culture

Is the Novel in Decline?

Author, Philosopher
Author, 2014 National Book Award
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale

Joseph Bottum

Author, Philosopher

July 27th, 2020
Dear Phil,
Despite my tears and imprecations, the publishers of this Pairagraph outfit have forced me to open with a “flat summary” of my book, The Decline of the Novel, refusing the job themselves. This, of course, is how publishers grow sleek and fat—their silken opera wraps and glossy top-hats an offense to God and man. It’s not enough, they say, that an author wrote the book; the author must also write the summary. And the ad copy. And then hawk the finished hardbacks from a Three-Card Monte table down by Washington Square.
Still, if flat summary be demanded, flat summary I deliver. From the tarpaper shacks of Appalachia to the ritzy homes of Beverly Hills, where the denizens glitter in the sun, my prose is celebrated for its directness and no-nonsense tone. “Here,” they say, “is a man who knows how to strike true. A horny-handed veteran who will square things up, all divided into proper parts.” They used to say the same of Julius Caesar, and I, for one, am proud to share his laconic, straightforward ways.
So, in a nutshell, The Decline of the Novel argues that we have lost the metaphysical and religious confidence that made the novel the central art-form of the modern age.
Of course, anything trimmed off enough to fit in a nutshell is likely to be a little nutty; anything baked down to the bite-sized will prove tough to swallow. And this is where I send readers to the book itself: a neatly-shod little volume they can get through in an afternoon. Or, I suppose, if they’re skinflints, they can look at the extract in the Spectator or some reviews. There’s an interview in Il Foglio I’m fond of, mostly because I don’t have enough Italian to understand it. As for the Albanian account, well, when one has said “Nuk është romani shkaku pse ne dështuam, ne jemi shkaku pse dështoi romani,” one has said it all. But readers should buy the book anyway, alongside Phil Klay’s story-collection Redeployment and forthcoming novel Missionaries. We need to consider authors less as lilies of the field, subsisting on air and the promises of publishers, and more as laborers worthy of their hire.
The reviews have tended to blend into a suggestion that, yes, this Bottum fellow seems right but . . . no, it just can’t be true that novels no longer do their old work. And that reaction speaks, I think, to our culture’s sentimental love of the novel at a distance and general disregard up close.
At the least, novels no longer hold the culture-commanding heights. Unlike previous gloomsayers (from Ortega y Gasset on) I don’t blame current writers. We’ve had instead a collapse of the old reader-author agreement that novels are mandatory texts for the culturally literate. And even with all the usual technological suspects, the reason is metaphysical: a failure of nerve about the possibility of advancing toward the moral meaning of reality.
I take the modern novel, emerging from eighteenth-century Britain, as born of a “Protestantism of the Air” breathed even by the non-Protestant likes of Dostoyevsky. The success of the novel matched the growing sense of an interior self: Novels are “Pilgrim’s Progress rewritten in self-consciousness,” with interior selves seeking salvation and sanctification.
In the great thinning-down of the age, the novel faced the modern crisis—and increasingly became the device by which the culture tried to reconnect reality to meaning. That’s why I aimed chapters at history in Scott, names in Dickens, and modernist ambitions in Mann. We have now no such confidence in artistic answers to huge cultural and psychological questions.
After a romp through a few genres of popular fiction, this Bottum fellow arrives at the grim conclusion that serious novel-reading has become little more than a hobby. Like teacup-collecting and butterfly-hunting, the activity continues among those who enjoy such things. But gone is the novel as the central art of the age, the novel existing in a grand cultural agreement that novels fundamentally matter.
As Ever,
Jody
0 Comments