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By Siddhartha Deb

Where is the contemporary novel of rent and the struggle to find a home?

Image Siddhartha Deb Credit... Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

“Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus, the Proust of the Papuans?” Instead of Saul Bellow’s condescending rhetorical questions, let us ask: Where is the contemporary novel of refugee people drowning off the shores of Homer’s wine-dark sea? Where is the fiction that gives us an account of what it feels like to be in solitary confinement? Where is the contemporary novel of rent and the struggle to find a home, one that can do for 21st-century New York what William Dean Howells’s “A Hazard of New Fortunes” did in the 19th century? I’d be glad to read all of them.

The questions are easily expanded upon, but the answers require a little more work. Of course, fiction takes time, especially good fiction, and no doubt some day, somewhere, there will spring into existence books that grapple with all of the above. And yet, the fact that fiction needs time doesn’t fully explain the degree to which literary fiction written in English seems cut off from the world, from the very substance of living.

I felt this isolation most acutely when reading through a set of applications for a prestigious fiction fellowship a few months ago. Most of the applications displayed much professional accomplishment, and yet only in a handful did the proposed fiction stand out. I remember an intriguing novel building itself up to the present from a historical workers’ strike in Montana, and another set among a group of African-Americans in a near-future California. Of the others, I recall only the aura of social ambition expressed by their authors, and the hackneyed subjects that gave the sense that the literary novel these days is exclusively concerned with the fulfillment and frustration of bourgeois characters, confined tightly to their own segments of race and class.

That weirdly compelling writer J.G. Ballard once praised the Surrealists for placing the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible. But the fiction being proposed these days appears to be all about placing the logic of the visible at the service of the visible. In this, it reflects the narrowing of sensibilities and interests of those writing today, something reinforced by the corporate demands of mainstream publishing houses, the astonishing lack of meaningful inclusion in cultural criticism and writing programs, and the emergence of a global elite in the world of Anglophone letters — one that creates the impression of diversity while leaving untouched the supreme reign of the unadventurous middlebrow.

The exceptions only prove the point. The emergence of Elena Ferrante, with her haunted fiction about women, ambition and modernity, is perhaps possible only because the writer has preserved herself through her anonymity from the rot of today’s literary scene. Her fiction and her life struggle with the fact, she has said in one of her rare interviews, that “class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder”; Ferrante therefore sets herself against the most entrenched of contemporary myths, the idea that it is possible to remake oneself endlessly, and at little cost to oneself or the world.

In Ferrante’s dramatization of such an unpalatable truth, and in her own living of it, one sees how a writer might free herself from the tired pursuit of fiction as a matter of professional advancement and set out in quest of the stories that don’t get told. It involves indifference to what the market wants and a turning away from the superficial truisms of the day, but it is only in such indifference that there might exist a liberation, a way for us to beat our way through to the stories that escaping refugees and confined prisoners might want us to tell.

Siddhartha Deb was born in northeastern India. He is the author of two novels and “The Beautiful and the Damned,” a work of narrative nonfiction that was a finalist for the Orwell Prize and the winner of the PEN Open award. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Society of Authors in the UK, the Nation Institute, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University, and the Howard Foundation at Brown University. His journalism, essays, and reviews have appeared in many publications, including The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Republic, The Baffler, The Nation, n+1, and The Times Literary Supplement.