David Galef | December 2015

NOTES

It was the morning after the storm had dumped over a foot of snow in Weston, and everyone was outside, shoveling walks and driveways. On his way to work, Harry passed a bunch of teenagers at the bus stop, just hanging out and looking bored doing it. Meanwhile, Dorothy sat in the coffee shop, looking through the want ads in a newspaper from last week. January 3, 2015, she decided was a bad day for job-hunting.

If the above paragraph appeared in a story you just read, would you see anything wrong with it? The first sentence ignores how many people nowadays own or have access to snow blowers. The second sentence doesn’t describe our modern tribe at all: more than half the kids would be absorbed with their cell phones. And by the way, most people aren’t called “Harry” anymore (apologies to those Harrys born within the last twenty years). The third sentence has conveniently passed over the shift from newspaper employment ads to sites like monster.com. The term “coffee shop” also sounds dated in an era of Starbucks and coffee bars.

Unless otherwise noted, most stories are assumed to take place in the present day. Yet the world of today contains a multitude of language, habits, and technology that rarely make it into current fiction. Here are some more examples: Ordering an Arch Deluxe at a McDonald’s. Using the term “bogus.” Going to a copy shop. Trying to find information on a subject in a library instead of just Googling it. Writing a check for a supermarket bill. Typing your name and address onto a paper form. An upper middle class kid missing a TV show instead of just having the DVR record it, or maybe he’d just stream it online the next day. Buying a dozen CDs. Locking yourself out of your new Honda Accord by shutting the door with the key still in the ignition, since the car would warn you with a telltale noise if you started to do that. (Disclaimer: yes, exceptions exist to all these points; yes, setting your story in a less affluent country might help.)

Other stories might include a rock band that broke up a few years back, or a teen wearing the low-rise jeans popular in the early 2000s. What’s surprising is how many such stories are sent out—make that uploaded—usually by authors who don’t take into account, for example, that their characters can just text each other in case of an emergency.

To be fair, whether you need to update your fiction is a trickier problem than might appear. After all, people don’t read the work of Jane Austen and wonder irritably why her people all walk or drive in horse-drawn carriages. In P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves, written in the 1920s, when Bertie Wooster declares, “I had sent poor old Bingo an outline of the situation by messenger-boy shortly after lunch,”¹ the reader simply gathers that, in those days, messengers were a reliable, fast way of delivering documents. For that matter, the mail used to be delivered three times a day. An author might peg suspense or anticipation on the arrival of the post, the way characters now wait for an email or a text.

Sometimes these changes are obvious, but not always. I recall attending a literature class in the mid-1980s on John Barth’s The End of the Road and hearing one student wonder why the wife, Rennie, didn’t just get an abortion. The relevant passage, where the protagonist Jake explains his plan, seems old-fashioned:

“All right. Where do I have to go? Baltimore?”
“Nope. Right here in town. Just don’t tell me you know Dr. Morton Welleck.”
“Dr. Welleck. No, I don’t know him. Do you, Joe?”
“I know of him. He’s been here about two years. You mean the damned fool’s an abortionist?”
“Nope,” I said, not a little proudly, “he’s a perfectly legitimate doctor, and a pretty good one, so I hear. And everything’s going to be completely legal.”²

To justify the operation, the plan is to present Rennie as suicidal over the prospect of having another child. This pretext to get around a restrictive law is similar to how spouses once had to allege infidelity or mental cruelty to get divorces, even if the real reason was just that they wanted out of the relationship. Barth’s novel was published in 1958. A few decades later, that abortion strategy seemed dated. In a political climate where the voice of the religious right wing is increasingly heard, Barth’s plot may strike a timely chord again.

Readers will unconsciously acknowledge cultural and technological differences as indicative of an earlier time, but only when the era is sufficiently old to seem markedly dated. Someone is driving a De Soto; a blue aerogram arrives from Belgium. On the other hand, consider the situation of an author who completed a piece of fiction a couple of decades ago and is dusting it off now, possibly to resubmit it somewhere. It features a main character who uses a phonebook, yet the era is assumed to be the present. This isn’t a story set in the past so much as a story that shows its age. Any story before 1970, say, and we probably know it’s from an old decade. After that, we enter a fuzzy era in which references are changing but still familiar, and this period of fiction gives readers pause.

Many famous authors start in their present, say, 1980, and stay there as time goes by. The supremely accomplished Anita Brookner comes to mind: her characters are still grappling with gender issues that today’s women have usually put behind them. In the 1994 novel A Private View, for instance, Katy Gibb states her intention of starting her own business:

“Oh, really, how interesting,” said Mrs Lydiard. “I am so in favour of women working. I always worked, you know, and I loved it…”
“A woman nowadays can choose her own lifestyle,” said Miss Gibb solemnly.³

Brookner’s characters are often either old-fashioned or old (the protagonist in this novel is a retiree), so that explains some of the thinking. But not all of it, and in fact Brookner’s recent work has been taken to task for being stuck in an earlier era. As Caryn James wrote in a review of Brookner’s 2006 novel, Leaving Home, “Apparently longing for the orderly rules of a Jane Austen world, Brookner allows her characters to behave as if one still existed.”⁴

Does it matter? Granted, great fiction is timeless: characters who embody qualities that never go out of fashion, stories that continue to enthrall readers, and themes that partake of the eternal verities—hard truths about human existence. But that doesn’t mean narratives exist outside time. Texts have contexts; stories have settings, preconditions, and references. The Greek myths that have come down to us over the millennia read as if they’re set in ancient Greece, with its swords and chariots. Updating these myths, which many writers have attempted, involves retelling with more modern dialogue, costumes, and hardware. Even a writer like Samuel Beckett, striving for a timeless universality in Waiting for Godot, refers to a bank account⁵ and works up some stage business with a vaporizer.⁶ Why should art reflect reality; i.e., what’s out there? As T. S. Eliot wrote in 1921: “Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results.”⁷ Eliot was writing about the 17^th-century metaphysical poets, but the message is still relevant. Any era demands an art that doesn’t seem quaint. As Ezra Pound is supposed to have remarked of poets who didn’t keep up with the times: “The year is 1920. Look out the window!”

Outdated references can pop up in any field, from slang (“cool” went out of fashion in the 1980s, then came back around 2000) to technology (one of these days, having your character send a fax just isn’t going to click). The same applies to fashion (ditch the wide shoulders), cars (no more Oldsmobiles), electronics (who still has a Palm Pilot?), food and drink (fish sticks, anyone?), and so on. Older readers may not feel that something funny’s going on, but newer readers will. Many publishers, worried about losing audience, try to stay modern.

Here’s a case in point: Back in the 1940s, in an effort to make the Nancy Drew series more current, Nancy’s blue roadster was replaced by a convertible. The Hardy Boys in recent decades have been known to use an Uzi. Here are two excerpts, the first from a new Nancy Drew story, the second from a recent Hardy Boys tale:

Bess and George were Nancy’s two best friends. They were cousins, too, but as different as strawberry and fudge ripple ice cream. George was really into computers. Bess could fix or build anything—like the homemade ice-cream maker George found instructions for on the web. (1–2).⁸
                                        *
BLURP! On the screen, the aliens were still coming. A few seconds later a big blob of goo took over the screen, and then two words appeared; GAME OVER.⁹

Staying current is crucial in the YA field, where adolescents like to think they’re reading what could have happened yesterday, even if it involves vampires. Note: zombies are still in, but won’t be forever.

Some authors try to have it both ways, unable to ditch their familiar descriptions but mindful that Things Have Changed. Danielle Steele, in A Perfect Life, depicts the morning routine of a well-known news anchor:

She went to the front door and got the newspapers. She always tried to get a good look at The New York Times and Wall Street Journal before she went to work. And then she checked online for anything that might have happened since. Anything even more recent than that would show up on her desk at work before the morning news, and Mark would make sure that she saw it if it was breaking news.¹⁰

Hmm, here’s a major media figure whose business is the news, who still reads the morning newspapers to see what’s happening. As a friend of mine used to exclaim about any rampant improbability, “Not bloody likely!” But beware of trying too hard to be au courant, or seeming to do so. In Joyce Carol Oates’s latest collection, Lovely, Dark, Deep, in the short story “Sex with Camel,” a high school age boy is having a semiattentive conversation with his grandmother. An earlier era might have featured him only half listening because he was immersed in a book or just drifting elsewhere. Here, “as the grandmother drove the boy had been skimming emails and text messages on his smartphone.”¹¹ One of the emails has to do with a crisis hotline at school. The reference seems timely. But later, as the grandmother is trying to locate a hospital, we’re told this information:

The grandmother was driving slowly along a newly paved road in the direction of a highrise building that looked to be made of dullgreen shimmering glass, in several flaring wings. Beyond this building were smaller and flatter buildings. All were surrounded by parking lots. The boy was trying to match up the Google map with the actual landscape and was having difficulty.¹²

Call this niggling, but there’s an app for that. Some readers may want to nudge the boy and whisper, “Just drop a pin in ‘present location.’” The smartphone will do the rest, including showing one’s progress toward the destination. Doesn’t the boy know this? He should, especially since later comes this description:

The boy was crazy for his smartphone which could occupy him for many minutes. On the boy’s smartphone were countless apps—a small galaxy of apps.¹³

Still later:

The boy checked his smartphone on the average of once every three minutes. He wasn’t addicted, it was just something he did.¹⁴

This description is by someone for whom the device is still rich and strange. If the piece were told from the grandmother’s point of view, that attitude might make sense, but it’s third-person privileged, dipping into only the boy’s mind. For him and anyone else his age, a smartphone just is, apps and all.

In another story from the collection, “The Hunter,” Oates wrestles with this technology again, this time from the viewpoint of a visiting poet on campus:

It was an era when most news came by phone.
…
By phone also meant land phone. Or, a more comforting term, home phone.
Cell phone can be defined as a mode of instant (if not universally reliable) communication between unicellular lifeforms. I was in fact in possession of a cell phone at this time, in an early year of the twenty-first century, for I liked to think of myself as drifting somewhat ahead of the curve, but it was my home phone I picked up to receive what I would later classify as the first, innocent seeming installment of a series of very bad news.¹⁵

One response to the new is to mock it, but the real issue is that the narrative problems inherent in overcommunication and lack of privacy have been finessed by deploying a character not overly fond of current technology. A lack of information that could have been conveyed via cell phone plays a crucial role later in the story.

So how are authors supposed to keep their fiction up to date? Is it a matter of scattering references to new products, the latest technology, and recent jobs? Gluten-free muffins, Google Glass, and gerontology nurses? Or is that a way to date a story really fast? Google Glass was withdrawn from the market in January of 2015. But maybe using such a reference is a way to date a story precisely and make a virtue out of what looks like a period glitch. West Side Story, an updating of Romeo and Juliet for New York in the 1950s, now feels like a period piece, but that’s not a problem if we know the era in which the story takes place. Otherwise, gangs using mere fists and knives would seem odd, and Doc’s drugstore, where the male lead, Tony, works, would be quaint. The play needs updating if it moves into the 21^st century, and someone’s probably working on an adaptation already. But there’s more. If writers are perceptive, they should pick up on how teenagers are speaking these days, how city life has changed in recent decades through a widening income gap, or just how many people in America are overweight. They should be aware of new usage prompted by technology, from texting to sexting. And they should do it gracefully rather than appear as anthropologists in an alien culture.

How can it be done? Here’s a paragraph from Antonya Nelson’s short story “Primum non Nocere”:

The woman on the porch had emphatic mauve hair, ribbons and beads woven into it, makeup thick on her face, her outfit far too heavy for the New Mexico fall weather. Jewel made immediate repairs in her mind, removing layers and ornaments, a habit she’d probably acquired from living in a house that was constantly being rearranged and improved upon. She had Photoshop in her head.¹⁶

Note the last sentence, with its apt metaphor based on computer software. Nelson could have summed up the girl Jewel’s talent as a knack for making “picture perfect,” a metaphor that shows its reliance on an era of straight photography. But Photoshop is more apt to the age. Not only that, but the purpose of Photoshop, to manipulate appearances, ties in with some of what’s going on in the story: that one can’t always judge by appearances.

On the other hand, the growing tension in Nelson’s story, which depends on a home intrusion not easily countered, is from an earlier era. Here’s where some authors start establishing temporal boundaries:

Jewel had left the back door open for Magic, the cat, who’d been missing for four days. If she’d had a cell phone, she could have surreptitiously dialed 911. But the landline was in its little hallway niche, another antique. The whole house was retro, which, although it looked kind of great and had been the subject of a New Mexico Magazine spread, was more trouble than you’d imagine. Being stuck in the last century meant tapping into the neighbor’s WiFi, watching DVDs, and having to talk on the phone, tethered by a cord and another cord, in a public place.¹⁷

Nelson acknowledges the standard, up-to-date way out while shutting the door against it. Additionally, she uses the opportunity to expand upon the poignancy of living without the technology that so many of take for granted. To generalize beyond Nelson’s story: lacking physical means of communication in our society is far less common than previously—and not as romantic as some would have it.

Does that mean ditching all electronic devices, for fear that everyone will explain everything all the time? No. Miscommunication is still all too possible and a good plot device. You text the wrong number on your contacts list. Or in your haste to leave the island after killing the minotaur, you neglect to hoist the white sail instead of the black sail, and your father the king sees the dark harbinger and throws himself off a cliff. Think of some equivalent for a 21^st-century Theseus. Think of all those wrong numbers and texts that seemed like a good idea at the time. Think of misconstrual, compounded by further misreadings. Think of gaps in continuity.

The advent of the cinema in the early 1900s influenced authors as diverse as Evelyn Waugh and James Joyce to make cinematic jump-cuts in their work. The internet presents a linked-together reality. We should know this by now. Back in 1993, Paul Kafka published a novel called Love <Enter>, written partly in e-mails. And Michael Joyce’s hyperfiction afternoon, with multiple narrative paths dependent on mouse clicks, is now over twenty-five years old.

Robin Hemley predicates an entire story on an email sent to far too many people. In “Reply All,” the secretary of PAWS, the Poets Association of the Western Suburbs, sends a perfunctory message to the group listserv, and a member types back a steamy message to her and carelessly clicks on Reply All. This act is comparable to putting a compromising letter in the mail and then being unable to retrieve it, but the effect of email is to magnify the damage. As one member puts it:

To: PAWS Listserve (7/17)
From: Sam Fulgram. Jr.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Next Meeting

Whoa boy! Do you realize you just sent out your love note to the entire Poetry Association of the Western Suburbs Listserve?

Cheers,
Sam¹⁸

The setup captures our current lack of privacy, not to mention our overemphasis on sharing. Or, as the closing lines of the story include: “please remember to always be conscious and considerate of your audience.”¹⁹

Curiously, one of the least noticeable sins of omission in keeping current is the way characters speak. Sure (natch, totes?), teenagers are continually reinventing the language, but a lot of authors have been writing dialogue for decades, and they’re not about to change now. Yet their people don’t sound dated, mostly because they talk in a nonmetaphoric, uninflected way:            

“I’m headed to the store.”
“When will you be back?”
“Probably before Jerry gets home.”

These lines aren’t specific to any particular era, which is good insofar as they won’t easily date. On the other hand, the language isn’t at all memorable. You can tell when a writer’s dialogue is a century old, or even from fifty years ago. But what about the way someone talked in 1990 versus how someone speaks in 2015? Apart from the latest slang or buzzword, whether the rhythm is smooth or jerky, the sentences long or short, has more to do with individual personality than with the character of an era.

This is not to say that conversational style hasn’t changed over time. Back in the day (as older people intone), let’s say the 1920s, a lot of speech was either more formal or more folksy than we use. Take doctors, for instance, and start by listening to Doc Vickerson at the start of Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, talking to young Martin Arrowsmith: “What you doing here, young fella? What you doing here? I knew the cat would drag in something if I left the door unlocked.”²⁰ Or when Martin sees his name on an office door for the first time: “in reverence he grunted, ‘There—by—jiminy!’”²¹

Now here’s another doctor some thirty years later, from Leo Rosten’s Captain Newman, M.D.: “Treatment rooms,” said Captain Newman. “We use them for Sodium Pentathol sessions—but never say that or the men will think you’re a cornball. They call it ‘flakjuice.’”²² The dialogue is similar but flatter, with less “Dag nap it!”

And finally, around the year 2000, here’s Ian Ogelvie, a doctor from Robert Cohen’s Inspired Sleep: “What I had in mind today was a little talk. That’s all. Make sure you were doing okay. No ill effects. Maybe answer any questions you might have.”²³ More sentence fragments. Less engaged.

*

So what should you do if you have an old manuscript that you want to publish? The easiest way to fix what might seem passé is simply to set back the date: “Los Angeles, 1979.” If that’s too clumsy, try newspaper headlines, key events, or other obvious points of reference. These allusions can be tricky: some people still refer to Obama’s taking office as if it were yesterday. Of course, if you’re still wedded to the past, you might as well embark on a piece of historical fiction: Manhattan in the 1930s, during the worst of the Depression, with its East River shanty town and Prohibition speakeasies; or Paris in the 1960s when the student revolt incited a general strike. Part of the pleasure in historical fiction is all those details from the past, brought back to life. In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon meticulously recreates the late ’30s, from the carbon paper in an office setting to the mass allure of comic books. The deliberately dated references aren’t just a range of old brands, as in the “dozen stubbed out ends of Old Golds”²⁴ that a character merges into one smokable cigarette, but also similes based on what used to be: the protagonist Sammy thinks of “his grandmother’s snoring shaking the walls like a passing trolley.”²⁵ They’re part of an entire cultural milieu.

As any historical novelist can tell you, recreating an earlier age is a lot of work. Still, one reason that some writers set their stories in the past, consciously or un-, is that plotting is in some ways easier. How many mid-to-late-career novelists write narratives with protagonists looking back on events from a ripe old age! It’s their world, or the one they’re most fond of, or at least most comfortable moving around in. Our digital age dissolves the old-fashioned suspense from being stranded or out of touch. Satellite mapping makes getting lost a lot harder.²⁶ It’s remarkable how many writers try to cut off these aids by having their characters lose their cell phones or run out of battery power. Living in an information age means that your characters can learn a great deal without leaving the room, even if you want to propel them on a quest.

Think these points are too obvious? Imagine a scene at an amusement park where everyone is just walking around, with no texting or use of ear buds. How quaint—yet the last two current amusement park scenes I read included no such activity at all. Another author I know set a scene in Borders, the bookstore chain that’s been bankrupt for over four years. [Note to self: update this figure if you don’t sell this essay soon.]

Granted, some things change over time but maintain the same label. A reader I’ve talked to about this problem says that she mentally adjusts her image of a simple phrase like “yellow sun dress,” depending on the era assumed. ²⁷ But an author should still know something about the History of Stuff. Another friend dressed one of his characters in a miniskirt, which luckily for him has made a sort of comeback. Retro phenomena may save you. Skateboards were big in the mid-’60s, then disappeared. They came back in the ’80s with different wheels. Or think of a Volkswagen minivan or a phonograph—but not a Walkman. What’s next on the list of vanished references? Answering machines, land lines? Some writers still compose in longhand. But using a quill would be considered odd. Would a fountain pen? Putting items on reserve for students at the school library?

Most of us are familiar with classic anachronisms, such as the reference to clocks in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In this era of quickly changing technology, one can make such a mistake just by having a character with an iPad mini a year before they were available. But what about Joe Haldeman’s Forever War, with a reference to “a stack of thick notebooks”²⁸ in the 32^nd century; or William Gibson’s Neuromancer, in which someone is trying to peddle “three megabytes of hot RAM”?²⁹ Or maybe you’ve set up something really advanced in your SF story—but consider zeerust, a term coined by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd back in 1983, “datedness of something originally intended to seem futuristic.”³⁰

So: update or date it? How much will any readjustments warp your plot? Does it matter whether your character is pedaling his bicycle with pedal clips or snap-ins? Must you have the teenagers getting wasted on Four Loko? Or two five-year-olds playing a board game when so many amusements have gravitated to the screen? Make it retro?—wearing a T-shirt with a tie-dyed peace sign, pedaling a vintage Schwinn Stingray?

The title of this essay, “Does Your Fiction Show Its Age?,” is an arch reference to magazine cover lines about preserving beauty, not letting age distort your proportions. Put that way, it sounds like an exercise in vanity, or trying too hard to be young. But writers are meant to be observers, and you exist in your era. Unless stated otherwise, so should your characters. Here’s a suggestion: When you’ve finished your work of fiction, why not give it to some teenagers to read? When they give it back to you with scathing comments, decide what can be updated or finessed or omitted, and establish a date for what can’t be fixed. Then move onward.                                

David Galef has over a dozen books in fiction, poetry, translation, and criticism. His latest book of fiction is the short story collection My Date with Neanderthal Woman (Dzanc Books). His flash fiction textbook, Brevity: A Short Short-Short Primer, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2016. A professor of English and the creative writing program director at Montclair State University, he is also a humor columnist for Inside Higher Ed.

Notes

1. P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves, 1923 (New York: Beagle, 1974), p. 24.
2. John Barth, The End of the Road, 1958 (New York: Bantam-Doubleday, 1967), pp. 167–68.
3. Anita Brookner, A Private View (New York: Random House, 1994), pp. 50–51.
4. Caryn James, “Ms. Lonely,” The New York Times, Jan. 15, 2006, web.
5. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), p. 13.
6. Ibid., p. 20.
7. T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich-Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988), p. 65.
8. Carolyn Keene and Macky Pamintuam, Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew, #2: Scream for Ice Cream (New York: Aladdin, 2006), p. 12.
9. Franklin W. Dixon and Scott Burroughs, Hardy Boys, Secret Files, #1, Trouble at the Arcade (New York: Aladdin-Simon and Schuster, 2010), p. 3.
10. Danielle Steele, A Perfect Life (New York: Delacorte-Random House, 2014), p. 26.
11. Joyce Carol Oates, Lovely, Dark, Deep (New York: Ecco-HarperCollins, 2014), p. 5.
12. Ibid., p. 7.
13. Ibid., p. 12.
14. Ibid., p. 17.
15. Ibid., pp. 116–17.
16. Antonya Nelson, “Primum non Nocere,” the New Yorker, 10 Nov. 2014: 65.
17. Idem.
18. Robin Hemley, “Reply All,” New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond, eds. Robert Shapard and James Thomas (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), p. 271.
19. Ibid, p. 276.
20. Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith, 1925 (New York: Signet-NAL-Penguin, 2008), p. 4.
21. Ibid., p. 153.
22. Leo Rosten, Captain Newman, M.D. (New York: Crest-Fawcett, 1961), p. 31.
23. Robert Cohen, Inspired Sleep (New York: Scribner, 2001), p. 271.
24. Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (New York: Random House, 2000), p. 12.
25. Ibid., p. 6.
26. See David Galef, “Technical Difficulties,” Salon June 21, 2001, web.
27. Beth Weinhouse, conversation, November 21, 2014.
28. Joe Haldeman, The Forever War, 1975 (New York: Griffin-St. Martin’s, 2009), p. 185.
29. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), p. 20.
30. 30. “zeerust.” Wiktionary. Accessed August 12, 2015. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zeerust. I’m indebted to Daniel Galef, age 20, for pointing out this term.