Essay: "The Future of the Novel - Part 1"

I resisted the temptation to call this essay the "death" of the novel. I hate it when people prematurely proclaim the death of things. It's so melodramatic. Relax everybody - the novel is never going to "die." But something his happening to the novel, something important enough that I think it's worth sitting back and thinking about what it is.

I've been a bit concerned since it dawned on me how few contemporary novels I've been purchasing. A lot of the reading I do is on the Internet: snippets of stupid bullshit, usually non-fiction, usually not even news but rather someone's half-assed commentary. I also read magazines and newspapers, of course. When I read books they are sometimes non-fiction: history, biography, or more half-assed opinion (think Malcolm Gladwell). When I read fiction, I often get the books out of the library, buy them used, or buy classic books.

Here I am, trying to be a novelist, and I'm not buying any modern novels! Who am I supposed to be selling them to?

The rest of you, I bet, are in the same boat. I'm sure there are some of you that still buy and read contemporary novels, the way I'm sure some of you regularly go see stage plays and musicals. But although stage plays and musicals aren't "dead", they've certainly been displaced by movies and television and things like that. Plays aren't "dead" but they've been kicked down the cultural ladder and are now an art form that isn't particularly relevant to most people. Will the same thing happen to novels?

The novel emerged in the seventeenth century and got a lot of bad press for its first hundred years. But in the nineteenth and twentieth century it was, I would argue, the single most dominant and important art form in the world. Novels were read by everyone, from the poorest to the richest, and from the least educated to the most. Whoever you were, there was a novel out there geared for your particular tastes. No other art form, I don't think, could say the same thing. Television was always aimed squarely at the lowest common denominator. Movies weren't much better. Radio came and went. Visual art grew more and more abstract and expensive and irrelevant.

The novel shrugged off challenger after challenger. It wasn't always the biggest moneymaker, but it was the oldest and most universally respected.

Now, are things changing? Booksellers and publishing companys certainly seem to think so. But sales can be misleading. Music, for instance, is not selling as well as it used to, but no one is talking about the "death" of music. That's because people still listen to it, even if they don't want to pay for it. The trouble with novels isn't that people are ripping them off. There's not really a thriving industry in "pirated" novels, and that's the whole problem. The trouble is that people aren't reading them as much as they used to - that they don't care about books.

So why is this happening? I can only look to my own experience. Why don't I read as much? Part of it is price. Part of it is time. Part of it is ease. Part of it seems to be a shift away from fiction towards more "reality" based entertainement (celebrity culture, sports, political commentary).

Part of it seems to be new distractions. The novel maintained its popularity through the introduction of radio, movies and television but all those mediums have been evolving. For instance, instead of three or five television networks showing similar shows (situation comedies) you have specialty channels delivering niche programming. And better special effects in movies allow film studios to create fantastical worlds, so that a story like Lord of the Rings can be told in film just as well as in literature.

Video games is another claimant for people's time, especially among the young. How many people who would have been bookish, like me, now spend their time shooting each other online?

But the big culprit, at least in my eyes, and the one that combines many of these factors, is the Internet. The Internet, although it is not often thought of this way, is endlessly diverting, endlessly time wasting. There are a million things there to click on and look at.  None of it requries any effort or time. All of it is interactive. You can check the same websites ten times a day and see new content uploaded, whether it's http://www.sherdog.com/ or http://www.perezhilton.com/.  And it is usually some form of "reality" entertainment - exactly what seems to be big these days, more than fictional worlds.

How much time do people spend dicking around on Facebook than they might have spent reading? How much time are you spending reading this post now?

The novel isn't going to die - but where does it's future lie? Will its reign of dominance as an art form come to a crashing end? Will it become a niche art form like live theatre, instead? Will most people stop reading long works of fiction?

The short answer is - I don't know, and no one does. The long answer will be posted in a couple of weeks.