I Wanted Both

"This is not a novel. It has too much to explain, to be one of those. But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story; only the story is the story of an idea, first of all, and only afterwards, glimpsed through the chinks of the idea’s fate, the story of the people involved."—preface to Red Plenty

My friend the California science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson has had a go at me over this. He says that sentence makes him laugh because there’s always too much to explain; that it’s the fate of the novel, every time, to digest down a load of heterogeneous stuff until it becomes a story. And of course I’d like it if people thought I was being witty and disingenuous, and slyly disavowing novel-hood as a roundabout way of claiming novel status by the back door. But in fact I meant it. In fact I still really do think that Red Plenty can’t quite be a novel because, though its idea is story-shaped, its story is still idea-shaped. It’s a narrative in which the large-scale structure is determined by the progress of the idea, not the progress of the characters’ lives.

I wanted very much for it to be a book that gives readers the satisfactions of a novel. Simultaneously I wanted it to be, lucidly and intelligibly, about a very abstract idea: an idea out of mid-twentieth-century economics, the idea cherished by a group of mathematicians in the USSR that a state-controlled economy was a more rational thing than a market, and could therefore be tuned intelligently to outdo, making Soviet citizens far richer than people living under poor old threadbare capitalism.

Fiction is usually about its characters’ private lives; it’s about what happens to us in ones and twos, with the public qualities of the society we’re in pretty much just providing a background. Even work, which takes up so much of our real lives, fiction finds it notoriously difficult to bring alive. Nonfiction, on the other hand, would go at the idea analytically. It would tease out the issues involved in a kind of cool impersonal way everything would happen in the blank no-space and no-time of the page.

I wanted both. I wanted thick, immersive experience, in which all thoughts and feelings belonged to particular people; and I wanted attention to the idea as well. I wanted to write, I realized, about what happens to an idea in lives. I wanted to track an idea’s consequences, both for the people who fostered it and for people affected by it. I wanted to bring to life the drag of a big piece of twentieth-century thinking as it furrowed and blundered its way through a big tract of experience: and in a place where an overhang of painful history made it horribly clear that ideas are never entertained in a vacuum, are never really conceived on a clean slate. That they’re never not soaked through with experience, however abstract they may appear.

The chapter about the summer night in the Siberian science-city is the one in the book that I’m probably proudest of, the one where I’m most hopeful that I’ve caught the likeness of a moment. It comes pretty much at the midpoint of the book, and it’s also at the topmost point of the book’s emotional arc, where the idealism of the mathematical reformers of Soviet life is in full flower but hasn’t yet received its first decisive check from Soviet reality. It was important to me to do justice to the intellectual excitement, and in a curious way the innocence of that instant, on a little pocket-sized island of intoxicated possibility and (relative) freedom, deep in the heart of a grim place. You can’t call something “Midsummer Night” without the word dream floating along by implication behind it, but I didn’t want to be dismissive of the summer’s night’s hopes, or to be ironic about them in a way that foreclosed on them and stopped them being felt while they were happening. Part of my aim for the book has always been to carry readers who like me are far from the Soviet experience deep enough inside it that we’ll feel the loss properly when hope drains away, and mourn it like something really possessed.

There’s a lot of homage in Red Plenty. It’s full of my pleasure in the three-legged scampering gait of Gogol, and my reverence for Chekhov’s details, and for Bulgakov as the pioneer of occult Stalinist black comedy, and (since SF is a major source for me too) my awe for the work of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

I supposed I started to think of it, while I was writing it, as a kind of imaginary Soviet artifact—an impossible variation on the real thing. Oddly enough, socialist realism was, yes, an aesthetic reference point for me here—but the socialist realist novel I learned most from, and imitated most, was the impossible one, Vasily Grossman’s wonderful Life and Fate, in which he filled out the conventional form of Soviet fiction with sustained truth-telling about the battle of Stalingrad and its aftermath that made the book completely unpublishable in the USSR. All of the manuscripts were confiscated; it only survived because it was smuggled West by some sympathetic hand among the secret policemen who’d taken it from him. I got my perspective on Soviet history on easy, easy terms. But perhaps there’s a precedent in the case of Grossman for the advisability of stretching and squeezing and cobbling the literary forms you have to work with, until they let you show the thing you need to show.