Why stimulate the reader's emotions?

The headline question is one that, as a novelist, has caused me some trouble. After all, isn't one of the reasons to read novels to be entertained (i.e., be positively stimulated), to feel safe grief when a character dies (i.e., it's only a story), to enjoy satisfaction when the protagonist triumphs? These emotions may not have the same quality as those we feel when a parent/friend/child dies or when we ourselves triumph, but they're convenient an cheap. They may not be as intense as the real thing, but they're better than nothing.

The question has caused me trouble because I am not convinced that my own fiction engenders emotion in readers—which I regard as a failure—while consoling myself that whether I intend to provoke emotion or not, a story automatically does so. The issue is not whether a novel stimulates emotions, but whether it stimulates strong emotions or weak and whether the emotions are what the author intended.

These thoughts were stimulated by an essay in The New York Times Book Review by Tim Parks, one of my favorite authors. Parks notes that today a book stimulates extreme emotions as a promotional tool. "Anything that disturbs us, arouses us, unsettles us, is unconditionally positive." The point of course is to sell books.

One effect of the current situation, Parks argues—from an admittedly limited perspective—is that contemporary creative writing courses "are obsessed with technique—how to arrive at that powerful detail, how to give it prominence, how to grab the reader, not why we want to grab the reader or to what end. Traditional literature courses used to reflect on the way detail was used inside a novel's overall vision. The present zeitgeist invites us only to contemplate how the trigger can be pulled, not where the bullet is going, because the purpose of creative writing courses—especially when the fees are high—is to teach the would-be writer how to produce a publishable narrative, not a 'good,' let alone 'responsible' narrative."

One might argue that this cry from the heart is Parks' rational for not writing more popular novels (as if best-sellerdom where the measure of quality). It certainly is a condemnation of much of commercial publishing: If you don't grab the reader—agent, editor, editorial committee—in the first two pages, if you don't put her on the edge of her seat, if you don't set her pulse racing, why publish the thing at all?

Perhaps because, as Parks suggests, the novel invites the reader to a higher level of intellectual engagement with complex issues. Or because it retreats "from spicy detail to offer a balanced view of life overall." Or because its characters manage "to handle potentially dangerous conflicts without arriving at a destructive showdown."

"Intellectual engagement"? "Balanced view"? No "destructive showdown" with a comely young woman threatened by ugly death? It sounds boring. And Lord (and publishing) knows, boring doesn't sell books.

Why not write in your native language?

Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for her best-selling short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies (1999). She followed up with two novels, The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013) and another short story collection Unaccustomed Earth (2008). She has now published a memoir, In Other Words.

Although Lahiri's parents immigrated from Bengal and spoke Bengali at home, they arrived in the US when Jhumpa was young enough that English is her native language and she wrote her stories and novels in exquisite English. In what sounds like her twenties, however, she fell in love with Italian. "When you're in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar feeling in me. I don't want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there will be a new word to learn. Thus true love can represent eternity." And after spending 20 years struggling to learn Italian, she moved her husband and children to Rome so that she could learn enough to write in Italian. She wrote In Other Words in Italian; it was translated into English by Ann Goldstein. The Italian and the English are on facing pages.

I am fascinated by Lahiri's story because (a) I too am in love with Italian and have been studying it for almost 20 years; (b) I am also in love with Japanese and am currently translating—with the considerable help of a native speaker—a book of contemporary Japanese short stories into English. So I spend a lot of time thinking about English, Japanese, and Italian.

I began studying Japanese because it seemed to me we think in a language and our language forces us in many ways to have a certain view of reality. For example, there are no words "brother" or "sister" in Japanese; there are only the words "older brother," "younger brother," "older sister," "younger sister." To speak of your sibling you have to define your relationship. Similarly in Italian, there is only one word for "grandson," "granddaughter," "grandchild," "neice," "and "nephew" (nipote). You need more words to covey the relationship and gender of your relative. Lahiri quotes a friend, Dominico Starone, who wrote, "A new language is almost a new life, grammar and syntax recast you, you slip into another logic and another sensibility."

Tim Parks in his review of In Other Words in The New York Review of Books writes, "I can think of no other book set in Italy that has less of the color and drama of Italy in it. Not a single figure emerges. Not a dialogue of any note. Not a single situation characteristic of Italy. Even the language is there only as a challenge."

Moreover, the translation does Lahiri few favors. "When translated," Parks writes about Lahiri's Italian, "this strangeness [in syntax and word choice] disappears, since such structures and word choices are standard in English. Instead, where Lahiri has deployed Italian idioms and rhetorical strategies, Goldstein follows her usual habit of bringing them more or less word for word into English, so that the strangeness of the English text is that of so many translations where what was ordinary in the original becomes quaint and off-key in translation."

Nevertheless (or because of the translation), In Other Words sounds like a book I should study.