Having Something to Say

I don’t have a lot of patience with literary works – plays, novels, stories – that show off their author’s facility with language but have absolutely nothing to say about the world we live in. I’m exasperated to discover that I’ve spent an hour (or many hours) reading a play or a work of fiction that lacks in some sort of meaning. Examples: I’m a great fan of John Cheever’s “Goodbye, My Brother,” which is at heart about the different ways people evaluate the lives they live, and even dares to suggest that there is one correct attitude. But Cheever’s story “The Wrysons” or “The Bella Lingua” tells me nothing except that this writer can create characters, describe settings, and turn a lovely phrase. Who has time for such meaninglessness? Joyce Carol Oates is another writer who knows the difference between significance and insignificance, but who doesn’t insist on providing work only of the first sort. So “The Tryst” is a great story about the danger when men see only women’s surfaces; while “Life After High School” is about a group of characters who speak, behave, participate in a “plot” – without signifying anything. Great fiction is about great themes – a case in point being Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which is about the terrible cost of needing a reason to live but not knowing how to search for one; or Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, about the devolution of the American Dream into something narrow and brutal and tawdry. As a writer, I’m dedicated to only putting pen to paper when I have a view to impart – anything less is a fraud perpetrated on the reader/spectator. And if I have time tonight, I’ll read Margaret Atwood, or Isaac Bashevis Singer, or Jorge Luis Borges. I can usually spend a little time in their company without feeling cheated.