Realism may be the death knell of the novel. Again.
I did get back to editing the new book after my ‘memory slip’ on the first of the month.
That’s the first 5000 words in second draft condition. It suddenly makes the book feel more like a growing thing.
But enough about my book; let’s talk about me. Boom boom. Old joke.
I was reading Sontag’s Nathalie Sarraute and the novel — an essay first published in 1963 and collected in Against Interpretation. I don’t have the critical faculties to analyse in any detail Sontag’s arguments but part of the essay’s gist is that — back in 1963 — she was bemoaning the fact that novels were lagging behind the other arts — and especially music and painting — in terms of technical advances. She believed the novel to be
The archetypal art form of the 19th century, perfectly expressing that period’s wholly mundane conception of reality….
It’s hard to argue against the fact that, over 50 years later, the case against the novel remains the same. Indeed, instead of explosive new directions in form and content, the novel has, for the most part, entrenched itself in realism. In fact, reality in the form of non-fiction — real life stories — has almost overtaken the novel as a genre.
Walk through the large Waterstones in London’s Piccadilly and compare the stacks of books on the display tables. Fiction struggles to compete with nature writing and misery memoirs and all varieties of history and science and biography. And that’s among the popular books and best sellers.
When I worked in a bookshop in the 1980s, science and memoir and nature writing were niche genres. No longer.
This may not be a bad thing. It may, indeed, be the spur to reinvention that the novel requires. But it may also be a case that the novel is failing, after its long centuries of dominance, to meet the needs of many who, in past generations, would have been its standard constituency.
Life writing is not fiction. For now, I’m sticking with fiction.
