It lies in the graveyard of history now, its tombstone beginning to grow crusty and weedy. You can still make out the words, barely. “THE NOVEL: 1605-2001.”
But who killed it? A few years ago, when I first saw a teen girl whip out a tiny portable DVD player at Newark Airport, I thought: Well, that’s it. I’d written a couple of novels myself – there is no reason you should have noticed – and wished I’d spent the time on something more lasting, like car repair.
Indefinite airport detention was the last situation where your options were to read or do nothing. Now you can bring a movie player that weighs less than a hardcover book.
So the novel was killed by the ADD teen, in the airport, with portable electronics. Thursday’s absurd announcement that the Nobel Prize in Literature – previously won by Winston Churchill, John Steinbeck and Hermann Hesse – had gone to someone named “Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio” amounted to stabbing the corpse.
M. Le Clézio’s annual sales may well rocket into three figures, but the Nobel has long since abandoned its mission to do what the Oscars continue to do – reward artists who must first meet some basic standard of communicating with a broad audience.
After 9/11, fiction sales plummeted and never really recovered as readers turned to current affairs. There is nothing that can be played on a screen that can approach the depth of a serious work of history or analysis, but movies and TV shows can do almost everything fiction can do, do it faster, do it minus the boring bits, all while being less demanding of the audience, shareable in social situations and cheaper.
Tech isn’t the only suspect spotted at the murder scene. Somebody should take a DNA sample from the literary critic James Wood.
Wood, an astute reader and author of “How Fiction Works,” is an elegant New Yorker writer. But he is much more than that. He is to the book reviewer what LeBron James is to the pickup basketball player. If there was a jersey with his name on it, every book-page editor in the US and UK would wear it.
At a class on literary criticism sponsored by the New Yorker Festival last Sunday, Wood handed out snippets from Beckett, Crane, Flaubert and Bellow, going over them with the audience sentence by sentence to explain why they worked so well.
The Flaubert passage is about what’s going on as Frédéric, the protagonist, walks down the street: “At the back of deserted cafes, women behind the bars yawned between their untouched bottles; the newspapers lay unopened on the reading-room tables; in the laundresses’ workshops the washing quivered in the warm draughts.”
This is evidently Wood’s idea of a prize morsel; he quoted it in a 2006 review for the New York Times. “Each detail is almost frozen in its gel of chosenness,” he wrote then.
Frozen, or comatose? “Sentimental Education” may be a great book, but it is not a great book because of this passage, which Wood on Sunday praised for its “banality,” its “ordinariness.” Banality, he went on to say, “is important business” in Flaubert. I suggest another B word.
Boring the reader is something anyone can do but it takes a special talent to praise boringness as a choice. Flaubert’s eye for detail is like a film’s beautiful cinematography – nice, but not sufficient to make the film worthwhile, and perhaps not even necessary.
Film critics were Woodian in the 1950s and ’60s, when they hossan’d the exquisitely composed and immensely dull work of Michelangelo Antonioni and Yasujiro Ozu. The audience chafed, and the critics wisely moved on.
Wood on literature is like a newborn mother on her child: unboreable. Except in one instance. His interest fades when it comes to story, the hurtling choo-choo of a narrative freight train. He is more attentive to the flecks of paint scraping off the wheels.
Frozen in its gel of chosenness, fiction has become like painting. Once they were vigorous popular arts, now each is a strange little habit indulged in by a roomful of specialists who no longer even try to interest the outside world.
It’s been ten years since Time magazine featured a living novelist, Tom Wolfe, on its cover, and 22 years since the cover featured a living painter, Andrew Wyeth. Wolfe is 77. Wyeth is 91. Will anyone succeed them?