Too Much Information
By Scott Dickensheets
Pity the historical novelist of the 2070s, ready to embark on a tale set in our times. The very plenitude of meaning-rich incident that tingles her storytelling antennae — a pandemic and a contested election and nationwide protests and an attempted insurrection and climate change events and Ted Cruz’s quarantine beard — will also pose a daunting challenge, as noted by many frazzled 2020 posts on the socials: If this was fiction, it would NOT be believable. There’s too much good stuff demanding inclusion, and we haven’t even gotten to the Cat Lawyer.
Tightening her narrative aperture on Las Vegas doesn’t focus our novelist much. Lockdown, COVID-19 spikes, closed casinos, toilet-paper skirmishes, economic devastation, protests on the Strip, a mayor who offered the city as a “control group” for early reopening, a governor who might be visionary or a klutz ... what doesn’t sound like it belongs in a novel about 2020-21, either as background verisimilitude or as character-defining action?
“There are days when everything / seems to mean something,” the poet Adam O. Davis writes, and that sounds especially true of a year in which touching your own face took on outsize significance. “If you’re looking for ideas and perspective,” says Meredith Allard, novelist and author of the recent book Painting the Past: A Guide for Writing Historical Fiction, “there is so much to see here in Vegas and across the country and across the world.” It’s thanks to Allard, by the way, that we situated our novelist in the 2070s — she says 50 years is generally considered the distance at which fiction becomes “historical.” From that vantage point, hindsight reveals the larger truths, patterns, judgments, and consequences that elude us in the frantic now.
Of course, the novelist’s specific story and characters will help thresh out the most irrelevant details — it’s possible her book will require no character to make sourdough, dance for TikTok, or tweet presidentially. Anyway, Allard says, details may change but not human nature. Citing Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, partially set during plague years in Tudor England, she says, “People mourned their family 500 years ago, and they mourn their families today. That’s what you need in historical fiction — that human element.”
“The readers 100 years from now will have very different fears and insecurities — I hope!” says Las Vegas author Amanda Skenandore, a historical novelist (her third book, The Second Life of Mirielle West, appears in July). “But they will be able to relate to our current fears: ‘Oh, yeah, that’s not so different, and they did make it through,’ or, ‘We cannot make those same pitfalls.’”
Still, from this abundance, our author must settle on the useful deets somehow. Skenandore suggests one place to start: language. “I love all the words that have come out,” she says, “like covidian, bubble, doomscrolling.” Each opens a portal into this moment’s zeitgeist, the way flapper, hooch, and blotto still evoke a Prohibition-era zing. “Those words will be such a gem for the historical novelist to uncover because they really speak to our experience, our anxieties, our preoccupations during this time.” Photos, too. Skenandore mentions images of the empty Strip, its darkened resorts turning on room lights in the shape of a heart or Vegas Strong. Such forceful visuals can sink their tentacles deep into a story’s psychology.
In addition to finessing the detail overload, the future novelist (or, sadly, a novel-creating Amazon algorithm) will have to see past our current preference for combative binaries (left vs. right, science vs. “freedom”) — something we have a hard time doing in the present. “On both sides those are people,” Skenandore says, “existing in a complex framework of their lived experiences. That’s another challenge for the future writer: to mine all of those experiences so they’re presenting rounded characters.”
Says Allard, “Historical novelists are pretty good at laying it bare for people to see and experience what life then was like. They’re not going to sugarcoat anything.”
Double Down Blogger image credit: Scott Dickensheets.
Scott Dickensheets is a freelancer writer and editor in Henderson, Nevada. He previously served as deputy editor of Desert Companion magazine and the editor in chief of Las Vegas CityLife and The Las Vegas Weekly.
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