Zadie Smith, in a recent Granta interview, mused that "the problem of life is basically: I only have one and it moves in one direction. People tend to seek all kinds of solutions to that dilemma, and the anonymity of technology has offered us a new kind of 'out.'"

I scribbled this on a piece of paper, so that I could see those words when I wasn’t working on my computer, and thought about my own novel. As I write it, I'm obsessed by the question of identity: how the self is defined, and divided.

I was once asked why my bookshelf had barely any titles published before 1950. My answer, then and now: I'm less interested in the theodicy of The Inferno or the social mores of Madame Bovary than I am in the perceptual miasma of American Psycho and the personal struggle for authenticity in Tom McCarthy's Remainder.

The philosophers to read on personal identity and the self — Derek Parfit and Thomas Nagel and Galen Strawson — are on my shelf, too. They all discuss identity from a personal point of view. Take Parfit’s thought-experiment: If I am perfectly replicated, down to my memories, on Mars, and my original Earthbound body is simultaneously destroyed, is my identity — memories and consciousness and all — continuous from one body to the other? (For the answer as well as further complications, read part 3 ofReasons and Persons.)

My question isn’t Am I the same person in these cases? so much as Do other people think I am the same person?

These problems are at the heart of Smith's novel, NW. They're not new problems, but she presents a relatively new solution: the Internet. Her characters change names, take on new virtual identities. The inverse, identity theft, is just as compelling: Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply (and let's not forget  The Talented Mr. Ripley) exploits the divide between the self we experience and the self other people perceive.

Whether multiple people are occupying the same identity, or one person is shifting between many identities, the allure for readers is the same: the inside does not match the outside, and one person has to struggle to keep up — or confront — the lie.

We keep reading because we believe the truth will out. Oedipus is one of the oldest stories of mistaken identity, and we feel weirdly vindicated when the king realizes the real relationship between himself and Jocasta. But it took gods and prophets to bring out the truth; we have no such props in the arsenal of postwar fiction. We are more like The Man Who Folded Himself, watching helplessly as the same person splits in two, four, a hundred...

So we wait and watch for our characters to betray themselves? I certainly do. I want Adam Gordon in Leaving the Atocha Station to admit that he does not know Spanish. I want Patrick Bateman in American Psycho to realize whether he is hallucinating or not. I want Julius in Open City to acknowledge the horrible act his old friend accuses him of.

I want the truth; I suspect we all do. We want to see two lives collapse back into one. Maybe it will show us how to collapse the identities we, too, harbor.

image: thegreatbookslist.com

There are plenty of fine, virile men in American literature today. Elaine Blair doesn’t think so: in a New York Review of Books article, she easily recognizes Michel Houellebecq’s sucky protagonists because she says contemporary American lit is filled with men who are losers, from Philip Roth’s Alex Portnoy to Sam Lipsyte’s Milo Burke. So where are all the big, strong, literary men?

John Galt from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

For an unhealthy dose of American exceptionalism, there’s nobody better to read about than John Galt, the ultimate anti-loser and the Atlas who decides to just shrug off the world:

"There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in the whole of human history...the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. Well, their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind.”

The Judge from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

One of Cormac McCarthy’s most hair-raising creations, the judge stalks the long flat terrain of America and preaches a violent form of justice, without regard to femininity of any sort.

“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”

Patrick Bateman from Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.

From his rapturous descriptions of music albums and finely tailored suits to his soulless ravages of New York’s restaurants and women, Patrick Bateman might be stretching the envelope for being "human," but nobody would dare call him a loser.

“I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy. My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage. This was the bone season for me and I needed a vacation.”

Tyler Durden from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.

The two men at the center of the novel and the movie have no interest whatsoever in slacking off, and the result is Tylder Durden's speech, easily one of the most bizarre and fascinating manifestos of masculinity in recent times.

“I see in the fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential and I see squandering...our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we've been all raised by television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't and we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”

Mike Schwartz from Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding.

Baseball novels are full of beefy sluggers, but this one has grandiloquence to match his skills at coaching:

“Me, I hearken back to a simpler time.” Schwartz patted his thick, sturdy midriff. “A time when a hairy back meant something...Warmth. Survival. Evolutionary advantage. Back then, a man’s wife and children would burrow into his back hair and wait out the winter. Nypmhs would braid it and praise it in song. God’s wrath waxed hot against the hairless tribes. Now that’s all forgotten. But I’ll tell you one thing: when the next ice age comes, the Schwartzes will be sitting pretty. Real pretty.”

Gender typecasting be damned! There are plenty of strong men—and women, too!—in the contemporary American novel out there. The French can keep Michel Houellebecq to themselves; we’ve got Pynchon and Palahniuk and Wells Tower leading the way for our All-American macho men.

image credit: guardian.co.uk