Reports of the Novel's Death

At Luna Park, a staff writer, discussing an essay by Benjamin Kunkel in n + 1, asserts:

"It’s neither the publishing industry nor its product but rather us, the human being, that’s changing as our technologies advance. Kunkel quotes Jonathan Franzen to this effect,

"Haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster?"

Our digitization is evidence of a change in our consciousness, so it makes sense that the novel and its role in our lives must change with us."



I am unconvinced that Mr. Franzen’s quote, in context, means anything like it’s taken to in Kunkel's essay. It’s from Franzen's lovely essay on the value of Christina Stead’s novel “The Man Who Loved Children,” that appeared in the Sunday Times Book Review, where he discusses why Ms. Stead has been excluded from the canon, and by extension, what the real value of the a novel consists of, what it does, what it is for and not for. There is an implicit criticism of a culture and world that has no place for novels… of course there is, coming from our supposed ‘new great American novelist.’

He says of TMWLC, “As the narrator remarks, matter-of-factly, “That was family life.” And telling the story of this inner life is what novels, and only novels, are for. Or used to be, at least. Because haven’t we left this stuff behind us? High-mindedly domineering males? Children as accessories to their parents’ narcissism? The nuclear family as a free-for-all of psychic abuse? We’re tired of the war between the sexes and the war between the generations, because these wars are so ugly, and who wants to look into the mirror of a novel and see such ugliness? How much better about ourselves we’ll feel when we stop speaking our embarrassing private family languages! The absence of literary swans seems like a small price to pay for a world in which ugly ducklings grow up to be big ugly ducks whom we can then agree to call beautiful.”

If you took the initial quote at face value, and didn’t consider that the words come from the man who just wrote a nuanced novel about family and culture, you could come away with the idea that Mr. Franzen thinks the novel a relic of the days of newspaper. But that would be willful distortion.

Perhaps new media indeed allows us new ways to consume print, new expectations and altered attention spans, greater connectivity, new kinds of community. Perhaps it will eventually give rise to new forms, though for me, as a novelist and short story writer and essayist, I can imagine no form I cherish more, that can accomplish more at saying something that matters. Regardless, I see little evidence of the novel’s decline– reports of its unprominence, let alone its imminent cultural irrelevance, are greatly overstated. Why, even consider the modest short story, that much-maligned form that commercial publishers have long refused to publish collections of. A great deal of attention and buzz has been paid to Electric Literature for their new delivery model and methods, their cost effectiveness. But the fiction that they publish is more than anything else classically (and finely, even brilliantly, I might add) crafted, and represents mostly the most celebrated and established fiction writers of our day. Delivery of an old form in ways you can interact with differently and consume differently is not a paradigmatic shift, let alone an evolution of mankind or of our culture. It is an affirmation of the old form’s significance, a quicker, easier, glossier access, a reassertion of form’s merit.

But I guess I am old-fashioned.

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