Donna Leon vs. Serious Lit

I started the first Donna Leon novel in Venice and finished it as the train was pulling into Milan.  Since returning from Italy I’ve read 5 more (she has published 20 so far and Frieda owns all of them so they’re available at no cost to me).  Her novels differ from the standard crime novel fare in that the protagonist, Guido Brunetti, is not your classic alcoholic, melancholy, womanizing loner, but a sober family man who enjoys good food, reads classic Roman literature in the original Latin, is honest, principled, fair, and capable, and has a wife and 2 teenage kids he loves dearly.  And despite his profession as a Commissario of police in Venice, rather than being hard-bitten and cynical, he is, at least early in the series, slightly naïve.  In the 4^th book (Death and Judgment) he underestimates the extent of the political corruption above him, including his own boss who, like many high-level bureaucrats, is only really concerned with protecting his own position and is utterly devoid of courage, ideals, or integrity. Indeed, the noir element in Leon’s books lies in the venality and rottenness of the Italian political order and the people that compose it, which may be why she has resisted having her books translated into Italian.  In the 2^nd book (Death in a Strange Country) this corruption extends to the USAF, whose senior officers cover up the murder of their underlings by Italian thugs because said underlings were threatening to expose the illegal dumping of toxic waste that was being flown in from German bases (the Germans take their laws more seriously).  Because of this ubiquitous graft, the justice that Brunetti is able to achieve is often flawed and approximate.  Sometimes he simply has to let the high level crooks escape, because they are just too rich, powerful, and well-connected to lay hands on.  Other times he has to try to devise some extralegal punishment for them.  In Leon’s Italy, the rich and powerful are, to a substantial degree, above the law.  They quash investigations, buy people off, or pay to have them eliminated.  But, stoically, Brunetti soldiers on, doing the best he can to make things right, and accepting the limits of his own power. 

Despite touching on matters of high culture and delving into stinging social criticism, these books are popular genre novels, not serious literature.  Leon touches on this difference at the end of the 5^th book (Acqua Alta) where she compares an opera singer to a curator of antique Chinese ceramics, saying the first can be appreciated by anyone whereas the second may be judged only by experts, and thus is held to a higher standard.  In literature, we tend to think of this distinction as escapism versus work that attempts to say something significant about life as we experience it.  John Banville is a serious writer who also produces escapist fare (crime novels) under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.  He calls it the difference between art and craft.  Of course, this distinction isn’t clear cut.  There is serious social commentary in Leon’s books (political miscreancy, environmental depredation, human trafficking, priestly child molestation, corruption in the church, etc.), and observations on how we live.  But in serious lit the focus tends to be not so much on plot or characters as on sentences, the writing itself, and, ultimately, on the big picture, the meaning (or meaninglessness) of everything.  In the last half century, really going back to Proust, serious lit has been enamored of the long and winding sentence.  David Foster Wallace is an American example, writing protracted sentences filled with parenthetical asides and footnotes.  The Hungarian writer Lázló Krasznahorkai has taken this to perhaps the ultimate extreme, composing sentences that may comprise entire chapters and feel potentially endless.   

Escapist fare tends to be more immediately enjoyable, because it’s easier to read and hooks you with a story line and characters you love or hate, but it can leave you feeling a bit empty in the long run.  Serious lit tends to be difficult, both to write and to read.  One sometimes gets the impression, in fact, that difficulty, even opacity, is an end in itself.  We have a deeply ingrained belief that hard work is virtuous.  Therefore, if a work is difficult, it must be worthwhile, because we feel virtuous undertaking the hard work of reading it (and reading it demonstrates our elite status and worthiness).  Likewise, if it can’t be easily understood, then it must be profound.  John Banville says that as Benjamin Black he can write 2500 words a day, whereas as John Banville he can only write 200 words a day.  This is because it’s a strain to get everything, the meaning, the sounds, the rhythms, every word exactly right.  In Banville, the payoff is the beauty of the language itself.  In Krasznahorkai it’s the fevered, hallucinatory quality of the prose, which writhes and twists in on itself in an unsettling way.  Though initially interesting, in the long run this becomes soporific, because it’s just too tiring to maintain this level of concentration for so long, and it goes against the tide of our increasing ADD.  Indeed, if our capacity for concentration continues to deteriorate as it has been doing, in 20-30 years no one will be reading this kind of literature because no one will have an attention span long enough to comprehend one of these sentences.  And yet despite its labyrinthine quality one may still detect in Krasznahorkai’s prose a nostalgia for communism, or for some great ism that would promise to remake society in a dramatic, epic way; an idealism that longs for purity, nobility, transcendence, and almost hankers for martyrdom, or at least for a cause that would justify martyrdom.  And maybe, every once in a while, that sort of earnestness and intensity is a refreshing tonic in our shallow and venal world, but a little of it goes a long way, at least in my non-expert opinion. 

So here’s the thing: if we cannot really crack the conundrum of mortality, and are not inclined to martyrdom, does the torment of serious lit, its endless, obsessive, circular brooding, despite its occasional appeal, its flashes of beauty, really offer us something substantially meatier and more satisfying than the distraction of escapist fare?  Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad there are writers like Banville, Wallace, Krasznahorkai, Claude Simon, Thomas Bernhard, José Saramago, W. G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño, and others who push the literary envelope, but if it’s okay with you, for now I’d rather just wander the beautiful byways of Venice in the company of my friend Guido Brunetti.