J. Robert Lennon on Contemporary Fiction

J. Robert Lennon has a great piece on why young writers should not immerse themselves in contemporary literary fiction. He wrote it in response to a piece by Dan Chaon. I have a minor quibble with his comments about poetry. I’ve noticed poets and novelists gaze at each other’s pastures and see green valleys on the other side of the fence, as opposed to their little yard of mud and shit. I occupy both pastures and can assure you poets are as boring and craven as fiction writers. The same ratio of borderline mediocrities who squeek through MFA programs with enough skills to flood the market with cliches applies to poets as novelists and short story writers. I would also add that in addition to genre fiction and all sorts of other writing, I at least learn and am entertained by reading widely in the past and in the works of other countries. But the past is the thing. If you want to refresh your language, find new ways of doing things, fire the imagination, a chaotic mixture of past and present is great. And I don’t mean the 20th century! I mean the Middle Ages, the Early Modern Period, Greece’n’Rome, the Bible, the Tao Te Ching and the Upanishads, I mean Sumerian epic poetry and Sung Dynasty detective fiction, Romantic poetry, Gothic fiction….I mean Shakespeare, yes, but also Marlowe, Middleton, Kyd, Webster and why not, Greene’s dreadful Pandosto….anything includes everything. A novelist, like a poet, should have encyclopedic and eccentric knowledge unrestricted by the contemporary and the acknowledged GOOD. Well, I don’t want to rewrite his excellent essay!