The novel was a dominant art form last century
What does the 21st century hold for it?
THE NOVEL is dead; the novel is dying; prestige television has killed it. These familiar complaints are oddly comforting, both because hand-wringing over the state of the novel is a time-honoured pursuit, and readers who pick up the remote instead of a book after dinner—as your correspondent does more often than he should—can feel they are engaging with culture’s dominant narrative form rather than just relaxing on the couch.
Novels are not, in fact, dying: bookstores flog ever-changing stacks of new ones. But neither are they as culturally central as they were in the 1900s, when they were “the literary form of the time, prestigious, popular, taken as both mainstay of cultured conversation and of democratic culture”, argues Edwin Frank of the New York Review of Books Classics Series.
The novel achieved that status by changing its focus. In the 19th century novels were principally concerned with illuminating social mores and characters’ inner lives: think of George Eliot, Henry James and Anthony Trollope. But over the course of the next century the novel matured, as writers responded to a rapidly changing world by experimenting with form, structure and subject. “Stranger Than Fiction” weaves historical overview and close reading into a biography of the form.
Mercifully, the author does not plod through the years, directly tying books to events. Artistic creation is subtler than that, and books that an author intends for one purpose often serve another. Novels can also inspire each other. “Mrs Dalloway”, for example, was shaped by Virginia Woolf’s loathing of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Mr Frank deftly captures how novelists translate, react to and sometimes shut out turbulent global events. (Returning to Trieste after the first world war, Joyce told an acquaintance, “Oh yes, I was told there was a war going on.”)
The first landmark 20th-century novel, Mr Frank argues, was “Notes from the Underground”, published in 1864 by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The narrator whines, hectors and obsesses; he is both emotionally honest and thoroughly unreliable. The plotless book tries to make sense of and to embody a frenzied world, offering none of the safety or resolution readers typically found in novels from the 19th century, which deployed “character and situation, expressed and explored through a reliable interplay of dialogue and description conducted under narrative oversight”. Though plenty of contemporary novels still fit this description, Dostoyevsky was early to show they did not have to.
The ghost of the unnamed narrator flickers at the edges of works written throughout the next century. His lunatic babbling prefigures stream-of-consciousness works from Joyce and William Faulkner. It is no accident that this voice and disordered, confessional work emerged from Russia, rather than western Europe, in the late 19th century. Until the first world war western Europe was largely peaceful, prosperous and bound by class and social conventions. The solid, reliable real world birthed the solid, reliable worlds of the social novel. Russia had its hierarchies and conventions but was wilder; its authors could borrow from European tradition while living in a world beyond it.
The two world wars changed all that, but authors born before the cataclysms retained their concept of what a novel should be and do. Reconciling beliefs nurtured in a stable world with an unstable one produced towering works. For example, “The Magic Mountain” (1924) by Thomas Mann, a German writer, is a long series of digressions and meditations that “preserves an image of unity by telling the story, down to the last detail, of a world whose pieces no longer come together”, writes Mr Frank. “In Search of Lost Time” by Marcel Proust did something similar. Despite its languid tone and convoluted sentences, it has at its centre a desire to remember and tell readers everything about a vanished world (including the transporting aroma of madeleines).
Vasily Grossman, a Soviet writer, displayed the same encyclopedic bent in two works, “Stalingrad” and “Life and Fate”, which are among the most ambitious and best fiction written about the second world war. Penned in a plain style and a self-conscious attempt to mirror “War and Peace”, Russia’s greatest novel from the 19th century, his writing fell foul of censors (who wanted him, among other things, to remove a sympathetic Jewish character). Grossman died in 1964; “Life and Fate” would not be published in Russia for another 24 years.
After the war, Mr Frank’s survey turns almost perversely idiosyncratic. He mentions great writers including Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth only in passing, yet devotes an entire chapter to the banal, unreadable “Life: A User’s Manual” by Georges Perec, a French novelist. Still, one of the pleasures of reading “Stranger Than Fiction” is arguing with it.
And the number of impassioned arguments that this book starts proves that the literary novel is not dead to everyone. Nor is it still the unquestioned king of narrative expression. Television has grown more sophisticated: “The Wire” drew justified comparisons to Charles Dickens. Millions of books are published each year, but the number of people who read daily for pleasure, as well as the amount of time they read, have been steadily declining. From 2017 to 2023 Americans aged 15 and older spent just 15-16 minutes a day reading “for personal interest”, 18% less than in 2013-15, according to America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics. Meanwhile, they watch TV for more than two and a half hours a day, on average.
This century’s novelists will need to grapple with this shift. Writers in the last century benefited from increased literacy rates, cheap mass production and the rise of chain bookstores, which all helped create a culture more receptive to their works. Novels could also easily hold their own against films; it is harder now that people have a giant film and TV library in their pockets.
What might a book written in 2124, looking back at the 21st-century literary novel, argue? That the novel continued to expand its focus outward, by engaging with genre fiction, for instance, as Colson Whitehead and Haruki Murakami do brilliantly; or with nature and science, as Richard Powers and Kim Stanley Robinson do. Novel reading will become even more of a niche, worthy hobby, like going to a classical music concert or ballet today. The story of the 20th-century novel is one of artistic triumph. In this century, the novel will experience a different story.
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