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The Crisis of the Realist Novel
Joseph O’Neill’s Godwin displays all the anxieties of a form stuck in place.
In 2008, Zadie Smith wrote in The New York Review of Books that there were “ two paths for the novel.” One was represented by Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, about a man who wakes from an accident-induced coma to find that he no longer understands the world around him,leading him to elaborately restage various episodes of his life in an attempt to create an experience that feels authentic. As Mark begins his journey to Europe with a nighttime bus ride to the airport, the Poconos Mountains seen dimly through the window resemble “immense geological ghouls,” and suddenly he realizes he is not at the center of the cosmos: “A sense of personal insignificance and doom is inevitable. This is the drawback of vigilance: from your watchtower you finally spy, in your binoculars, your fleeing self; and you release the hounds.” Then, he adds, “I speak for myself, of course, on the basis of my experiences and hunches, which is to say, my misconceptions and my stupid fears.” This is the O’Neillian two-step: an elegantly written gesture at the notion that the self is an inadequate vessel for conveying reality, then a whole novel that uses the self to do that anyway.
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