Geoff Dyer and the Exhaustion of Fiction

Even the supposedly avant-garde, or "experimental," novel appears stale when set beside the vitality of the contemporary versions of the chronicle form. As much is evident in this exchange in The Believer between Geoff Dyer, one of the best English-language chronicle writers today, and a former editor of his, Ethan Nosowsky:

GD: It seems to me that with someone like Sebald you really don’t know where you are, what those books of his are doing. And I like to think that something like that goes on with my books as well, and with Jeff in Venice. I mean, on every level it is posing the question of whether it’s really a novel.

BLVR: This makes me think of John Barth’s “The Literature of Exhaustion,” which argued that the novel of psychological realism had basically become a genre whose conventions had gone stale. But similarly, so many mediocre, supposedly experimental writers today are indebted to Barthelme and Pynchon and Borges and Calvino and Beckett and Kafka — and that kind of stuff has started to feel a little exhausted, too, in Barth’s sense. Any sophisticated reader who’s read these books sort of knows how they work—a story about the artifice of the story, or is this real or not, or is the narrator narrating or is he being narrated—I mean, all of these questions seem equally tired to me.

GD: And given the choice of that old-fashioned psychological realist novel or John Barth, I think we’d all go for the former.

BLVR: But it does seem that there are alternatives to either that I like to think that you’re exploring.

GD: Sure, I think I am, too. But not in that kind of “experimental” way.

A New Chronicle From Geoff Dyer

After detouring back into fiction (ostensibly) with "Jeff in Venice," the very good Geoff Dyer returns to his exploration of the chronicle form with "Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room." To be released February 21 in the United States, it is concerned with the themes of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 science fiction film "Stalker." In the book, Geoff Dyer attempts, according to the publicity material, "to unlock the mysteries of a film that has haunted him ever since he first saw it thirty years ago. As Dyer guides us into the zone of Tarkovsky’s imagination, we realize that the film is only the entry point for a radically original investigation of the enduring questions of life, faith, and how to live." It is a narrative, the publicist assures us, "that gives free rein to the brilliance of Dyer’s distinctive voice, acute observation, melancholy, comedy, lyricism, and occasional ill-temper."