The Decline of the Novel

by Joseph Bottum

The novel has lost its purpose, Joseph Bottum argues in this fascinating new look at the history of fiction. We have not transcended our need for what novels provide, but we have grown to distrust the culture that allowed novels to flourish. “For almost three hundred years,” Bottum writes, “the novel was a major art form, perhaps the major art form, of the modern world—the device by which, more than any other, we tried to explain ourselves to ourselves.” But now we no longer “read novels the way we used to.” In a historical tour de force—the kind of sweeping analysis almost lost to contemporary literary criticism—Bottum traces the emergence of the novel from the modern religious crisis of the individual soul and the atomized self. In chapters on such figures as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Mann, he examines the enormous ambitions once possessed by novels and finds in these older works a rebuke of our current failure of nerve. “We walk with our heads down,” Bottum writes. “Without a sense of the old goals and reasons––a sense of the good achieved, understood as progress––all that remains are the crimes the culture committed in the past to get where it is now. uncompensated by achievement, unexplained by purpose, these unameliorated sins must now seem the very definition of a failed culture.” In readings of everything from genre fiction to children’s books, Bottum finds a lack of faith in the ability of art to respond to the deep problems of existence. “the decline of the novel’s prestige reflects and confirms a genuine cultural crisis,” he writes. Linking the novel to its religious origins, Bottum describes the urgent search for meaning in the new conditions of the modern “If the natural world is imagined by modernity as empty of purpose, then the hunt for nature’s importance is supernatural, by definition.” the novel became a fundamental device by which culture pursued the supernatural—facilitated by modernity’s confidence in science and cultural progress. Losing that confidence, Bottum says, we lost the purpose of the “the novel didn’t fail us. We failed the novel.” Told in fast-paced, wide-ranging prose, Bottum’s  The Decline of the Novel is a succinct critique of classical and contemporary fiction, providing guidelines for navigating the vast genre. this book is a must-read for those who hunger for grand accounts of literature, students of literary form, critics of contemporary art, and general readers who wish to learn, finally, what we all used to the deep moral purpose of reading novels.

Genres: Nonfiction, Writing, Literature, History, Cultural, Literary Criticism

150 pages, Hardcover

Published December 2, 2019

Reviews

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really informative book, one that I really enjoyed. It will not astonish you to discover that the contemporary malaise of the novel is largely theological.

[Josiah DeGraaf · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found myself a bit disappointed in this book. I was first introduced to Bottum in his CT article proposing the idea that the novel is a Protestant form of art (https://www.booksandculture.com/artic...) and was rather intrigued by his thesis. So when I saw he had a whole book out on the subject, I knew I had to read it.

In terms of the actual argument, though... I found that the book had a number of brilliant insights interspersed by a confusing structure and a very muddied argument. After discussing it over with one of my colleagues, I think I can buy into his thesis that the novel historically comes from the Protestant tradition, but we also needed to add some reasons and structure to his argument that is unfortunately lacking in the book.

I emerge skeptical of his thesis that the novel has declined because Protestantism has declined in the postmodern world, however. As much as some like to find a worldview cause for every major change, I suspect that the declining interest in the novel has a lot more to do with the television and the internet than it has to do with religious faith. Neil Postman got it right on this front.

In summary, this is a thought-provoking book with some fascinating ideas, but the ideas would be better served with some clearer argumentation, rationale, and structure.

Rating: 3-3.5 Stars (Fairly Good).

[Jeremy]

Positive review here. Bottum wrote this in 2015.

[Brett T · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a point in the introductory section of Joseph Bottum's The Decline of the Novel in which he offers a kind of summary statement about why the particular art form under consideration has declined. We live in a culture that more and more looks only to the natural and material for explanations about being and behavior. We didn't stop asking questions about existence, but we did stop asking them of written fiction. "The novel didn't fail us," he says. "We failed the novel."

At first glance it's the kind of plummy nose-in-the-air quote that folks who read a lot of popular fiction have grown to expect from people who still invest a lot of time in what's usually called "literary fiction." Our coarse and uninquisitive modern culture doesn't aspire to the kinds of deep exploration of what it means to be a good person. We interrogate much shallower art forms in that quest these days. Even some of the classic fields are so dominated by iconoclasts and would-be transgressors that it's tough to listen to the crude and offensive conversations they may prompt. Sure, Andres Serrano might want us to think about how cheap we have made our most precious ideas and concepts by turning them into assembly-line lowest bidder merchandise, but all we see is that he has taken a picture of a plastic crucifix in a jar of urine. The thesis statement's just a little too crude to get past and get into the discussion.

Bottum's question, though, does run deeper than that first glance suggests. The phenomenon he's investigating is tough to deny. For a big chunk of our most recent history, from sometime in the middle of the 17th century up through about the middle of the 20th, people who thought about serious things relied on written novels to spark their questions and thoughts. Many of them might indeed be members of a social and cultural elite, but not all. For these people, Bottum says, novels became the way we explained ourselves to ourselves. They addressed questions of existence: What does it mean to be a good person? How do we figure out who we are? What is the meaning of life? Prior to the Protestant Reformation, these questions were largely answered in the community of the church. The magisterium of the Roman Catholic church had fairly definitive answers to those questions and the authority to give them weight.

But as religious life and faith unmoored itself from that magisterium and grappled first of all with Scripture itself as a source of answers for those questions of life, the authority for the answers diffused a little. In Bottum's terms, we started explaining ourselves to ourselves rather than accepting the magisterium's explanations.

The novel was the vehicle for this exploration and explanation. Through crafted stories, people explored how other people handled different situations and incidents in life. Of course the answers were those of the author, but the author's goal was to create works of internal logic sound enough so that the answers could withstand examination. Pleasurable reading or what we sometimes call "mind candy" was still done, of course, but those who wanted to be taken seriously about things when talking about them imbibed serious work too.

As the 19th century turned into the 20th, authors took on other goals, such as social change. Upton Sinclair wanted to advance the cause of socialism with The Jungle, but he was less successful at that than he was in bringing about reform in the meat-packing industry. Other art forms took on the role the novel had held, especially movies and later television. When people wanted to be taken seriously in discussing the human condition, the pallette of their conversation was more and more onscreen than on the page. There weren't many novels that folks would have been expected to have read to enter those conversations, but there were movies they would have been expected to see. Today the movies have given way to television -- top-level shows such as The Wire, Breaking Bad or The Sopranos make up the language of the discussion these days.

At the same time, our confidence in the ability of science and natural explanation to offer a purpose for living eroded. The idea that a fictive imagination could provide what the evidence of our senses clearly said did not exist -- purpose -- became more quaint and old-fashioned. Sure, people still read fiction for serious reasons, such as finding the meaning of some core concepts of living or of the ways in which we deal with one another, but the inquiry is not so deep as before and the belief that serious discussion requires assimilating this or that author's perspective is not at all a given.

Decline doesn't necessarily address one way in which writers facilitated the decline of their art form: Impenetrability and reluctance to accept an open search for answers. Don DeLillo, for example, is considered by many people to be one of the foremost novelists writing today. He may be; I usually can't get more than a hundred pages into one of his non-linear narratives before returning the book to the library. He's often lauded for things like "the complexities of language" and in one of his own quotes about the purpose of what he does says, "Writers must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments..." If there are answers to human existence that might somehow have something positive to say about power, corporations, the state and such, well, you won't find them here.

The problem could be with me, of course. But I'm a serious person who takes seriously questions of human existence and enjoys exploring them. If novels aren't going to help me do that (and by and large there are many that do; not even everyone writing today opts for providing artificial and predetermined answers to those matters for people who already agree with them), then why read them?

That's the one gap in Bottum's otherwise interesting thesis. At only 150 pages it seems strange to suggest potential cuts, but the latter sections outlining the modern part of the decline could stand a trim, or at least a tightening up. But overall, The Decline of the Novel is a book as well as an idea that's worth some consideration and reflection.

Original available here.

[Wes Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes, this is an academic book, but it's written in a fun, easy to follow style. Don't run away fearing it might be some sort of dry doctoral thesis. It's not. And as to its topic: within the first few chapters, I was saying to myself: "Hmmm...and I thought I was the only one." Meaning, I thought I was the only one sensing the drift (the "decline") Bottum traces in this analysis of literature and culture. (That last sentence sounded more pessimistic than I meant it to. I'm not so bleak. Neither is Bottum. It's a call to action. "To our keyboards, fellow novelists!") His argument about the Protestant influence on the novel form, about the "thickness" of the old world and the "thinness" of the new (you'll know what that means when you read the book--or if you read C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy) all made me feel less alone. Granted, I am a weak literary scholar, so I can't validate this or counterargue that. Read his book and draw your own conclusions. Nor can I fully follow his middle chapters because I have not--not yet at least--read all the authors he references. (I held my own with his chapter on Dickens, but I've got catching up to do on the others.) I'll leave off by saying that The Decline of the Novel is a book I needed to find and needed to read. Bottum clearly worked hard on it, and his work has not been in vain. Perhaps you need to give it a look, too.

[Shawn Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in discrete sessions, somewhat spaced apart, treating it as a collection of essays. It seemed natural to give it some space, because it’s worthy of analysis. Superb writing and worth a re-read, but only after I’ve given more attention to Thomas Mann.

[GONZA · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting, especially the last part about contemporary authors. Not for everyone anyway.

Molto interessante, specialmente la parte sugli autori contemporanei. Non per tutti, comunque.

THANKS EDELWEISS FOR THE DRC.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

An eye-opening ride through the history of the novel, and how we ended up (sadly) where we are now when too few novels have the power to shape our conversations.