Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul has announced his retirement. He has also announced that the novel as a genre is dying:

I have no faith in the survival of the novel. It is almost over. The world has changed and people do not have the time to give that a book requires. A book needs great thought.

I'm interested in readers' thoughts on this claim. On the one hand, it's a too-familiar gesture to declare the death of art, culture, and so on, particularly when the occasion of such a declaration is one's own creative exhaustion. On the other hand, Naipaul has a point about the novel, which requires prolonged periods of dedicated concentration to be read properly, not fitting in well with either our hyperactive lifestyles or the depleted attention spans that go with them.

So I am curious: Is there really a problem? If not, why not? If so, are there novelists working today who promise to revive, reinvent, or rejuvenate the genre? Do we even need novels (or, if you prefer, do we need even more novels)? If the novel-as-art-form essentially dies out, will it matter? What, if anything, would the death of the novel say about our styles of attention and our modes of imagining?

Naipaul is talking nonsense. Just because he has been petering out, writing the same novel repeatedly over the past few years, doesn't mean the novel itself is dying. After 9/11, James Wood declared that the ironic, experimental novel was dead because the world would suddenly demand truth and sincerity from its fiction. I guess people were too busy watching *Viva La Bam* and *The Apprentice* to read Wood's article.

Let's remember one thing. Writers have been bemoaning or celebrating the death of the novel for over a century. Poe thought the short story would supplant the novel, because it could sustain its effect over the brief amount of time a hopped-up coffee-drinking, ceegar-smoking, newspaper-reading public had to devote to reading.

Let's also recall some of Naipaul's other brilliant statements about the novel. Speaking of Afro-Caribbeans, Naipaul once declared that they would never produce an enduring work of fiction because they didn't have the developed social institutions required to support the novel. Tell that to Wilson Harris and Patrick Chamoiseau, Erna Brodber and Michelle Cliff.

In fact, one look at an ugly corporate bookstore suggests that Americans, at least, are reading novels in novel quantities. And great novels are being produced regularly. DeLillo's *Underworld*; Pynchon's *Mason and Dixon*, Morrison's *Paradise*; Sheri Holman's *The Mammoth Cheese*; Joanna Scott's *Make Believe*; Colson Whitehead's *The Intuitionist*; Jeffrey Eugenides' *Middlesex*; Nathaniel Mackey's *Bedouin Hornbook*; Philip Roth's last four novels; William Vollmann's *The Royal Family*; Alasdair Grey, Michael Turner, John Wideman, Stewart Home, Iain Sinclair, James Kelman, Coetzee, Sebald (RIP), and so on.

I'm not worried about the novel. If Norman Mailer couldn't kill it; if Lynn Cheney's *Sisters* couldn't make it hide its head in the sand; if ChickLit and the "Left Behind" novels couldn't give it the syph; If James Wood couldn't dictate what should be written or read after 9/11; it'll keep going long after Naipaul himself goes that great Borders-in-the-Sky.

He may well be right. The thing that has changed is that there's just no time anymore; and when there is, reading a novel has for me, become a guilty pleasure, I almost expect to put on weight as the result of reading one.

I have to say I disagree with the above commentator. There is nothing like a good long novel and I still make it a priority to set aside time to read them. I have a friend who works 80 hours a week and she still manages to find quality novels and polish them off at a rate of 1 or 2 a week.

People find time to do what they want to do. I don't think novel-reading was ever the pastime of the masses. Probably the fraction of the population that reads novels is fairly static over time. My 17-year-old is currently subsumed into Harry Turtledove's Guns of the South, a wonderful alternate-history novel.

I'm hearing the academician's bias that a "novel" must be great literature.

I read several types of novels. Some are great literature, consisting of timeless themes and observations about humanity or nature.

Some are unenduring, but extremely valuable at highlighting one point of view.

Some are really less than exciting in terms of plot or character development, but with such exciting turns of phrase that you find yourself wondering what about the author caused him to see things that way.

And some are just tripe. But they're novels.

Blisset (above) in criticising Naipaul - forget about the novel - has almost killed the post. So much bitterness, so little info. Nex

Alan, I don't believe my comments exhibit any bitterness whatsoever. I respect Naipaul greatly as a novelist, especially as the writer of *A House for Mister Biswas* and *The Middle Passage*. These, among others, are great accomplishments. However, I don't feel a need to bow and curtsy just because it's Naipaul this time issuing a coroner's report on the novel.

Erin asked a series of questions, to which I thought I provided some preliminary responses. I listed a series of (largely American) novelists who I believe are carrying on the best of the novel tradition. I could have made the list even longer, as I see a vast number of great contemporary novelists out there.

I also tried to contextualize Naipaul's comments. His vision of the novel in history has always been pinned on a notion of stable social institutions and structures. Wilson Harris, one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, has countered Naipaul's earlier claims about the novel in a Caribbean context. Mentioning Poe's "philosophy of composition" was a further attempt to put Naipaul's claim in context. At an earlier moment of social chaos, when culture was seen as threatened and pop culture as a big force behind this threat, similar claims have been made. They haven't panned out. Nor has Wood's claim that social chaos *demands* a return to earnest, realist fiction. The best artistic response to 9/11 has been Art Spiegelman's surreal and darkly comic cartoon panels.

So, Alan, where is your info? Your views on the subject?

The novel isn't dead, and the "there's no time anymore" meme has been greatly exaggerated. How much time did people have when 10-hour days, 6 days a week, were common?...and these were hard, physical jobs that left people exhausted. How much time did women at home have in eras when 3-5 children were common, labor-saving appliances were underdeveloped, and cooking of meals from basic ingredients was required?

Just during the past few months, I have read and loved Jeffrey Eugenides' sprawling Middlesex, Peter Carey's Chinese box of a novel, My Life as a Fake, Arthur Phillips' indolent and ironic Prague: A Novel, (which is really about Americans in Budapest) and Edward P. Jones' wonderful The Known World. Not only that, but Azar Nafisi's literary memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran underscores the importance of literature in many unexpected ways. I think the death of the novel is greatly exaggerated. Perhaps Naipaul is feeling drained of creative juices.

Of course, the publishing industry, and what gets published and marketed, is another story all together.

Maybe this comment is too flippant for Erin's readers, but it seems as if Some Prestigious Writer of Note makes a prediction about "the imminent death of [X]" literary form about as often as Some Prestigious Technologist of Note made monthly predictions about the imminent death of the Internet in the middle 90s.

P.S. I'm about finished with A House for Mister Biswas. I'm really enjoying it.

One of those Prestigious Technologists of Note actually *did* eat his words, literally. Bob Metcalfe, creator of Ethernet, had predicted a major Internet collapse, and he wound up eating his words, (in the form of a column he had written for a trade publication) in front of a large audience at an industry event. (He ran it through a blender first)

As someone currently writing novels, I'd have to say I hope Naipaul is wrong. I'm not sure, though, that the "novel" hasn't gone off on a tangent and may need to be reinvented. But in my trains of thought lately, I don't think anything's been written to match either Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter since 1850, unless you count Huckleberry Finn. That's something to ponder. You can visit my site for current novelistic output and occasional reflections.

Well, having started my own blog ( http://ethesis.blogspot.com/ ) and reading some fanfics that my daughter pointed out to me (literally tens of thousands of them in some areas, literally hundreds of thousands of pages of them, all updated within the last six months -- or they age them out -- per collection), I'm convinced that bad writing is as common as it ever was -- and great writing too.

Novels suffer not from the form going south, but from the readership getting larger.

I need to blog on this, but when you have a collection of 20,000 literate people, you can have a movement. Larger and it becomes difficult -- there is too much good stuff. What you need for the classic environment is an environment small enough for many to read literally everything and for a consensus core of material to arise.

You can watch the same process at work in genre writing. At one time it was easy to define the great writers of fantasy. Was Howard, for example, really great? Or was he great because there was so little competition.

Now, that same genre would require one to read a book a day -- to keep current with half of the current publication roster. Getting fully engaged in the field is more than a normal person can do.

Which results in numerous clusters.

Of course sales are higher than ever. 10k books sold is not a triumph any more. 20k in sales does not make one a smashing success.

It is an interesting pattern, and one that will get sorted out some time.

It is like web pages, or blogs after that.

At one time there were so few pages in any genre I was involved in (ADR, grief, etc.) that you could read them all in less than a week of evenings and list all the useful links on an 80x20 column page.

Blogs were that way once.

Now ... it is a flood. Is blogging really dead or is the web dead? Or is it too large to be merely a social construct and expanded to something else?

Interesting, though, the angst it generates.

Perhaps the question ought to be rephrased, in terms of the "death of the novel as widely-read serious writing." It does not seem that a case can be made for the death of the "popular novel," as they continue to be published -- and purchased -- in substantial quantities.

The fate that one ought to be concerned about is whether serious fiction goes the way of poetry, which, one must admit, has become the province of a small "literary community" and has vanished from sight as a mainstream phenomenon. I plead guilty to the charge of being "part of the problem," as a reader of poetry. On those few occasions when I manage to come across some serious contemporary poetry, my reaction is almost always, "Hey, this is good stuff!" Yet, somehow, I fail to "return to the well" for a second draught. Shame on me.

As a reader of fiction, I fall between the stools. On one hand, popular fiction strikes me as pretty thin gruel -- lots of plot and characters drawn with all of the subtlety of a cartoon, delivered to the reader through language that is workmanlike at best. In other words, little more than a fleshed-out screenplay. On the other hand, my occasional forays into "serious fiction" have not been rewarding, because the author is demanding much from me as a reader but doesn't give me much in return. I recall vividly reading "Gravity's Rainbow" as a graduate student in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars program in 1972 . . . and ultimately putting it down as not worth the mental effort.

I've only read "A Bend in the River" by Naipul, but extrapolating from that, perhaps his complaint is that the novel is going in two directions, neither of which he cares for. One direction is "pulp" and the other direction is the self-consciously "literary" construct (like a poem) that has only a loose relationship with the society of the author who produced it. Perhaps his view of the "proper novel" is rooted in best of the 19th century works (which, no doubt, formed the basis of his literary education) that combined a rich narrative with a commentary on the society that produced them.

Two final thoughts: First, my sense from watching my own children, two of whom have completed one of the best secondary educations available in the United States, is that, even 35 years after I was in high school, English courses do not do a very good job of teaching students how to read fiction that is anything but a conventional, third-person omniscient point of view narrative. In my own case, the discovery of Wayne C. Booth's "The Rhetoric of Fiction" was a tremendous help in making fiction accessible to me that wasn't written in the "conventional" style. College English courses at Princeton (which I attended) did not. I don't know that the situation has changed much in the intervening 35 years. I think schools could make better readers, but they don't.

Secondly, the issue of time relates not so much to the lack of leisure time as to the competition for audience attention that other, related, "serious" narrative works pose to fiction -- drama and, yes, (some) films. A novel does require a sustained commitment of time over many days; these offer rewards in a two-hour "package."

In any event, I'm grateful to the other participants in the thread for giving me some ideas of what to look for the next time I'm in the library or the book store.

New Novels, Big Awards, No Readers By EDWARD WYATT Published: October 17, 2004:

PERHAPS the 150 or so people who have bought Christine Schutt's first novel, "Florida," will agree that it may be the year's best book. But last week, much of the literary world was left perplexed when the fiction judges of the National Book Award named it one of five finalists for the annual prize.

The anemic sales of "Florida," published by TriQuarterly Books and the Northwestern University Press, is not anomalous; three other finalists for the award, which recognizes the best work of fiction by an American writer, have sold between 700 and 900 copies apiece, according to Nielsen BookScan. Only Kate Walbert's "Our Kind: A Novel in Stories" (Scribner), has sold as many as 2,500.

In an age when entire industries have sprung up around awards to publicize and commercialize various corners of the culture, a prize that finds merit in the obscure has much to be said for it. But this year's fiction finalists have touched a nerve in the industry that sponsors the award, and among those concerned that literature and American culture are growing too distant.

"We are completely closing ourselves off from the culture at large," said Larry Kirschbaum, the chairman of the Time Warner Book Group, "we are supporting our demise."

Esther Newberg, a literary agent at International Creative Management, said, "We are not helping the book business this way, and we're not exactly flourishing already."

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Maybe Naipaul is not wrong? Maybe novels, like jazz, classical music and poetry, have become exercises for a very small, self selected, coterie. Just do not expect novels to be the featured elements in public school ciricula or government subsidies.

It puts me in mind of Stephen King asking, "Do you think you get literary brownie points for being out of touch with your culture? Novels are more populist than ever, and most of them will probably be bad. Doesn't mean there won't be good ones, even or especially among those adored by the unwashed masses.

I highly recommend you read "The Art of the Novel" by Milan Kundera (who also wrote "The Increadible Lightness of Being")
Kundera agrees with the premise that the novel is dying but goes further to demonstrate what a novel is and why it is dying.

"The Art of the Novel" is only 165 pages a great entertaining afternoon read.

I tried to put my email richard@r[mylastname].com but it wouldn't let me because it said questionably content [mylastname].com. Disney IS my name and part of my email address. Please change.