Art, reason, and reality

Finding elements of the supernatural in American fiction is, of course, nothing unusual. From Nathaniel Hawthorne to Stephen King, there has always been an element of the Gothic in the American imaginative landscape. During most of the twentieth century, however, American literary fiction has been determinedly realistic. With one or two exceptions - Joyce Carol Oates comes to mind - the writer who wanted to produce fiction-as-art over the past eighty years dedicated himself to a naturalist tradition. Dreiser wanted to show what life was like for the poor and disenfranchised. Hemingway wanted his readers to understand what it really felt like to be in a war. Roth committed himself to recreating the experiences of American Jews, without favor. Every once in a while one of these writers would produce a fantasy, like Roth's about the man who turned into a gigantic breast, but it was clearly labeled a fantasy. There was no confusion about what you were to believe could happen in the real world.

American popular fiction, on the other hand, has always been enamored of the fantastic, the religious, and the paranormal. Even the hard-boiled private eye novel, that quintessential home of "gritty realism," has really been a fantasy, the daydream home of people who would prefer to think of themselves as possessed by cynicism rather than the devil. Still, hard-boiled private eye novels were considered "literary" exactly to the extent to which they were considered realistic. The more obviously unrealistic productions - the vampire and werewolf novels, the ghost stories and tales of religious conversion - spent a great deal of space setting the stage to make their premises more believable. I have written fourteen detective novels, and in only one of them did I have an element (highly ambiguous) that might be considered paranormal. I spent three pages preparing the reader for it and hedging around it in every way I could think of, because I didn't want my work to be treated as a joke. All the popular writers of the fantastic, from Stephen King to Dean R. Koontz, treat the paranormal as in need of vigorous defense if it is to be acceptable in fiction. No modern writer of ghost or horror or detective fiction would assume her readers willingness to. swallow the existence of ghoulies and goblins and beasties. Even Frank Peretti's religious novels, aimed at an audience of born-again and Pentecostal Christians, surround their miracles with explanations and theories, to make the unscientific sound scientific and therefore acceptable for belief.

In Alice Hoffman's Seventh Heaven there is no attempt to explain or justify the use of the paranormal at all. It is just there, like the Bosco chocolate syrup and the Metrecal weight-loss milkshakes that turn up in every one of the nearly identical houses in her 1959 Long Island suburb. In Turtle Moon, the Hoffman novel that followed' Seventh Heaven, there is a lovesick ghost and a dog with telepathy. In Practical Magic, the two old women who serve as foster parents to the girls whose stories are at the center of the novel are witches with a vengeance. It's what they do for a living.

If this phenomenon were restricted to the work of Alice Hoffman, there wouldn't be anything to worry about. I could either decide not to read Alice Hoffman's novels, or only to read them when I wouldn't mind if the fat middle-aged homewife checking out the price of Kraft Singles in Safeway is also able to move large objects just by thinking about it. Unfortunately, over the past ten years, more and more self-consciously literary novels, the kind of novels that get reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, have wandered into the territory of the semi-real. What is more discomforting is that none of the highbrow journals of review has thought it important to mention that they have. In the reviews of Ann Beatties Another You, there were complaints of a lack of the usual fire in Beattie's writing, but no mention of the fact that two of the characters are connected in some cosmic, unspecified way that involves telepathy across decades.

Sometimes these books are attempts to address the differences between Western and Eastern ways of looking at the world, with the Eastern (predictably) coming off the winner. In Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses, one of the two main characters is a ghost come to 'earth to rerum the reincarnated spirit of her friend to the happiness she was not able to achieve when the two of them were together in a former life. This is presented as the silly nonsense of an uneducated Chinese immigrant until the end of the book, when it turns out to be true. In the novels of Louise Erdrich, Native American healing rituals fight valiantly against the rationalistic excesses of the white scientific civilization that is destroying a noble people.

Most of these novels, however, throw in elements of the supernatural simply because they do. Unlike popular horror fiction, the supernatural is not the point of the stories they tell. It's just another detail, like the brand names and car makes and suburban street names (Maple Way, Lilac Lane) that dot the prose like pats of butter. When one of the three women in Jane Smileys A Thousand Acres lies down on the bed in her childhood room and gets up with a recovered memory so paranoically complex it could have done duty as an Oliver Stone screenplay, none of the other characters is even surprised.