The Novel, Who Needs It?
By Joseph Epstein
(Encounter Books, 142 pages, $25.99)

I have my high school teachers to thank for my lifetime of reading for pleasure and learning. Not that they were good at convincing me that the great writers could enrich my understanding of life. Au the Contraire. I found most of them (the teachers, not the writers) so boring that, out of self-defense, I usually had a book out of the school library or from the local newsstand secreted behind my open and propped up notebook. I became adept at attending to my book while at the same time appearing to be listening to what the teacher was banging on about.

I’m sure my uncharitable view of my teachers’ worth then was my own fault, down to the untutored youth I was in those final Eisenhower years. But not all, by God. Some of them could put a leprechaun to sleep on St. Patrick’s Day.

The books I read then were not of the literary classics, or long on nuance. None stood in danger of winding up on anyone’s list of The Great Books, though most were intelligently done and entertaining. There was James Michener’s The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Tales of the South Pacific, and Sayonara. Leon Uris’s Battle Cry was a favorite. And I much enjoyed Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny and Edward L. Beach’s Run Silent, Run Deep. There were plenty of sports books too, mostly baseball, which was indeed the national pastime then. I never would have strapped on anything as long and complex as The Brothers Karamazov, that is unless the brothers were named Vince, Dom, and Joe.

But in addition to my comprehensive callowness then, I didn’t have the benefit of Joseph Epstein’s fine brief for the beauties, charms, and deep understanding of the human enterprise and its manifold mysteries that can be gained through the careful reading of serious fiction. A level of understanding available, Epstein insists, nowhere else. The well-read Epstein is clearly the man for this job. In The Novel, Who Needs It, without being preachy or didactic, he makes a convincing case. (READ MORE: Arguably Rides Again)

Fiction, by definition, is something invented and, at least on a literal level, untrue. But in the hands of the novel’s best and most insightful practitioners, these made up stories can provide thoughtful readers a higher level of truth about the human heart than is available by reading history, philosophy, politics, or the many social science “ologies.” These last, with their endless studies, sporting charts and graphs and soul-crushing jargon, have failed to reveal to us more than Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Melville, Miguel de Cervantes, and others laid out for us in more agreeable forms well before these ologies were even born. (READ MORE: Medicalizing the Human Condition)

To receive its rewards, Epstein says, we must read serious fiction differently from the way we read nonfiction, as it’s not information we seek when reading Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather, or Henry James, but understanding. We arrive at this deeper understanding of the human enterprise through the specifics of the lives of fictional characters rather than through the generalizations of scientists, or the schemes of academic or political theorists, who tend to have a weakness for Big Ideas that purport to explain and simplify all. “Good novels,” Epstein says, “are always informing us that life is more various, richer, more surprising, more bizarre than we had thought.”

When speaking of novels, Epstein is not talking about the latest Stephen King creepy, or the raging three-continent “thriller,” in which a retired CIA agent saves the world from conflagration at the last second. Reading solely for entertainment has its uses: taking the dull edges off a long flight or a solo evening in a hotel room on a business trip, or just beguiling a lazy Saturday afternoon with one’s favorite fictional detective. “Page turners” have their place. But these, Epstein argues, tend to be mostly plot, little character development, and no thought. He prefers “page stoppers — novels that made you want to stop to reread key passages, to admire brilliant formulations, to pause to grasp the import of the material, and to consider how the novelist had achieved his marvelous effects.”

In preferring, for lack of better terms, serious or literary fiction to the genre kind, Epstein is not engaging in snobbery, a subject he has written about with humor and insight. I’ve argued elsewhere that crime fiction, the most well patronized section of today’s book store (to the extent we still have book stores) is our current novel of manners. A small number of writers in this precinct use theme, character, setting, and deal with character’s moral choices in ways that lift them above genre fair. The best I’ve found in this regard is P.D. James, she of the Inspector Dalgliesh series. But I’ll concede that most of the entries in the mystery section, including some of the most popular, are pretty fluffy stuff. Entertaining, but intellectual empty calories.

Nowhere in this compact book — extended essay really — does Epstein give us one of those 50 best lists of writers or of books that have repaid his reading time or added to his insights on human nature and the vanity fair that we call life. But through its chapters Epstein praises the work of those writers mentioned above along with Ivan Turgenev, Marcel Proust, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Franz Kafka, Tom Wolfe, Milan Kundera, V.S. Naipaul, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Anthony Trollope, Barbara Pym, Thomas Mann, Anthony Powell, et al. His book mentions would require a list too long to share here.

The serious novel, like other forms, has had its rich and less than rich periods. We seem to be at a literary ebb tide just now, at least partly due to an increasingly arid culture and to our current obsession with politics, especially of the identity kind. This has had a toxic effect at some of our major publishing houses, where too many editors concern themselves more with the race, sex, or sexual proclivities of the author than with the literary quality of the work.

Cancel culture is alive and well in publishing, where young employees – even sometimes those old enough to know better — police new titles for language and ideas uncongenial to the current progressive orthodoxy. One of the more destructive features of PC publishing today is the notion of “appropriation,” under whose lunatic strictures white authors cannot write about black or brown people, men cannot write about women, and straight writers cannot write about gay characters. (So far no mention that black authors can’t write about whites, women about men, or gays about straights. Progressivism has its own rules, and madness awaits those who try to make sense of them.) There might be a quicker way to suck the life out of imaginative writing than this mindless rule, but it would take a while to think of what that might be.

With 23-year-old philistine graduates of the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters schools, brimming with progressive zeal and without an ounce of tolerance, acting as gate-keepers at so many publishing houses, would today’s Leo Tolstoy or Evelyn Waugh even make it out of the slush pile? With this regnant police state mentality, the literary present is pretty lame and the future uncertain. It’s a good thing our literary past is such a rich lode. A literary classic being both of a certain time and timeless, it can speak to us today even if it was composed many generations ago.

I’m sure Epstein knows he’s facing strong headwinds in urging more Americanos to take up serious fiction. Much of the work of the more thoughtful writers is long and requires a major commitment of reading time. Even the best readers do not get War and Peace down over a weekend with any level of understanding beyond, “It’s about Russia.” Alas. time is at a premium in our busy lives. Epstein, who says he hasn’t had to report to an office since about 1970, is able to spend most of his afternoons reading. Few of us are so fortunate.

Another impediment to reading in anything save the shortest forms is the diminished attention span of our online, digital age, where pixels have replaced pages and the modern mind wanders after more than a few sentences. In the past 20 years or so, my guess is more people have climbed Mt. Everest than have gotten through the almost 3,200 pages of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

So The Novel, Who Needs It? is unlikely to become a best-seller. And I’m sure Epstein’s expectation of converts is modest. But I’ve never said that lost causes are necessarily bad ones. Epstein does the work of the angels by making the effort, even if the kind of reading Epstein recommends is too much time under the lamp for most. I’m hardly Epstein’s target convert, having enjoyed a long reading life. But Who Needs It? has left me with a list of books and authors that I very much would like to get to before I turn my last page. I’ll attend to these, of course, after I’ve read The American Spectator in the morning.