Roger Kimball is the latest to admit he doesn’t read a lot of contemporary fiction and to speculate why. Short version: there’s no common culture. Or in a few more sentences:
We lack the requisite community of readers, and the ambient shared cultural assumptions, to provide what we might call the responsorial friction that underwrites the traction of publicly acknowledged significance. The novel in its highest forms requires a certain level of cultural definiteness and identity against which it can perform its magic. The diffusion or dispersion of culture brings with it a diffusion of manners and erosion of shared moral assumptions. Whatever we think of that process — love it as a sign of social liberation or loathe it as a token of cultural breakdown — it has robbed the novel, and the novel’s audience, of a primary resource: an authoritative tradition to react against.
I complained about something similar just the other day. What E. D. Hirsch Jr. called “cultural literacy” may no longer be possible, not only because the works of the past are no longer considered indispensable to becoming human, but also because no one could possibly agree what the indispensable works are, even if anyone still believed as a general rule that some are.
But this isn’t the whole story. Even if Kimball does not, some people read a lot of contemporary fiction. I know: I’m one. And though I am as eager as the next pundit to bemoan the loss of a common culture, I know that even now there are novels being written that are worth reading. It is true that the publication of a major new novel is no longer a public event, but this truth is entirely beside the question. The question is not whether a new novel passes what my friend Joseph Bottum, also writing in the Weekly Standard, called the “cocktail-party test.” The question is whether a new novel is worth reading.
To answer this question, though, you must read contemporary fiction. If you are troubled by the loss of a common culture, and especially by the novel’s loss of rank within the culture, then you need to start doing the work of restoration. And, sadly, this means that you must sort through a great many lousy novels to find a few good ones — although in this respect the present is no different from any other age in literary history. You must, in short, be prepared to do the work of a critic. The only reason no one reads contemporary fiction is that no one wants to do the work.
"The question is whether a new novel is worth reading. To answer this question, though, you must read contemporary fiction. " n nseems like a circular reasoning firing squad … n nmaybe just maybe the reason less people are reading contemporary fiction is that they in fact did try to read it and just found it wanting as entertainment … n nnawwww, that can't be it … writers are never …. ahhh, whats the nice way to put this … incompetent losers … ok thats not the nice way … n
Jeff, n nHave you read Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, Roland Merullo’s The Talk-Funny Girl, Peter Cameron’s Coral Glynn, Hilma Wolitzer’s An Available Man? While many contemporary writers are admittedly “incompetent losers,” none of these books were written by them. n n—DGM
I don't know about "no one" reading contemporary novels. I read few, especially lately with two babies, but still managed Julian Barnes's Sense of an Ending and will now need to read Turn of the Screw from which it was born. But this is the problem as one struggling jazz musician put it: You are new to jazz, decide it may be a worthwhile endeavor, and stroll into a record store. Do you take a chance on a contemporary practitioner or a collection by Thelonius Monk? Likewise novels. You decide to expand your (literary) reading horizons. Do you go for a contemporary author, even a well recommended one like W.G. Sebald or Alexsander Hemon, or The Mayor of Casterbridge? Or Madame Bovary? It really is a struggle.
Fiction was largely ruined for me when I was taught to analyze it in high school. Remember the billboard with the eyes in The Great Gatsby? I never would have dreamed that it represented God watching everyone. Someone had to tell me. Once I was taught that stories are not thumping good reads — whose lessons may grow on you in time — but are symbolic codes, the pleasure of a story was spoiled and I found one novel is much like another. If I'm going to try newer fiction, I hunt for novels published before the 1970s, which is when it seems to me the Code took over (writers' workshops and) book publishing.
And speaking a bit off topic, though also about a contemporary author, Jonathan Franzen had an essay about Edith Wharton in the New Yorker. I was going to try the Corrections, but now I don't think I will. He's just not good looking enough for me to read his work.
It's the cultural breakdown itself that we have in common and that forms the shared experience through which the novel today speaks to the general reader . The sense of that loss is palpable-like the presence of His absence" that informed the writing of the existentialist theologians. The general conditions of cultural disintegration and personal confusion that prevail haven't prevented very worthwhile novels from being written. R.K.'s critique is over-general,and possibly politicized…….