It's amazing to me that Tom McCarthy is considered by a considerable number of critics to be "the standard-bearer of the avant-garde novel" (Adam Kirsch, Slate). There is nothing at all "avant-garde" about the way McCarthy treats plot, character, narrative or really any other conventions of the modern novel. Has mainstream literary fiction really become so banal that a novel simply has to have ideas in it for it to pass for avant-garde? Satin Island is a good book with some interesting stuff to say that occasionally even manages to challenge the status quo and flirt with the politically incorrect, but its not even as avant-garde as J.G. Ballard…and I'm not talking about the J.G. Ballard of The Atrocity Exhibit, a truly outrageous read even by today's standards, but the Ballard of the much less avant-garde Crash. To tout McCarthy's avant-garde creds by claiming that he writes, as some critics have done, in the vein of Robbe-Grillet is not only wildly inaccurate but hilarious when you consider that Robbe-Grillet himself was avant-garde a freaking half-century ago!
Yes, it's true, I suppose. American mainstream literary fiction really is that lame! It hasn't even caught up with Kathy Acker and she's been dead for nearly two decades! As far as challenging convention goes, Tom McCarthy isn't even in the avant-garde minor leagues when compared to Acker. Or William S. Burroughs, whose Naked Lunch remains an indigestible experiment in avant-garde fiction for the weak-stomached mainstream since it was first served up in 1959.
There is an American avant-garde but I guess the lesson to be learned is that you're not going to find it between the covers of anything published by Random House—or any other mainstream publisher, for that matter. Satin Island is avant-garde only if you stand it alongside something by A.S. Byatt or Julian Barnes.
Satin Island is a good book, though. I said it earlier, but it bears repeating. It's an entertaining read, timely, and provokes some thought. But it hardly breaks any new ground. It doesn't even travel the ground already paced off by long-dead avant-garde writers. Okay, if you want to say that McCarthy re-chews some aspects of past avant-garde and postmodern writers and spits them back out in a half-digested mush more easily assimilated by your average reader of New York Times recommended literary fiction, I'll sigh and, resignedly, agree just to end the argument. But don't try to compare him to Gertrude Stein, or, as some reviewers did, to Samuel Beckett! That's just too much to bear.
Ultimately, It's not McCarthy's fault that the critics and publishers must make the claim that he's something he's not so as to warn the great common denominator that comprises their core audience to be ready for something that doesn't entirely meet their timid middlebrow expectations. At the same time, it enables this same audience to congratulate themselves, to feel they're true literary outlaws reading on the wild edge of the literary frontier. What bullshit! To these folks I'd offer something like pornocalypse by M. Satai and see how fast they run back to the relative safety of a Tao Lin.
America isn't the leader anymore in a whole host of areas. But it's never held the lead when it came to the literary avant-garde. And considering how far behind it is at this point, and how incredibly dumbed-down and conventional even "smart" commercial literary fiction is in this country, it's hard to believe it will ever get within half-a-century of shouting distance.
That's fine. That's American publishing.
American publishing, like American everything else, is about making money. Okay. Have at it. But don't co-opt the term "avant-garde." Don't stick it on what are nothing more than conventional novels with marginally quirky themes and a handful of provocative ideas the way you'd splash the words "new" and "improved" on a roll of paper towels. These terms mean something to some of us.
As if you ever cared.
As if you ever will.
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