A love-letter to the novel

The novel, who needs it?
Joseph Epstein
New York
July, 2023
152 pages
ISBN: 978-1641773058

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“The [novel], unlike any other literary genre, provides truths of an important kind unavailable elsewhere in literature or anywhere else.” This is the claim at the heart of Joseph Epstein’s book: not that the novel is important, or that it still has relevance in the twenty-first century, or that more young people ought to read, or that stories are valuable. No, the claim, in all its boldness, is that the novel is the most complete, vital and profound of all literary and narrative art forms, that it is superior to poetry, theatre, cinema and short fiction, and that you need to be reading it, for your sake and for the sake of the world.

This is a grand mission statement. Epstein and his publishers must have believed in it, because this 152-page volume, published in 2023, is more essay than book – a compact package to earn its own spine, sleeve and space on the bookshelf. Epstein divides it into seventeen chapters of varying shortness, some just a couple of pages long and some running to a dozen or so. Each chapter makes a particular point in the novel’s defence, though their uneven lengths and sometimes tenuous connection to one another may distract the reader. For the most part the prose is very readable, often conversational but rarely rambling. The author is an academic and this comes through in the many quotations from writers and critics which bolster the arguments and add flavour, though the approach to implementing these quotes is somewhat scattergun.

Epstein spends most of the time making an argument for the novel and a little time listing its “enemies” – which include, but are not limited to: the internet, graphic novels, university creative writing degree programmes, workshopping, bad sex scenes, publishers, political correctness and psychotherapy –. Here is how the argument goes. The novel is special – but not all novels are special. There are novels, and then there are “literary novels,” great works such as Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment and A la recherche du temps perdu. While it does amuse, the literary novel is not merely entertainment but a method of philosophical enquiry. It involves “the hypothetical posing of questions – chiefly moral questions – through the lives of imagined characters.” When we think of questions, we might expect their answers to contain information, but the novel does not merely present facts; it seeks to do something more complex and interesting. The plots of the novels we have read will escape us, but in their absence a “rich deposit” will remain, an intangible substance which will make us wiser, more engaged, more human.

The notion of transcendence is important to Epstein’s argument: that in reading literary novels, they elevate us in a vaguely defined, quasi-spiritual way. Novels themselves can transcend their formal limitations. A literary novel, for instance, can be badly written, as in the case of Theodore Dreiser, who transcended not only his poor moral character but also his poor prose to write beautiful, penetrating works. Dostoyevsky, a reckless gambler in his personal life, did similarly. Describing or analysing these works does not do them justice. Epstein, a teacher of novels, claims they cannot satisfactorily be taught, that something is always lost and missed. They are elevated in the reading, not the explaining, of them.

Poetry and theatre, on the other hand, can be taught, though why this is is never explained. Other forms of literature are regularly suggested by Epstein to be inferior without much in the way of evidence. One might ask themselves why the novel and poetry are being set against one another when they surely seek to achieve, as a rule, different things. Epstein’s case becomes bolder still. “One could,” he suggests, “put together a list of novels that would tell more about the history and the psychological condition of the United States than a general history of the subject.” Not content to assert the novel’s dominance over the arts, the author insists on subjugating history and politics, too.

This may be where he loses the reader, who perhaps has not had the experience of falling for a novel, of being moved to laughter, tears or anger. His insistence on denigrating the other literary forms, while amusing, distracts from the core claims of the book. The claims themselves sometimes seem to rely on the reader already being in agreement with them prior to reading them. It is far from certain that his arguments will sway those sceptical of the novel’s supremacy, even where, as above with his comments on the history of the United States, I believe there could be some strong reasons to believe he is at least partly right. The analytical reader will find much to upset their sensibilities.

But analytical proofs are not what is on offer here. Epstein has not written a set of syllogisms, he has written a love letter. His claim is that there is something intangible happening in the genre, something mystical and transcendent, something which can’t be taught. In a sense, it also can’t be written about to any satisfaction. The proof of his premises is found in reading great novels, entering into them, a body of evidence which is experiential rather than analytical. That is, it seems to me, the purpose of the book: to provide a kind of literary springboard into the greatest – if Epstein is to be believed – of all the literary forms.

If the novel really is the superlative narrative art form, we would do well to pay attention to it. Lest we forget the importance and power of narratives, we might recall that half the world regards Donald Trump as a narcissistic lunatic, the other half a courageous leader. There is no global consensus as to whether Israel are expansionist warmongers or embattled defenders of sovereign soil and the people residing on it. The debate continues in lecture theatres and over bar counters as to whether the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary evils to save Allied lives or war crimes on a massive scale. These are profound differences in perspective which we might reasonably expect there to be clarity on, and yet there is not. We might also recall that much of the Bible is composed not of mathematical proofs but of narratives, and when Jesus preached he did so in stories. It is through stories we make sense of facts. It is through stories we understand the world.

Read Epstein’s book, then, if you love the novel or question its relevance. Better yet, head down to your local library and pick up something with a bit of weight to it. Life is too short for bad books, but it’s long enough that we should make time to read the great ones. The novel matters, Epstein insists, and “in this age of distraction, we may just need it more than ever before.”