“Over lunch one day, the wonderful magazine-essayist Andrew Ferguson gave me what he called the Cocktail Party Test for new books: Would you be embarrassed to show up at a get-together of writers and public-intellectual types without having read it? And the last novel he could remember for which that seemed true was Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987.”
Joseph Bottum relates that anecdote in The Decline of the Novel. (Bottum goes on to note the same thing is true of poetry, opera, sculpture, painting, and plays.) An interesting test, that. If I were to use it on my students, I would be met with blank stares. But then the light would click and they would all have an answer. Harry Potter. It would indeed be a bit mortifying to admit you never read Harry Potter.
The Harry Potter exception would not phase Bottum in the least. You see, as he explains late in the book, stories for children don’t really count as examples of that once high art form, the Novel. But, we are getting ahead of ourselves here, so let’s back up. What is The Novel?
Now you, Dear Reader, might be tempted to say something akin to “The novel is a fictional story written in prose which is longer than 100 pages.” In that case, it is hard to see much decline in the novel. There are lots and lots and lots of novels being published. If you are willing to include self-published novels, there are undoubtedly more novels being published than ever before.
Bottum doesn’t like your definition of The Novel, though. He wants something more specific, much more specific.
The art form of the novel gave us a fascination with the interior self, its emotions and its reasonings, greater and more insistent than anything the world had ever known before….Novels became central to the culture in part because their narratives were the only available art form spacious enough for all the details authors needed if they were to draw what was increasingly seen as realistic pictures of their characters. That kind of literary space just doesn’t exist in lyrical poetry…
The novel, as Bottum defines is, is thus a product of Protestantism. That seems like a bit of a leap, right? “The novel came into being to present the Protestant story of the individual soul as it strove to understand its salvation and achieve its sanctification, illustrated by the parallel journey of the new-style characters, with their well-furnished interiors, as they wandered through their adventures in the exterior world.”
There you have what the novel is: a clever Protestant means to cement the central importance of the individual over the community. Think I am exaggerating? How about this: “In the end, we arrive at a suggestion that to write a Catholic novel is to attempt something a little tricky, a little verging on the self-contradictory. And when a Catholic or a Catholic-aiming novel fails, it typically fails because it is at war with its own form.” Meanwhile: “To write a Protestant novel is, instead, to do something a little unnecessary, a little verging on the redundant.”
That is, to put it mildly, a quirky definition of the novel. The thesis of Bottum’s book, however, hinges on that definition. The novel declined because of the collapse of Protestantism in the 20th century. The Protestant view on life in which there is no intermediary between humanity and God is, in Bottum’s word, thin. Over time, that thinness of life gets stretched more and more. Novelists tried to thicken that life, but they failed. Eventually it got so thin it snapped, and the novel declined, if not outright died.
I am pretty sure that is a fair description of Bottum’s thesis, but truth be told it is sometimes a little hard to tell because of another odd quirk in the book. In a bit of admirable forthrightness, Bottum notes in the afterword, “I am such a slow writer that, even to complete this small work, I had to go back to previous essays and reviews, borrowing sentences, paragraphs, and even whole sections from work I’d previously published…” That note explains a third of the book; the three chapters devoted to Scott, Dickens and Mann, none of which cleanly fit into a whole.
Don’t get me wrong. There is much in these first 110 pages (of the 150 page book) which is thought-provoking. There are many asides and tidbits that make you look up and think for a bit. At his best, Bottum has long been someone whose essays are thought-provoking, and scattered through the early parts of the book are all sorts of mini-essays. But, strung together like this, the book does indeed read like a whole bunch of things from other essays tossed together in a giant salad. A quirky thesis is not enhanced by lengthy plot summaries of novels by Scott and Mann or a discussion of every single person with multiple names in David Copperfield.
Then, on page 110, Bottum gets to a discussion of Tom Wolfe, and the whole book snaps into focus. “Tom Wolfe and the Failure of Nerve” expresses admiration for Wolfe’s obvious rhetorical gifts, but then takes Wolfe to task for his failure as a novelist. He “never did know what a novel is.” Wolfe’s novels lack “a kind of presence that haunts the text and draws it together at a level deeper than plot.” They lack “completion.”
The problem: “The ending of a Tom Wolfe novel is usually a disaster, or at least a minor fall, because the resources necessary to conclude a story of justification and sanctification simply do not exist for him….It’s not something that can really tell us the way we live now or, more important, the way we ought to live tomorrow.” Take an example: A Man in Full abruptly ends when the protagonist Charlie Croker becomes an apostle of Stoicism. Bottum hates that ending:
It’s hard to see what genuine use could be made of that philosophy Wolfe throws away in a silly parody of Christian revivalism and a preaching of “the cult of Zeus” in the last ten pages of the novel. But even taken at its most promising, Stoicism simply isn’t the answer to the problems the author has set himself in A Man in Full.
To which the automatic reply is, “Why not?” The ending of a Tom Wolfe novel is certainly not akin to the ending of a Daniel Defoe or a Walter Scott novel. The ending to a Tom Wolfe novel is certainly not an example of how you would end a Protestant novel. But, who said that novels needed to have Protestant endings? Well, that was Joseph Bottum who said that. It is certainly true that Tom Wolfe fails to write novels that fit Bottum’s definition of a good novel.
But, what if we define “novel” a bit more broadly as a story that captures the spirit of the times in which it is written? Then Bottum’s 18th century exemplars would indeed be Protestant. But, as Protestantism collapses, as Bottum argues it does, what would happen to the novel? Does the novel decline or does it continue to reflect the times, becoming less Protestant, but no less novelistic? Tom Wolfe’s novels had loose baggy pseudo-endings because, as Bottum would be the first to argue, we live in a loose baggy time with no grand endings in sight. This is after all, the age of Eliot: “Think at last/ We have not reached conclusion, when I/ Stiffen in a rented house.” Charlie Coker’s ersatz stoicism is the perfect ending to a novel written in that rented house.
In other words, Bottom becomes a victim of his own definition of the word “novel” and fails to realize that the entire decline of which he speaks is simply the failure of modern novelist to live up to his unusual definition. There is no lack of great novels being written today. Bottum himself is happy to mention a few. Off the top of my head, Helprin, Ishiguro, McCarthy, Morrison, and Robinson are all recent novelists whose work is surely worthy of notice. Are they writing Great Books? Are they as Great as Scott and Dickens? Maybe. Therein lies another problem with Bottum’s argument. It takes at least 50 years to have any idea if a novel is Great enough to be read by future generations. Obviously looking back a century or more we can identify novels which have stood the test of time. Which novels written in the last 25 years will people still be reading in 2120? There is no way to know. That ignorance does not mean Great Novels are not being written.
Bottum’s problem seeing the landscape of the modern novel is perfectly illustrated in his chapter on what has happened since Wolfe. As Bottum, half-jokingly, notes, the novel was killed by Neil Gaiman, who channeled his prodigious ability into (insert shudder) a comic book. Instead of writing David Copperfield, Gaiman wrote The Sandman. Alan Moore and the early Frank Miller similarly channeled their abilities there. Genre fiction, including children’s literature, has all sorts of talents. But none of these things count as proper novels in the way Bottum has defined the term, and thus they cannot serve as counterexamples to the decline of the novel.
The problem with Bottum’s book is that it was written inside out. There are two things that Bottum thinks are in decline: the novel and society. If Bottum’s book had a slightly different frame, it would have been a much cleaner argument. Society is in decline and a marvelous way to see that decline is to look at novels. Novels are, after all, a wonderful lens with which to think about the society in which they were written. There is a huge difference between the older world in which Scott was writing Waverley and Austen was writing Pride and Prejudice and the newer world in which Gaiman is writing The Sandman and McCarthy is writing Blood Meridian. You could learn a lot about the decline of society with a comparison like that.
But Bottum wants his thesis to be stronger. He doesn’t want to argue that the novel illustrates the decline of society. He wants to argue that the novel itself is one of the things that declined when society declined. He wants to argue that the novels of today are worse and scarcer and less important than the novels of yesteryear. That thesis is harder to sustain, and ultimately detracts from the point I think Bottum really wants to make. He wants to convince you, the Reader, that something is rotten in the state. But, instead of pointing to the dead things rotting all over in the castle, he takes you to the library and starts insisting that Tom Wolfe just isn’t as good as Samuel Richardson.
