Sentiment, Schentiment

In some quarters of the art world, sentiment is mocked, derided, downgraded, disdained. R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe, whom I would follow to any frontier of creation he cared to visit (and I did!), once said, "I despise nostalgia and I’m a naturally sentimental person so of course I abhor sentimentality." (He also said all of this in a highly nuanced way, so please read the interview.) Reviewers of serious literature—whatever that is—often take away points when sentimentality is present or even sensed.

What's a sentimental guy—a lover of It's a Wonderful Life, someone who cries when Rocky calls out for Adrian, a music lover who mists up when a McCartney song reminds him of when he first heard it and what life was like then*—to do?

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I was thinking about this during the past week as I re-read a novel I'm calling Jane, Divided (those who remember the song I poached it from will recognize this as a sentimental title). The story is set in near present day (well, 2016), with a main character who is back in her Texas hometown, which just so happens to be my Texas hometown. She is pushing forward, as we all should, and grappling with her past, as we all do. Jane comes from my generation, if not my specific year of vintage, and thus some of her memories are mine, or at least from the same vicinity.

I'm not sure how sentimentality is to be avoided, in this case. And that's fine, because I'm also not inclined to avoid it.

What I am inclined to avoid, however, is the laziness that often accompanies the sentimental lookback. Who among us hasn't said "times were simpler then"? But were they, really? Simpler than now, certainly, but the versions of us who existed back then had no way of knowing that. In those bygone moments, the times were as complicated as known time has ever been, technology was on the cutting edge, attitudes were shifting in dizzying ways, etc. If you're in 2025—and you are, if you're reading this—and you pine for 1975, just remember that each day and each development, each heartbreak, each triumph was new to you fifty years ago. The times, man, they were crazy. Not like they were in 1965 (yeah, they were crazy then, too) or 1955 (ditto) or 1945 (are you kidding me?).

If we don't strive to see the fuller picture of where we are and how we got here, that simple yearning for a simpler time can be corrosive to a thoughtful consideration of matters.

Sentiment, however, is not the problem. If one strives for art—and I should say here that I don't, at least not as the driving motivation for doing the work**—the manner in which sentimentality is conveyed can be the problem. It can be clumsy and cloying, but that's a fault of the writing, not the sentiment. I could pull every book I've ever written off the shelf and find you some sentence, paragraph, or chapter that causes me to cringe in the face of its bald-faced sentimentality. (I won't, but I could.) But what difference does that possibly make now? If I've been true to myself, if I've written the best thing I can write at the time I've written it, I'm good. The only thing that matters is the next thing.

In this sense, I'm with John Irving (In Defense of Sentimentality, 1979): "When we writers—in our own work—escape the slur of sentimentality, we should ask ourselves if what we are doing matters."

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*—That's the thing about the past. I don't have a full picture of what life was like then, because I'm relying on memory. The lens aimed backward is attached to an unreliable camera. Interestingly enough, it's the malleability of those memories and the transformative power of imagination that often combine for good fiction.

**—I consider myself a storyteller, not an artist. On occasion, if I do my work well and faithfully, art emerges.