Afraid of the Novel

On Joseph Epstein's 'The Novel, Who Needs It?'
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The following review is part of RealClear Books & Culture's symposium on Joseph Epstein's 'The Novel, Who Needs It?'

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.”

Obviously, then, when Epstein asserts of the novel in his final sentence that “we all need it, and in this, the great age of distraction we may just need it more than ever before,” he means something more specific by “the novel” than the famously capacious genre defined with joking imprecision by Randall Jarrell, in an aperçu Epstein quotes, as “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” Epstein favors what he calls the “serious” novel: “For me the most serious, the most significant, the best novels are those through whose pages a never blatant, if not always obvious, but ultimately central moral conflict plays out and is generally resolved.”

Anything that detracts from this exploration of moral complexity—whether the stylized language of Joyce and Nabokov, the philosophical exploration of Mann and Bellow, or even the amoral sexuality in Roth and Updike, not to mention the flights of fancy in postmodern and genre fiction—lowers a novel in Epstein’s estimation. His touchstones are the Russian realists, with their resistance to ideological tyrannies from Czarism to Stalinism, and the English and French realists, since the novel in England and France accompanied the rise of the middle class and of individualism.

Though he grants that the novel emerged from “the lives of the saints and the adventure romances of the crusades and the Arabian Nights and the stories of King Arthur’s court,” he relies for his own history of the genre on Ian Watt’s classic 1957 study, The Rise of the Novel. Watt traces the novel to the burgeoning capitalism of the 18th century in England, a time when increasing literacy meant that merchants and servants wanted to see their own lives reflected back to them in such prose narratives as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. From this origin, the realist novel increased in intricacy until we arrived, by the end of the 19th century, at figures like Tolstoy, James, and Proust, able to capture the complex interiority and moral interrelations of ordinary people with immense sophistication.

Epstein is generous in his praise of his favored authors, those who meet this severe standard. “I shouldn’t like to have to choose between Tolstoy and Shakespeare as the greatest of all writers in the West,” he writes, while also praising the disillusioned realism of Conrad at length. Of modern American writers, he favors Willa Cather, whom he judges “the best American novelist of the past century” due to her “consummate literary skill, a calm philosophical detachment, and an unwavering confidence in the truth of the imagination.” Though Epstein doesn’t say so, to elevate the measured and melancholy Cather in this way is to demote the writer most readers and critics would consider the greatest 20th-century American novelist, William Faulkner, a figure no doubt too impassioned, too experimental, and too political to pass the test of “calm philosophical detachment.”

Epstein doesn’t consider the possibility that the genre’s longer history and more varied origin in fantastical romances and religious narratives might have legitimate successors in modern and contemporary fiction. For him, we need the novel to enshrine the small-c conservative value of resistance to ideology and the small-l liberal value of individualism. Writers who fall short of the realist seriousness and moral complexity he prefers also fail to inculcate these ideals—an ethical and political as well as an aesthetic failure. One chapter in this book decries the explicit portrayal of sex in fiction as trivializing (Epstein quips, “If Norman Mailer had written James’s Portrait of a Lady, Gilbert Osmond would doubtless have required fellatio of Isabelle [sic] Archer”), while others assail the fiction of ideas (“To be sure, novels are ultimately about ideas, but ideas played out in the lives of their characters”) and fiction that relies too much on style rather than on “a questing spirit and a large heart.”

Late in the book, Epstein surveys the “enemies of the novel”: “The Internet and digital culture, political correctness, creative writing programs, the state of contemporary publishing, and graphic novels” alongside the triumph of a “therapeutic culture” where “self-esteem and self-gratification are the chief goals.” These pages are Epstein’s weakest, full of boilerplate objections one could read in innumerable laments over left-wing censoriousness, excessively workshopped fiction, and screen addiction. He observes that reading online encourages one to skim, but so do his clichéd complaints, even those we might agree with. While he’s right to object to shallow online culture, MFA groupthink, and identity politics that trespass on the rights of the imagination, his wholesale dismissal of the graphic novel for “represent[ing] a radical dumbing down” exemplifies the complacency and incuriosity that mars this book overall. A graphic novel like Maus, which he mentions but does not discuss in any detail, uses complex formal strategies unique to its medium to dramatize moral questions every bit as sophisticated as those addressed by Conrad and Cather.

Epstein claims that the serious novel combats totalizing ideas by embedding them in a thick web of human relations that shows life to be more varied and heterogenous than any ideology. Yet a critic with an enemies list as long as Epstein’s might himself be in thrall to a controlling idea. Epstein’s aversion to ideology turns out to be an ideology of its own; this ideology ironically limits the moral complexity and pluralism his own argument can attain.

He evades, for instance, the complicity of the novels he prizes in the social change he disparages. If the novel as a genre accompanied the rise of the middle class and of individualism, then why not regard “political correctness” as a further development of novelistic consciousness—as an effect of more and more people from more and more groups seeking the same type of social recognition the early novel conferred on commoners like Defoe’s Robinson or Richardson’s Pamela? Admitting this rather obvious connection between fictional representation and social recognition, though, would require Epstein to question either his celebration of the realist novel or his distaste for the politics of identity.

Similarly, mightn’t the therapeutic culture that Epstein persuasively reviles, with its narcissistic and neurotic perseveration on the wounded self, have its roots in the exhaustive excavation of the inner life undertaken by writers Epstein admires, such as James and Proust? If this is the case, then the rise of genres Epstein wholly dismisses—postmodern fiction, science fiction, detective fiction, the graphic novel—might resist the therapeutic sensibility with their often more imaginative and less inward presentation of moral experience. This possibility, however, goes unmentioned, perhaps because it might challenge Epstein’s own settled convictions.

Epstein believes his taste to be correct: “Yet one can in fact account for good taste,” he writes, “which one acquires partly by instinct and temperament but chiefly by training and experience.” But his refusal to consider his ideas at an intellectual remove, to consider them as ideas, prevents him from deepening his argument, from altering his perspective, from seeing the world as a stranger and more intransigent place than any ideology (including his own ideology) can capture—prevents him, that is, from doing what he claims to be the essential work of the novel itself. This lapse results in a book whose argument for nuance and complication is often perilously simplistic. If the novel—or the thin slice from the whole feast of fiction that Epstein tendentiously calls “the novel”—leads to such a conclusion, then, indeed, who needs it?

John Pistelli is a novelist and critic. He's currently writing a weekly newsletter on literature and culture and serializing a novel at grandhotelabyss.substack.com.

Stephen G. Adubato's contribution to the symposium: An Antidote to Our Disenchanted Age | RealClearBooks

John G. Grove's contribution to the symposium: The Indispensable Novel | RealClearBooks