The lies have it

WHEN WE START counting the ways in which American life has soured in the past few years, we need not start with the matter of fiction. For one thing, there are broader sides of barns, or white houses, to heave our snowballs at – not to mention malevolent clowns with names like Cheney and Rumsfeld, each deserving of an icy one right in the kisser. For another, fiction is perennially a mess, a bog of the misconceived and mismanaged, a patisserie of the half-baked, with the rare stunner indifferently shelved beside its woeful cohorts, there for its quality to be noticed by those who retain the capacity to notice such things. One suspects these oddly perceptive creatures to be small in, and of diminishing, number. The woeful cohorts, meanwhile, proliferate like cobwebs in a dark basement. Nothing, not even the greatest political crisis in America since the Civil War, seems to slow, much less affect, the spinning of that flimsy fabric called contemporary fiction.

I confess to a certain degree of bemused irritation not just with the superfluousness of all this imaginative prose but with the volume of it: the turbid river of novels and story collections, each bearing a somberly elusive title and little or no relation to the preoccupying world whose troubles quiver in our hearts, that gurgles past my desk in the form of review copies every day of every week. Political fiction, like war fiction, is generally pretty bad – journalism far better answers the call of public drama – but fiction divorced from public reality tends to seem shrunken and, when that reality is as toxic as the years of the Bush restoration have been, more than usually irrelevant.

"Novelists lie for a living," announces Dale Peck, the Lizzie Borden of American literary criticism, near the end of his blood-stained, recently published collection of book reviews, Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary American Fiction (New Press, $23.95). One cannot help but admire Peck for his unapologetic foul-temperedness and his willingness to strike off the heads of some of current fiction's many unclothed emperors. A Herculean task. On the other hand, Peck is a dreadful novelist and, if he really is unable to distinguish between invention and prevarication, a fool.

Fiction, if it is to have any value at all, must be deeply true. We must, as we read, feel shocks of recognition at the author's awarenesses and observations, tellingly relayed in original and imagistic language. We must clap our hands and think: Yes! That is right! And we must, in the same moment, take delight in the paradox that we are being shown the deepest verities of our lives and our world through made-up stories – fictions, inventions. That paradox is fiction's magic.

It is revealing, to say the least, that a celebrated (or at any rate once-celebrated) young American writer considers fiction's essential mission to be mendacity. Peck might not be positioning himself for a presidential run – though plainly presidents, too, lie for a living – but perhaps he is telling us more than he understands about the state of American culture, whose basic character, for better and for worse, is reflected in our political discourse. If the coin of the realm in America has become dishonesty, then of course we will accept that fictions and presidential pronouncements are lies. Untruth is the material at hand; it is the air we all breathe.

Yet in this mephitic atmosphere a certain residue of shame about our graceless descent from the high ground of truth-telling persists. You sense it in the press, which uses such soft-soap words as spin and exaggeration to describe the on-camera lying of elected officials. You see it in the way John Kerry declined, in a recent presidential debate, to say openly that our president has been lying to us about pretty much everything, from the Iraq war to the federal budget to the state of the environment to his own military record. Lie and liar are words too strong and too direct to use in polite or televised company, especially since we all know we're being lied to and we have agreed to accept the lies, which makes us part of them and them part of us. Lying must be, in the end, consensual and symbiotic to succeed; it is an incorporative activity. A nice irony and symmetry of our culture of dishonesty is our unwillingness to be honest with ourselves about how dishonest we've become. Thus is our moral co-optation by the untrue perfected; thus does it become part of the culture.

But, strangely, in shame there is hope. The fact that (if the polls are to be believed) there continues to be a widespread reluctance to acknowledge that we have been massively lied to by our elected officials is, paradoxically, a sign that most of us still know what the truth is. We still recognize its shape and smell, and we know when we're being handed a stinking sack of something else, or watching some contemporary fiction, perhaps bearing a hatchet mark or two, slowly bob by on the muddy floodwaters of our diseased culture. Although Dale Peck is sensationally wrong in his estimation of what literature can and must be, he has nonetheless – a paradox? – told us a central truth about ourselves.