The Relatable Novel and Its Discontents

In the noble but futile attempt to salvage literature from the bargain bins of mass culture, few of its virtues have been extolled half so much as its empathizing capacity to put the reader into the consciousness of some nebulous “Other.” That despite the rigid filtration in the 2010s and early 20s of any book outside its lane to ensure a three way match between author, protagonist, and target demographic, the real power of literature was to live a life unlike your own. This never stops any agent, marketing exec, or book reviewer from praising a novel for its “relatability,” often used interchangeably with “resonance.” I myself have done it on more than one occasion. On its own, such praise is often the indicator of a superficial, if not penurious work, but might a novel’s relatability ever be in service of a higher aesthetic ideal? To answer this, let us first forget about such ideals for a moment, forget about virtue altogether, and indulge the less earnest side of our literary consumption. Nothing virtuous, after all, can be as pleasurable as a good book.

To begin this indulgence, I divulge a passage from a novel most relatable to me personally: Discontent by Beatriz Serrano. It’s about a woman who doesn’t want to work. Reading this aloud made my girlfriend say “That is literally you.” It made me stop browsing Barnes and Noble to just buy it instantly.

What neither that doctor nor the therapist understood was that the stress was caused not by what I did at my job but, as I’d try to explain to him, by having to go to work. Spending eight hours from Monday to Friday on alienating and unsatisfying tasks, surrounded by people with whom I was forced to have futile and boring conversations full of absurd platitudes about mortgages or parking spaces or the words their children said wrong or the last series they’d watched on Netflix. All that time I was giving to others instead of staying home reading or drawing or simply looking at the ceiling, half naked, observing the cracks. I couldn’t stand the idea of being forced to live that office pantomime in perpetuity just to pay for things like rent or food or a book or a weekend at the beach. I broke down every morning when the alarm beeped because life, lived this way, seemed like a badly written tragedy, boring and sterile, devoid of fun and, even worse, devoid of content, and so, on my way to work, I felt like grabbing strangers by the shoulders and asking them why they weren’t feeling like me. What was their secret, how did they manage to maintain their composure, why didn’t they cry every time their alarms beeped? And the truth is that before going to the doctor and the therapist, I already knew what my problem was, and also that, unless I won the lottery or cut off my hand so I could receive a state pension instead of working, my situation was hopeless.” - Discontent, Beatriz Serrano.

It’s not the most stylistic or poetic of passages, but it’s one of the most honest. It made me come to terms with two things: 1. That there’s a visceral pleasure in having your own internal world articulated to you in a way you haven’t seen. 2. Every protagonist I relate to gets called “insufferable” on Goodreads. I’ll only dwell on that first point. Something about this type of pleasure feels too immediate to enjoy guilt free. I must have seen a hundred videos on TikTok in my six months on that platform giving some version of that same monologue, all covering the same points, with the same feeling of dread with the realization that very little of our lives are in accordance with our own nature. None of it felt illuminating or cathartic. I would hesitate to even call it entertainment. Given the vast flow of information we’re inundated with every day that has no other purpose beyond being relatable in some capacity, surely if literature must have some higher mission if it’s to remain relevant in the era of memes and Instagram reels is to give “relatability” some higher aim. This “higher aim” which typically involves making an audience complicit through the protagonist’s relatability to instill I’m not quite sure Discontent has one, but that might be as much to its credit as its detriment. I kept waiting for the big “be grateful for what you have” moment or the “we can still live authentically outside of work” consolation but mercifully, it never came. The big font blurb by Jean Kyoung Frazier likens it to “Office Space for literary weirdos…” which is kind of correct so far as it takes place in an office some of the time. It’s humorous enough, but I wouldn’t call it a comic novel. I’m also not sure what the weirdo appeal is unless reading books in general is just a niche quirky thing to do now. Unlike your typical “office comedy,” it never legitimizes its setting. We see its narrator fake her way through meetings, watch Youtube all day in her office and go on a hellish office retreat where her increasingly poor decisions lead to the big spiral the novel spends its time building up to. I won’t spoil it. It should be noted that none of these plot developments seem to really influence the final outcome. You can place the epilogue right after the first chapter and it would make for a perfectly coherent, if structurally disjointed, short story.

It’s perhaps at least partially to the translator’s credit that I kept forgetting it was a translated work at all. Its setting feels as American as any Richard Ford novel. Everything I had known thus far about Madrid came from Expat influencers on TikTok painting the city as an almost atavistic refuge from modern life: where people spend hours in the middle of the day napping instead of working, where the elderly smoke cigars and commune in cafes and on cobblestone streets rather than rot in retirement homes, where the cost of living was significantly less expensive than the major cities of the U.S, where people engaged in a primarily older way of living based on tradition and not capitalism. Discontent all but obliterates this fantasy as Marisa suffers the same soulless corporate routine the English speaking world knows, listens to complaining coworkers and hokey management calling the place a “family,” goes back to her apartment where she sometimes sleeps with a man who is not really her boyfriend but sometimes plays the role of one because he’s close and convenient. It might as well have taken place in Seattle, uptown New Orleans, Pittsburg probably.

In other words, it offers no fantasy of elsewhere. The back cover blurb calls it “Office Space for literary weirdos. . .” and I’m not entirely sure what the weirdo appeal is. It is very much a normie novel about a normie, written in normie prose, with normie dianoia. Maybe the idea was that reading itself is so niche that holding any book makes you some kind of weirdo, which, sure. I actually preferred it this way. That Marisa is characterized as so ordinary, that she is not some unrecognized genius or rarefied soul for whom managerial conformity is more difficult for than the average person forces the reader to confront the machinery itself, and not just the wayward romantic being crushed by it.

As a whole, it’s a fairly frictionless novel. The tortured company retreat ends with Marisa using a less than ethical (or legal) means of making the soulless ecosystem of her colleagues into the more Dionysian image of her favorite Heironymous Bosch paintings, but she evades the professional, financial, and legal consequences through some of the most convenient authorial intervention possible. Still, the darkly ironic ending is pleasing enough despite the incredulous backflipping it takes to get there. I just couldn’t help but wonder, given how certain passages mirrored my own internal world, what a greater novel might have done to then spin it, shatter it, pull the mirror back further to show what I’ve otherwise failed to scrutinize. The novel which remains relatable through its entirety can do none of those things. That’s all fine for the most part; sometimes you don’t want a great novel, you just want a good book, but too much of that kind of relatability and literature does nothing but re-iterate to you your own palsied self mythology.

More to the point, a novel that is relatable and not much else misses all the doors it’s relatability could have opened. How many English majors had their lives mapped out for them by a Dostoevsky quote they read at eighteen? For better or ill, the writer that can articulate a reader’s inner world can better make a reader buy into the world of the novel. It’s not just because Celine was such an unenviable grotesquery that Journey To The End of The Night is such a great book. “And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.” I must have had that quote on a permanent loop in my head for at least six months during my first office job, and on rotation on and off again thereafter like an old Elliot Smith record. Given that this is the most quoted passage of the novel, I can only imagine I’m not the only one. The tension between Celine’s overall deplorableness and his ability to articulate the internal lives of many readers is what makes his grotesquery compelling in the first place: to accept his diagnosis of the human condition in full is to accept your own fate of becoming a slobbering, bigoted, raving shadow of that old self you thought you could never kill. The resonance of Celine’s writing comes with its own microscope to hold itself under.

If we can acknowledge the indulgent pleasure of a relatable and digestible passage, we acknowledge that it’s a pleasure easily exploitable. Perhaps it isn’t television that usurped the novel but the Instagram quote, with its aphorisms and lyrical anti-poetry. If none of it quite matches the insights of the greats, you can extract what you need from The Myth of Sisyphus with a brief quote and image of Camus looking soulfully away from the camera, cigarette in mouth. With the proliferation of short form video across most social platforms, even this is becoming dated. My instagram feed is filled with people who have turned their lives into 30 second micro Hallmark films with the One day___, It’s very important you that ____ format, (pick your choices from column A: Your crush will ask you out, a follower will tell you you’re in danger, someone will tell you you’re destined to be a star. Match with choices column B: say yes, listen, keep in touch, run far away, don’t give up). If there’s anything the 21st century has excelled at, it’s making perfect unions of individual self mythologies and advertising, co-opting them, multiplying them, and making them a full assault on your feed. This multiplicity of the conversational vernacular from the constant barrage of short form video and podcasts is partly why I am skeptical of those who insist it be the default narrative voice of a novel. Surely no one can be naive enough to think the mundanity of ordinary language should have the same effect as those Hemingways, Celines, and Fitzgeralds who shook the world from its Victorian slumber. The conversational narrator is proliferated through every crevice of online life, more so than even the offline world. Certainly these Instagram trend chasers have richer internal worlds than the three act holiday card they present to the world, but algorithms don’t reward strangeness.

It isn’t that the truly great novel is never relatable, it’s that the particulars of a great novel are so superseded by its form that you might feel as if you might relate to them despite never having shared their circumstances. Lucy Snowe, the plausibly autofictional protagonist of Villette, withholds much of her immediate feelings from the reader as she does the other characters. Rather than outright state that she feels like a wallflower, not compelling enough to star in her own drama, she simply fades into the background for much of the opening chapters, when after an unnamed tragedy leaves her an orphan, she goes to live with the widow Mrs. Bretton and her spirited son Graham. Soon they have a visitor: six year old Polly, a delicate child of sophisticated upbringing, who clings desperately to her father who must leave for a business trip. In the beginning she wants nothing to do with the Brettons (or Lucy), sulking and waiting for her father to return. The older Graham teases her gently until he eventually wins her over. The next couple of chapters almost comprise a standalone short story as the two children grow closer, occasionally acknowledging the existence of Lucy, until they must tragically part. In these chapters, Lucy is much like Ishmael in the middle chapters of Moby Dick, primarily an observer of the larger personalities around her. She never acknowledges her solitude, but you can feel it just by the novel’s very structure. Years later, when she is reunited with Graham, they strike up a friendship. Lucy so longs for his companionship that she begins to live for his, mostly mannered and uninspired letters. Polly re-emerges as well, treating Lucy like an old best friend. It is very obvious even to her that Graham will marry either Pauline or the school coquette, Ginerva. The scene where you can really feel Lucy’s heart braking is not when Graham announces his engagement to Polly, but after all the time Lucy and Graham had finally spent together and In one outstanding scene, Graham finally tells her what it is he loves about her: that she is so easy, so plain, predictable, with not a sinful inclination in her heart, or a complex thought in her head. Lesser novels would have had interior monologues go paragraphs about their heroines feeling invisible, perhaps for their refusal to be the “cool girl,” but Villette leaves it unsaid but entirely plain and inescapable through its structure. You can feel Lucy Snowe’s heart breaking in the white space. It also

It’s why I can’t help but keep going back to the modernists, where feeling and form in its greatest harmony. In texts like The Sound and The Fury and To The Lighthouse, the alienation is so inherent to its syntax that it never even needs to announce itself. The Benji Compson section of The Sound and The Fury might be the most famous section but it’s the Quentin Compson section where the novel reaches its peak. Where time feels kaleidoscopic in Benji’s section, where events are untethered entirely from the before and after, for Quentin it is circular. For all its avant garde stylings, this section is as truer in the depiction of depressive spiral than many I’ve read. We aren’t just shown Quentin grabbing the metal irons for his bags for some insidious purpose; we don’t just see him aimlessly wandering the outskirts of Harvard, but his recalcitrant memory is as entrenched in his immediate reality as any physical object before him. Though far from his home in Mississippi his memory is a tempest of honey suckle, lust, unconsummated incest and humiliated honor. He was fundamentally a character I could not relate to, particularly in the time I read it, but never had I ever been more deeply absorbed in a character. The collapse of the text is the collapse of Quentin’s mind is the collapse of old southern gentility is the collapse of time itself. The form June Second 1910 makes the idea of relatability as relevant as a vintage lotto ticket.

But do we really want this all of the time? As often as I’ve grumbled about a lack of great modernist works in the 21st century, and in the anglosphere in particular, imagine Random House trying to pump out neo-modernist epics the way they do multi-generation diaspora family sagas. Sure it would be nice to have a few such novels some of the time, but a whole wave of mediocrities plastering the front Barnes and Noble front tables looking to collapse text, time and history would just make the modernists look lame in retrospect. Even Cormac McCarthy’s posthumous literary status is threatened less by the story of his teenage muse than the hordes of amateurs trying to write like him.1 All this is to say that a book that foregoes its aspirations towards great literature simply to be your friend might be okay some of the time.

I reserve the right to contradict this at any point.