In a recent New York Times Book Review interview, novelist Rick Moody — not chiefly known as a pusher of polemical fiction or social views — had this to say: “Messing around with form is great, but I still want stories to save lives.” His remark is startling & apt, coming as it does in an era when American social conscience has been wrested from its complacency and relaxed tending of events. It is impossible to make a hierarchy of the insults to human life we are slowly acknowledging and some of us are too afraid to face.

    First, a brief inventory: the depredation of the globe by transnational capitalism, genocide in two countries in one decade, terrorism directed against countries which, in turn, exploit lesser nations for economic and territorial gain, national conflict in Israel, Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia — these are but a few of the dehumanizing features of our times. And onwards: starvation, oppression, and abominable living and working conditions for people of all classes, nations, and stations to varying degrees.

    What dominates the social imagination is the aggrieved picture of a world knocked off keel and the futility of ever reclaiming a hospitable direction through deep and troubled waters. The semblance of decorum and sanity has been painfully scraped away to reveal a broken visage which looks for value and instead finds that violence (metaphysical and actual) or its own trepid psyche has cemented its eyes shut. Myopia in these anxious occasions is predictable but jeopardizing: the ethical risk of not approaching conditions as they rear themselves is grave. It leads inevitably to the debasement of a compassionate orientation to the world; moreover, it leads to the encroaching death of representation — the old symbols and interpretations will no longer do. In terms of literary expression, it also leads to the vexing question: where are the writers, the supposed guarantors of imaginary assessment, the fearless vanguard of the kind of expression which clarifies actualities even while negating the injustice of their contents? Instead of generating a new orientation to new circumstances, the majority of contemporary literary models resort to the old forms of and narratives from which not even the most experimental of fictions can salvage a modicum of purpose.

    Of course, we are dealing with literature and Moody’s concern for its potential function to save lives is at best figurative and indirect, and at worst, a banal directive for writers to assume an activist stance in their writing that is limiting and just as hopeless. Moody, it’s safe to guess, is speaking strictly of the former. “Walk quietly and carry big signs, ” wrote Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) in 1964, scathingly condemning artists who felt that their work was provocative enough to be a better recourse than social protest to bring the beast to its knees. Yet, and Baraka would agree, if literature wishes to maintain its scruple of reflectiveness and invention, it must tangle itself with those personal and collective concerns poised to exacerbate the problems in which we wade — or drown. In other words — words, I’m fully aware, that are far too declamatory for those readers and practitioners of what Paul Valéry called “pure art” — American fiction must more deeply engage with the contours of experience it seeks to explore, inhabit, articulate, codify. I am not arguing for a programmatic art á la thirties proletarian fiction but writing — and writers — more profoundly responsive to conditions as lived and more fiercely reimagined. It is a plea for a rendezvous with the lineaments of scrutable experience against the indifferent, egocentric, passive voice and vocation of too many of our writers.

    Whether or not the writer has extensive credentials as an arbiter of moral or political judgment is moot; whether or not they conceive of their works as artifacts of public usefulness also should not be our concern. But the flat, cosmopolitan, self-satisfied and scarcely intelligible worlds of high-glamor New York or the sexually promiscuous suburbs just won’t do. Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz take note. You, too, Paris Review. Equally unsettling are the variants of the urban drug memoir — gossipy and voyeuristic excreta that here in New York pass for “downtown” literature. Paeans to debauched cool, these narratives portray fractured lives with pharmacological desires in an unsubtle, overripe Xerox of 50’s and 60’s Beat writing. Instead of the Prada suits and cocaine sniffs of the wealthier, uptown, demimonde, we get the truculent black eyeliner and and junkie withdrawal of the Lower East Side. Chemical fatigue and fashion cater to the reader’s romantic notions of organic disintegration and social indiscretion. Instead of beatitude, attitude; instead of convincing, stylish prose we get the mechanized staccato of the writer as junkie or would-be junkie (who is equally suited, we’re led to believe, for the syringe as the pen).

    Identity politics make for neither good politics nor nor good art; fictions which deal with an ethnic or sexual type as their sine qua non are bound to be undone by the very prominence allotted to the provincialism espoused to counteract the ignorance or insensitivity of the status quo. While Paul Beatty and Edwidge Danticat describe their lives as respectively, African American or Haitian American, with a density fixated on upon the tensions and marvels of withstanding minority status in a nation still incapable of recognizing the presence of a majority of its citizens, Ernest Quinones’s Bodega Dreams, Junot Diaz’s Drown, Angie Cruz’s Soledad, or Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes all simmer in the precious touting of their specialness without outlining their ideas with distinction.

    The upsurge of satirical writing is also a telling aspect of this debacle. Satire may be a rehearsal for confronting the issues it highlights, so too the slavering irony which is its primary confection, yet it languishes on the verge without really coming to terms with its materials. Rather than invest and invent, it triumphally, though exhaustively, parrots the preconceived and obvious wrongness with which we contend. It assuages anxiety with the tang of bitter laughter, but rarely forces its trajectory to imagine alternatives or pinpoint its targets with a dexterity that would invoke a redemptive spirit. David Foster Wallace, the writers associated with McSweeney’s, and Sam Lipsyte’s The Subject Steve hardly convince us that they are above the banality and absurdity they lampoon. Intent on effects, they fail to extend their cases to a point where their caricatures may be recuperated by a transformative power, their dilemmas forwarded to an area of dissection and restitution.

    One need not be constrained by a discernible formula — and this essay is by no means a pitch for the via propre — to feel an exasperation that so few of our writers seem willing to throw themselves unmercifully into a fuller rapprochement with their imagined worlds so as to delight us with the force of their recognitions. While there are certainly some able wordsmiths out there who have broached, engulfed, and retouched their subjects so as to deepen our conception of humanity in conflict — A.M. Homes, the late Robert Bingham, Rick Moody, and Tom Paine, among the younger writers — we are left in the main with the bewildering incommensurability between fiction and fact, and the faultlines that tremble between them. To make contact with a gesture and description beyond the traditional idioms and fascinations seems a possible, indeed productive, route. Will writers take up the challenge? Where are all the literary agitators? One hopes they are out there and sharpening their pens as you read this. We’re sorely in need of their deliverance.