Novel Interruptus

Novel Interruptus or Writer's Block

“I’ve written a story about school days in Saskatchewan. It took me about two-hundred hours to write it down, another twenty hours to edit it, and I paid a professional editor two dollars a page to edit my final draft. Then I spent another twenty hours making changes the editor suggested. How much would you pay me for a chance to read it?”

“I’ve painted a 24 X 18 canvas depicting the town we were both born in ca. 1905. I’ve won two awards for it and I’ve made ten reproductions. How much would you pay me for the original? For a reproduction?" 

The Wife, with Glenn Close and Jonathan Pryce, is a 2017 movie based on Meg Wolitzer’s 2004 novel with the same name. This is not a review. If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, but intend to, you might not want to read this. The ending is a “surprise,” except that to most viewers—I’m guessing—it’s not that big a surprise at all.

The Wife opens a window on book publishing in the ‘50s, a window that probably hits at today’s authors’ dilemma as well. As the movie illustrates, competence, even brilliance in the art of fiction may never see the light of day given the fact that book publishing, movie making are businesses in the hands of non-artists who weigh name-recognition and book-buyer whims-of-the-day against the likelihood of profitability or loss. It’s an art-in-the-marketplace conundrum, and we all know that the marketplace is subject to psychological manipulation, crass advertising and all the rest of those tricks of Mammon.

Because, as the movie script makes clear, readership is a partner to creative writing and writers want to be read, sculptors need to be displayed, movies need viewers but there are any number of ways in which mediocre art can be flogged to dizzying heights while genius remains locked in the cellar.

In this case, the blocking of genius is gender-based; publishers assume that women writers will be harder to sell than male writers, and so their manuscripts are shuffled to the bottom of the review pile, if they’re to be read at all. So if you happened at that time to be a female with great creative talent, wouldn’t you consider—as Mary Ann Evans already did in the mid 19^th Century—to write under the name of, say, George Eliot? In The Wife, Joseph Castleman becomes the conduit and the name for the genius of wife Joan Castleman with the complication that Joseph wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Sorry, I gave away a significant plot component, if you hadn’t already guessed.)

Art as commodity raises a number of issues not conducive to pure artistry. A chainsaw is a commodity but with a chainsaw, an owner can produce other commodities so that in a capitalist/market world, a chainsaw has multiplier possibilities and therefor capital worth. Even things like chairs, because they consistently provide comfort and ease, can convince consumers on their own merits to pay a fair price. Not so with art, which has no obvious utility beyond the aesthetic, no marketplace multiplier effect and so in the eyes of crass economics, may be seen as having dubious intrinsic value. Furthermore, why buy a book when you can read it for free at your subsidized library? Why pay admission to a movie theatre when you can access a pirated version for free on your wide-screen TV? Why put money into the donation box at a museum when paying to enjoy the work of artists is optional?

How did “starving artists” become a “thing” unless art itself is seen to be of dubious value on its face?

I could go on here to defend the value that’s been added to our various cultures by artists, echoing perhaps Shakespeare's contention in Hamlet that the dramatic arts—in that case— “hold, as it were, the mirror up to nature, etc” (Ham. III,ii,17-24). In an age where the apple-cart is being regularly upset (what with streaming video, self-publishing, audio books, art as speculative investment, smart-phone photography, etc.) the value of art—fiction, in this case—is again in question. 

To build a house and to be paid, possibly praised, accrues to the satisfaction of the builder and motivates him/her to further creation. The Wife illustrates through an almost-believable scenario what might theoretically happen when an artist’s work goes unrecognized, unrewarded or unacknowledged.

How the Castlemans Nobel-Prize-to-him-and-not-her dénouement unravels, I’ll leave to be discovered, a small surprise.

“Sorry. I never asked you for a book about school days in Saskatchewan and who has time to read in any case? So, no thanks.”

“I just bought a huge picture with a deer and a stream at Walmart for over the couch. It cost me eighteen-fifty on sale. I’ll give you the same for your original but I don’t know where I’d put it.”