But the “lyric” essay-the specific kind under investigation in Shields’ Reality Hunger-has been a particularly common site of novelistic retreat. Only naïve novel historians think of fiction as untrue, or characters as entirely invented. Why recreate it?” Many critics now would roll their eyes at these erroneous and perilous clichés. “The pages are filled with anti-fiction fighting talk,” she notes, quoting the following polemical statements: “The creators of characters, in the traditional sense, no longer manage to offer us anything more than puppets in which they themselves have ceased to believe.” And: “All the best stories are true.” And: “The world exists. He staked out his philosophy for the lyric essay in Reality Hunger: a Manifesto (2009), the book under review in Smith’s essay. Or the money.įor David Shields, it was yes to much of the questions above. Why do novelists write essays? In a 2009 essay, Zadie Smith pondered this question in detail: do they write out of a kind of “novel-nausea”? When “fiction turns sour”? When “oppressed by a run-of-the-mill version of that narrative scepticism Kafka expresses so well in one line in ‘Description of a Struggle’: ‘But then? No then?’” To become a reader again? To succumb to the “strange circular effect” of writing essays, which has the capacity of renewing the essayist’s “enthusiasm for the things fiction does that nothing else can”? When they have literally lost the plot? If the essay resists narrative and loves irregularity, but is equally characterised by limitation in length and subject, “hich is it… that attracts novelists-the comforts of limit or the freedom of irregularity?” 1 Perhaps it is for the prestige. Patron saint of the essay, Montaigne, looking on.

Novel nausea