Foreword to the Preface to the Proem of the Novel of the Future

notes toward my supreme fiction

I am working on that serialized novel I promised, for a small price, to write you.

When I promised, though, I forgot the chaotic way I write novels: the way I have to blunder and grope for the structure, the way I begin by scattering pearls at random before I find the string, the way I write 1000-word sentence after 1000-word sentence and then quarrel with myself over whether or not they should be shortened or if this is what for me counts as “style,” the way I never come up with the title until the end.

Still, a serial, a narrative, a book is underway. Almost 20,000 words have been written (not all of them in the last 18 days, admittedly; some date from a false start around this time last year)—20,000 out of how many I’m not yet sure.

You never really know how to write a novel, at least not what Pushkin in Eugene Onegin calls “a free novel.” It’s not a genre, like “tragedy” or “comedy,” like “mystery” or “romance,” with prescribed plots and defined rules. You have to build it for the first time, every time. I’m trying to make something different: a present-day vessel to catch the eternal stream of thought and feeling.

I don’t like either Fredric Jameson or the phrase “lived experience,” but this, a passage from The Prison-House of Language explaining why formalist literary criticism’s emphasis on “defamiliarizing” traditional literary structures doesn’t apply to the novel as a form, gets it right:

[T]he novel as a form is a way of coming to terms with a temporal experience that cannot be defined in advance or indeed dealt with any other way. In a genuine novel, in other words, there cannot be any name for the basic subject matter in question; there cannot be any preexisting conventional substance on which defamiliarization is able to act. To put it another way, we can name only the things that happen to other people; our own lived experience, our existence, our feeling of the passage of time, are all too close to us to be visible in any external or objective way; they form the privileged object of the novel as narration, for it is at one with the evocation of just such incomparable, nameless, unique experiences and sensations.

It follows that there are no preexisting laws that govern the elaboration of the novel as a form: each one is different, a leap in the void, an invention of content simultaneous with the invention of the form.

I will write a full-dress manifesto of a 19th-century-style preface explaining myself before I start serializing the novel with its shocking proem, but, in the meantime and in Jameson’s spirit, as a foreword to the preface to the proem of the novel, I offer some “notes to self” I’ve hastily taken down so far in the process of the composition:

• novel is kaleidoscopic not linear, has to be co-assembled by the reader, this justified by every part’s being fascinating and beautiful in itself rather than a transit station to somewhere else, one way besides cliffhangers to warrant serialization since each chapter can stand on its own

• novel is narrated by a persona assuming you already know the story so is not so much telling you the story as commenting on it, expanding on it, interpreting it, extrapolating from it, beautifying it, enveloping the characters in a haze of gossip, rumor, innuendo, and myth

• novel is internet-era, post-cinematic, more like a blog than a screenplay, the point is no longer just to conjure a moving picture in the inner eye but to put discourse itself in swift motion, to appeal to the part of the mind that wants to hear ideas and arguments about controversial behavior, and to acknowledge by a compression of prose how much discourse already immerses us 

• novel’s realist element is to accept as material and without polemical prejudgment much of the social world we live in, with focus guaranteed to inflame every reader regardless of ideology on gender and internet-vectored magical thinking

• novel’s utopian element is to refuse the ambient ignorance and make all major characters well-read, preternaturally articulate, and passionate about aligning thought and action, because half the novel is the world we live in and half is the world we want to live in

And if you’re tired of waiting, you could always buy the novels I’ve already written: Portraits and Ashes, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, The Class of 2000. I also offer them as free pdfs to anyone who emails me a request—in exchange for a pledge to leave an honest review in a public forum. Thanks for reading!