'There Can Be No Substitute for It'

My taste for fiction has been hibernating for twenty years or more. This would have surprised my younger self, who often had two or three novels going simultaneously. In an unexamined sense, the novel was literature. This can be explained, in part, by my youth and a fruitful time for American fiction coinciding. A brief reminder: Nabokov, Malamud, Ralph Ellison, Bellow, Cheever, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Eudora Welty, et al. Many youthful enthusiasms, of course, haven’t survived – think Gaddis, Updike and Pynchon – but it was my springtime. I’m reminded of Miranda gushing, “O brave new world” and Prospero, with infinite gentleness replying to his daughter’s naiveté: “’Tis new to thee.”

 

Only lately have I noticed that I’m reading fiction again. It started early in the lockdown with short stories – Singer, Peter and Elizabeth Taylor, Chekhov, Malamud, Joseph Epstein, Babel, Kipling, Cheever, Elizabeth Bowen, Varlam Shalamov. The brevity of short stories was appealing. I could read two or three before turning off the light. Without quite being aware of it, I moved to longer forms – novellas or short novels -- by James, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov again. All are works I’ve read before, often many times, but reading the familiar carries surprises. The book remains the same but the reader is new. Chekhov’s “In the Ravine” and "My Life" floored me all over again, as did James’ “Madame de Mauves.”

 

In his recent essay “Duty, the Soul of Beauty: Henry James on the Beautiful Life” (Wiseblood), R.R. Reno says James “invites his readers into a different dream, an attractive vision of life penetrated by moral authority.” This thought may offer a clue as to the origin of my unexpected revival of interest in fiction. In recent years, history had supplanted fiction as the foundation of my reading life. Contemporary fiction is a dismal scene – propaganda or refried avant-garde experimentation. Those are the big attractions. That leaves only the enduring works of the past, the novels our forebears read as part of their education, moral and aesthetic. Now I’m reading Tolstoy’s The Cossacks (1863). In “Reading the Century,” the final essay in The Necessity of Anti-Semitism (Carcanet, 1997), the novelist and screenwriter Frederic Raphael writes:

 

“The necessity of fiction, as a mode, is that, however unreliable, it is part of what assists our access to knowledge. . . . Generally speaking, there is no such thing as collaborative insight, which is why art is not a science and also why there can be no substitute for it.”