The Indispensable Novel
The following review is part of RealClear Books & Culture's symposium on Joseph Epstein's 'The Novel, Who Needs It?'
An odd characteristic of the novel, Joseph Epstein writes, is that it is perfectly possible to have read one thoroughly and to retain great benefit from it, even if you have forgotten what really happens in it. It’s easy to forget names, specific details about characters, or even how the plot resolves, and yet still sense that one has drawn and retained a certain wisdom from it.
Something similar might be said of Epstein’s engaging and delightful short book, The Novel: Who Needs It? It is difficult to summarize or precisely trace out Epstein’s argument over the course of the book, except that he presents the novel as offering a unique window into human life, and that, to answer the titular question, we all need it.
It consists of eighteen chapters, each a short essay reflecting on what makes for a great novel, what makes the novel as a genre great, and how we ought to approach and appreciate this exceptional literary form. What helps a novel pass the “timelessness” test or the “re-readability test”? Should readers “identify” with the characters of a novel? How much sex makes a great novel slide into smut? Is there a canon of great novels, and if so, which ones make the cut?
I am, in some sense at least, woefully underqualified to review such a book. I’m a political theorist, and while I have read my share of novels, I possess no special literary training and have an embarrassingly long list of classics I have never read. I certainly am in no position to judge or challenge Epstein’s assessment of particular novels or to offer up any rival theories.
But on the other hand, I may be precisely Epstein’s target audience: a reader who is often genuinely torn about whether to spend the rare “pleasure-reading” time with a novel or with history, a play, or philosophy. What exactly will I get out of choosing that thousand-page doorstop about a made-up aristocratic Russian family over Shakespeare, Aristotle, a biography, or an easy-reading narrative of the Battle of Chancellorsville?
If there is a theme that ties all of Epstein’s observations together, it is the novel’s unique ability to capture the complexity of human experience—those elements of life that cannot be adequately conveyed by systematic analysis or the objective accounting of real-life events.
The novel’s combination of description, dialogue, action, and depth of character gives it a unique ability not just to convey a particular meaning but to provide an experience. “One can describe a novel, but short of retelling it, word for word, one cannot hope to grasp it all, either for recounting to others or even to oneself.” Plunging ourselves into a serious novel is, perhaps, the closest we can get to actually experiencing a life and circumstance different from our own.
This experience transmits the complexity of life in a way that shorter fiction, history, philosophy, and other forms of writing can’t—and often don’t want to. We often read in order to find clarity—to cut through confusion, emotion, myth-making, and psychological or cultural tendencies to find some clearer explanation of a particular aspect of human experience. And though Epstein does not emphasize this, I would add that this is often good and necessary. It is an important undertaking to “clear the field,” so to speak, and seek a more precise understanding in one particular area of life. We experience and understand the world in a host of different ways, each worth examining on its own. But we must always remember that the things we “clear away” in such examinations are often essential, if imperfect, parts of the human experience, too. We of specialized intellectual pursuits are often too eager to treat the object of our study as the key to understanding everything else.
All of this put me in mind of a discussion I recently had with another political theorist about the tendency of our ilk to examine great literature only in order to pull out the author’s simple, cohesive “political teaching.” The fact that the author wrote a novel, though, and not a political treatise ought to prompt us to consider whether any political “teaching” is just one part of a more complicated whole. Epstein argues that a good political novel ought to so embed the political ideas into the context of the story that it prompts us to “surmount our own politics in the name of a more complex, a higher truth than politics itself permits.”
Epstein’s case for the novel, then, is that it is free from the narrow blinders of specialized study, and instead presents us with that magnificent jumble that is actual human experience. “The knowledge—and with luck occasional touches of wisdom—that one acquires through reading novels differs from that acquired reading history, biography, science, criticism, scholarship, and all else.” It is “less exact” and “has no use outside itself” because “its subject is human existence itself, in all its dense variousness and often humbling confusion.”
Lurking in the shadows of Epstein’s account, however, is the constant distraction that characterizes so much of our world today. Our daily life—now constantly online—prizes simplicity over complexity; quantity over quality; straightforward facts over puzzling and enduring questions. At our fingertips, we always have something that can more easily entertain us than a novel. We have something or someone that offers us easy answers to the kinds of questions a novel might make us ponder. Even the “serious” content online is often carefully catered to ever-shortening attention spans, littered with hyperlinks and ads that encourage you to jump from thought to thought, without bothering to spend minutes reading the same material, let alone hours or days. There is something “twitchy, nervous, hectic” about it. “Something, more to the point, that seems the opposite of, if not outright opposed to, the calm and repose required for reading books.”
Interestingly, Epstein examines political correctness in the context of this sort of distraction. Political correctness, one might posit, springs in part from a desire to feel the satisfaction of moral rectitude without having to wrestle with the complexity of moral life. (And, it is worth noting, understood in this way, it need not be an exclusively left-wing phenomenon.) It is therefore not unrelated to our simplified and distracted age, which offers only soundbites, easy affirmations, and packaged emotion.
In place of the agonizing, conflicting, tragic quandaries of real moral life, political correctness offers a moralism that can convey righteousness and condemnation with simple answers to simple questions: “How many minority characters do you have?” “Are any ‘problematic’ words used?” “What percentage of dialogue is spoken by women?” “What emotions about contemporary social life is this likely to elicit?” Given the rise of “sensitivity readers” and the ever-present threat of online cancellation, we live in a time that threatens to both smother great novels in the cradle and ensure that few people ever develop a mind free enough to appreciate those that might sneak through.
Epstein may overstate his case from time to time, holding that the novel stands head-and-shoulders above philosophy, theology, history, or even other forms of fiction as a means for understanding the human condition. One can appreciate Epstein’s robust defense, however, while still holding that these other writings might also offer us something that the novel does not. Given that Epstein is not a novelist himself, but a writer of short stories and essays, he likely agrees, but he does not dwell on any of the novel’s limitations.
Ultimately, the test of this sort of book is not what nits a reviewer can pick, but the effect it has on the reader. After reading Epstein’s book, I consulted my “Need to Read Someday” list and opted for As I Lay Dying over historian John Lukacs’s Historical Consciousness. My historian friends might have something to say about that, and I’m sure I will (eventually) be edified by both books. But I suppose my choice vindicates The Novel: Who Needs It?
John G. Grove is the managing editor of Law & Liberty.
John Pistelli's contribution to the symposium: Afraid of the Novel | RealClearBooks
Stephen G. Adubato's contribution to the symposium: An Antidote to Our Disenchanted Age | RealClearBooks
