'They Still Fascinate Me'

“I have not ceased to read novels. Since my reading of contemporary novels has diminished almost to zero, I have again read most of the works of Dickens, Eliot, Peacock, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Couperus, Conrad, Wharton, Melville, James, and many other novelists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” 

My experience precisely (except for Peacock, whose work I have never read, and Couperus, whom I had never heard of). The author is the sociologist Edward Shils who was taking part in the symposium “Who Reads Novels?” published in the Spring 1979 issue of The American Scholar. I first realized I was no longer reading much contemporary fiction twenty or twenty-five years ago. I still read novels and stories, which have always been central to my understanding of literature, but mostly from the past, often books I first read when quite young. As Shils puts it:

 

“I find that to read once more books which I first read in high school and as an undergraduate, and even as recently as twenty years ago, is almost the same as reading them for the first time. They still fascinate me and give me very great pleasure.”

 

I think age is a factor, with its generalized sense of estrangement from contemporary culture. Also, the growing prominence of so-called “genre fiction.” I don’t read thrillers or science fiction. Neither do I read much that passes for “experimental” or avant-garde fiction, which seems a tiresome dead end. The last Nobel Prize winner whose novels I read was V.S. Naipaul. Political correctness and fashionable sloganeering have also corroded fiction. Perhaps writers are as distracted by other media as their readers. Put bluntly, I seldom encounter a new novel worthy of my time.

 

Still, this change in custom nags at me. I have no desire to live in a cultural isolation chamber or a self-satisfied state of fuddy-duddy-ism. I can’t get self-righteous about the State of the Novel and I really don’t care what others choose to read. My late friend David Myers had a goatish appetite for new novels. I worried about him the way I might worry about a friend who gorges on ice cream and candy.

 

The novel and its enormous potential for giving readers, as Shils puts it, “an artistic portrayal and an assessment of the course and problems of human life,” hasn’t changed. Fewer novelists seem interested in such traditional literary roles. In other words, novelists, not the novel, are the problem. Yes, there are a few brave exceptions. Shils writes:

 

“A question about the centrality of the novel is a judgment on those who are producing novels today rather than on whether the novel is still an adequate genre for the literary imagination. I think that it is – for those who are serious in their desire to produce works of literary value and who have the imagination, discipline, and verbal facility and sense to do so.”

 

Shils’ friend Joseph Epstein recently published The Novel, Who Needs It? In his final sentence Epstein answers the nicely cocky question posed by his title: “[T]he answer is that we all do, including even people who wouldn't think of reading novels--we all need it, and in this, the great age of distraction we may just need it more than ever before.”