art.

      But sometimes Ozick’s critical parameters are a bit too narrow, and sometimes they turn around and bite themselves. For one thing, her stable of admired writers is markedly aged; with the exception of Philip Roth, most of them did their writing at least a half-century ago, many of them long before that. Are we really to believe that no serious novels have been written in the last years of the twentieth century, or are we simply to conclude that Ozick, grumpy and disillusioned, stopped paying attention decades ago?

      And although she discredits the notion that popular culture should play a significant role in a serious literary enterprise, she criticizes Updike for writing characters who are so wrapped up in themselves and their mundane lives that they are untouched by the larger world around them. For Ozick, history—”brooding and burdensome history”—must inform serious fiction, but her acceptable history is selective: it’s primarily the catastrophic side of Jewish history, the horror of the Holocaust that hangs over Bellow’s writing. “Poetry belongs to the trustful calm that is the negation of Auschwitz,” she writes; by this she means that the absence of the Holocaust in Updike’s writing relegates his prose to the realm of historyless Americana, the merely poetic, the decorative, the trivial.

      Just a few weeks ago, I read Bellow’s Seize the Day, and I was struck by the weight of the book, its solidity, its seamless craftsmanship, its satisfying and undeniable artistic quality. I understood, suddenly and clearly, how deficient is most of the contemporary fiction I read. They truly don’t often write them the way they used to. But I would not go so far as to suggest, as Ozick does, that there’s no place for the contemporary in serious fiction, and I certainly wouldn’t claim that there’s anything like a specific historical context that makes a novel artistically valid. But, I do have to agree that sometimes I just don’t understand—or really appreciate—what makes these writers today tick.

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