John Freeman, President of the National Book Critics Circle, meditated on the question “Has the novel been murdered by the mob” in last Thursday’s Guardian. The mob he had in mind, of course, was Tony Soprano’s gang of Jersey boys, and while they might not have set out to whack the novel, they managed something just as effective: they made it redundant.
Novelists from Norman Mailer to Gary Shteyngart have described the show – which as yet does not exist between two covers – as a Great American Novel, and for good reason. Spread across nearly 100 hours of viewing time, The Sopranos developed characters to a degree unparalleled in American television, save that other current HBO drama, The Wire, which is, in fact, occasionally written by a novelist, George Pelecanos.
The Sopranos also covered some of the primary themes of the Great American Novel. Like Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, it explored the ways in which each new generation attempts to fix the parenting mistakes of the one before; like John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, it hitched its star to the emotionally complicated but intellectually unsophisticated inner life of an unreconstructed American man; and like Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, it depicted the death of an American city, revealing the rupture between classes (and races) around its grave.
Freeman’s point has been made before: readership for all forms of literature is falling in America, and the novel has been replaced as the topic of even literate conversation by the rise of well-written serial television. (I remember the same claim being made during my childhood about less well-written television, but never mind.) And in the end, it’s not Tony who killed the novel, according to Freeman; it’s the decline of public education, the language of advertising, and the visual tyranny of the screen (television, internet, Blackberry), which has taught our eyes “to scan, and to receive, and less and less to read.” Watching The Sopranos requires no acts of reading, only weary appreciation: “there is no better delivery system than the image for themes which transport – because that’s how our eyes work the rest of the day. The Sopranos does the imagining; our eyes need only follow.”
As Freeman notes, the decline in readership is steepest in the young, and it’s no coincidence that this is also the generation that has grown up with digital media. With all those electronic diversions to tempt your eyes, the pleasures of the novel must seem quaint, an Amish buggy clip-clopping along the shoulder of the information superhighway. And as the novel rose from romance narratives, it may now be losing some of its most ardent readers — those who seek escape from this world in the consuming pleasures of adventure stories — to the participatory narratives of online gaming. Why read about dragon-slayers when you can literally become the hero who fights the dragon and makes off with the treasure? Why read about others’ lives in fiction when you can create your own Second Life every evening on your computer?
But is that really the same pleasure as a well-written novel? What’s missing in the world of online gaming, I suspect, is subtlety: you can slay many dragons, but there’s no sense of tragic irony in that accomplishment. The act demands nothing but skill and practice: no wisdom, only craft; no emotion except the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat. Any good novel embeds us in an interior world which is strangely more participatory — in the sense that we feel rather than act — than all the glittering treasure-hordes of the digital dragon.
Critics have been predicting the death of the novel for decades, until they start to sound like the children of wealthy parents, who’ve had the deathbed made up and the pall-bearers on call since the day the trust fund ran out. But I suspect that if the novel is finally breathing its last, it’s not because people won’t read. Rather, it’s because they’ll read differently: a digital world trains its children to love brief pleasures. In many ways, the internet is perfect for lyric poetry: like many people, I click Poetry Daily every morning, so that it now feels like the literary equivalent of a sip of coffee. But fiction takes time, and a novel demands a real commitment. You can’t just hook up with a novel; at the very least, it’s a passionate weekend, complete with awkward parting and lingering sense memory. At its most intense, it can be like a marriage, a life-long engagement that shapes our perceptions of both self and world.
But let’s face it, if the novel dies as a popular commodity, that only means the commercial novel. With the exception of a few brand-name authors, literary fiction has mostly vanished from commercial publishers’ lists, taking refuge in the world of small presses. And there may be a paradox in this for literary magazines like The Kenyon Review: as journals expand their online presence, it may become easier for readers to find wonderful poetry and short fiction on their screens than it is to find a novel worth reading in the wasteland of their local Barnes & Noble. Perhaps the literary novel will move online as well, offered up to readers in serial form, or perhaps, like Amish buggies and marriage, it will simply endure as a kind of spiritual discipline, a way to turn our backs on the endless temptations of commodity culture. Now that Tony’s been whacked (or simply vanished into darkness), we’ll have to find someone else to blame for our declining literacy. But that’s not the same as the decline of literature. Those who love to read will find plenty of great writing; they just may have to look beyond the novel to find it.