Writers whose roots are not in the mainstream culture may still have a lot to say.
...............
So people say, with a hopeful lilt in their voice.
In practical terms, this works out to be, for example, a story about a Lagos family's angst instead of the dramatic goings on of a London or New York based clan.
Or, there are the "non-mainstream voices" found within: the musings of a
clever young Indian American woman, the daughter of immigrants, who lives in two worlds and seasons her opinions with, to the Western mind, "exotic" or folksy references to Shiva et. al. instead of that staple, the clever young Anglo woman or that other, more recently crafted trope: the 'strong, independent' African American woman.
And of course, there's a whole world's worth of troubled young and disappointed old men to choose from. China's vigor will no doubt gift us with a shower of translated novels and novelized travelogues about that future shocked land, but told, sadly, from the usual points of view.
None of this takes us anywhere, does it? I can weep and laugh and gasp at the grandeur of fine writing with the rest of you but none of it is telling me anything about the deep systems - of how we're situated within the natural world of bio-evolved and human built things.
McCarthy's "The Road" is a bleak example of what happens when the mainstream novelist tries to imagine something beyond his exhausted genre's usual concerns. That unrelenting book is about the ultimate dead end: an apt symbol of mainstream novelists' failure to examine structure and super structure and see what strange, new places that might take a story.
What I want: a fiction as brave as a simple scene in a Michael Mann film; the camera's eye patiently settles on an LA street in the dead of night in such a way that the hidden things, the vastness, the adapted wildlife, the deep technological-ness of the place is made clear.
A Mann shot seems to look through the skin to the skull beneath.
That's what I want. That is not what mainstream novelists are giving.
.d.