'At Least When Practised By a Master'

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.