For Literary Novelists the Past Is Pressing

 

 

By Jonathan Lee

New York Times

June 13, 2021

 

 

In an interview in 2012, Hilary Mantel, the author of the “Wolf Hall” trilogy, was asked if she felt any trepidation writing about the Tudors. “Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect,” she replied. Then she added, with a hint of Cromwellian confidence: “I thought I could do better.”

 

Underlying every writer’s personal brand of self-doubt, this is the itch from which many novels are born: I thought I could do better. The unusual thing is that Mantel picked the historical novel to do better with. For the past two decades, the novels celebrated for defining our time have almost always been books set within our time, from Jonathan Franzen’s voluminous social comedies to Sally Rooney’s smartly self-knowing novels and the seam of contemporary autofiction that has run between them.

 

Historical fiction, by contrast, has not been in fashion. Or, rather, it has been seen as its own fusty fashion, relentlessly uncontemporary and easy to caricature, filled with mothballed characters who wear costumes rather than clothes, use words like “Prithee!” while having modern-day thoughts, and occasionally encounter villains immediately recognizable by their yellow teeth or suspicious smell. What light could such novels possibly shed on the present day? “I like fiction by writers engaged in trying to make sense of their lives and of the world in which they find themselves,” Franzen has said, “and this makes me particularly resistant to historical fiction.”

 

For most of the last decade, when fellow writers and editors asked me what my latest novel is about, my reply — “the murder of a famous New Yorker in 1903” — elicited mostly frowns. “You mean,” came the response, “historical fiction?” It’s as if the words themselves were as filthy as a turn-of-the-century street.

 

But recently the tone of such conversations has begun to change. As students of history know, fashions ebb and flow; it’s increasingly clear that the historical novel is being embraced and reinvented.

 

In the 15 years before “Wolf Hall” earned Mantel her first Man Booker Prize, in 2009, only one novel set before the 20th century had been given the prize. The history of the Pulitzer is similar: In 2017, “The Underground Railroad,” Colson Whitehead’s novel about an enslaved woman in the antebellum South, became the first fiction set before World War II to win the award in more than a decade. The book was met with the kind of critical parlance usually reserved for novels grounded in the reader’s own era: “urgent,” “timely,” “important.”

 

Whitehead’s novel — now a mini-series by Barry Jenkins — is all these things, and his example has started to seem less lonely. Yaa Gyasi’s “Homegoing” (2016), which examined the slave trade and its legacy across two continents and seven generations, has as good a claim as any to being the breakout debut of the last few years. It was a historical novel recognized for using history not to hide from the “now” of America, but to confront it. Then there is George Saunders, who, after nearly two decades devoted to fiction focused on the present and the future, finally wrote “Lincoln in the Bardo” (2017), a novel about the death of President Lincoln’s young son Willie during the Civil War. “I was really afraid that the Lincoln subject would necessitate or cause the book to be a little stiff and 19th-century,” Saunders has said of the novel’s 20-year gestation. When he brought his own restlessly inventive sensibility to the historical fiction form, he was rewarded with the Booker Prize.

 

Jennifer Egan’s “Manhattan Beach” (2017), which follows a young girl’s coming-of-age in 1940s New York, was a National Book Award nominee and New York Times best seller. Téa Obreht’s “Inland” (2019), a reimagining of the Arizona Territory in 1893, and C. Pam Zhang’s “How Much of These Hills Is Gold” (2020), set during the California gold rush, breathed new life into the historical western. And in March, Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet” (2020), a novel conjuring Shakespeare’s England, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

 

One of the most talked-about novels of this year so far is by another literary writer who has swerved into the past: “Libertie,” by Kaitlyn Greenidge, which is set in post-Civil War Brooklyn. Among prominent novelists most associated with chronicling contemporary American life, Lauren Groff comes to mind. But her next novel, “Matrix,” out in September, is set in the 12th century.

 

Readers sometimes assume art is born only from autobiography; writers know that it arises just as often from emulation. The success of “The Underground Railroad” or the “Wolf Hall” trilogy, on the page as well as in the marketplace, may be inspiring some novelists who previously dismissed historical fiction as a form. But emulation alone can’t account for how rich and varied the genre’s current revival seems to be. Perhaps it has its roots in another phenomenon: The present has rarely felt as transitory as it does now — as fleeting as a refreshed Twitter feed, or a masked dash around a grocery store. Brexit, Trump and a world-altering pandemic: The last few years have not been short of events that might legitimately break our faith in the readability and writability of our “now.” At the same time, they have also not been short of reminders — systemic racism, rising hate crimes, mass incarceration and the shootings of unarmed Black citizens by the police — that in America the past continues to erupt into the present and remains key to understanding it.

 

Part of the power of works of fiction set in our era comes from their familiarity. A present-day setting provides a recognizable foundation from which other less stable experiences might be productively explored: love, life, loss. But what happens when history emerges as the overwhelming force shaping the entire unstable narrative of now?

 

Franzen’s distrust of historical fiction stemmed from a belief that writers should grapple with “the world in which they find themselves.” Yet by writing powerful literary novels set on slave plantations and in the Jim Crow South, and examining the effects on characters both white and Black, writers like Esi Edugyan (“Washington Black”), Brit Bennett (“The Vanishing Half”) and Robert Jones Jr. (“The Prophets”) are doing exactly that. These novelists are acutely alert to the ways in which history profoundly informs the present.

 

The historicizing impulse has crept into other media as well — notably television. Dramas originally set in the present day are currently being rewritten to take place in earlier decades — the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Rewinding time in this way is attractive because it sidesteps awkward questions: Should characters wear masks and reference the pandemic? Will indoor dining in an early date scene seem like Chekhov’s gun, a trigger the viewer expects to be pulled with a cough later on? Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Netflix’s winter hit “Bridgerton,” which is set in Regency-era London but features a 21st-century multicultural cast, has apparently been its most popular series ever.

 

The portraitist has always been drawn to the subject that sits still — and nothing about 2021 sits still. It’s always fidgeting for its phone, reaching for a remote, updating and posting and refreshing in a doomed effort to keep current. Doomed because the present will always rewrite itself faster than we can record it. A kiss in “Normal People” may, in 2021, feel as anachronistic as a kiss in “Pride and Prejudice” — we want Rooney’s lovers to be together, but we’re concerned they haven’t shown each other their vaccination cards. In fast-changing times it becomes clear that every novel is a historical novel.

 

Novalis is credited with saying, “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.” We do not talk of Tolstoy or Balzac or Hawthorne as “historical novelists” any more than we think of Shakespeare as a historical playwright. Yet when they wanted to capture their own unstable times, these writers looked to history. For better or worse, they saw history as alive rather than dead, ripe for reinvention and re-examination. A new generation of writers may find in the past better ways to capture the present.