‘The Novel, Who Needs It?’: Joseph Epstein Replies

"Muse of Literature," 1893, by Henry Siddons Mowbray. Oil on canvas. Yale University Art Gallery. Public Domain

In Chapter I of “The Novel, Who Needs It?” Joseph Epstein includes this snippet of dialogue from Bernard Malamud’s novel “The Assistant”:

He asked her what books she was reading. “‘The Idiot,’ do you know it?” “No. What’s it about?” “It’s a novel.” “I’d rather read the truth,” he said. “It is the truth.”

“The truth she is referring to,” Epstein then writes, “is the truth of the imagination.”

"Woman Reading a Book," 17th century, by Gerard ter Borch. Oil on canvas. National Museum in Warsaw, Poland. Public Domain

The 86-year-old Epstein has devoted much of his life to writing and to teaching literature. He is the author of 31 books, most of them nonfiction, and served for more than 20 years as editor for The American Scholar. He is celebrated in particular for his mastery of the essay, many of which have reflected his literary interests.

Now, in “The Novel, Who Needs It?” Epstein offers a ringing defense of what he calls “the serious novel” or, at times, the successful novel, explaining why the best of this genre “provides truths of an important kind unavailable elsewhere in literature or anywhere else.”

He also spends several chapters critiquing the current state of the novel and the factors militating against good literature in today’s culture.

In Defense of Fiction

Famous literary works by Jane Austen on display in her former home in Chawton, England. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Epstein devotes over half of his book to the origins of the novel and its evolving genres, like the picaresque, family chronicles, and satire; its profound influence on both the reader and the author; and the unique opportunities it provides for delving deep into human nature. Along the way, he musters dozens of writers to support his arguments, some of them old masters like Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy, and Jane Austen, others closer to our own time like Vladimir Nabokov, Tom Wolfe, and Milan Kundera.

That above paragraph does a disservice to Epstein, as it sounds dry as dust when in fact Epstein skillfully weaves together authors, plots, asides, and commentary into a fascinating literary tapestry.

With the insight and wit found in his previous books, he also undertakes frequent side expeditions on this tour. At the beginning of Chapter VI, for instance, he mentions figures like economist John Maynard Keynes, jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and sociologist Edward Shils, and then notes that all “were devoted readers of novels.”

He next shares this anecdote: “The English philosopher Gilbert Ryle, when asked if he read novels, answered, ‘Yes—all six,’ by which he meant the six novels of Jane Austen, which one gathers he read over and over.”

In this same paragraph, Epstein asks: “What was it, do you suppose, that these men, towering intellectuals all, found in novels that they couldn’t find in economics, philosophy, jurisprudence, political science, sociology, and anthropology?”

He begins the next paragraph by answering that question: “What such impressive intellectual figures found in novels, I believe, is a respect for the complexity of experience unavailable anywhere else.”

Guides to Our Humanity

The unfinished painting "Dickens's Dream," 1875, by Robert William Buss. Watercolor. Charles Dickens Museum, United Kingdom. Public Domain

This “complexity of experience” as investigated by serious novelists is a major theme of “The Novel, Who Needs It?” Of his boyhood reading—when he like so many of us read novels like “Black Beauty” but also “Classics Illustrated” with their encapsulated and illustrated stories by writers like Dickens and Twain—Epstein writes: “The novel took me to places I hadn’t known existed, but in which I was delighted to find myself; it expanded my world like nothing else I had known, or, for that matter, still know.”

Epstein shares the ways this expansion works for so many readers. He writes, for instance: “What the novel does better than any other form is allow its readers to investigate the inner, or secret, life of its characters.” That, of course, is only a part of the effects of a worthy novel on its reader. It can as well broaden our vision of the world, enhance our sympathies for others, and take us on journeys inside of ourselves.

Certain characters in a novel, as Epstein points out several times, can also serve as exemplars, figures who inspire in readers the desire to become better persons. I myself had that experience reading Mark Helprin’s “A Soldier of the Great War,” a novel not mentioned by Epstein. Here, a retired professor of aesthetics, Alessandro Giuliani, tells his life story to a young, 17-year-old hiking companion. As Alessandro reflects on the sufferings and horrors of World War I, and his trials afterward, I came to deeply admire this tall, elderly professor. With each terrible challenge he faces, he grows in nobility of character, undoubtedly creating in many readers, in addition to myself, the desire to wear that same cloak of dignity.

The Novel Besieged

Engraving of a group of men pushing philosophers toward a fire with burning books, circa 1515–1527, attributed to Marco Dente. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public Domain

While lauding the serious novel, Epstein doesn’t shy away from that perennial topic the death of the novel. Though that interment was often prematurely announced in the past, he feels a foreboding about present circumstances: “Yet just now talk about the death of the novel has a credibility it has never had before.”

The reasons for this possible demise are plentiful. Epstein praises our digital age for its ready wealth of information and other advantages, in his case as a writer, yet he accuses its addictive “powers of distraction” as destructive to reading. He notes the shortened attention span that our electronic devices have wrought on young and old, including himself, and the diminishing numbers of serious readers in our culture.

He then turns to social media with its frequent insistence on political correctness, which is “another enemy of the novel.” Not only does political correctness inhibit novelists in their writing, but it can also create “Sanctimony Literature,” which is the title of an essay on this topic by Becca Rothfeld.

Epstein offers this quote from Rothfeld: “The sanctimonists maintain a tidily bifurcated interest in good people and bad people, when in fact what they should be studying is the good and the bad in all people—the full murk of human motivation, the tangle of tensions and contradictions, of desires and principles, that is the permanent condition of human choice.”

Creative writing programs, which often breed more teachers of writing than serious novels, publishers who care less about serious literature and more about the bottom line, and the explosion of graphic novels also have eroded the novel’s standing. “But perhaps the most subtly pernicious enemy of the novel,” observes Epstein, “may be what Philip Rieff, in an important 1966 book, called ‘The Triumph of the Therapeutic.’”

As he does with the internet, Epstein praises the good done by therapy and pharmacology for those afflicted with diseases like schizophrenia or suffering from depression. Yet a therapeutic culture like ours, Epstein writes, is intent on personal happiness and self-esteem, whereas “for the serious novelist, self-esteem and so much else in the therapeutic realm is tosh.” Great literature, he reminds us, is about destiny, moral character, and human frailties and strengths.

Taking Stock

Portrait of American novelist Henry James, circa 1866, by Bendann Bros. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public Domain

Near the end of his book, Epstein brings up the “so-called canon, or elite grouping or body, of the great novels on which most people would agree.” After a brief look at the selections made by some major literary critics, such as Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling, Epstein gives us his personal canon of great writers of fiction. Their names appear throughout “The Novel, Who Needs It?” and in his essays of the last 50 years: the Russians including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Victorians like George Eliot and Charles Dickens, Americans like Henry James and Willa Cather. Of the latter, he comments that “she did all these things with consummate literary skill, a calm philosophical detachment, and an unwavering confidence in the truth of the imagination.”

Epstein then goes a step farther and lists 26 “lesser known novels and novelists” who have brought him pleasure and broadened his worldview. In this company are such luminaries as Paul Scott and his “Raj Quartet,” Penelope Fitzgerald, Muriel Spark, Richard Wright, and Anthony Powell. Here, readers will surely find, as I did, some books they’ve never read that will pique their interest.

Answering the Question

In his conclusion, Epstein asks about the novel: “What really have we gained by reading about people who never really existed living through events that didn’t actually happen?” He answers that without the novel, the hope of gaining a more complex view of life—its meaning and mystery—is lost. We are then left with the ideas and guidelines for living with the likes of social science, pop psychology, and journalism.

And so, Epstein concludes: “To turn to the question put by the book’s title, ‘The Novel, Who Needs It?’ the answer is that we all do, including even those who wouldn’t think of reading novels—we all need it, and in this, the great age of distraction we may just need it more than ever before.”

Cover for the 2023 book “The Novel, Who Needs It?” by Joseph Epstein.

‘The Novel, Who Needs It?’ By Joseph Epstein Encounter Books, July 18, 2023 Hardcover: 152 pages