Truth and Misery

"People have always been depressed, but, during the early 80's, there just seemed to be this overwhelming public consensus that being depressed was the most normal thing anyone could be; in fact, being depressed sort of meant you were smart." -Chuck Klosterman

One of the perks of working at a place like BookPeople (maybe the biggest perk, in fact) is that the environment invites conversations about the whys and wherefores of life, as well as the sort of co-workers that you would want to have these sorts of conversations with. One such co-worker is my friend, Jenn. Jenn is crazy smart and super literate, but is not at all pretentious or off-putting. She can speak intelligently about art and about what art says and why art matters without being someone who can only talk about such things. Anyway, Jenn's cool, but cool in a way that both my sister and my grandfather would like, and not just in a way my hipster ex-girlfriend would like.

So, today Jenn and I are talking about authors writing today and about how literary seems, to an increasing degree, to equal miserable. She gives as one example the fact that more than a few of the novels she has read recently include the brutal death of an animal. She says, more generally, that it seems as if classic literature used to allow that a book could be hopeful and its characters generous, kind, and even happy without this ever seeming shallow or sappy; and yet, more recent fiction seems set on being dark, depressed, and even violent.

Granted, that's a broad statement, and Jenn knew that when she made it. She knows that dark and violent novels have been around a lot longer than the last decade. She wasn't trying to offer up an indisputable fact so much as to address a mood, a feeling that the current trend in literary fiction is towards something darker and meaner, more cynical and clinical. Her question was this; can you give an example of recent fiction that was both literary and yet not miserable?

I could only come up with one, off the top of my head, and that was Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. Robinson's novel has its sad moments, but it is, ultimately, a hopeful and redemptive story. But it was the only example I could come up with. I consulted my "Kester's Best of the Decade" display in the store; Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, these are miserable stories, every one. I tried to rack my brain, but couldn't come up with one other example of a novel, written in the past decade, that wasn't more miserable than not.

My contribution to this conversation was to wonder if we haven't started to equate truth with misery; to assert that the hopeful people are just those who aren't paying attention. Understand that neither I nor Jenn are complaining that these more miserable fictions aren't good (they made my "Best of the Decade"), or even that they should be less miserable (how do you write an upbeat version of The Road?), but we did share a concern that the smartest among us may have given up hope and may even have embraced the idea that doing so is the smart thing to do.

What do you think?