He asked her what books she was reading. “‘The Idiot,’ do you know it?” “No. What’s it about?” “It’s a novel.” “I’d rather read the truth,” he said. “It is the truth.”
“The truth she is referring to,” Epstein then writes, “is the truth of the imagination.”
The 86-year-old Epstein has devoted much of his life to writing and to teaching literature. He is the author of 31 books, most of them nonfiction, and served for more than 20 years as editor for The American Scholar. He is celebrated in particular for his mastery of the essay, many of which have reflected his literary interests.
Now, in “The Novel, Who Needs It?” Epstein offers a ringing defense of what he calls “the serious novel” or, at times, the successful novel, explaining why the best of this genre “provides truths of an important kind unavailable elsewhere in literature or anywhere else.”
In Defense of Fiction
Epstein devotes over half of his book to the origins of the novel and its evolving genres, like the picaresque, family chronicles, and satire; its profound influence on both the reader and the author; and the unique opportunities it provides for delving deep into human nature. Along the way, he musters dozens of writers to support his arguments, some of them old masters like Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy, and Jane Austen, others closer to our own time like Vladimir Nabokov, Tom Wolfe, and Milan Kundera.
That above paragraph does a disservice to Epstein, as it sounds dry as dust when in fact Epstein skillfully weaves together authors, plots, asides, and commentary into a fascinating literary tapestry.
With the insight and wit found in his previous books, he also undertakes frequent side expeditions on this tour. At the beginning of Chapter VI, for instance, he mentions figures like economist John Maynard Keynes, jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and sociologist Edward Shils, and then notes that all “were devoted readers of novels.”
He next shares this anecdote: “The English philosopher Gilbert Ryle, when asked if he read novels, answered, ‘Yes—all six,’ by which he meant the six novels of Jane Austen, which one gathers he read over and over.”
In this same paragraph, Epstein asks: “What was it, do you suppose, that these men, towering intellectuals all, found in novels that they couldn’t find in economics, philosophy, jurisprudence, political science, sociology, and anthropology?”
Guides to Our Humanity
This “complexity of experience” as investigated by serious novelists is a major theme of “The Novel, Who Needs It?” Of his boyhood reading—when he like so many of us read novels like “Black Beauty” but also “Classics Illustrated” with their encapsulated and illustrated stories by writers like Dickens and Twain—Epstein writes: “The novel took me to places I hadn’t known existed, but in which I was delighted to find myself; it expanded my world like nothing else I had known, or, for that matter, still know.”
Epstein shares the ways this expansion works for so many readers. He writes, for instance: “What the novel does better than any other form is allow its readers to investigate the inner, or secret, life of its characters.” That, of course, is only a part of the effects of a worthy novel on its reader. It can as well broaden our vision of the world, enhance our sympathies for others, and take us on journeys inside of ourselves.
The Novel Besieged
While lauding the serious novel, Epstein doesn’t shy away from that perennial topic the death of the novel. Though that interment was often prematurely announced in the past, he feels a foreboding about present circumstances: “Yet just now talk about the death of the novel has a credibility it has never had before.”
The reasons for this possible demise are plentiful. Epstein praises our digital age for its ready wealth of information and other advantages, in his case as a writer, yet he accuses its addictive “powers of distraction” as destructive to reading. He notes the shortened attention span that our electronic devices have wrought on young and old, including himself, and the diminishing numbers of serious readers in our culture.
He then turns to social media with its frequent insistence on political correctness, which is “another enemy of the novel.” Not only does political correctness inhibit novelists in their writing, but it can also create “Sanctimony Literature,” which is the title of an essay on this topic by Becca Rothfeld.
Epstein offers this quote from Rothfeld: “The sanctimonists maintain a tidily bifurcated interest in good people and bad people, when in fact what they should be studying is the good and the bad in all people—the full murk of human motivation, the tangle of tensions and contradictions, of desires and principles, that is the permanent condition of human choice.”
Creative writing programs, which often breed more teachers of writing than serious novels, publishers who care less about serious literature and more about the bottom line, and the explosion of graphic novels also have eroded the novel’s standing. “But perhaps the most subtly pernicious enemy of the novel,” observes Epstein, “may be what Philip Rieff, in an important 1966 book, called ‘The Triumph of the Therapeutic.’”
Taking Stock
Near the end of his book, Epstein brings up the “so-called canon, or elite grouping or body, of the great novels on which most people would agree.” After a brief look at the selections made by some major literary critics, such as Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, Epstein gives us his personal canon of great writers of fiction. Their names appear throughout “The Novel, Who Needs It?” and in his essays of the last 50 years: the Russians including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Victorians like George Eliot and Charles Dickens, Americans like Henry James and Willa Cather. Of the latter, he comments that “she did all these things with consummate literary skill, a calm philosophical detachment, and an unwavering confidence in the truth of the imagination.”
Answering the Question
In his conclusion, Epstein asks about the novel: “What really have we gained by reading about people who never really existed living through events that didn’t actually happen?” He answers that without the novel, the hope of gaining a more complex view of life—its meaning and mystery—is lost. We are then left with the ideas and guidelines for living with the likes of social science, pop psychology, and journalism.And so, Epstein concludes: “To turn to the question put by the book’s title, ‘The Novel, Who Needs It?’ the answer is that we all do, including even those who wouldn’t think of reading novels—we all need it, and in this, the great age of distraction we may just need it more than ever before.”
