Our Historical Fiction Hang-Ups

The historical novel isn’t cool. Popular? Yes. Enduring? Yes. A bit, well — for nerds? Also yes. Coolness lies in being at the right place at the right time, particularly before everyone else — in possessing a sensitivity to the zeitgeist. This grasp of the bleeding edge, crucial to literature considered broadly countercultural, is used by writers (in a downtown bar, or up in a garret) to make history, not to recall it, even if no one would be so dull as to admit such ambitions. After all, the other hallmark of coolness is effortlessness. And the felt effort of historical fiction — research, dates, facts, figures, articles of clothing you didn’t know the name for until you looked them up — is always present. To the uninclined reader, this is homework. It’s boring. Yet a desire to visit the past springs eternal. There’s always that child curled up on the train or plane with a brick of a book, immersed in a vast world, a somewhere that’s electrifying in how different its ordinary is. As the novelist L.P. Hartley wrote, with great nostalgia for that innocent feeling, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”