Yesterday I bought a short book called ‘The Novel, Who Needs It?’ by Joseph Epstein. For context, Epstein is an author, teacher, and critic who has written books on myriad topics relating to life, literature, and human nature. This is the first book of his that I’ve read, but I’ll certainly have to read more. He’s quite an opinionated man, lent credence by a cutting style born from his days as a critic, and the profound thought he puts into most every topic he covers in this book. While I can’t say I wholeheartedly agree with everything he’s written here, that being the nature of a powerfully opinionated work, I was able to find a lot of wisdom, wit, and laugh-out-loud humor in many of the points he makes. It captured me so thoroughly I hardly put it down until I was done, even with all the pauses I took to think about what he wrote and what it meant to me. I really can’t recommend this enough, and since it was published just last year, I have to say I think it needs to be read sooner rather than later since the topics are so timely.

The question at hand is as the title asks, who needs novels? Over the course of about a hundred pages, he covers the history of the novel, what makes a novel a novel, who writes novels and how, who they write them for, how ideas and characters are at once opposed and the same, publishing, criticism, some epic failures of judgement, and last but not least, his opinions on the future of novels and society in general. All throughout is the lingering theme of the enrichment to our lives that novels offer, and his belief in the novel as the chief literary artform. As I mentioned he has some strong opinions and he states them without reserve, but as a true reader usually does, he maintains an openness to being wrong and an invitation to the reader to think for oneself above all else. There is a lot of food for thought packed into this short read, with a surprising amount of entertainment value along the way. Here are some of my favorite quotes, including points of wisdom, interesting ideas, and some of the funniest passages I’ve ever read in my life.

On the topic of forgetting novels he’s read (something that always made me feel insecure), he says:

“While I can produce no hard evidence that I read many novels whose plots now escape me, I nonetheless walk the streets as a man who has read all the novels of Barbara Pym, The Idiot (twice), and many other novels in which I have lost significant details of their fascinating characters’ lives.”

He goes on to say,

“I do not worry overmuch about having lost the plots of novels–even of superior novels–because I am confident that they have nonetheless left a rich deposit in my mind of a kind that, I like to believe, goes well beyond recollecting the details of their plots.”

This certainly made me feel a little better about forgetting half the plot points of half the novels I’ve ever read. That being said, he does remember quite a few details about some of the authors he reads. Sometimes those details were frankly brutal, but all the more entertaining for it. This quote about about Theodore Dreiser comes after about a page and a half of ranting about Saul Bellow’s shortcomings when it comes to his plotting.

“In the realm of intellectual sophistication, next to Saul Bellow, Theodore Dreiser wasn’t even a yokel. Such ideas as Dreiser had were wretched. He fell for communism and fascism both. He was not free of anti-Semitism. His lechery was such that you would have been foolish to leave your great-grandmother alone in a room with him. He was uneducated, untouched by culture.” … “His sisters cavorted with married men; his brothers lapsed into flashy living and alcoholism. Gawky and awkward, he had buck teeth and an eye that wandered. Shame was part of Dreiser’s heritage.”

To show you what kind of writer he is though, this is what he has to say about the content of Dreiser’s novels, despite the harsh words he had for his character:

“How did it come about that Theodore Dreiser, clod and creep that he was, was able to write novels that not only told important truths about the way his countrymen lived but was able to do so in a powerful and persuasive way?”

He goes on to talk about Dreiser’s strengths as a writer, which is a remarkably wholesale view of someone he clearly thinks is irredeemable as a human being. Many of his strongest points are tempered with a deep understanding of the facts of situation, and an unbiased plumbing of all of them regardless of irreconcilable they first appear to be. There are some exceptions however, small points he makes that sometimes made me balk a little. What he says about the progress of science, for example, I can’t agree with:

“If the novel has a history, it isn’t necessarily one of unrelenting progress. The history of literature (and the arts generally), unlike that of science, isn’t a tale of successive victories built on those that have gone before.”

I don’t think science is a tale of successive victories either. In the long history of technological progress, many inventions and theories have been forgotten, rediscovered, forgotten again, left to waste, literally burned to the ground, or misused to the point of being backward progress. The current height of technology we’ve achieved is a result of building upon previous success, but there’s really no evidence that it will be permanent, and in the past we’ve had stretches of time centuries long where not much progress was actually made. I think he says this because the history of science and technological innovation is much longer than the history of the novel, leading to a bit of averaging out that the novel can’t benefit from with it’s ~400 year history (assuming Cervantes’ Don Quixote was the first). Maybe if we consider all storytelling rather than just the novel, it becomes a easier to average out those long periods of little interest and say that humans have been telling better and better stories since we first drew a cave painting, all building on the last idea without fail.

That’s just a small contention I had with a brief comment though, nothing that actually detracted from my enjoyment of the book. There is one part though that scarred my mind permanently, in the section where he discusses the divergence of printing press, book seller, and author. He starts talking about contemporary novels, and has quite a bit to say about them. I’m going to put this here because my brain is cursed with knowledge now and I refuse to be the only one:

“I myself read fewer and fewer contemporary novels, though I do check the publication of new novels in the weekly fiction section of the London Times Literary Supplement, and not many of the novels there seem, to me at least, promising. Here, to cite a single egregious example, is the opening of an August 17, 2018, review of a novel with the title Come Join Our Disease by Sam Byers:

“‘In Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the narrator defecates on the floor of the gallery where she works: it is a farewell ‘f— you’ to employment and civil society as much as it is a comment on contemporary art. This dirty protest is positively quaint, however, in comparison with the scatological activism of Byer’s third novel (brace yourself): ‘I brought the wadded chuck of bread round to my backside, pressed it into the cleft of my buttocks, and drew it as firmly as I could across my anus to wipe myself …’”

Unfortunately, I’m sure you can see where that last bit is going. Yeah. As Epstein says afterward,

“Pause here to block this out of one’s mind, hopefully forever.”

This had me crying with laughter, in a book I thought was going to be a stuffy presentation that only a writer could ever enjoy reading. This combination of dry humor and deep interrogation of the format we all love is really not something to miss out on. After this cursed review he goes on to talk about such vast topics as the internet and its effect on the novel, the questionable existence of a true canon of novels, and the broadening of experience that comes from reading. One final passage nails home the point of the book in an excellent round up:

“To turn to the question put by this book’s title, The Novel, Who Needs It?, the answer is that we all do, including even people who wouldn’t think of reading novels–we all need it, and in this, the great age of distraction, we may need it more than ever before.”

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley