Babies and Metaphors

Just finished a contemporary novel, mostly about marriage and love--wonderful themes, but the novel was unsatisfying. I never felt that the characters were living, breathing people I could care about--in other words, I never suspended disbelief. And the novel didn't offer enough, in terms of its style, to make that lack of suspension enjoyable. The plot felt contrived, and the language was often stilted and bombastic.

I don't like the use of metaphors in most contemporary novels. I find that the metaphor's signifier often takes over and announces itself as the product of a writing workshop, not anything that the narrator or characters in the story might have actually said. For instance: in this particular novel, one of the characters dies. One of his internal organs fails, and "turned on him like a servant with a drawn dagger." The image has a certain drama and excitement; but taken in context, the metaphor is so overblown, so nineteenth-century Gothic, and has so little to do with the character and his actual death, that it wrenched me from the flow of the story; in my disgust I almost stopped reading the novel altogether.

Don't get me wrong, I do like wildly creative metaphors--if they suit the character being described, and the overall tone of the novel. Otherwise, it just becomes the kind of awkward straining for effect that calls attention to the author, not the characters or the story.

But this happens all the time in the contemporary novel, this use of metaphors that scream out, "Pay attention to me! Never mind about the story itself--it's all about me!" I thought it worked well in Mysteries of Pittsburgh because it suited the characters; and it works in some of Lorrie Moore's stories because she, like Michael Chabon, has a flamboyant style. It doesn't have much of a place, however, in most novels because it starts to feel like a story about oranges in which the word "rasberry" keeps showing up for no apparent reason.

Somehow this has something to do with babies.

I think because, in my discussion with my husband about this novel and the metaphor about the illness, I said, "That metaphor has no meaning whatsoever in the context of this story," and he responded, "Well, that doesn't surprise me. I don't think people are looking for meaning any more. They're just skating over the surface of everything. They're interested in appearances, not meaning." And that started me thinking (very late at night) about the kind of world my son is going to inherit when he's an adult. Are we passing through some sort of Baroque or Victorian era, where various forms of art have become so overly decorative, and the cultural language has become so encrusted with artificial meanings, that artists will have to rebel once again, as they did at the turn of the last century, and create new languages and forms--reinvent the wheel (or perhaps turn it into a cabbage)?

It's hard to generalize like this without sounding self-important. I'm no avatar for the new age in art. What it boils down to is, I want my son to feel connected to the flow of his life, and art is supposed to help him do that. I don't think most contemporary art helps much in this respect.

And this doesn't just apply to the babies of today...I wouldn't mind feeling that connection myself, and it's been a bit hard to find it and feel it, lately.