Wood on "Hyphenated" America

Peter J. Leithart, September 07, 2003

James Wood is always worth reading. His latest review in The New Republic examines the first novel of Monica Ali, entitled Brick Lane. It tells the story of Nazneen, an eighteen-year-old Bangladeshi woman who is taken from her home to an arranged marriage to a much older man in London. The novel as Wood describes is sound affecting and stylish, and along the way Wood points out some interesting effects of the new literature of "hyphenated" America:

In the last twenty years, British and American ficion has been renewed by what might be called the immigration of content. In America, this useful novelty has tended to result from the inevitable hyphenation of the once apparently stable monad of Americanness (Cuban-American fiction, Puero Rican-American, Asian American, and so on). In Britain, the vast centrifuge of empire has more often resulted in fiction set outside Britain, or, when set in Britain, fiction explicitly about immigration. Hyphenation has been, for immigrants, a trickier train to catch in Britain than in the most hospitable United States.

Plenty of readers, critics, and academics have been grateful for the augmentation of material, the opening of "colorful" worlds, not to mention the at times radical literary techniques, that this new life has brought to fiction. At such times the etymology of the word "novel" is always mentioned, and Ezra Pound's definition of literatures as "news that stays news" is reliably invoked. What is not so often said is that this new material has another and perhaps more momentous service to perform, which is to return fiction to its nineteenth-century gravity. This is does by re-importing into the Western novel traditional societies, with their ties of marriage, burdens of religion, obligations of civic duty, and pressures of propriety — and thereby restoring to the novel form some of the old oppressions that it was created to comprehend and to resist and in some measure to escape.

In particular Wood points out how adultery functions in these new fictional settings. While Ali's novel, Wood says, provides some new material in fiction, that novelty

is also a restoration, for it allows her, quite naturally, to inhabit a fictional realm in which prayer, free will, and adultery all have their antique weight. Take adultery, for instance: once the great motor of the novel, it is not an idle cylinder, only formulaically or nominalls used to give plot a bit of a lift. Adultery has withered as a fictional theme because it drags such little consequence behind it nowadays. In nineteenth-century fiction, by contrast, adultery was literally used by plot: it had weight by virtue of its place in a system of shame, punishment, desire, escape, and imprisonment, and to set it ticking was to set that system ticking.