Customer Reviews

The Novel of the Future

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This book, a manifesto of sorts, is probably of most interest for close followers of Nin's work. Written in 1968, the book serves as an exploration and defense of Nin's creative process, and while it was probably fairly engaging at the time, "Of the Future" definitely feels a little dated today. Nin is perhaps best known for her erotic short fiction, and all of her work develops from a commitment to bringing the unconscious substratum of experience into the forefront of the reader's perception, "to proceed from the dream outward" and, fundamentally, to write about what's really going on within the mental and emotional worlds of her characters.

Throughout this book Nin periodically rails against the stuffiness and insincerity of writers and artists preoccupied with conventional realism. Mostly, however, she devotes herself to repeatedly stressing the importance of integrating psychoanalytic and surrealist insights into contemporary art, of exploring and communicating the subjective experience. What she is basically arguing for, though she doesn't seem to realize it, is post-modernism.

This is why the book feels dated: in the past few decades we've already seen, in frequently overblown variations, both the positive and negative ramifications of the kind of art and writing that Nin is arguing so enthusiastically for here. There are definitely some perceptive observations, insights and rewarding anecdotes throughout the book, but the reader will have to work for them, trundling along through what amounts, in part, to an argument for the validity of her own output. I've read one of Nin's novels and was quite impressed, but the lengthy excerpts from a number of her works included in "Of the Future" don't seem to make for very good demonstrations. She talks quite a bit about her own work in this book, and for the devoted reader there appears to be lots of good stuff here. For me, though, it was a little too self-concerned and really rather boring.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect is that much of what Nin calls for is an assertion of independence and individuality in response to the stifling conformity of life in 1950's post-war America. Now, existing as we do in a hyper-individualistic, narcissistic world culture, we may actually begin to imagine the trajectory of the "novels of the future" as a re-envisioning and return to the collective, to a new articulation of community and possible balance between extremes...