another report card with A’s and B’s from the reviewers who had replaced the teachers whose approval, when I was younger, I had both craved and taken no satisfaction from; decent money; and the silence of irrelevance. Meanwhile, my wife and I had reunited in Philadelphia. For two years we’d bounced around in three time zones, trying to find a pleasant, inexpensive place in which we didn’t feel like strangers. Finally, after exhaustive deliberation, we’d rented a too-expensive house in yet another depressed city. That we then proceeded to be miserable seemed to confirm beyond all doubt that there was no place in the world for fiction writers.
In Philadelphia I began to make unhelpful calculations, multiplying the number of books I’d read in the previous year by the number of years I might reasonably be expected to live, and perceiving in the three-digit product not so much an intimation of mortality (though the news on that front wasn’t cheering) as a measure of the incompatibility of the slow work of reading and the hyperkinesis of modern life. All of a sudden it seemed as if the friends of mine who used to read no longer even apologized for having stopped. A young acquaintance who had been an English major, when I asked her what she was reading, replied: “You mean linear reading? Like when you read a book from start to finish?”
There’s never been much love lost between literature and the marketplace. The consumer economy loves a product that sells at a premium, wears out quickly or is susceptible to regular improvement, and offers with each improvement some marginal gain in usefulness. To an economy like this, news that stays news is not merely an inferior product; it’s an antithetical product. A classic work of literature is inexpensive, infinitely reusable, and, worst of all, unimprovable.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American political economy had set about consolidating its gains, enlarging its markets, securing its profits, and demoralizing its few remaining critics. In 1993 I saw signs of the consolidation everywhere. I saw it in the swollen minivans and broadbeamed trucks that had replaced the automobile as the suburban vehicle of choice—these Rangers and Land Cruisers and Voyagers that were the true spoils of a war waged to keep American gasoline cheaper than dirt, a war that had played like a thousand-hour infomercial for high technology, a consumer’s war dispensed through commercial television. I saw leaf-blowers replacing rakes. I saw CNN holding hostage the travelers in airport lounges and the shoppers in supermarket checkout lines. I saw the 486 chip replacing the 386 and being replaced in turn by the Pentium so that, despite new economies of scale, the price of entry-level notebook computers never fell below a thousand dollars. I saw Penn State win the Blockbuster Bowl.
Even as I was sanctifying the reading of literature, however, I was becoming so depressed that I could do little after dinner but flop in front of the TV. We didn’t have cable, but I could always find something delicious: Phillies and Padres, Eagles and Bengals, M*A*S*H, Cheers, Homicide. Naturally, the more TV I watched, the worse I felt. If you’re a novelist and even you don’t feel like reading, how can you expect anybody else to read your books? I believed I ought to be reading, as I believed I ought to be writing a third novel. And not just any third novel. It had long been a prejudice of mine that putting a novel’s characters in a dynamic social setting enriched the story that was being told; that the glory of the genre consisted of its spanning of the expanse between private experience and public context. And what more vital context could there be than television’s short-circuiting of that expanse?
But I was paralyzed with the third book. I was torturing the story, stretching it to accommodate ever more of those things-in-the-world that impinge on the enterprise of fiction writing. The work of transparency and beauty and obliqueness that I wanted to write was getting bloated with issues. I’d already worked in contemporary pharmacology and TV and race and prison life and a dozen other vocabularies; how was I going to satirize Internet boosterism and the Dow Jones as well, while leaving room for the complexities of character and locale? Panic grows in the gap between the increasing length of the project and the shrinking time increments of cultural change: How to design a craft that can float on history for as long as it takes to build it? The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: Where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture? These were unhappy days. I began to think that there was something wrong with the whole model of the novel as a form of “cultural engagement.”
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, when Dickens and Darwin and Disraeli all read one another’s work, the novel was the preeminent medium of social instruction. A new book by Thackeray or William Dean Howells was anticipated with the kind of fever that a late-December film release inspires today.
The big, obvious reason for the decline of the social novel is that modern technologies do a much better job of social instruction. Television, radio, and photographs are vivid, instantaneous media. Print journalism, too, in the wake of In Cold Blood, has become a viable creative alternative to the novel. Because they command large audiences, TV and magazines can afford to gather vast quantities of information quickly. Few serious novelists can pay for a quick trip to Singapore, or for the mass of expert consulting that gives serial TV dramas like E.R. and NYPD Blue their veneer of authenticity. The writer of average talent who wants to report on, say, the plight of illegal aliens would be foolish to choose the novel as a vehicle. Ditto the writer who wants to offend prevailing sensibilities. Portnoy’s Complaint, which even my mother once heard enough about to disapprove of, was probably the last American novel that could have appeared on Bob Dole’s radar as a nightmare of depravity. Today’s Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.
The essence of fiction is solitary work: the work of writing, the work of reading. I’m able to know Sophie Bentwood intimately, and to refer to her as casually as I would to a good friend, because I poured my own feelings of fear and estrangement into my construction of her. If I knew her only through a video of Desperate Characters (Shirley MacLaine made the movie in 1971, as a vehicle for herself), Sophie would remain an Other, divided from me by the screen on which I viewed her, by the surficiality of film, and by MacLaine’s star presence. At most, I might feel I knew MacLaine a little better.
Knowing MacLaine a little better, however, is what the country mainly wants. We live in a tyranny of the literal. The daily unfolding stories of O. J. Simpson, Timothy McVeigh, and Bill Clinton have an intense, iconic presence that relegates to a subordinate shadow-world our own untelevised lives. In order to justify their claim on our attention, the organs of mass culture and information are compelled to offer something “new” on a daily, indeed hourly, basis. Although good novelists don’t deliberately seek out trends, many of them feel a responsibility to pay attention to contemporary issues, and they now confront a culture in which almost all the issues are burned out almost all the time. The writer who wants to tell a story about society that’s true not just in 1996 but in 1997 as well can find herself at a loss for solid cultural referents. What’s topically relevant while she’s planning the novel will almost certainly be passé by the time it’s written, rewritten, published, distributed, and read.
None of this stops cultural commentators—notably Tom Wolfe—from blaming novelists for their retreat from social description. The most striking thing about Wolfe’s 1989 manifesto for the “New Social Novel,” even more than his uncanny ignorance of the many excellent socially engaged novels published between 1960 and 1989, was his failure to explain why his ideal New Social Novelist should not be writing scripts for Hollywood. And so it’s worth saying one more time: Just as the camera drove a stake through the heart of serious portraiture, television has killed the novel of social reportage. Truly committed social novelists may still find cracks in the monolith to sink their pitons into. But they do so with the understanding that they can no longer depend on their material, as Howells and Sinclair and Stowe did, but only on their own sensibilities, and with the expectation that no one will be reading them for news.
THIS MUCH, at least, was visible to Philip Roth in 1961. Noting that “for a writer of fiction to feel that he does not really live in his own country—as represented by Life or by what he experiences when he steps out the front door—must seem a serious occupational impediment,” he rather plaintively asked: “What will his subject be? His landscape?” In the intervening years, however, the screw has taken another turn. Our obsolescence now