Fiction: A Year in Reflection
The historical novel, Henry James once declared, was a genre “condemned . . . to a fatal cheapness.” Throughout the 20th century, while historical fiction produced plenty of bestsellers, the literati tended, with grudging exceptions, to look down upon historical fiction as middlebrow escapism. It may seem odd, then, that the most noticeable trend among literary authors in 2023 was the embrace of this fusty old genre. Well-known authors and ambitious newcomers were engaged in the same endeavor: reflecting on the past, using it as a way to interpret the present.
In “Writing Backwards,” one of the year’s most trenchant (if jargon-heavy) literary studies, Alexander Manshel points to the importance of the canon debates that have roiled university literature and history departments since the 1970s. Historical novels, he notes, became a convenient way of making syllabi seem more inclusive of groups that had been traditionally overlooked or silenced. The historical novel thus began to acquire a gravitas it had not enjoyed since the 19th century: It had become the type of book most likely to be enshrined in the classroom, the surest form of posterity we have.
The appeal of historical subjects as ideological vessels has increased as fiction writing about the present-day has become more and more perilous—writers can get into trouble when they portray characters outside their own demographic groups; likewise they can get into trouble if they omit characters outside their own demographic groups. But retrospection is also well-suited to another aspect of contemporary fiction: The novel today typically has a therapeutic function, and historical fiction offers an ideal means of plumbing the past for foundational traumas, even—or especially—when they are cross-generational.
Maybe the most illustrative recent example of the changing attitude is Colson Whitehead, who started his career writing critically lauded works that adopted the conventions of a variety of genre categories, from crime noir to horror. Then he turned to historical fiction, and with “The Underground Railroad” (2016) and “The Nickel Boys” (2019), he won the Pulitzer Prize twice in four years. “The Underground Railroad,” which imagines a magical railway system delivering escapees from slavery, seems to have been particularly influential: Most of this year’s most celebrated novels are what you might call historical fantasies, books that shape the past into allegories for the crises of the world today.
These include Lauren Groff’s “The Vaster Wilds,” the adventure of a servant girl who flees a besieged Jamestown settlement and learns uncannily 21st-century lessons about colonialism and environmental damage. Jesmyn Ward’s “Let Us Descend” is a breathless slavery narrative that blends a host of supernatural influences—from Dante’s “Inferno” to African mythology—with a Freudian fable about parental separation. James McBride’s stirring and sentimental “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Story” deals in the magic of soft-focus nostalgia for a mixed Jewish and African-American community in 1920s Pennsylvania. Benjamín Labatut’s “The MANIAC” is a different kind of fantasy: a vivid fictionalized biography of the AI pioneer John von Neumann presented as a work of Gothic horror.
Again and again, the past is both excavated for underrepresented figures and molded into a cautionary tale. The linked episodes of Daniel Mason’s “North Woods” comprise a survey history of rural New England told in the style of campfire ghost stories. Justin Torres’s “Blackouts,” the winner of this year’s National Book Award for Fiction, refracts gay experience through the spottily archived life of a trailblazing lesbian activist. In the alternate history of Catherine Lacey’s bravura “Biography of X,” about a shape-shifting visual artist, 20th-century America has again been divided by a violent civil war. “I have no time for historical fiction, seeing it as merely science fiction facing backwards,” the critic James Wood once complained. Even readers who don’t share that intolerance might note that today’s historical novels neatly complement the many futuristic dystopias, warning of global collapse, that fill bookstore shelves.
Historical fantasies tend to be broad in their characterizations; finer psychological subtlety can be found in historical novels more grounded in research. The contradictions of personality and motivation lie at the heart of Zadie Smith’s “The Fraud,” which dramatizes a famous 19th-century London trial. Ms. Smith’s book enacts a kind of lover’s quarrel with canonical Victorian literature, satirizing facets of it while borrowing features—Dickens’s humor, Eliot’s humanism—for its own purposes. Fiona McFarlane’s “The Sun Walks Down” is a work of pellucid antimythology, taking up Australia’s ubiquitous colonial legend—the story of the white child lost in the outback—but retelling it from the disparate points of view of ordinary settlers and indigenous laborers. And the specificity of Susanna Moore’s depiction of the Dakota War of 1862 in “The Lost Wife” makes her version of the often-romanticized captivity narrative feel palpable and unnerving. Ms. Moore’s narrator is a scrupulous chronicler not only of period details but of cruelties, her own included.
It’s fitting, in this year devoted to recasting history, that two of the best novels were meditations on the ambiguities of recollection—meta-historical novels, you might say. Ed Park’s wildly inventive “Same Bed Different Dreams” springs from the conceit of a discovered manuscript that purports to reveal a secret, alternative history of South Korea. Mr. Park splices the contents of that manuscript with scenes set in a lightly tweaked version of the present, developing a dizzying canvas in which it’s impossible to pick apart textbook facts from conspiracy theories, or reality from illusions. The heightened, sometimes hilarious bewilderment adds poignancy to the book’s repeatedly asked refrain, “What is history?”
That question, too, is asked by Ismail Kadare [jb: see bio in Wikipedia] in his 37th, and perhaps final, novel, “A Dictator Calls.” Mr. Kadare focuses on a 1934 phone call made by Stalin to the writer Boris Pasternak, exploring the 13 different, sometimes contradictory, written accounts of the brief interaction.
The author then braids these retellings with his own experiences of writing under Albania’s dictator Enver Hoxha. A brilliant capstone to a towering career, “A Dictator Calls” is a kaleidoscopic consideration of the bloody crossroads of 20th-century politics and literature, from a man who stood at the center of it.
—Mr. Sacks is the Journal’s fiction critic.
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