We’re in the middle of a cluster of literary comebacks. Ten years after Never Let Me Go, and 15 years after he conceived it, Kazuo Ishiguro is about to publish The Buried Giant. Tom Stoppard’s The Hard Problem, his first stage play since Rock‘n’Roll nine years ago, is in the National Theatre’s repertoire. An English translation is forthcoming of The Festival of Insignificance, Milan Kundera’s return to fiction after a 13-year gap. (Adding to the impression of the ubiquity of senior, long-silent authors finding their voice again are the returns of Harper Lee and Elizabeth Harrower, though Harrower’s In Certain Circles and Lee’s forthcoming Go Set a Watchman - both written long ago but previously withheld from publication - are not new books).
Typically, such comebacks are joyously heralded when announced - each after all represents another author rescued from the ranks of those for whom creative blockage never ends, with their final years spent wrestling with a never-finished Great Book, or those (notably EM Forster and JD Salinger) who compete to pull off literature’s longest sulk after taking early retirement from publication. But while (or perhaps because) calling such works “eagerly awaited” or “long-awaited” is de rigueur when they eventually appear, reactions to comeback books tend to be sniffy. The politely disappointed note stuck by Stoppard’s reviews echoed the response to Something Happened (1974), Joseph Heller’s follow-up to Catch-22 after 13 years, and to Vineland (1990), Thomas Pynchon’s even tardier next novel after Gravity’s Rainbow.
Though usually simply explained as “writer’s block”, many factors, usually in combination, can underlie extended silences, including alcohol or drug abuse, drastic and paralysing life changes, obsessive perfectionism, rejection by publishers, diversion to other kinds of writing (often for cinema, but Melville published only poetry in his last decades) and Damascene experiences in which authors repudiate their previous work (as Tolstoy did) or switch to a radically different genre or aesthetic. Books after intermissions caused by such strategic rethinks appear to have a better record than those reflecting emergence from personal crisis: they include A Game of Thrones (1996, after a 13-year gap), a debut in historical fantasy by George RR Martin, and The Corrections (2001, nine-year gap), Jonathan Franzen’s triumphant re-emergence as a maker of baggy Dickensian sagas afterturning his back on postmodernism.
Among fiction’s giants, Tolstoy’s 22‑year hiatus between Anna Karenina and Resurrection, Joyce’s 17-year silence between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and Pynchon’s 17-year pause after Gravity’s Rainbow are the most spectacular authorial time outs; but they look puny alongside the 33 years it took the US writer Harold Brodkey to produce his first novel, The Runaway Soul (1991), after a promising story collection in the 1950s; let alone the 60 years between his compatriot Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934) and the start of his 1994-98 Mercy sequence. Reviewers were kind to the octogenarian Roth’s magnum opus, but clearly not excited by it, while few deemed Brodkey’s debut worth the wait and some were openly scornful.
One of the puzzles scholars of writer’s block have yet to solve is why it appears to afflict proportionately higher numbers of men than women. Successful female writers who stop writing, such as Lee, or who make comebacks like Jean Rhys – no novels between Good Morning, Midnight in 1939 and Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 – seem comparatively rare. Could it perhaps be because they’ve become less grandiose in their ambitions – less compelled to attempt a Great American Novel, to “define” an era or the state of a nation, to use combat metaphors for what they do – and so are less self-torturing than men? Or because there is, or was, less cultural indulgence of self-destructive behaviour where women are concerned?
