Daily Beast Editor Tina Brown asked esteemed author Philip Roth, in this Vimeo video, about the future of the novel.
Basically, Roth says, the novel is screwed. Not even the Kindle can save the novel, because it has to compete against all those screens: first the movie screen, the TV screen, and now the computer screen. Now all three of those are out there, and the book just doesn’t measure up.
Roth predicts that in 25 years the novel will have a "cultic" following, perhaps slightly larger than the group of people who now read Latin poetry. What do you think, TeleReaders? Is he right? Or will the novel carry on as it has these last centuries?
It does occur to me that as recently as a century or two ago, the reading public for a novel was perhaps at what Roth might call a cultic level. Then came the Golden Age of Reading, from perhaps the late 1800s through, say, the 1930s. Now novel-reading is in an inevitable decline, soon to return to being the pastime of a small group of hobbyists?
But perhaps Roth is speaking only of the literary novel, which already could be said to have largely a cultic following, big prizes and splashy headlines aside. People line up for Dan Brown’s pulp, but how many will read Roth’s latest offering, The Humbling? And he is among the biggest names among contemporary literary novelists. What hope, then, for those as-yet unknown writers?
Have a look at the video, and then have your say in our comment area.
He’s wrong. The book has been competing fine against “all those other screens” for quite some time. It may not lead them, but it still has a place of its own… and if e-books manage to spread books even further, they will actually have a larger place.
If all he’s worried about, though, is sheafs of paper on people’s shalves… he’s right. Those days are numbered.
I read 99% only E, and I love my Baen novels and not much into short stories.
If anything, E will help novels by removing constraints on book size. No more need to split a long novel in two or three book.
The format may change somewhat (become shorter, more episodic perhaps) but written fiction will remain. To me this sounds like bitter old man talk about the world changing. I don’t even know who he is and I read all the time, largely dead or independent authors below his notice though.
We are a culture of stories. The cost of producing all those other story forms and the limitations of the forms themselves will keep written fiction going. It might get smaller, then again, it might get bigger. We don’t know and neither does this guy.
I think the bigger danger is illiteracy among our teachers. If anything is likely to cause a decline in reading it is the inability of teachers to stoke a love of reading — or even its importance — to students. And I think that inability is a result of the teachers’ own illiteracy.
As regards the likelihood of novel survival, I think Roth is wrong. Novels are not under threat so much from screens as from mediocre and worse writing — and abundance of it.
Roth is a sour and bitter old man, disgusted at his country and the way things are going in general. And he overstates this.
There are effects words can achieve that pictures and sound cannot and never will be able to. In particular, vagueness: ‘A man stood on the corner, watching’ is something that is impossible to depict: as soon as it is pictured, it becomes a specific, particular man, wearing particular clothes, standing in a particular pose; and the corner itself becomes specific and particular, and of a certain place, and of a certain time…and so on. Another effect that words can manage that images cannot, is specificity via the word. The final Pierce Brosnan James Bond movie had the preposterous notion that the British actor playing the villain was in actuality a Korean…insane, and impossible to truly wrap your mind around when you watch the movie. But in a book, that’s very simple: you just call the character by the Korean name, and the reader understands instantly and perfectly. And for a third effect to mention, there is nailing an emotion. ‘Show don’t tell’ is gospel, but sometimes when the author tells, we get it perfectly; on a screen, depicted, acted, there is always the chance some of us will interpret the emotions in different ways.
What has developed over the past century, due to different reasons, is that the internal, subjective point of view has come to dominate fiction. And I suspect that a strong cause is that this technique, this relationship between reader and storyteller, is extremely difficult to film, but it is as easy as anything else in text only.
Now as to the ‘novel,’ we must remember that the ‘novel’ became a cult item simply because of the physical manufacturing process of paper books. A novel was a fictional narrative that filled an entire book on its own; and later this definition was narrowed to a word count, rather artificially. But as David notes, once the text becomes an electronic file, then the peculiarities of printing and binding don’t enter into it anymore, and what goes today for the 1200-page doorstop is just a file, like the 230-word short.
I think if you put the word “literary” in front of the word novel, he might be right. Genre fiction has a bigger following already, and I suspect its lead will grow.
Thanks for your comments, everyone. I tend to agree with Rich: the biggest threat to the novel is mediocre writing. Although clearly that is in the eye of the beholder, as witnessed by the usual whipping boy, Dan Brown.
And Pond’s point is apt: the novel is simply a form of technology. Perhaps the future of lit will not have much to do with the novel, as we presently know it. Which would leave the Philip Roths of the world out in the cold.
For the record, I’ve read a couple of Roth’s novels and was vastly underawed. Perhaps he’s just worried people won’t be reading his novels …?
The novel as an independent art form may well be on its way to the cultic. What will probably survive are novelizations and media tie-ins. Many authors will not be writing their own stories, but stories based on or part of other media ventures. See the movie on the screen, then read back story adventures as a novel until the next movie in the series comes out. Hell, if you go to Borders or Barns and Nobel, there are already whole bookcases of Star Trek and Star Wars, and this type of writing will probably become even more dominate.
Alternatively, an author may write an independent novel, but publishers may not risk it unless there is also an option for film or TV show backing it up.
Personally, I don’t read novelizations or other kinds of tie-in books, and will be part of the cultic group if this ever comes to pass.
Most of the movies are based on novels, so I don’t think the movie screen, at least, will replace the novel.
Fortunately for me, there are enough public domain and currently written books that I’d never be able to read them all in my lifetime.
This may be an odd knot to tie, but I was just reading someone else’s statement that “the big chain book stores move into a neighborhood and shut down all the local, independent places,” and I thought (as I almost always do in response to poor logic, sometimes quite loudly) “No, they didn’t! The consumers shut the old places down, because they were getting what they wanted for a better price at the new places.”
Then, of course, came the normal refrain about better service, local economy, blah, blah, blah, which brought out my normal responses: the customers picked the place with the service they needed, so there’s no sense saying yours was better; the chain stores hire a lot more people from the local economy, pay more taxes, usually donate more to charity, blah, blah, blah.
Since competition picks its own winners, the survivors are clearly “better” in terms of consumer needs (assuming all is legal and aboveboard. Clearly, if BigMart arms its greeters with baseball bats to kneecap those who shop elsewhere, all bets are off).
The point is, and as a novelist, it pains me to say this, people may simply stop reading novels. If we want to compete for reader time, we need to look long and hard at what it is that is attracting them in droves to what seem to me to be seriously inferior forms of entertainment, ones which do not require the same level of emotional and or intellectual involvement.
Why is there even such a thing as nanofiction? Why is fanfic so popular? Why is it “stodgy” or “old-fashioned” to like novels?
We can forget the name-calling, the vitriol, and the head-in-the-sanding, and we can maybe save out art, or we can stick our fingers in our ears, call each other sour and bitter, and go down with the ship.
just another (most excellent) old-timey author pulling a bunch of assumptions out of his sleeve. i’m a fan; but i think he’s premature in his opinion. most kindle owners report reading more, rather than less.
let’s not re-write history, shall we? reading was in a fairly serious decline for a couple of decades before the e-ink reader started to catch on and make e-books a viable, salable product. if mr. roth thinks that having books is more important than reading, that is perhaps understandable. in the end of the day, authors and publishers don’t really need us to read; they just need us to think we *want* to read, so we’ll buy books. ‘book people’ who read electronically overbuy e-books in the same way as they overbuy print books. in fact, they may overbuy even more, as they can now choose to have their espionage novels in electronic form and will therefore have more room on the shelf for large-format books on cookery and woodworking.
change is scary. but its results are not always to the detriment of culture.
{blowing the thick dust off that English Lit. degree before I comment}
How did people get their entertainment before the “novel” became a way to package a bunch of words for consumption by the educated?
A bunch of people get together (acquaintances, friends, strangers traveling together, etc) and tell each other stories (eg. Homer, Chaucer). Or a group puts on a play to “animate” a story (Shakespeare).
The person being entertained has a connection (proximity, common history, politics, religion) with the entertainer.
And stories were serialized – Dickens may have written some long novels but didn’t most readers get them in smaller bite-size chunks?
Very few of them received their entertainment in a solitary manner (huddled over a candle, reading a novel)
The ‘screen’ isn’t going to kill writing but it is returning us to a more intimate style of community story telling that the literary novel lacks.
A different “take” on the same topic:
“The Demise of Literary Popular Culture”
http://literaplexy.blogspot.com/2009/08/demise-of-literary-popular-culture.html
Novels will always be read, if only because they were the predominant genre of several centuries. Whether they will continue to be written remains to be seen. (economics and supply & demand seem to suggest not).
Reading and storytelling will always exist whatever the year; what are we worried about?
Paul Verhaegen says the literature will be like opera is today. Still alive and kicking, but very small audiences.
Oh that’s just crap. I have read 38 books since I started keeping track June 10th and about half of them on my Kindle. Currently I am reading “The Alchemy of Air” which is about the designers of Haber-Bosch technology but I have also read “Twilight”. There are “Readers” and then there are those other people. Much as it’s always been.
I think I had the same conversation with an author over at the Kindleboards. He’d written a novel in, his opinion, the best story-telling tradition of Star Trek and Star Wars. Whereas I think those TV shows and films are probably some of the worst example of science fiction ever, and should probably be called Space Fantasy instead.
I don’t intend to read the author’s novel. I’ve always said, if an author wants to write a novel, write it as a novel, not a movie manqué, and if the authors wants to tell the story in a visual style, write a film script instead. To me, one of the worse criticism of a book is … “It reads just like a movie.”
he’s wrong.
good writer, can be very funny . quite a bitter chap, that comes across in his books. my guess is he’s not the biggest fan of women.