What does Walter Benn Michaels want? In a frustrating essay in Bookforum, he argues that in recent years American literature has fallen down on the job, mainly because it has failed to get into the business of “criticizing the primacy of markets.” Instead writing novels about, say, the widening income gap, we’ve written much-praised novels that spend too much time looking backward to slavery or the Holocaust—Beloved, The Plot Against America, and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union are particular failings for Michaels on this front, while American Psycho is praised for at least working off the premise that this country is sickened by its consumerism.
Setting aside for a moment the implied argument that what American literature really needs is a good novel about the widening income gap, the maddening thing about Michaels’ piece is the author’s seemingly arbitrary decisions about what books get to be considered as worthy. If he wants to say that historical novels, by definition, fail to look at the present, that’s fine as far as it goes. (Though The Plot Against America had plenty to say about present-day anti-Semitism and propagandistic administrations.) But, strangely, memoirs are wiped off the table because their stories are not about society but individuals. Margaret Thatcher is quoted to exemplify the problem here; Michaels cites her saying, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” So a book like Maxine Hong Kingston The Woman Warrior would be too shallow, concerned as it is with just one family; apparently so would Adrian Nicole LeBlanc‘s Random Family (while we’re talking about nonfiction), even though it’s one of the best-researched, most granular portraits of the effects of that widening income gap you’ll ever read—and it was written during the boom years, which according to Michaels caused this current failing in American letters. (I’m sure LeBlanc will be disappointed to hear that during that all those years of reporting in the Bronx she was just playing into Maggie’s hands.)
But The Woman Warrior has a double failing for being a story about immigrants, according to Michaels:
And no more stories about the children of immigrants, trying to figure out whether and where they fit into American culture. Ethnic identity is just the family writ large, and no move is more characteristic of the neoliberal novel than the substitution of cultural difference for (one of the things Thatcher meant to deny) class difference. What the neoliberal novel likes about cultural difference is that it sentimentalizes social conflict, imagining that what people really want is respect for their otherness rather than money for their mortgages.
Here, I’d love to shove a copy of Ha Jin‘s A Free Life in Michaels’ hands; though he may be obligated to dismiss it for being an immigrant story, it is a story about money for the mortgage. It may not be the Great American Class War Novel he’s dreaming of, but he’s never going to find it if he keeps paging through novels by Toni Morrison and Philip Roth. (Presumably the latter’s portrayal of Newark in American Pastoral didn’t scratch the itch for Michaels in the way he’d prefer.) He’s also not going to find it if he keeps moving the goal posts.
If you’re in New York tonight, you’ll be able to catch a discussion about all this, featuring Michaels, critic-novelist Dale Peck, novelist Susan Straight, and journalist David Simon. Simon’s Great American TV Show, The Wire, is praised by Michaels at the end of his essay, so I have to imagine that at some point during the conversation Richard Price‘s Clockers will come up—the novel was, as Simon has said many times, a key inspiration for The Wire, and a better argument for the book Michaels is looking for than American Psycho. One question I hope somebody asks: Would anything change if we had more novels of the kind Michaels wants? (Assuming, of course, there’s been any drop-off in them.) Would we have better public policy? A better society? Simon, I suspect, would say no—in numerous interviews he’s shied away from any big statements about the show’s impact. Novels simply don’t change the world in that way. Some time back I asked Price about the legacy of Clockers, and he figured the book mainly affected how his books were shelved:
Q: What do you think is Clockers’ legacy?
A: There are a lot of books about the urban world where Clockers will come up in the blurbs. “Not since Clockers….” Or something like that. The only thing I don’t like is that because I stay with writing about the cities, and use the police for access to a world that otherwise I would not be privy to, I don’t like crime books, and I don’t ever want to see my stuff in the crime section. I don’t want to be genre-ized.
So before we get into too many high-flown statements about what responsibility fiction has to society, it’s worth considering whether fiction has any capacity to transform it.
markathitakis.com 
>What does Michael Benn Michaels want?
I can only suppose that one thing he wants is to be called Walter.
Duly chastised. I’ve corrected the post.
…and who’s this Matthews fellow?
Seriously, though, I can understand your frustration with Michaels if that Bookforum essay of his is the only thing you’ve seen. He’s painting with a genre-wide brush in order to be polemical, which is very much part of his favored style.
But the real argument underneath the essay is one Michaels has been making his whole career, and it’s much more intelligent than you (and, to be fair, his Bookforum essay) give it credit for being. I’d recommend checking out any of his three big books—Our America, The Shape of the Signifier, or The Trouble with Diversity–before taking his hyperbolics at face value.
And so we learn the pitfalls of writing at 6:30 in the morning, without editorial backstopping….
Your points are well-taken, and though I’m interested in reading more of Michaels’ (got it right!) work, it’s a little disingenuous to argue that a piece can only be properly understood in the context of other work; the writer is ultimately obligated to make sure that the piece stands on its own. I think there’s an interesting conversation to be had on the social uses of fiction, and whether there should be more of it that addresses current economic and class divides. For me, though, Michaels’ argument fell flat, and his case for “American Psycho” seems like a hollow provocation.
Disingenuous? Maybe I wasn’t clear. I don’t think that the Bookforum essay is particularly good, and that’s because it’s so broadly polemical that it can be easily dismissed by people who don’t know the work behind it.
But there is work behind it, and it’s good and interesting and important work, and that’s where I think you should spend your energy if you’re curious about Michaels. That isn’t an argument for the value of the essay, it’s an argument for the value of the underlying work.
Michaels reads fiction in a very idiosyncratic way: he sees works of literature as arguments with actually existing society. That’s not quite the same thing as seeing them as socially useful, but it’s not completely different either. His beef with the politics of culture is a beef with society first and foremost, but it’s also a beef with literature insofar as books like Beloved make (in his mind) an argument on behalf of that politics.
(Incidentally, I tend to agree that a “writer is ultimately obligated to make sure that the piece stands on its own”–nothing’s more frustrating as a reader than to feel like you’re only getting half of the conversation. But obviously that can’t be an absolute: would a consideration of Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost be fair without some attention to The Ghost Writer? I don’t think it could be.)
Many in America have always been unhappy with literature which does not have an explicit social use — in other words, literature which is medicine to cure society’s wounds and ills. If we see this as our ideal, the logical endpoint is that Harriett Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” must be the greatest novel of all time.
Edgar Allen Poe complained bitterly about this kind of attitude in his literary criticism of the 1840s. But it persists. A great many readers want to be reassured by what they read, to be told what they already know. Then they can feel virtuous and know they have not wasted their time.