Lifestyle - US;Great Depression

When American writer David Foster Wallace committed suicide it did not just mark the death of a novelist. Rather, it perhaps was one of the first few indications of the death of the American novel. Wallace, 46, best known for his novel Infinite Jest was driven to taking his own life as he could not cope with his demons, and a chronic depression that lasted 20 years.

And this was a man who could write insightfully on any subject — from tennis to boiling a lobster. Which makes one wonder why Americans have a high incidence of depression, what with 10% of adults affected in a given year. Naturally, it gets reflected in contemporary American writing. Much of what comes out through American fiction are personal accounts of dysfunctional families, depression-related disorders and frustrations.

Studies say that many of the disorders are being caused by recent recession-related woes, low wages, rising unemployment and the trauma of war. However, Wallace’s condition was of a different kind. He was down because he found it difficult to put his views across in a world that is in love with advertisements, cheap entertainment, acquired and affected tastes and sophisticated sarcasm. Above all, his primary concern was telling the truth, and he feared he was not succeeding since he didn’t see any signs of change around him.

The contemporary American novel is guilty of encouraging all that he derided. Which is why it is driving away readers from American prose. That could also be the reason why readers the world over are turning to writers from elsewhere, particularly in translations. In his book A Reader’s Manifesto author B R Myers argues that proof of the decline of American prose is most visible in the disappearance of the long sentence and any attempt to look for genuine stories.

He hopes that one day readers would stand up to the literary establishment. He argues against the current trend of ‘genre’ writing which is replete with pretentious prose ornamented with wordplay and clever turn of phrases. His grouse is against stories mostly about an insular society. Now, that’s another symptom of the American illness!