“We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.”
— T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, “Little Gidding”

Awhile back, probably a couple of years ago now, my son said he had a problem he wanted to talk to me about.

Ok, I said, wondering if he was going to ask me for money.

He said, I just don’t think I’ve really done anything with my life.

What are you talking about? I said.

He was 18 years old, had been graduated from high school, been co-captain of the baseball team, and accepted to college. He could look out over the course of that summer and count both a summer internship and a paying gig teaching tennis at the local pool club. If he would have gotten a reference to Goodbye, Columbus (Phillip Roth’s 1950’s novel about a working class young man’s sybaritic summer in the wealthy Jewish suburbs of New Jersey), I would have made one.

I don’t feel like I am going anywhere. (We were, ironically in the car—best place ever for mother-son conversation.)

Then it hit me. What he was complaining about was not that he hadn’t really done anything, or wasn’t “going anywhere.”

It was that, at an almost proprioceptive level, his achievements didn’t feel the way they were supposed to: as this rapid narrative montage, quick cuts documenting obstacles, exertion, and final triumph.

In other words, he thought that “success” was supposed to be the Rocky training montage. It’s a reflection of his youthful innocence that he could actually admit this out loud.

But it’s true of all of us, and it’s nothing new. Neal Gabler’s book Life the Movie came out in 1998, and the 2007 introduction of the iPhone supercharged the tendency, but I’d suppose, at bottom, the real culprit is the massive burst of post-Second World War affluence that turbocharged postmaterialism—in America, and most everywhere else. Thus enabling average folks like me to defer less to the Decalogue of than to the cause of self-definition.

And below that, of course, lie all the high points we know (or are supposed to) from our Humanities classes: Bible translation, the printing press, mass literacy. Even listing them like that makes me sound as superficial as the factoids I’m quoting. Which, I suppose, is what happens to someone who reads long-form “think pieces” on my iPhone in the Starbucks parking lot. Sigh.

This tendency has obvious implications for art, and I’m wondering, again, whether it’s related to the problems I’ve been having with so many contemporary novels. Novels: that form that quintessentially tracks with the emergence of modernity, subjectivity, etc. Whereas the earliest ones were kind of baggy—Clarissa, anyone?-—they got honed during the next couple hundred years to a structure not unlike a play, the “Roman arch” (perfectly round-topped; weight bearing) that novelist Caroline Gordon described as an ideal in her letters to Flannery O’Connor. That ectomorphic structure achieved its apotheosis in works as disparate as The Great Gatsby, As I Lay Dying, Sula, Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts. But the structure persisted even in more maximalist works—none finer, to my mind, than Invisible Man.

Sorry for the whirlwind exposition, but that brings us down to today. Despite some fifty years now of “experimental fiction,” the majority of current novels I’ve read still aim for the Roman arch structure—but fail miserably. I’m mostly thinking of books in the “blockbuster midlist” category, like Jonathan Franzen’s works. Like the painstaking ratchet of roller coaster cars up the incline, these novels develop complex action and character so meticulously that they are forced to cut loose in the final third, the cars careening downhill in the kind of ex nihilo zaniness usually reserved for the Marvel movie franchise.

So the arch persists, I guess, but is kind of bent. And it yields the kinds of plot resolutions that cut and dissolve as rapidly as the kinds of narrative arcs my son thought would represent what it would mean to achieve something. Franzen is a major offender on this score: the last thirds of Crossroads, Freedom, and going all the way back to The Corrections were basically exercises in mechanical exhaustion, though Franzen’s skill with sociological observation and humor still make them fun and even valuable to read. It’s even true with books I Ioved greatly—even, to some extent, G-d forbid, Christopher Beha’s The Index of Self-Destructive Acts.

Such is the medium, but what is the message? If media technologies have trained us to expect this kind of Instant Arc, I’m afraid we are now offloading those same bad habits onto our literary art.

I’m wondering if that is why, then, that the genre of poetry seems more vigorous than fiction. I’m a co-editor of a small literary journal—Vita Poetica; faith-based but open—and it’s striking how much stronger and broader the poetry submissions are than the short stories, and, to a lesser extent, nonfiction. The reasons for that could have to do, of course, with ever-decreasing levels of attention and other contemporary woes.

But poetry’s relative economy of expression and the inherent music of the genre speak to a need for something more incantatory than our late-capitalist narrative arcs can afford.

I’d argue that what we need now are less arcs or Roman arches than actual circles. The poem, as genre, feels like an excerpt from an eternal cycle or stream, from which an instance of clarity (or concentration, or celebration) is tapped.

It’s not that fiction or nonfiction can’t accomplish that goal: Don DeLillo’s Underworld and even David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, if the fifty pages of it I got through are representative, seem to call up that emotion. And perhaps the circles can even extend to the narratives that bend out and back in around, once again.

Like the narratives of Genesis in the Parshah or the Liturgical calendar, the stories told around ancient fires, they keep coming around, and our humility is in recognizing that we are only a point in the cycle. But we keep on telling them to one another, we do.

Caroline Langston was a regular contributor to Image’s Good Letters blog, and is writing a memoir about the U.S. cultural divide. She has contributed to Sojourners’ God’s Politics blog, and aired several commentaries on NPR’s All Things Considered, in addition to writing book reviews for Image, Books and Culture, and other outlets. She is a native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, and a convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church. She lives outside Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children.