Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Is the Novel Dead?


No.

From a piece in the Wall Street Journal...

Doomsayers have always worried about the commercial pressure on novelists. Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that American authors would "aim at rapidity of execution more than at perfection of detail…. The object of authors will be to astonish, rather than to please, and to stir the passions more than to charm the taste." 

John Updike, in "Bech at Bay," expressed that anxiety in more modern terms: "The book trade, that old carcass tossed here and there by its ravenous jackals? Greedy authors, greedy agents, brainless book chains with their Vivaldi-riddle espresso bars, publishers owned by metallurgy conglomerates, operated by glacially cold bean-counters in Geneva."

H.G. Wells lamented the fragmentation of fiction into islands of taste: "It was no figure of speech that 'everyone' was reading Byron or puzzling about the Waverley mystery.…" Today, even best-selling fiction captures a fraction of the number of people who watched the latest episode of "Mad Men."
I don't believe the novel is dying. I have just read a couple that reassured me of the vitality of contemporary fiction—"The Barbarian Nurseries" by Hector Tobar and "History of a Pleasure Seeker" by Richard Mason. They could hardly be more different; they could hardly be more provocative.



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