What Is "Risk" in the Contemporary Novel?

Catriona Menzies-Pike has a review of Amanda Lohrey’s new novel, Capture, in the Guardian. It’s characteristically perceptive and intellectually curious, focusing in no small part on the author’s paratextual note and its gentle guidance on how the narrative should be read and understood. It also contains two short paragraphs that have given me food for thought on the state of the novel as an artform, beyond the particularities of Lohrey’s latest:

Some readers might also be incredulous that one of Australia’s most celebrated and serious-minded authors has elected to write a novel about alien abductees. And yet, over four decades, Lohrey’s consistently surprising fictions have been typified by a willingness to take tremendous risks, including The Labyrinth, which won the 2021 Miles Franklin award.

Lohrey’s novels confront readers with characters whose experiences challenge the techno-rationalism that circumscribes the institutions of contemporary life, and they withhold soothing resolution. It is evidence of Lohrey’s skill, as if anyone needed it, that a plot that teeters on the edge of profound silliness should be a vehicle for urgent questions about how we make meaning of our own lived experiences, and those of others.

Menzies-Pike makes some critical judgments here, both explicitly and implicitly, and I think it’s worth pausing over them. The main explicit judgment is this: Lohrey’s work is reliably willing “to take tremendous risks.” The main implicit judgment is this: Capture is a risky novel, of a piece with Lohrey’s oeuvre to date. But there are more implicit judgments nested within this last one, about what constitutes risk in a novel such as Capture. Among these, I count the following: that a novel takes a risk if it “confront[s]” its readers, presumably rather than simply entertaining or gratifying them, and that characters who grapple with forces running counter to cultural norms or conventional wisdom are a sufficient mechanism for staging a confrontation. I also note a branching judgment about a different locus of risk: in addition to the risk borne by any one novel, there’s a suggestion of risk to the author—to her standing, perhaps her career—if her choice of subject is deemed to be, in a sense, beneath her readers’ notice.

I don’t mean to take issue with Lohrey; I like her work a great deal. I don’t mean to take issue with Menzies-Pike, either; I like her very much too. I do wonder, though, whether these sorts of risks are in any real sense worthy of the label. The one seems to rest on the assumption that readers don’t want to have their priors troubled by a novel, that they turn to fiction for validation of the prejudices they bring to it and confirmation of their pre-existing ideas about the world. The other is relevant only to the author’s social or cultural status and is therefore beside the point when assessing the artistry of a given work. In what meaningful sense can a novel take a risk? If, in addressing this question, the author’s status has no salience, the answer must still have something to do with readers’ responses—the disruption of which renders the novel an inert block of paper—but with a different feeling for what, if not subject matter, would make readers turn away.

Here’s an alternative way of assessing whether or not a novel takes a risk: ask yourself, while reading it, whether or not it’s going down like a cool glass of water on a scorching hot day. How much resistance does it give you as you’re trying to move through its pages? How regularly does it impede your easy consumption of its words, by way of friction or ambiguity or instability or other means? If it’s fluid, if you can basically drink it, I think you’re looking at some relatively risk-averse literature, regardless of whatever other virtues it may have as a result of how it treats its subject matter. I think Capture is risk-averse in this way, even though some readers may raise their eyebrows over its subject matter, and even though others may hear a tsk-tsk from the novel if they follow Menzies-Pike in reading it as a fable with a streak of cultural criticism.

Underlying all of the above, of course, there’s something like a rudimentary theory of the contemporary novel, or, more properly, a theory of the novel as an analog technology. The novel makes a bid for the reader’s attention. The purpose of this bid for attention is to initiate an experience. This experience, before it is anything else, is an aesthetic one. The novel, in order to prolong the experience for its duration, must supplement its initial bid by then sustaining the reader’s attention. To the extent that it tries to do this via aesthetic strategies that minimise the disruption of attention, it is averse to risk: that is, it isn’t willing to risk interfering with the continuation of the experience for which it exists. To the extent that it wilfully breaks, impairs, or otherwise takes an abrasive approach to its own efforts to sustain the reader’s attention, it is taking a risk: it’s putting itself at hazard and at stake, toying with the possibility of its own undoing.