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February 2, 2003
ARTICLES: Is the novel really dead?
Only a few years ago, you could not open a newspaper or literary magazine without finding some critic holding forth on the death of the novel. This bourgeois art form, ran the argument, had exhausted its potential for originality and, reaching the end of its natural life, was now terminally ill.
How hasty this diagnosis now seems. Between the early 1970s and the mid 1980s, the novel somehow found the strength to escape from intensive care and its academic life-support system, and discharge itself into the hurly-burly of Grub Street.
Today, no one in their right mind would talk about the death of the novel. Fiction, from faculty to library to bookshop to reading group, is flourishing in a multiplicity of genres across the English-speaking world.
As readers, we have become obsessed — the verb is hardly too strong — with the novel. Reviews of new fiction dominate the literary pages. Fiction has become the genre to which everyone aspires. It seems, everyone is writing, or wanting to write, a novel.
Far from being outmoded, it turns out that the novel is perfect for an age without ideology and a self-obsessed society without strong beliefs. Where once the novel was a vehicle for expressing complex ideas about the condition of society or the fate of the working-class, the novel has become the natural vehicle for youthful self-obsession, conveying both author and reader on a magical mystery tour of the self in a time of narcissism.
This kind of novel, so-called literary fiction, backed up by a celebrity-conscious culture, has become a staple of all the big publishers’ lists, attracting wannabe novelists, unrealistic five- and six-figure advances, and yards of media attention. The craze for novels is now so widespread that BBC2, a useful bellwether, has just commissioned a poll — the Big Read — to determine the nation’s ‘best-loved’ work of fiction. It’s a campaign that will only intensify the appetite for new fiction.
The novel, of course, is quite as difficult as any other serious literary form to master. Much of contemporary fiction fits Philip Larkin’s laconic summary. (‘a beginning, a muddle and an end’) and the promise of all this fiction-publishing is often rather at odds with actual performance.
Indeed, a cursory glance at the literary pages of 2002 might suggest that the game is up for British fiction. What, you reply, is the evidence for this outrageous assertion? Well, in the first place, let’s take some of the novels that actually aroused public interest this year. Not one of them originated in the United Kingdom.
The year began with the publication of that American literary sensation, Jonathan Franzen’s The corrections. Shortly after the justified furore aroused by Franzen, the Orange Prize was awarded to Bel Canto by Anne Patchett, another American.
The next novel to hit the headlines was Alice Sebold’s The lovely bones another American novel that found more than a million readers largely through word of mouth and the sponsorship of Amazon. And, shortly after that, the Canadian Yann Martel won the Booker Prize with Life of Pi. If there was a novel to rival Life of Pi in October it was probably The crimson petal and the white by Michel Faber, an Australian novelist of Dutch ancestry living in Scotland. So, if it’s been a busy year for books, it has not been a vintage year specifically British fiction.
All is not lost, however. There is evidence that this lean spell is drawing to a close. I have just spent four months on the jury for Granta magazine’s Best of Young British Novelists promotion. I have read some 50 new novels by British-passport-holding writers under the age of 40. I can say that on the evidence of the Granta list, new British fiction is alive and well and in excellent health. — Dawn/Observer news service
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