Yesterday I posted Wandering the Aisles wherein I lamented the dearth of emerging books and authors of quality. As I thought about what I had written, I began to feel myself being sucked into what seems to be the quagmire du jour. I began to imagine the possibility of giving credence to the idea that Literary Fiction might be terminally ill.
After all, in our hunger for instant information, reality everything has become popular vogue, even when the reality is staged. Non-fiction currently outsells fiction and fiction sales are dwindling. Publishers are publishing fewer titles, the trend toward POD is growing, and the practice of hardcover release of literary fiction with a subsequent paperback rollout is no longer considered mandatory. Something must be up, right?
Well, first off, it must be stated that fiction, literary fiction in particular, has been said to be on its deathbed for 60-75 years. It’s my belief that as technology evolved with the advent of new media, there was, and continues to be, a fragmenting of one’s cultural kaleidoscope. Prior to motion pictures, radio, television, video games, and the Internet, entertainment and learning avenues were obviously more narrow. But having said that, I also have to add that there is truth in the idea that attention spans have shortened as information is fed to us in tinier and tinier sound bites.
There are, then, really two questions: are people willing to spend the time with a literary novel, and, if so, is it worth it. As to the first question, more books are being sold than ever before, so I assume people are still reading them—enough said. The answer to the second question, though, might be that sometimes it’s worth it and sometimes it isn’t.
The problem for me is that I find too many novels nowadays where the author simply has nothing to say. And I’m not questioning the writer’s skill. There might be a good story, characters might be well developed, but in the end, I find myself asking the age old question: what’s the point of it all?
I believe there has to be intent. I believe in psychological and artistic intricacy. I believe in the tragedies of wealth and poverty, the drama of murder and court cases, the things we want or fear. I don’t mind a story of average people doing average things in average places, but I need the author to transcend the blandness of it all. Why not try for more? Make the story resonate with the power to move me, make me question my world, grip me, be brazen.
Writers can do all that in fiction. Fiction can be better than non-fiction books and semi-reality television. And to all those who say fact is stranger than fiction? To them I say it might be stranger because in fiction we know the characters’ thoughts at crucial moments, their deepest motivations—details that intensify a story and turn it into art. You only get this with a novel. Only a novel allows us to be privy to the details that, in other media, remain masked.
Other books have done it: The Great Gatsby, Catch-22, 1984, The Grapes of Wrath, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, A Farewell to Arms, Slaughterhouse-Five, To Kill a Mockingbird. You might not like all of these, but they sure as hell managed to get to the bottom of things. They helped explain our world and you can’t ask for more than that.
And it’s happening still. There’s a much larger garden now; we have to pluck a few more weeds to allow the flowers to blossom. But literary fiction will never die with writers like Francine Prose, Joyce Carol Oates, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, James Salter, Richard Ford, and your list, and my list goes on and on . . .
September 19th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Lovely essay. And you make the point very well that on the surface literary fiction may seem passe, an artifact of a culture that no longer exists, and yet, there is good evidence that good readers– and admittedly “good readers” do not abound–still seek and respond to good writers, and you list some of the best. It occurs to me that there is still a fairly large group of good readers in England, and the English writers continue to flourish, better there than here, but still to flourish: Penelope Lively, Muriel Spark, Anita Brookner, Shirley Hazzard, Sally Vickers, and the lates Penelope Fitzgerald and Iris Murdock. And that is only the women! And northward to Canada where literary fiction is still thriving–perhaps the reason first-rate writers have moved to Toronto from all over the world.
I find your blog delightful.
September 19th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
Thanks, Edgar.
While I agree there may be a good number of good readers in the UK, it’s interesting that in November of 2007, Picador, an imprint of Pan MacMillan, the UK’s 8th largest publisher announced that beginning in 2008, they would launch almost every new novel as a £7.99 paperback. Other publishers are expected to follow suit. Picador’s stable of writers includes Alice Sebold, Colm Tobin, Graham Swift, Alan Hollinghurst, Bret Easton Ellis, Helen Fielding, John Banville, VS Naipaul, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy.
There’s a great post on the Guardian’s site, from which I culled the following:
Andrew Kidd, the publisher at Picador, is convinced the hardback’s primacy is over. “Over the last few years publishers have witnessed sales of literary fiction in hardback reaching new lows,” he said. “All of us find that depressing, and there are, frankly, no reasons to think the situation might soon reverse itself.”
“It is not uncommon for a literary fiction hardback to sell under 100 copies,” said Scott Pack, commercial director. “The vast majority of literary fiction is only published in hardback because otherwise the reviewers won’t review it. It’s mad. They should be reviewing on the basis of content rather than the binding.”
Sad, but true.