The fragment novel

"...William Gass complained about the effects of the American penchant for simplicity on the country’s writing, so often reduced to the meat and potatoes of straightforward storytelling. In the contemporary fragment novel, the inverse has occurred. What a plainly narrated adventure was to Gass’s pioneers, a performance of profundity is to the fragment novelist. Oracularities, the more muddled and gently elegiac the better, are offered as evidence of sophistication. “Can you think of writing as a gaze?” the narrator of Drifts asks her students. “Maybe writing was about being visible when I felt invisible,” she reflects later. “Or maybe writing was about becoming invisible again after having become too visible. Maybe it was both. I wasn’t sure anymore.” Zambreno comes close to clarifying that her method hinges on her resistance to clarity—though of course the method itself rebuffs clarification. “One of the notes I take that spring: ‘vagueness.’ Another: ‘signs,’” she writes. Maybe what this means is that vagueness is a sign of poignance, but then it is not altogether clear what it means. After all, why think when you can mimic thinking? And why write a novel when you can meditate on the difficulty of writing a novel? Fragment novels are in effect reflections on novels that, by their own admission, their authors never end up finishing: “What prevents me from writing the book?” asks the protagonist of Drifts. “The heat, the dog, the day, air-conditioning, desiring to exist in the present tense,” and so on and on. It is less a novel than a gesture at a novel. At first glance, the fragment novel’s structural equivocations about how its pieces hang together and substantive equivocations about all its internal architecture appear antithetical to two of the declutterer’s foremost tics: her allergy to euphemism and her request that everything be stashed in its proper place. But in fact the novel’s studied evasiveness is the product of its commitment to tabling wants and honoring needs, in accordance with the minimalist’s most cherished directive. There is no plot, no food, no friends, and very little dialogue. Perhaps the fragment novel is not in fact constructed by way of removal, but it might as well be, for it is no more than an accumulation of negations."

"All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess": https://a.co/caQ5YMc