Countless pundits have put forth theories of how to escape our current moment of social atomization and existential decay. For these philosophers, economists, activists, and sociologists, the culprit can range from systemic racism and technocratic elitism to the loss of faith and the collapse of moral values.
Yet their conceptual diagnoses and solutions fail to capture what is most essential–that is, what is most human–about the issues that plague us. “Create a concept and reality leaves the room,” as Jose Ortega Y Gasset once quipped. Rather than turning to various theoreticians whose ideas are often divorced from reality and only tell “part of the story,” Joseph Epstein insists that we should turn to novels.
“A novel,” Epstein writes in his latest book, The Novel: Who Needs It?, “can incorporate history, engage in philosophy, confront morality.” But the novel is all of these and more: “it is the book of life. More than any other literary form,” he continues, “the novel is best able to accommodate the messiness of detail that life presents. The novel, for those who love it, is the literary form of forms.”
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