I’m old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural events. There were reviews and counter-reviews and arguments about the reviews.
If you look at the Publisher’s Weekly list of bestselling novels of 1962, you find Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and JD Salinger.
Today it’s largely Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction. I have no problem with genre and popular books, but where is today’s F Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, George Eliot, Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace? I’m not saying novels are worse now. I am saying that literature plays a much smaller role in our national life, and this has a dehumanising effect on our culture. There used to be a sense that novelists and artists served as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are. As sociologist C. Wright Mills once put it, “The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely lively things.”
Why has literature become less central to American life? The most obvious culprit is the Internet. It has destroyed everybody’s attention spans. I find this somewhat persuasive but not mostly so. The decline in literary fiction began in the 1980s and 1990s, before the Internet was dominant.
People still have attention span enough to read the classics. George Orwell’s “1984” (an essential guide for the current moment) has sold over 30 million books and Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” has sold over 20 million.
People still have the attention span to read a few contemporary writers — Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith, for example — and a sprinkling of reliably left-wing literary novels: Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead.” It’s just that interest in contemporary writers overall has collapsed.
I would tell a different story about the decline of literary fiction, and it is a story about social pressure and conformity. What qualities mark nearly every great cultural moment? Confidence and audacity. Look at Renaissance art or Russian or Victorian novels. I would say there has been a general loss in confidence and audacity across Western culture over the past 50 years.
In the 1970s, artists and writers were attempting big, audacious things. In literature there was Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” and Saul Bellow’s “Humboldt’s Gift.” In movies there was “The Godfather” — I and II — and “Apocalypse Now.” Rock stars were writing long ambitious anthems: “Stairway to Heaven,” “Free Bird” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Even the most influential journalists were audacious: Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson. Everything feels commercialised, bureaucratised and less freewheeling today.
Furthermore, the literary world is a progressive world, and progressivism — forgive me, left-wing readers — has a conformity problem. Even more than on the right, there are incredible social pressures in left-wing circles to not say anything objectionable. (On the right, by contrast, it seems that you get rewarded the more objectionable things you can say.)
Conformity is fine in some professions, like being a congressional aide. You’re not being paid to have your own opinions. But it is not fine in the writing business. The whole point is to be an independent thinker, in the social theorist Irving Howe’s words, to stand “firm and alone.” Given the standards of their time, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain and James Baldwin had incredible guts and their work is great because of their nonconformity and courage.
If the social pressures right around you are powerful, you’re going to write for the coterie of people who consciously or unconsciously enforce them. If you write in fear of social exile, your villains will suck. You’ll assign them a few one-dimensional malevolences, but you won’t make them compelling and, in their dark way, seductive. You won’t want to be seen as endorsing views or characters that might get you cancelled.
Most important, if you don’t have raw social courage, you’re not going to get out of your little bubble and do the reporting necessary to understand what’s going on in the lives of people unlike yourself — in that vast boiling cauldron that is America.
We have lived, for at least the past decade, in a time of immense public controversy. Our interior lives are being battered by the shock waves of public events. There has been a comprehensive loss of faith. I would love to read big novels capturing these psychological and spiritual storms. And yet sometimes when I peek into the literary world, it feels like a subculture off to the side.
Literature and drama have a unique ability to communicate what makes other people tick. Even a great TV series doesn’t give you access to the interior life of another human being the way literature does. Novels can capture the ineffable but all-powerful zeitgeist of an era with a richness that screens and visual media can’t match. It strikes me as highly improbable that after nearly 600 years the power of printed words on a page is going to go away. I would put my money on literature’s comeback, and that will be a great blow to the forces of dehumanisation all around us. — The New York Times
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