Colson Whitehead v. Emma Cline

The Second Bout of the Writers' Cup

Dear Republic,

We continue with the second contest of the Writers’ Cup: Colson Whitehead v. Emma Cline. Voting is open until Sunday, October 26. If you prefer Whitehead, write “Whitehead” in the comments. If you prefer Cline, write “Cline.” The winner advances to the next round.

-ROL

COLSON WHITEHEAD AND LITERATURE AS IMAGINATION

By Troy Valentine

Ok, so there are problems with Whitehead as a writer. His novels have a way of collapsing into cartoonishness. It seems to be his misfortune that he reached his peak in the 2010s when the entire literary culture was flattening itself out into politically-correct talking points.

But in agitating for Whitehead, I am doing more than just arguing for a single writer in a, frankly, sort of silly contest. I am making the case for imagination in literature more broadly. Here are a few of the things that you get if you vote for Whitehead over Emma Cline in The Republic of Letters contest. You get the vast sweep of the metaphor in The Underground Railroad. Places are not just places, they are also whole epochs. Georgia is the domain of vicious antebellum plantation slavery, South Carolina is the progressive era but afflicted by Tuskegee, North Carolina is the Klan at its apogee. This isn’t just novel-writing. This is world-building. Where else do we get that kind of vivid imaginativeness? I guess in something like Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere where the entirety of London becomes overlaid with different fantasy realms, but with a writer of Whitehead’s caliber that kind of ease with metaphors crosses over from the speculative fiction ‘ghetto’ and becomes a way to give history volume and dimensionality. With Whitehead, too, you get the ability to move easily between genres. The Underground Railroad is a completely different book from The Nickel Boys, which is a completely different book from Harlem Shuffle — one being Pulitzer-ready surrealistic historical epic, the next being feature film-ready civil rights realism, the next being the sort of hardboiled crime fiction that’s full of lines like “Miami Joe sipped Canadian club and twisted his pinkie rings as he mined the dark rock of his thoughts,” and then in the Whitehead back story there’s noir and zombie apocalypse and historical fiction and lightly-fictionalized memoir. Maybe not every moment works perfectly in every book — it’s tough to read gangsters saying to each other, in Harlem Shuffle, “take a gander at my Fucking Apology face, it’s like Medusa you only see it once” — but, here, the stakes are higher than that. It’s about the scope of what novelists are willing to take on. And with Whitehead, it’s not just about the quality of any individual book it’s about an underlying ambition in which — in a tradition stretching from Balzac to Ellison to Ellroy — the novelist positions themselves in sort of the captain’s chair of society as a whole, insists that they are the ones to speak its deepest truths and they capable of writing in any genre and from any angle of attack that you can think of. Realistic fiction? Check. Genre fiction? Check. Nonfiction? Check. The role of the writer isn’t just to produce bejeweled sentences, or to be aesthetically accurate all the time — mistakes like the “Medusa” line come with the territory — the role of the writer is to be truly ambitious, to float above their creation and to be as all-encompassing as possible. “A couple of years ago I thought maybe the scary book is the one you’re supposed to be doing,” he said to The Guardian of the origin of The Underground Railroad and that’s the kind of sentiment that a lot more writers could stand to take in.

It’s not a good time for literature right now. More and more of the fiction that gets celebrated is what Joyce Carol Oates referred to as “the wan little husks” of MFA programs and the autofiction vogue. So much else might as well be a spec script that the writers — and their agents — vainly hope might get optioned by a studio. Whitehead suffers from none of those maladies. He dreams big, he swings for the fences. In an era where literature is becoming more and more marginalized, he is one of very few writers we have who truly believes in the vast, society-encompassing power of the novel.

Troy Valentine keeps planning to write on his Substack. He listens to way too much Frank Zappa.

EMMA CLINE AND THE CASE FOR REALISM

By Isabel C. Marks

I am grateful to Troy Valentine for sharing his draft of the piece on Colson Whitehead, and that’s about the only good thing I have to say about it. Literature is falling apart and that means we have to be grateful for anyone showing ambition? What?? Craftsmanship matters less than the ability to incorporate genre into literary fiction? I’m sorry but…

The existence of a writer like Emma Cline goes a long way, all by itself, towards disproving the airy arguments so blithely made by Valentine. Literature is doing just fine. Actually, we are in a golden age for literature, as Henry Oliver recently argued in The New Statesman. Cline is the kind of writer who writes as if she’s never read a hand-wringy piece about “the death of the novel” or whatever the fuck. All experience is interesting and is subject to the relentless exercise of craft — whether that’s the story of the Manson cult in her breakout The Girls or the few days of a prostitute’s downward spiral that she depicts in The Guest. What matters isn’t what you break off to chew but how you do it. And Cline manages to put crystallinely perfect sentences together one after another long past the point where it seems possible for a human being to do so. Take this line from The Guest — “he was uninterested in the specifics of Alex and the boy, though his expression was arranged in a smile” — or this one — “people were never more focused and professional than when they were splitting drugs.” There is nothing showy, nothing ornate about any of this writing, there is no insecurity in it, and none of the zany exploration of genre that Valentine celebrates in the Whitehead piece. Writing like this is, above all, an act of faith — it comes from a concerted belief that life, just as it is, is interesting and the role of the writer, like a dedicated votary, is to train themselves to really see, to take in the world in the kind of fierce, supple way that life presents itself to us: nothing wasted, nothing fancy, just hard, focused observation.

Cline’s writing is unadorned enough that it seems like everybody should be able to do it, but the truth is that almost no one can. She seems to have gotten there through hard internal work, by being hyper-perceptive to whatever it is that’s going on around her. In an interview with The Paris Review she neatly describes what she’s doing and what she isn’t: “I find myself really resisting a neat narrative arc,” Cline said. “Just thinking about the way that I experience my own life, or my own cultural moment, or the lives of the people I love and am around, life rarely follows any kind of recognizable pattern or pleasing conclusion.” Given the kind of success she’s had — a $2 million advance for The Girls in an era where a five-figure advance is something to write home about — there’s a temptation to believe that she’s a unique talent or that she played her cards right with the industry or something like that. But all of that misses what’s really going. Literature is just fine, actually. There are lots of books being published — more than ever before. There are lots of great writers around too — probably more than ever as well. The only really viable approach to this bounty is to stop whining! To try and celebrate what’s out there, to give credit where it’s due when the publishing industry, for once, pays out to a literary writer the kind of salary that might be commanded by a middle reliever, and to learn from somebody like Cline. Realism is doing just fine, the publishing industry is standing tall even in the digital age, and the art of writing hasn’t really changed since Flaubert’s time if not Aeschylus’. Just take in the world without judgment, observe everything, be interested in everything, and line up pearl after pearl in your writing as if the world-despairing think-piece had never existed at all.

Isabel C. Marks is a producer and reporter and world traveler.