Fiction has “lost its ambition,” Sam Kahn says in a recent piece on “Castalia,” his popular newsletter. “It’s lost its centrality to the culture.” I agree with the broad thrust, with an exception I’ll get to later. Kahn is thoughtful about this, and I happily chewed over the topic with him recently on my podcast.
And yet. This point, expressed in various ways, has been out there for a long time. One marker is the Tom Wolfe essay, “Why They Aren’t Writing the Great American Novel Anymore,” that appeared in the December, 1972 issue of Esquire. It’s worth quoting Wolfe at length:
There is no novelist who will be remembered as the novelist who captured the Sixties in America, or even in New York, in the sense that Thackeray was the chronicler of London in the 1840’s and Balzac was the chronicler of Paris and all of France after the fall of the Empire. Balzac prided himself on being “the secretary of French society.” Most serious American novelists would rather cut their wrists than be known as “the secretary of American society,” and not merely because of ideological considerations. With fable, myth and the sacred office to think about—who wants such a menial role?
Now, Wolfe’s main point, sometimes forgotten, is that the journalist, the so-called “New Journalist,” was taking over this “secretary” of society role with long-form pieces, in magazines like Esquire, that were heavy on character, on big chunks of in-scene quotations, on authorial voice, on interesting social facts that were, um, not always what we think of as facts. You know, like in Wolfe’s 1963 breakout piece, the one with “VAROOM!” in the revved-up title, on Southern California’s hot-rod culture.
But, to remind, Wolfe’s declaration of the big novel as moribund is now more than, as he might punctuate the observation, a half-century old! (He died in 2018, at 88.) So why isn’t this conversation kaput? Are we—as in, those apparently few of us who still care about novels—staging a stupendously long and possibly indulgent nostalgic memorial for this once consequential art form? Yes, I think that’s part of it, and here I’ll show my cards.
I grew up with the novel as, by far, my most formative reading experience. I can literally remember where I was—that black polyester swivel chair of my teenage bedroom youth—when I consumed Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Probably I had tears in my eyes at the end, when the faithful Sonya and the gradually repenting Raskolnikov get together. Never mind about the axe. As I think back, the distant yet intimate world created in that novel must have felt more interesting to me than anything else in my (mostly) tidy upbringing in middle-class 1970’s America. Russia, somehow, inhabited me, and years later, became the consuming focus of my journalism in a stint living and working in Moscow. I married a native Russian speaker and learned some Russian.
So yeah, I’m homesick for the “lost” big novel. The novel that can even shape a life. And no, “New Journalism,” whatever exactly that was, hasn’t supplanted the novel. If anything has, it’s novelistic, drawn-out dramas, rich in character and dialogue and shown on the viewing screen, like AMC’s “Mad Men” and HBO’s “The White Lotus” and “Succession.” “The White Lotus,” created, written and directed by Mike White, strikes me, especially, as in this Balzacian role of “secretary” of society. Is there a more captivating, more incisive treatment, in any media form, of the Rich, Coddled and Addled American, and all that comes, society wise, from the obsessive catering to this Person? OK, lots of folks have made this point about the big roiling novel being replaced by the big roiling video-streaming presentation, so there’s no need to dwell on it.
But I would like to dwell on my Exception. That would be Barbara Kingsolver and the one novel of hers that I have read, Demon Copperhead. It spreads out on a large canvas, contemporary rural Appalachia, the opioid crisis afflicting that region. You bet, it’s a commentary on America, a savage one. It checks every box on what a big novel can be. Yes, I get the objection that can be made—that Kingsolver, in adapting her tale from Dickens’s David Copperfield, is not quite displaying copious quantities of imagination. I violently disagree. Her engagingly snotty voice, delivered in the first person by Demon, is uniquely her own. (First sentence of the novel: “First, I got myself born.”) And her imaginative reach is vast. So there.
Anyway, I read Demon in a big gulp in the heat of last summer and all I can do is express gratitude to the author. Her story is perhaps instructive. First, she’s not a product of the often-maligned, university-based creative-writing system. (Here the nod to the absolute must-read on that subject, Mark McGurl’s terrific The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, published in 2009.) She grew up in Appalachia, in east-central Kentucky, and when not dodging snakes or capturing snapping turtles, she spent her time reading “anything from classic comic books to the encyclopedia Britannica.” She started keeping a writing journal at age eight. After college, she received a Master’s degree in evolutionary biology.
Sounds like a good (which is to say, unformulaic) nesting ground for a novelist. Demon Copperhead, by the way, was a big bestseller. So, maybe we can suspend for a moment our nostalgia for the lost novel. I’m heading off to Italy. I expect I’ll read a novel during my sojourn, and the only question is which of the other Barbara Kingsolver’s I should take with me.
This piece originally appeared in Paul Starobin’s Substack “America and Beyond” which he also hosts as a podcast at the New Books Network.
