Endangered Languages
John Wilson on Evangelia Adamou's "Endangered Languages" and the distinctive language of novelists
It’s good be back after a break. As the title of this particular column suggests, I’ve been reading a book called Endangered Languages, by Evangelia Adamou, a volume in MIT Press’s Essential Knowledge Series. The subject is close to my heart, and I’m glad to have this particular take on it, though I’ve often grated my teeth (while reading) at the author’s framing of this or that aspect of “language endangerment.” (Don’t come here for any recognition of the heroic labors of Wycliffe Bible Translators and SIL International—formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics—in preserving endangered languages.)
Meanwhile, Adamou’s title began to resonate with another preoccupation of mine, the “endangered languages” of novelists who weren’t born yesterday. Every memorable fiction-writer creates a distinctive language. This isn’t simply a matter of “characters” or “plots” or “themes,” say, let alone “personality” or “worldview”; above all, a fiction-writer’s style is embodied in sentences.
And sentences themselves are embodied in a particular time, to a degree that the writer can’t possibly be fully aware of: “the style of your own period,” Hugh Kenner observed with pardonable hyperbole, “is always invisible….[I]n our own time we cannot identify what will someday seem to be our time’s clichés: to us, now, they are vital elements of our active awareness.”
The flip-side of this, so to speak, is that to read fiction written by men and women formed in a time different from our own, we have to “learn their language,” and this is true not only if we are reading fiction from the eighteenth century, say, but also much more recent stuff. For a while now, I’ve been wishing for a really good book on the remarkable and wildly diverse cohort of outstanding American fiction-writers born in the 1930s, including (in order by date of birth) Toni Morrison, Donald Barthelme, John Updike, Reynolds Price, Philip Roth, Donald Westlake, John Gardner, Charles Portis, Larry McMurtry, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Stone, Raymond Carver, and Joyce Carol Oates. (I haven’t deliberately excluded sci-fi writers; it just happens that none of those I particularly esteem were born in that decade. Fans of Joanna Russ, say, or Harlan Ellison will disagree.)
In the last several years, I’ve had conversations with readers who are younger than I am (I’m 76) but not REALLY young (they’ve mostly been in their thirties or above) for whom the writers I mentioned are not (with a couple of exceptions, perhaps) particularly of interest. “Well,” you may be thinking, “are we supposed to be surprised by that? Isn’t it entirely predictable, especially given the character of our time? I mean, to start with, this list consists almost entirely of white men!”
Sure. That accounts for some of what I’ve described, but there’s more to it. Based on these conversations, I’d say that the distinctive languages of these writers are endangered. And to me that seems a terrible loss. I wish some of my younger friends and fellow-travelers who devote so much energy to Great Books (bless them) could encourage readers to dive into the work of at least a few of the writers I’ve listed above.
I’ve just received a copy of a newly published novel I’ve been looking forward to for months: Lake of Darkness, by Adam Roberts (I ordered it from Blackwell’s). If you simply don’t read science fiction, you won’t want to give this book a try, and even if you do read in the genre, it may not be your cup of tea. I have loved Roberts’s work since Alan Jacobs (bless him) pointed me in that direction years ago. I don’t know anyone else now writing who remotely resembles him. The wonderfully resonant title of this new novel, as you may recognize, is from King Lear. But given that it’s a book by Adam Roberts, the darkness is sure to be accompanied by all manner of outrageous wit.
Arriving just a couple of days earlier was A Farewell to Arfs, the latest (splendid) Chet & Bernie novel from Spencer Quinn, whom I wrote about here a while back; I’m happy to report that Mrs. Plansky Goes Rogue, the second novel in the delicious series that began last year, is due in 2025 from Forge. And coming in October from Mysterious Press is A Woman Under Ground, the fourth novel in Andrew Klavan’s Cameron Winter series. (If you haven’t put a toe in the water yet, try the first book in the series, a novella, When Christmas Comes; if you relish it, as I did, you have plenty of time to catch up before the latest installment appears.) And of course I am very much looking forward to the new Michael Connelly novel, The Waiting, which features Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch; I’ll devour that one within 24 hours of its arrival. What a blessing, always to have good books to look forward to!
An intriguing idea, John. I struggled through The Great Gatsby on my first read. In part because I found virtually every character loathsome, but also because the style seemed to glance of the subjects. It took me a second read to appreciate it. Similarly even writers as recent as Kurt Vonnegut and Joan Didion are of their time; few (maybe nobody) writes as they do anymore. I love Didion’s essays, but nobody would write them like that any longer, nor would many publications and publishers seek them out and publish them. They’re endangered.
Thanks for this, John! Added some Klavan to my library requests — I think they might be good for read-alouds with my 14 year old, who still lets me do so... All best, and thanks for all your work.