On the evidence of this slim book defending the novel in our age of its diminished relevance, there are whole libraries full of novels Joseph Epstein doesn’t need.
By his own admission, the long-time critic and former American Scholar editor doesn’t read science fiction, detective fiction, or graphic novels, and has stopped reading much contemporary fiction. He concedes that reading such “lower” types of narrative might lead a younger reader to more serious material, but, lest we think him a snob, he also assures us that mandarins like Flaubert, Joyce, and Nabokov don’t meet his standard either, in this case because their novels are too cold and unfeeling. Luminaries like Lawrence, Roth, and Updike are too sex-obsessed to merit his approval, he tells us, even as Mann, Broch, and Bellow care too much for ideas to write fiction he might wholly endorse. Renata Adler, Joan Didion, Jonathan Franzen, Gabriel García Márquez, Graham Greene, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, George Orwell, Cynthia Ozick, Thomas Pynchon, J. D. Salinger—Epstein finds them all wanting and dispatches them at length or in passing in this self-styled book-length “essay.”
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