Critics have long debated the state of the novel as an art form. The argument has intensified with the rise of the fictional memoir over the past 20 years and recent efforts to discern a novel’s “usefulness,” not as an aesthetic or ethical experience but as therapy to cure one’s ills and neuroses.
It might be easy to give up on the novel, but in his latest book, The Novel, Who Needs It?, Joseph Epstein argues against such despair. He not only affirms the novel’s status as an art form but also helps to rekindle the passions found in old stories. Balancing cultural criticism, meditations on particular novels, and personal experience, he invites us to take a journey, in an almost Homerian sense, through the world of the novel, asking what the form means to us and to our culture.
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