July 24, 2006
Time, Life, Books Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:25 PM EST A while back I read a novel called Life and Love, Such as They Are, by Anna Shapiro. It’s a comic story with serious aspects, and though the author has a weakness for shoehorning one too many gags into a paragraph, overall it is very well done. But there’s something strange about it.
Ms. Shapiro’s novel was published in 1994, and when I read it, I assumed that that was when the action was taking place. So did the New York Times reviewer, who called it “a novel of New York in the ’90s.” But a few weeks later, the Times published a letter from Ms. Shapiro in which she pointed out that “‘Life & Love’ is a novel of New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s” (in fact it’s almost all ’70s, with only a brief epilogue in the latter decade). She pointed to an ambiguous mention of the 1970s in the next-to-last chapter and to a church fire that readers were supposed to know had occurred then. Yet if, like me and the Times reviewer, you didn’t catch these references, late 1970s could pass quite easily for mid-1990s.
I experienced the same sort of confusion recently when I read Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. It never says when the action is taking place, and I was guessing 1880s until I saw a mention of somebody being taken to the train station in a “motor.” When coupled with the publication date of 1905, this narrowed down the possible range considerably, but for the first third of the book, I was off by 20 years. By the time she got around to writing The Age of Innocence, her Pulitzer Prize winner from 1920, Wharton had become wise enough to begin the very first sentence with, “On a January evening of the late seventies . . .”
Don’t you wish more authors would do that? Or at least put “Fall 1973,” or whatever the date is, in italics at the start? Maybe it’s just me, and perhaps it’s because I work at American Heritage, but it always bothers me to go through a book not knowing when it’s taking place. Consider a recently published novel, King Dork, by Frank Portman. The author, under his stage name of Dr. Frank, leads the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, the Mr. T Experience (also known as MTX), and the title of his novel is also the title of one of the band’s songs. (The song can be found on their best album, . . . And the Women Who Love Them (Special Addition), and if you’re still reading this, for goodness sakes stop immediately, click on the link above, and buy the record.)
Anyway, King Dork is narrated by a high-school student, and it’s being sold as a “young adult” book. A few imprecise time references early on suggest that it’s set in the present or the recent past; near the end, the author gives enough information that we can place it in 2000, give or take a year. Yet any high school student who reads it will smell a rat immediately, because it was quite clearly written to take place during the author’s own late ’70s/early ’80s high-school days.
It’s not just that all the narrator’s favorite rock bands and other cultural references are from that period; that might simply suggest that he has retro taste. And while I seriously doubt that any high school in America still has a “mod” subculture like the one in the book, I could be wrong about that, too, since I don’t spend as much time hanging around schoolyards as I used to. No, what gives it away in an instant is the absence of current technology.
No one in King Dork ever sends an e-mail or a text message; in fact, the author mentions dating couples who use third parties to carry handwritten notes back and forth. Students fulfill dopey “research” assignments by copying from books with pencil and paper instead of downloading from the Internet. When the narrator wants to research a girl he’s met, he searches for her number in a printed phone book, and when he wants to find a verse in the Bible, he goes to the library and looks it up in a concordance. Computers are mentioned only a couple of times, and then only in passing. That most ubiquitous prop of today’s high-schoolers, the mobile phone, is entirely missing, as are portable music players, laptops, and video games.
I suspect that Mr. Portman originally intended his book for an adult audience and set it in his own high school days. Then, I’m guessing, the publishers decided to recast it as a young-adult title, and he did a hasty rewrite to make the dates work out but left most of the text intact. Or maybe he just decided that there was no way he could portray today’s high school scene accurately, so he wouldn’t bother trying. Not that it makes much difference. Whatever the story behind it, King Dork is a funny and telling book as long as you don’t mind the shaky chronology.
All this made me think about how technology can be used as a measure of that nebulous quantity, “how much life has changed.” As Ms. Shapiro’s novel shows, it was possible to write about daily life during the mid-1970s and have it still ring true in the mid-1990s. Technology changed a lot during that time, but very little of it became so ubiquitous that it would necessarily come up in a novel. Some people in the 1980s had home computers, for example, but most did not, and those who did generally used them for things like alphabetizing their record collections, not for interacting with others. Ms. Shapiro’s novel came out right when the Internet boom was about to start. Between the early 1990s and today, the differences in communication and information technology have been enormous, and they’re so deeply embedded in our daily lives that any description of a person’s routine activities today would be unrecognizable to someone from a dozen years ago—and vice versa, as we see from Mr. Portman’s book.
So are we living in an era of unusually rapid technological change? Not really. It would be more accurate to say that the 1970s and 1980s were an era of unusually slow technological change—or, more accurate still, that they were characterized by great advances that did not reach the saturation point until the end of the century. Consider the big transformative consumer technologies since the start of the Industrial Revolution: railroads, telegraph, telephone, electric lighting, automobiles, aviation, movies, radio, television . . . and what? After television, there wasn’t any great leap of this sort for about four decades. Socially, to be sure, there were enormous shifts, and there were lots of incremental technological improvements and major steps that remained hidden. But there was no single, dramatic new technology used directly by the average American that had a transformative impact.
Yet behind the scenes, the stage was being set for the revolution that the general public is experiencing today. These changes tend to happen in spurts, which is why life can seem stable for a couple of decades and then become completely unrecognizable in the space of a few years. All of which suggests that it’s important for novelists to get their details right—and that they’ll do their readers a big favor by telling them at the start when the story is taking place.
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