Creative Digest #11: recent reading and future writing
The latest edition of our departmental Substack looks at two recently published novels and the very future of the novel itself
Welcome to the eleventh edition of Creative Digest, the Substack from the Creative Writing team at City, University of London, where we teach on undergrad and postgrad degrees in the School of Communication and Creativity. We hope you enjoy it.
Upcoming event:
Wednesday 6th November, 5-7pm: Postgraduate Open Evening – Come along to City’s Clerkenwell campus this evening to hear more about the MA and MFA Creative Writing and meet some of the team – and hear current students reading from their work. Register to attend here.
On Sally Rooney
By Jonathan Gibbs
Sally Rooney is one of those writers who I’m very happy to have alive and writing in my lifetime. And I’m happy, too, that she’s here while I’m teaching creative writing. There’s a lot to learn, I think, from her novels. They’re very teachable. By which I mean: not only are they highly accomplished, but they clearly achieve what they set out to achieve, and what they set out to achieve is always clear.
Rooney’s novels are teachable in part because each one seems a carefully considered step forward from the last, even though they all have the same central theme: how romantic and sexual relationships work in contemporary Western society. What are those steps forward? You could think of them as a systematic testing of different narrative designs, to see how the novel can variously explore and represent the contemporary life of the heart and mind.
Rooney’s newest novel, Intermezzo, treats five characters who between them form a couple, a love triangle and a sibling relationship. The siblings are the extrovert, self-hating elder brother Peter and the much younger Ivan, an introverted chess 'genius' who might, it's suggested, be on the autism spectrum. (The way Peter and Ivan’s relationship is explored and developed over the course of the novel is very similar to the friendship pairing of Alice and Eileen in Beautiful World, Where are You. That the central relationship of these two novels isn’t romantic doesn’t negate the fact that the main appeal of her novels is their treatment of the characters’ love lives.)
What I find most interesting about Rooney's modus operandi in all of her novels is that she doesn't hitch her basic romance narrative to 'plot' as such. I say ‘romance narrative’ because all her books stories are essentially ‘will-they-won’t-they’s, with the old-fashioned ‘will-they-won’t-they-fall-love/get-married’ updated to a more era-appropriate ‘will-they-won’t-they-find-a-way-to-be-as-well-as-sleep-together’.
Traditionally, a romance narrative would put plot events in the way of our characters coming together and consummating their relationship. Rooney doesn’t do this. She just moves her characters in and out of each others' emotional forcefields, testing different effects of attraction and antagonism, misunderstanding and empathy. The order in which these happen seems almost random. The couple, sibling pair and love triangle all intersect at different points in the novel, in different combinations, like a geometry problem unfolding in real time.
The biggest change to Rooney's writing, in Intermezzo, is that of narrative voice, which is markedly different for Ivan and Peter, though the other women have POV sections that stick pretty much to those of the previous books – which have all been pretty consistent in tone and approach, with the exception of the email exchanges in Beautiful World, which I liked a lot more than other people did. Here, Peter's voice seems modelled on that of the opening chapters of Ulysses – syntactically fractured and restless; almost painfully perceptive and referential – while Ivan's has the meticulous, painstaking prolixity of some of David Foster Wallace. Neither is groundbreaking, but both serve the novel.
Peter's sections fold in familiar references (Shakespeare, Eliot, Larkin etc) that first of all flattered me – clever me, I thought, for getting them – and then amused me, when I realised I wasn’t being flattered, but being condescended to. After all, it’s pretty basic to go through your life with a private soundtrack of Hamlet quotes playing out in your head. It’s basic of Peter to do it, and basic of me to nod along with him as he does it.
The characters work then. Peter and Ivan I understood (Ivan I cast as a young Ben Whishaw), and Sylvia and Margaret, the two mid-30s women, and, to an extent, the younger Naomi, who seemed like a reworking of Bobbi from Conversations with Friends, as Peter is a version of Simon from Beautiful World. (Simon gets a namedrop, for those that care for that kind of thing.)
But do the relationships? By and large, yes, though not always that between Peter and Sylvia, the one-time girlfriend-for-life who self-punishingly pushed him away after a terrible car accident shut down the possibility of a full sexual existence. Some of her choices frustrated and annoyed me. And the ending works: it does its job; it made me well up and very nearly cry.
But here's the thing, and it’s to do with that essential similarity of Rooney’s novels, that they all reject the conventional 'marriage plot' that pins characters' romantic lives to traditional narrative arcs. (*cough* spoilers coming up)
Rooney's first two books blatantly sabotaged their own happy endings, as if Rooney was worried we'd take a momentary equilibrium for 'Happy Ever After', à la Jane Austen. The plots seem to end happily – Marianne and Connell together, Bobbi and Frances reunited – but then, at the very end, Rooney pulls the rug, deliberately destabilises an achieved equilibrium. By contrast, Beautiful World ended studiedly, unashamedly happily, and I loved her for that.
And Intermezzo... well (again: spoiler!) it somewhat repeats the trick of bringing characters together who haven't yet met, who might not get on, but who do, to facilitate a happy ending. And it repeats the idea that friendship (siblingship) is in its way more important than love, and sex. This works...
...but it is rather a case of rearranging the possibilities of a particular set of constraints, like a chess player will play out different versions of a game. When you get near the end, there are only so many possible moves.
We want a happy or an unhappy ending. Rooney’s right that ‘Happily Ever After’ doesn’t wash any more, but you have to end a novel somewhere, and unless she’s going to follow her characters right through to the end of their lives, the provisional ending she picks to leave us with will always seem to stand for a more general happiness or unhappiness in her characters’ lives to come. Novels, in this way, are different to chess. Chess games can happily end with a draw. Novels can’t.
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel
By Jessica Andrews
My recommendation for autumn reading is Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel, recently longlisted for the Booker prize. This novel is set in Reno, Nevada, over two hot July days and follows the fictional Daughters of America amateur boxing tournament, for women aged 18 and under.
Bullwinkel depicts each fight between the girls in crystalline detail. She describes the precise movements of their bodies, the different ways in which they hold themselves and the desert heat gathering in the dusty gym.
This is a tight, terse novel, grounded in a short period of time, set in a single location, using the immediate physical interaction of each fight to explore her characters’ memories, motives, dreams and ambitions, as well as flashes forward into their adult futures, when the tournament will almost be forgotten. Headshot depicts competition, power, strength and vulnerability in the boxing ring, to interrogate what it means to be a teenage girl, trapped or liberated by a particular kind of body, trying to find your own power within the limits of your world.
It is a masterclass in voice, told through subjective third person narration that moves fluidly between the girls, occasionally giving insight into the minds of other characters, such as their coaches and family members.
The publication of this novel coincided with the release of Love Lies Bleeding, the second film by Rose Glass, which depicts the world of women’s bodybuilding, wrought with sex and murder. As readers and viewers, we are exposed to women’s bodies in extreme states, navigating strength and power, as opposed to victimhood. This feels like a welcome turn in a cultural tide, in which rage and humour are used to explore women’s bodies as sites of extremis, without over-reliance on personal trauma. Both Glass and Bullwinkel ask what we might do with our muscle and fury, and whether the world will let us have it.
The Future of the Novel
By Simon Okotie
One of the things I’ve been enjoying ahead of the publication of my book The Future of the Novel next spring is re-reading previous essays of the same (or similar) name by other working novelists. The literary critic Peter Boxall provides an invaluable (although not exhaustive) list of such titles in his Oxford History of the Novel in English, starting with the great Henry James in 1899. Recently I have been trying to discern what each of these essays says not just about the envisaged future but also about the contemporary period within which it was written.
James’s essay, for instance, was written in a predictably prudish moment at the end of the Victorian era, one in which he called into question the novel’s ‘most guarded treatment of the great relation between men and women, the constant world-renewal’. As his biographer Leon Edel says of this ‘elaborate Victorian reticence’ (in his introduction to James’s The Future of the Novel: Essays on the Art of Fiction), these days it wouldn’t be difficult ‘to find so global a euphemism for the word sex.’ This aspect of James’s essay might best be paired with a title that is not on Boxall’s list: Anaïs Nin’s The Novel of the Future, from 1968. Nin published a series of novels and stories that were part of a ‘continuous novel’ called Cities of the Interior and which, unusually for their time, portrayed female sexuality explicitly, with her work including ‘frank portrayals of illegal abortions, extramarital affairs and incest, all of which Nin wrote about without judging her female characters’ (which, as The Guardian goes on to say would be brave now but which, in the 1940s, when she was writing some of these fictions, was ‘career suicide’). The main focus of Nin’s Future, though, is on what she refers to as the ‘“psychedelic” with emphasis on psyche’, and it captures something of her interest in (and the contemporary fascination with) dreams, psychoanalysis and surrealism.
The obvious partner to Zadie Smith’s Two Directions for the Novel (originally published in the New York Review of Books in 2008 as Two Paths for the Novel) is Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 1956 A Future for the Novel (translated by Richard Howard), partly because Smith refers to Robbe-Grillet’s essay throughout her own. If the former is characterized by a relative innocence as to the full political ramifications of the global financial crisis then unfolding, the latter has an air of incipient revolution, one in which it was hard to imagine that the art of the novel could ‘survive for long without some radical change’.
It has been clear to me from the moment I started writing my own Future that one of the abiding themes of the book – and a key contemporary backdrop – would be technology. (It is striking, for instance, how Penguin Random House announced this month that no part of their books can be used ‘for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.’) It was also clear from the outset that my book would be paired with another title absent from Boxall’s list. John Carruthers’ Scheherazade, or the Future of the English Novel was published in 1927 as part of Kegan Paul’s ‘To-Day and To-Morrow’ series – the great-grandparent of, and inspiration for, the new ‘Futures Series’ from my publisher, Melville House. My book is, in part, a conversation (and, at times, an argument) with Carruthers, particularly given that he was writing at a time – five years after the publication of Ulysses and two after Mrs Dalloway – that seems to us now to be a golden era for the novel in English. Yet, for him, ‘the indubitable masterpiece of English post-war fiction’ was still to be written. What, precisely, could he have been looking for?
Simon Okotie is the Royal Literary Fund (RLF) Fellow at City St George’s. He is the author of an acclaimed trilogy of novels published by Salt: ‘Fiction as original as this deserves a long shelf life.’ (London Review of Books). The Future of the Novel will be published in Spring 2025, and can be pre-ordered here.
Students at City St Georges can get free and confidential one-to-one advice on their academic writing from the RLF Fellow, independently of their programme teaching. To book a one-to-one tutorial with Simon, please email him at simon.okotie@rlfeducation.org.uk.
Thanks for reading! Do get in touch if you have any questions or comments. If you want to find out more about the programmes offering Creative Writing teaching at City, University of London, then do explore here:
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Contributing writers:
Simon Okotie is the Royal Literary Fund (RLF) Fellow at City St George’s. He is the author of an acclaimed trilogy of novels published by Salt: ‘Fiction as original as this deserves a long shelf life.’ (London Review of Books). The Future of the Novel will be published in Spring 2025, and can be pre-ordered here.
Jessica Andrews is the author of Milk Teeth and Saltwater, both published by Hodder & Stoughton. She co-runs literary and arts magazine, The Grapevine and co-presents literary podcast, Tender Buttons. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing and is teaching the Creative Writing Workshop this term.
Jonathan Gibbs is the author of Randall, The Large Door and Spring Journal. He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at City, and is currently writing a book on the non-academic or ‘literary’ essay.
Department news:
Jessica Andrews’ stage adaptation of Saint Maud will run at Live Theatre in Newcastle from 10 Oct-2 November 2024. Details here.
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