I’ve just been reading the hilarious novel Banal Nightmare, by Halle Butler, and the hilarious short story, Final Boy, by Sam Lipsyte, both of which follow in what might be called the Lorrie Moore tradition of stories in which a witty, disaffected, downwardly mobile, immature, but fundamentally good person has to navigate a world of people who just don’t get it.
When writing about Lipsyte before, I’ve referred to his protagonists as “literary schlubs,” and I traced the trope back to Joseph Heller. Commenters traced the archetype back to Sancho Panza and some characters from 19th century Russian novels. Separately I characterized Lorrie Moore’s stories as “always seem to be centered around a female character who is witty, thoughtful, and refined, and surrounded by really piggy guys.”
The concept I’m thinking about here is related to but not quite the same as “literary schlub” or “witty social victim.” Here I’m focusing not the journey of the lead character through the story, which is structured as a series of episodes in which he or she ineffectively banters with a series of humorless or boorish personal and business associates amid an environment in which we, the readers, are made excruciatingly aware of the unfairness of the world toward the protagonist, while simultaneously receiving the sociopolitical message that our entire society is self-destructive.
In that sense, maybe these books are in the tradition of the George Orwell of Down and Out in Paris and London and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. But different from, say, Jonathan Coe, who is socially critical too but he won’t novels on a single viewpoint character in this way. The closest to that from Coe would be What a Carve Up!, but even that sour-funny book doesn’t quite follow the Butler/Lipsyte/Moore path of a character trying desperately to make sense of the world through wit, in a sort of distant portrayal of the author as Cassandra-like social commenter who can see all but can communicate nothing to the “dense commuters” (to use Auden’s words) surrounding them.
Andrew wrote:
“In that sense, maybe these books are in the tradition of the George Orwell of Down and Out in Paris and London and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. But different from, say, Jonathan Coe, who is socially critical too but he won’t novels on a single viewpoint character in this way.”
Is that “won’t” meant to be “wrote”?
More likely, “doesn’t write novels based on.”
Surprised not to see you include T.C. Boyle. He may have harmed his ascent as a 30 under 30 by insisting on the Corraghesan spelled out. He has been the voice of the man holding down ‘good shitty jobs’ (the term’s from Sam’s The Ask), invariably men on a toboggan deterministically aimed right past the bottom. I love his blow out endings that never stop getting worse. Martin Amis is the other huge voice of the Loser, the weasel shlimazel who’s pretty implicated in their unbroken streak of bad luck.