Attitudes change, novels don't

Times change, attitudes change, moral positions change, yet great novels stay the same, and therein lies a problem for many readers. The same is true of movies, of course, but let's stick with novels.

The novelist Richard Ford, for example, was paid in advance to write an introduction to Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. He thought he should read this novel he loved once again. "And I found things in it that I didn't want to have to argue for," he said. He then declined to write the introduction and sent the money back. He still loved the novel, he said, but he didn't want to be caught in the middle of the inevitable criticism by cultural critics about the novel's outdated points of view.

Many, if not most, novels from earlier eras reflect attitudes toward women, people of other races, etc, that once were commonplace but now seem objectionable. I still like to read Donald E. Westlake's comic crime novels on occasion, but I now cringe at some of the attitudes reflected in them.

Yet I also find objectionable many of the attitudes found in so many modern novels. Perhaps worst of all are the modern attitudes found in so many historical novels being written today. Authors want their heroes in stories set in the 1930s or 1860s or whenever to think and behave like most of their readers do in the 2020s. It just makes their characters seem phony, unrealistic. Yet too much historical accuracy would certainly decrease book sales, assuming such books could even be published at all.

Some balance is required by both writers and readers. For writers, that may mean softening, without eliminating, the faults common even in the best people of earlier times. For readers, that means accepting novels as they are, whether or not one accepts the views of its characters.

One doesn't have to admire Humbert Humbert to admire the novel about Humbert Humbert. Novelist Donna Tartt has called Lolita her favorite novel. When asked if changing attitudes had changed her opinion of the novel she replied, "I don't have an altered view of it. It's a masterpiece." Good for her.