I sometimes ask myself why I write historical fiction. I’m not a genre-oriented reader, and I’m not really a genre-oriented writer. Genre, particularly in today’s market, implies conformance with a fairly strict set of market criteria which, as someone attempting to write serious popular fiction, I am not particularly interested in meeting. So the question probably shouldn’t be why I write historical fiction, but why I don’t write contemporary fiction. And the answer seems to be that contemporary fiction somehow doesn’t seem real to me. This is very odd.

The realization came to me when I saw some enthusiastic praise for Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin and decided to read the “Look inside” sample on Amazon. The sample — the opening chapter — depicts a geeky young man emerging into a crowd in Grand Central Station and navigating it with difficulty and some distress until he spies a girl he has known since childhood. He calls out to her, fights his way through the crowd to her, and then attempts to chat her up and persuade her to miss her train and have coffee with him. The scene is well written with lots of writerly craft and skill, and it captures the claustrophobia of the crowd and of his mind very well. It’s easy to read, it hits the boy/girl notes very well, and it is full of writerly cleverness that is not obtrusive enough to be really distracting.

But for all its excellence of craft, it does not quite work for me. For one thing, the boy’s inner and outer voices don’t match. What he thinks about the encounter and what the skillfully integrated background story and authorial commentary tell us about his shyness and lack of confidence don’t match the ease with which he cajoles the young woman into staying and talking to him. Even when she lets slip the mention of a boyfriend, he is not put off. This is not the behavior of the shy, poor, physically inadequate young man he is portrayed to be. I feel for him, but I don’t quite believe in him.

Boy and girl are both computer geeks in 1995. There is a whole interior monologue on how easy it has become to find people in the technological age, along with a painful passage about how he could find her address, phone, and email address but would never have the courage to use them to contact her (which contrasts quite unconvincingly with his successful attempts to keep her talking to him). As they part, she hands him a disk with a game she has written and asks him to play it and tell her what he thinks. Her email is in the readme file on the disk, she says.

The pretty rich girl handing the geeky poor boy a disk of a game she wrote with her email address on it doesn’t quite work. It is at very least improbable. But it is the kind of improbability that we are usually inclined to forgive in a novel. Novels are, after all, concerned with improbabilities. They are too neat to be probable, and it is accepted practice that improbabilities can initiate stories and make the protagonist’s life more difficult; they just can’t be used to save the protagonist and wrap up the story.

The scent of the manic pixie dream girl is around the girl in this opening chapter, though it may only be a passing whiff, and she may be something quite different as the novel goes on. But that’s fine. It sets things in motion. It might be more credible if she just brushed him off and caught her train, but the twin improbabilities of his overture and her reciprocation introduce the essential will-they-won’t-they tension that is required to get any story’s wheels turning.

This kind of thing is part of the contract between the novelist and the reader. We recognize the element of wish fulfillment for both sexes. For the boys, the geeky boy who actually manages to talk to the pretty girl. For the girls, the pretty girl who is respected for her brain and her accomplishments by the geeky boys. It’s not the wish fulfillment that puts me off. Much as I long to find serious popular fiction, I like fanciful fiction as much as the next person.

And if any fanciful story should work for me, it should be this one. This should be my wish fulfillment. I was that geeky guy, or almost, anyway. I was more of a literary geek, reading and writing sci-fi and fantasy novels and joining a club in university called “The League of Semi-Real Nations,” and messing up any attempt to talk to pretty girls. That culture had not merged with the computer geek culture when I was in university, because there were hardly any computers and Pong was still an arcade game. But by 1995 I was working in the tech industry, as so many of my contemporaries were. Every code nerd had a copy of Lord of the Rings on the shelf next to his Visual Basic programming manual. I did too.

This moment in the development of our current tech/geek culture is therefore intimately familiar to me. I lived through that time. The first significant purchase that my wife and I made after we married was an IBM PC AT clone with a 286 processor, two floppy drives, and one whole megabyte of RAM. It cost far more than you would ever pay for a PC today and it took us two years to pay it off. But the investment paid off and it changed our careers. In short, this story is set in my own time and in the field of my own experience. It should be bread and butter to me.

But it doesn’t seem real.

Does this make any sense? Does anyone else feel the same way?

You might well ask whether I mean that the events portrayed and the scene painted by the novel don’t seem real, or if I mean that such a novel does not seem like a real novel. And the answer is that I don’t know. I can’t quite pin down the sense of unreality that I feel when I read it.

I acknowledge that the scene in the station is portrayed realistically and that it is ably described with just the right details to make the scene flesh itself out in the imagination. And I also acknowledge that being realistic is not actually a requirement for a place to feel real in a novel, because places like Narnia and the Riverbank in The Wind in the Willow seem real to me in the sense that matters in a novel. They work as what Tolkien called subcreated worlds. They are successful story worlds, in other words, and I enter them and inhabit them, and in the context of the story they are real. Why, then, should that sense of reality be missing in a novel set in a place and time that have the additional advantage of actually being real and very like places I have actually experienced and remember?

Unless that is the problem. Maybe I specifically want or require the story world of a novel to be unlike my everyday experience. Maybe I want fiction that takes me out of my own experience to other when and other where and other what and other how. Maybe I am simply rebelling against the tedium of familiarity. When I think of the contemporary fiction that I do enjoy, I realize that what comes to mind is things like Tony Hillerman’s mystery novels set on the Navaho Nation in the American Southwest — a landscape and culture very different from my own.

But if I am rebelling against the tedium of familiarity, why isn’t everyone else? And why is the sense I am getting not, this is too familiar, but, this is not real?

Perhaps it is not the time and place that seem unreal to me. Perhaps it is the characters, or something about them.

One of the things that comes across strongly to me in the opening of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, as in so many other contemporary novels, is a sense of unconnectedness. The main character enters the scene alone in the crowd. One is never given any sense that he is connected to anyone else in the world by any ties of affection or obligation. The girl too seems to float untethered through the station and through life. Her casual mention of a boyfriend is framed very specifically not to suggest a connection, but rather as a means to fend off a potential connection with our hero.

There is something in contemporary society that values this ability to float free. Family and community connections are to be tolerated only so long as they do not constrain the ability to wander. Countless book blurbs boast of how their heroes and heroines shake off the bonds of family or social expectation and obligation. We seem to live in a world that cherishes disconnectedness above all things.

I recently stumbled across an article on an attempt to cancel a children’s book from the 90s about a “rainbow fish” with multicolored scales. The other fish ask him to share his beautiful scales. When he refuses, they won’t play with him. Then a wise old octopus advises him to share his scales so people will like him. Typical picture book stuff, you would think, but it drew the ire of some social crusader.

“So he got acceptance when he gave up parts of who he was, he had to change to get others to like them,” Mr Vuong says.

“While I think it carries a toxic message - the scales could be used as a metaphor for pride - but this is normally read to primary age kids, at that level, they will interpret Rainbow Fish as giving out scales as them needing to give something that’s important to make a friend.”

Well, yes, this is how life works. To gain acceptance you do have to give up parts of who you are; you do have to change to get others to like you. To demand to be liked without making any concession to the other person would, after all, be demanding that they change themselves to accept you. Do you need to give something important to make a friend? Of course you do! How could anyone imagine otherwise?

But no, today it is deemed better to live in loneliness rather than to give anything of yourself to anyone else. In another recent article, I read about a book by a Cambridge philosopher who teaches that it is immoral to give other people advice.

Giving friends and relations advice about crucial life choices such as whether to take a new job or start a family is immoral, according to a new paper by a Cambridge philosopher.

Dr Farbod Akhlaghi, a moral philosopher at Christ’s College, argues that everyone has a right to “self authorship”, so must make decisions about transformative experiences for themselves.

Let’s pass over the irony that this book is, by its own tenants, immoral, since it gives advice to people on life choices, which is something it argues is immoral. Let us just marvel at the commitment to loneliness that is inherent in both the phrase “self-authorship” and the advice that flows from it. To let anyone influence you is to give up your self-authorship. To attempt to influence anyone else is to violate their right to self-authorship. What a crimped, cramped, lonely, disaffected, insular life people must author for themselves who live by these rules!

No! Fie on this nonsense. A man is not a monograph. We are a collaboration. We are formed and shaped by our families, our friends, our communities, our churches, our clubs, our work, our education, our reading and listening and seeing. How could it be otherwise, and how could a sane person want it to be otherwise? We do not have the time, the capability, or the resources for self-sufficient self-authorship.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man 
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe 
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as 
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine 
own were; any man's death diminishes me, 
because I am involved in mankind. 
And therefore never send to know for whom 
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. -- John Donne

Is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow that sort of book? I haven’t the slightest idea. I have only read ten pages. This essay is not about that novel; it is about my reaction to those ten pages. It is about why, despite admiring the author’s skill, I feel very reluctant to read further. The author may have chosen to begin with a portrait of two unconnected people with the intent of cutting through this all-too-familiar modern malady and connecting them left and right. But I don’t trust that that is the case. Perhaps my experience of other contemporary works has made me shy and judgmental and unwilling to trust.

Thinking about my own books, I realize that I have, in each case, begun by showing how my characters are connected. Though Elswyth begins The Wistful and the Good alone on a clifftop, I immediately begin to connect her: to the young men of the village who desire her and who she desires in turn, to the man she is to marry, to the friends whose ship she longs to see appear on the horizon, and to her father, who comes to check on her and argues with her about her desire to ride alone if alarm must be given for the ship she has sighted. The second chapter connects her to her mother, her sister, and to her prospective mother-in-law. It delineates the responsibilities that rest on her shoulders and the consequences of neglecting them. Elswyth is defined by how she is connected.

Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight is really all about connectedness too, but in the negative, as it shears away one connection after another. Isabel’s ensnarement by the Elf Knight’s power cuts away every bond that had defined and nurtured her leaving her to descend into loneliness and madness.

St. Agnes and the Selkie chronicles a highly connected society and explores how Elswyth’s introduction and integration into its web of connections threatens to tear those connections apart.

The Needle of Avocation looks at a lonely young woman who has become disconnected from her family by secrets kept and lies told and who slowly and painfully learns to make new connections and mend those that have been broken. But even so, the opening is a catalogue of those strained and broken connections. Hilda’s disconnectedness is anchored in connection.

Connectedness, apparently, is important to me.

But then, couldn’t one take almost any novel, any classic novel, at least, and argue that it is about connectedness? Isn’t The Grapes of Wrath about connectedness? Isn’t Pride and Prejudice? Isn’t Great Expectations? Isn’t Crime and Punishment? Isn’t Moby Dick or Huckleberry Finn, or Lord of the Flies? Aren’t they all, unless they are explicitly about disconnectedness? No man is an island. Unless it is the very theme of the novel to argue that a man is an island.

But something about contemporary literature has made me distrustful. Is this what it is? Is unconnectedness to blame? I’m not honestly sure, though I think it must be at least part of the reason. What I do know is that once one becomes distrustful of something, any encounter with it puts you instantly on guard, and any hint, however slight, that your distrust is warranted leads to instant flight. This seems to be the state I have got myself into with contemporary fiction.

There must, surely, be trustworthy contemporary works out there. But perhaps I am no longer able to recognize them, or no longer willing to trust them long enough to discover them.

You might fairly ask, isn’t unconnectedness a feature of contemporary life, and isn’t it right, therefore, that contemporary literature should explore it? You might fairly suggest that in shying away from it I may be seeking a more fanciful, upbeat, even Pollyannaish kind of literature, and thus not living up to my stated preference for serious popular fiction.

Maybe that’s the case. But let me offer a different interpretation in my defence. Suppose contemporary literature, in its attempt to portray unconnectedness, is getting it somehow wrong. Perhaps an ideological commitment to unconnectedness, such as that displayed by Vuong and Akhlaghi is causing contemporary authors to paint a picture of unconnected people that is more aspirational than real, that they are missing the real flavor of unconnectedness? After all, if I were shying away from unconnectedness as a theme, why would I have made it a central theme of The Needle of Avocation?

But even if this is so, is it fair for me to make up my mind after just ten pages that Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow gets unconnectedness wrong? Not that a book can’t be painfully and manifestly wrong in the first paragraph, of course, but that is certainly not the case here. If there is a false note in the first ten pages (other than those described above), I certainly can’t put my finger on it.

It is more likely that I have found enough false notes in enough contemporary novels that the general style and approach and subject matter of a typical contemporary novel sets off alarms in my head long before the story has committed any sin of which I might justly accuse it.

Help me. Give me the titles of contemporary novels — novels by contemporary authors set in contemporary time, or in any time within the span of my adult life — that isn’t going to disappoint me, that is going to break me of this distrust that makes me put down books like Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, despite admiring the art and craft of the author, after reading only ten pages.