I know several industrious readers who read nothing but novels, not even short stories and certainly not biographies, poetry or other forms of nonfiction. Some are devoted to genre fiction – mysteries, science fiction – and at least one sticks to the “classics” -- Austen and Conrad, for instance. What they have in common despite mutually exclusive loyalties is a taste for “prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it,” to use Randall Jarrell’s witty definition of the novel.
Novels have evolved into the ideal form of entertainment, rivalled only by movies. They are long enough to create a detailed alternate world and sufficiently compelling to
sustain our interest across hundreds of pages. Of course, the best novels do
more than entertain and some even contribute to our moral education. Theodore Dalrymple
writes in his review of Joseph Epstein’s The Novel, Who Needs It? (Encounter
Books, 2023):
“It is the
novel’s capacity, at its best, to illustrate the complexity of life that is its
glory, for no other literary or artistic genre can do so. The novel is a kind
of vaccine against the terribles
simplificateurs who are the bane, or at least a bane, of this world, the
kind of people who think that they have found the key to life as Mrs Baker Eddy
thought that she had found the key to the Scriptures, or Baconians think that
they have found the key to Shakespeare.”
I've often
wondered why in seventh grade we were assigned to read Upton Sinclair’s unreadable
The Jungle when most of us hadn’t yet
read Dickens or Melville. In retrospect, it seems patronizing, as though we
could only appreciate an earnestly written lecture. Throughout the novel’s history, didacticism
has remained one of its severest threats. The fates of well-rounded strangers,
people we will never know and who, in fact, don’t exist except in healthy
imaginations, are more lastingly instructive than sermons or preacherly tracts.
Dalrymple again:
“Trying to
describe or explain the whole of human life by means of principles, either
moral or scientific, is like trying to catch a cloud with a butterfly net. It
is here, according to Mr Epstein, that the novel reveals its incomparable
strength, at least when practised by a master.”
As I wrote last January about The Novel, Who Needs It?: “Epstein, the Last Man
of Letters, has written a bittersweet love letter and eulogy. There’s a
humility at the heart of his advocacy.”
How
reassuring it is to have a writer one admires endorse the work of another we
admire even more. Like so much of literature (especially novels), the essay lies
gasping on life-supports and the prognosis is not encouraging. Dalrymple and
Epstein are the coelacanths of our literary age, surviving, outliving fashion, politics
and aliteracy.
1 comment:
I can describe my reading habits over the past seven decades as "One thing leads to another". Reading has helped me to know the human condition, and myself, in ways that I could not otherwise have known.
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