Robert Macfarlane’s elegiac Is a River Alive? arrived last year and quickly claimed its place among the most evocative nature writing of recent memory. In startling prose, Macfarlane backs up his contention that rivers must be considered “alive” not only by marshaling evidence from countless cultures and civilizations across human history, but also by conjuring from our forgotten collective subconscious a set of immanent beliefs that, while perhaps rarely articulated, ring as true as the ideas that fish swim and birds fly.
That Macfarlane delivered his bold thesis in a book is, like the notion of riverine subjecthood, a throwback to an older way of injecting daring and complex ideas into the public discourse. These days, you’re probably better off promulgating such notions in a true-crime podcast or viral BlueSky thread than by publishing a book. As a podcaster myself, I can tell you the bar for entry to that medium is quite low; but as a podcaster focusing on literature and books, I can’t help but be intrigued by what this specific book represents, particularly if one spins its ideas beyond their original bounds.
In considering the relationship between a novel and the state of being alive, I mean not to simply replicate Macfarlane’s quest with an object of my choosing standing in for his. There may be value in such substitution as a thought experiment or Mad Libs booklet, but without iteration, the exercise remains just that. Yet neither is the question solely rhetorical, because in 2026, asking whether literature is alive is also asking, “If so, how much?” and “For how much longer?”
The ways which we would say a great novel is alive are myriad: its characters strike us not as imagined but as real, breathing humans; its settings are painted so well as to have personalities; its many meanings and interpretations change when humans and cultures change, too. None of these would fit the rationalist-scientific definition of capital-L Life, with its requirements for biological processes like metabolism, growth, and reproduction: books do not, to my knowledge, eat food. And while it’s tempting to recast these processes as metaphors, rendering them pliable enough to align with the characteristics inherent to a novel, this also seems too much of a stretch. Words are not a lot like enzymes, for instance.
The Oxford English Dictionary says the definition of “alive” is simply “living, not dead”—but this tautology is prefaced by a restrictive set of guardrails: “of a person, animal, or plant.” It would appear that in the dictionary, only members of those three categories can be said to be alive. Yet how many of us live in a reference book? Out here, words and phrases are dynamic, taking on new meanings (six seven!) and jettisoning obsolete denotations like an ex-partner’s forgotten belongings. Language is, one might say, alive, and asking the question serves not as a call to Google the definition, but to expand the list of concepts allowable for discussion when we talk about what alive really is.
To wit: a story from an oral tradition is alive. Any example will suffice. There is no biology to a retelling of an Anansi story, but our awareness of how it evolves to suit the audience, the teller, and the context of the retelling lead naturally to this uncontroversial, if figurative, conclusion. As noted, characters in a novel are also alive, when the author does their job well, and the lively interplay of its plot, thematic elements, reader perspective, and locus in contemporary discourse refute the appearance of stasis generated by the unchanging text on the page. If you never step in the same river twice, you never read the same novel twice, either.
The term “hylozoism” refers to the belief, common in ancient Greek philosophy, that material objects are animated with life. As an idea possessing some cultural cachet, hylozoism has gone through a boom-and-bust cycle over the last few millennia, reappearing now and then, only to be (temporarily?) debunked once more. Matthew A. Taylor traces this pattern in a 2020 PMLA article, exhuming discussion on the topic from Immanuel Kant, William James, Hermann Lotze, Michel Foucault, Arthur Schopenhauer, and even Thomas Edison. Taylor also finds evidence that belief in living matter leads easily to the belief that some things are more alive than others—for instance, animals over rocks and stones—which has historically given succor to the eugenicist view that some humans are “more” vital than others, perhaps as classified by race or ethnicity. An unsettling thought for anyone who thinks a living river is a progressive concept.
A novel is not the paper it’s printed on, though. You can throw that away and the novel will still exist. What renders it alive is its content, which, while linked strongly to its physical or digital form(s), is infinitely reproducible. And here is another dirty little secret: if something can be alive, it can also be dead. Could we say that about a novel? We’ve all read lifeless prose or characters who struggle to take shape, but I hesitate to say I’ve ever encountered a book devoid of any animating spark.
Macfarlane’s project goes beyond asking us to rethink how we conceive of rivers; he also urges the reader toward a more expansive understanding of what “alive” can mean. By implication and extrapolation, his work questions the strict definitions that hem in our world, arguing both that rivers live and that our lexicon need not remain frozen in time. (Macfarlane’s frequent use of uncommon nouns-as-verbs underscores this effort: why shouldn’t we say water was “havocked” into the ocean, or “daylighted” when exposed from man-made cover?)
This is also what the best novels do: they tell stories that expand our comprehension of the world around us. They prod our metaphysics in new directions by using patterns, characters, or tropes that are familiar enough to recognize yet shrink, twist, or gyrate into previously unimagined shapes and juxtapositions. Perhaps this could be another exhibit in the case for the living novel. They change our world, as humans do, by making us reinvent our understanding of it, again and again.
Whether the novel is alive in our discourse is another question entirely. The death of the novel has regularly been prophesied and not yet materialized, but that does not mean it will never happen. Typically, such predictions point to declining sales figures or depressing survey results showing a vanishingly small sliver of adults choose to read fiction in their free time. I think this is the wrong metric, however. At present, our tech overlords continue to improve their Large Language Models, making them ever more adept at imitating human speech. While writing stories or holding conversations are not the profitable part of an AI firm’s offerings, getting better at them has captured the world’s attention, precisely because telling stories is what humans do.
I stand by my previous contention that an AI cannot replicate the human spirit necessary to compose a decent novel, or any work of satisfying creative expression. But that won’t stop them from trying. Social media is full of AI-generated images, garnering millions of likes and reposts despite obvious and unsettling visual flaws. Spotting an AI-generated written work is harder, and our collective bar for quality in this field has already tanked following the rise of Amazon self-publishing. Earlier this month, the New York Times sent writers into a collective convulsion with an article about a romance author who published some 200 AI-generated novels last year, selling 50,000 copies in the process. This is a recipe for a world drowning in AI slop fiction, and in a few generations, nobody will remember a time before it.
The dream of machines, computers, and now AI has always been that they will do the grunt work for us, so that we can live our lives. The extreme of that would be finally achieving economic post-scarcity, where humans can be liberated from the tedium of scraping out a living and instead pursue activities of leisure and creation. We would explore the world, skydive, or take up watercolors, while the robots build our houses and pick up the trash. Instead, they’re putting artists out of work and publishing phrases like “Certainly! Here’s an enhanced version of your passage.” What happened?
I don’t have a solution, other than urging people to support human writers and artists instead of software programs. But just asking us all to act a certain way doesn’t have a great track record. If AI takes over the production of creative work, the question will no longer be whether a novel is alive. It’ll be whether we are.
